Kim summarily presented a small heap of Rune Bones as well as a cosmetic hat usable by scouts. It was a sort of fez looking thing. It would look awful on Rache. Eternally banished to the depths of the inventory, instantly, no hope of freedom.

“So where is this ‘best loot?’” I asked.

“Here. Take a look at this absolute beauty.” Kim proudly offered me a little box. Roughly the size of my palm and maybe three inches tall.

“What is…” I spotted a key sticking out of the side. “It’s a music box.”

“YES!” Kim shouted, leaping surprisingly high in the air and punching upwards. Sort of a cute version of Shoryuken? The emotion was lost on me.

“Oh boy. A music box. By any chance, does it provide stat buffs when it plays music?”

“Sorry boss? I think the crowd noise made me a little deaf.”

It wasn’t quite silent in here, but no one was chattering.

“Got it. Thank you, Kim.”

I sighed and cranked the key a couple of times. The lid sprung open, revealing a beautiful dancer, dressed in a cheerfully revealing version of the same dresses the Blue Roses wore. Cut low and tight, with thigh high splits along the sides, a single lickable leg thrust forward.

The song was quick paced, jaunty. I didn’t recognize a lot of the words, so I assume it was slang. My shoulder brushed something hard as steel. I glanced left, then it was my turn to leap alarmingly high. Versai had put her armored shoulder to mine, staring fixedly at the music box.

I started to demand to know what she was thinking but… well… she looked a little scary. I let the music play all the way to the end.

There was silence. She kept opening her mouth to speak. I could see her trying to move her hands, and couldn’t. Something held her back.

“Would you like to hold the music box, Versai? You could play the song as much as you liked, when not on a mission.”

“More than I have wanted anything in my whole life. I don’t have anywhere to store it though. I would appreciate it if you could keep it safe for me until the end of the exploration today.” I couldn’t put words to what was in her voice. So many things. Things I probably didn’t have words for at all.

“I can do that. Shall we give it another listen now?”

“I couldn’t possibly say.” Her eyes were begging me to turn the key, so I did.

The song ran through once more. Jaunty. Something rumbling and tumbling.

“Something about gambling?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Gated behind the relationship system again.

“Anything you can tell me about this gambling hall, beyond what I can see?”

“I don’t want to talk about it!”

“Gradden March?”

“I don’t want to talk about it!” She would have been sobbing, if the Game would have let her. I could hear it in her voice, even if I couldn’t see it in her face.

“Another time, then. When you do want to talk about it.”

She nodded her head, eyes fixated on the music box. I felt like I should be sweaty. My doll body didn’t sweat, but this was a sweaty moment. She was staring. Fixated. Not on me, but close enough. I groped for the right words.

“Versai? I’m putting it in my inventory now. Nothing can hurt it while it’s in there.” As far as I know, anyway. “We need to clear this building so we have every edge to beat tonight’s wave. Pushing on to day five. Which means I need you.”

She kept right on staring. I know she heard me. She just couldn’t tear her eyes away. I saw her mouth working, trying to say something. I dropped my hand, putting the music box into my inventory. She lurched a step forward before she recovered.

I gave her a minute. I reached out to pat her shoulder, hesitated, and put my hand down again. Nobody wants to be touched by me. Which is fair enough. I don’t really want to be touched by others either. Not IRL, or as close to RL as this world was.

I took the time to take a closer look at the gambling hall. Definitely not as nice as the Blue Roses’ place. Much more rough-and-ready, I supposed, though the tables were varnished dark wood, the felt table tops were free of stains, and the bar looked like it was very generously supplied with drinks. No stage here- the entertainment was the games.

Happy thought, maybe there would be a cashier’s office. Nothing that looked like a cashier’s cage in sight, though. Pity.

Smaller than I had expected a casino to be, but my perspective had clearly been warped by Las Vegas. It was basically one big room, with a door leading to a hallway at the back.

“Kim, anything behind the bar?”

“Nothing we can bring home, Boss.”

Figured. Versai looked like she had gotten herself together and gave me a nod.

“Alright, Versai leads the way, then Rakim, then Kim, then Pammy, then me, and Mika protects the rear. We’ll work our way down the hall. Versai, how many doors are there?”

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“Two, Tower Master.”

Two? Seemed… not enough. “Alright, start with the closest one.”

We stacked up outside the door in the order I set. Versai didn’t bother trying the doorknob, she just directly booted it in, then rushed into the room. I could hear throwing knives pinging off her shield before Rakim’s rifle announced itself. Kim was already casting her buffs before she entered the room. I held Pammy back. “Mika, go! Pammy and I will be behind you.”

We rushed in behind Mika’s big shield. I looked around quickly- this room was even bigger than the first, looked like an old fashioned warehouse with wooden crates stacked on long shelves. I thought fast.

“Rakim, can you knock over those shelves?”

There was a burst of fire from her rifle. Three rounds clustered perfectly center left on the chest of a knife throwing gambler that unwisely popped out of cover.

“They look bolted to the floor, Sir.”

Damn. Alright, what about the crates themselves? These guys looked pretty mindlessly aggressive. I could work with that.

The room had gone quiet for a moment, but I didn’t think for one second we had got them all.

“Alright, Rakim, start hauling some of those crates over and make a strongpoint we can defend with them. Looks like they only attack from range?”

Versai nodded. “Yes, even if you are right up next to them, instead of stabbing, they try to throw their knives from just inches away. Doesn’t work well.”

I grinned grimly in the gloomy gambling warehouse. “It occurs to me that you are a hard counter to them. You have a shield and a strong melee attack, as well as being quick on your feet.”

“Yep. Classic vanguard/direct damage situation. It’s what Vanguards get used for a lot.” She smiled her own grim little smile. Hers was, of course, like an angel fell into Hell and realized that they were in a target rich environment.

“Good. Well, what I don’t want is to get flanked again. So we are going to fort up here. Rakim, can you make traps in the alleys between the shelves?”

“Yep. Lots of big crates well above head height? No problem.”

“Good. We fort up here. Versai will press forward until she makes contact with the enemy, then falls back. Try to lure them into a trap if you can. If not, just straight back here where you, Mika and Rakim can jump on them together. Rakim, keep replacing traps if they get triggered. Ideally I want to be able to know a given alley is enemy free because the traps are still intact.

They nodded and got to work. It went remarkably quickly. Rakim was good at this kind of work. The coarse wooden boxes were hauled around into a makeshift barricade, nothing fancy but more than enough.

Then she and Versai got to work. It was tense. The air in the warehouse was stuffy, cool, but still choked with the smell of burning wood. The crates were unlabeled. Which I would have expected from devs of this… sterling quality, but seemed weird if this was, in fact, a place ripped out of time.

I tried the lid on one of the boxes. Nailed shut. Figured.

There was less shooting than I thought. Certainly only a few of the meaty chunk and swish noises I had come to associate, reassuringly, with Versai. I did, however, get to occasionally enjoy a loud CRASH or two. It seemed that the headless gamblers weren’t all dumb, and were determindly trying to flank around the mobile attackers. Maybe even pick us off.

There was exactly one who got past the traps. A thoroughly buffed Mika punched so many bolts into his chest, he could do double duty as a novelty hat rack. It quite cheered me up, watching the knives “ping” harmlessly off her helmet and shield.

Armor is a good thing. Get more armor. Get all the armor. Fingers crossed for more armor kits.

That being said, I was a bit worried. What if the enemies turned up with Katanas? Well known fact- Katanas can slice through steel like paper. Other swords, armor, doesn’t matter. Gets cut. I would have to think of anti-Katana tactics.

The gamblers didn’t seem to have much luck on their side. It took a long while, but eventually, Versai and Rakim came back.

“Looks clear. All the traps are still in place, so either they are hiding out very, very carefully, or we got them all, Sir.” Rakim reported.

“Excellent job. Loot?”

“Two weapons upgrade kits for workers.” I blinked at that.

“In this whole… admittedly not huge… warehouse, there were only two weapons kits?”

Versai nodded, looking troubled. She kept opening and closing her mouth. I stopped her with a hand.

“Versai, could you open one of these crates for me?”

“No, that would destroy my sword!”

“Remember the tree branch?”

Versai blinked, then carefully hacked at the very edge of a box. Her sword barely slowed as it passed through.

“That never ceases to be unnatural.” She grumbled. Then with a seemingly easy swing, she sliced off the top of a box three feet on the cube.

“That should have, best case scenario, made my sword get stuck and probably damaged the edge. Maybe even snapped the whole blade, if the angle and point of impact were wrong.”

“I’m surprised the steel is so bad.”

“It isn’t!” She practically hissed. “I don’t want to talk about it!”

Ah. I waved away the conversation and took a look in the box. It was… well it was booze. Booze I had no interest in drinking. I frowned a bit at it. The packaging was kind of dumb. It was bottles of something unlabeled, probably wine or whisky, nestled in straw. But this box was a three foot cube. Was it wine and straw all the way down?

“Empty it out.”

Pammy and Mika dug through it dutifully, making a bit of a mess on the floor. Yep. Only the top third was wine. The bottom two thirds were… books? I picked one up. Sinews of War. Another, a door stopper sized book called To The Far Shore. Presumably about swimming. A worn, almost tattered, copy of Ducks, and How To Make Them Pay.

Alarming. I had heard of some specialty… providers… in Thailand that supplied a notoriously frugal clientele, but those had always been nothing more than disgusting rumors. So far, at least.

I tried to put it in my inventory. It wouldn’t go. I tried to open the book, just to see if it was as depraved as I suspected. The covers seemed glued to the pages, like a wooden block. It turned out the other books were much the same. “Sorry, Versai.”

“Thank you for trying.”

“Let's check a few more crates.” We picked them more or less at random. All had the wine on top, all were smuggling what could be broadly categorized as “stuff.” Curtains, sets of plates, children’s toys, four hundred bars of soap, neatly cut and still smelling of laurel. Some were mixed- bed linens wrapping what looked like meh-tier antiques, or shoes stuffed with little candies, and carefully covered with monogrammed napkins.

Nothing that was the least blind bit of use, in other words. Or worth smuggling. I had thought that the boxes were stowed upside down, but the top was clearly a lid. I couldn’t figure it out.

“Let's go to the next room. I smell a rat. And I’m not leaving until it gives me its cheese.”