Saber gingerly opened a crack in the lid of the chest. I leaned forward to get a better view. She took out a necklace of silver chain, with an eight-sided coin attached to it. Upon the coin was a graven eye.

 

"Oh wow," I said. "That's kind of useless for us."

We sold it on the market for $8000 and split the profit. Someone really, really wanted their 30 damage, I supposed.

Thanks to the income from the sale, I finally had enough money to buy the Magus Battlehat. To attune to the hat, I had to wear it for five hours straight. I did, and at the end of that period, a gentle coolness spread over the velvety fabric of the hat. A small shard of ice had appeared on the side of the hat, affixed there by a silk ribbon that hadn't been there before. I gave the ice-shard a tug. It remained securely in place. Pretty cute.

 

 

Nice.

With some of the money I still had left, I visited the phone-charging girl to get my phone charged. She came out a minute after I knocked on her residence's door.

"Ahoy," I said. "How's it going?"

"Just hanging in there." She gazed aside for a moment, as though to organize her thoughts. "Josh died in the challenge."

Josh. We had met him at the museum, and he had been the one to introduce Saber and the rest of us to this girl. I thought we'd get to see him again. I had planned to thank him for helping us, maybe offer him a kind gesture of sorts in return. Of course, everyone knew we were playing a death game, but after months spent living day-to-day in Silvercreek, even such basics became easy to forget.

"Oh no," I murmured. "I…I didn't know. I'm sorry."

"I'm just letting you know," the girl said as she took my phone. "I'm not upset or anything about it. Josh and I weren't friends. I don't have friends here."

She began shaking my phone to charge it. When she finished, she went back inside without asking for payment. Nonetheless, I slid a 50-dollar bill under the door.

I applied for a job transfer to the Research Division at the Combat Institute. It got approved, perhaps because I was now level 3. I visited Tanin's office to give him a two weeks' notice before I switched jobs.

"Congratulations," he said. "The Institute had been the slightest bit cleaner while you were around."

"Thanks for taking me in," I said with a slight bow. "Huh. I haven't thought of it before, but what division are we currently in?"

Tanin worked directly under the Headmaster of Logistics, he explained. All janitors worked under the Logistics Division as well.

"Our headmaster is known as Khan of the Bloody Fingers," Tanin said.

"He's an assassin?" I guessed.

“No. He’s just known for getting finger injuries a lot.”

“He's a fist-fighter?”

"No, no, he gets his fingers injured out of combat. Slams them in closet doors, burns them while cooking. One time he tried lifting a barrel, and it slipped and tore the skin off his thumb."

I blinked in disbelief. “...How did he even survive? Not even here. Like, in the real world?”

“You know?" Tanin said. "Joining this death game probably raised his life expectancy.”

"He sounds like the most pushover headmaster ever," I said.

"I know, right? He's not even a regent of the Institute. We have five divisions with five headmasters, but only four regents who get top-level executive authority. They're currently filled by the other four headmasters."

To be honest, I hadn't much of a clue what regents were, besides the fact that they sounded like important people.

"You think Khan's salty?" I asked. "About not being a regent, I mean."

"Deep down? No doubt."

Huh. So even in a life-threatening fantasy world, people still had career discontents. I mean, even I did.

Now that I'd be transferring to another division, I doubt I'd see Tanin much anymore. And I'd see Hei less at work, too. He had joined the Combat Division, where Saber worked.

"Before I go, I want to ask you a question."

Tanin leaned back in his chair. "Fire away, chica."

"Remember the interview question you asked Saber? The last one."

"No."

I rolled my eyes. "You asked her how to win the game, and wanted her to give a single word as the answer."

"Oh yeah! That was a pretty brilliant question, huh."

I disagreed, but allowed him his moment of pride. "Is there even a correct answer?"

“Well? To most people, this is a fighting game, where the strongest win. That, I hope you’d agree, is not an accurate understanding of our situation.”

"But like, fighting is still pretty important," I said.

“Saber sees this as a strategy game," he continued. "She is a strategist, and a formidable one. But even she misses the big picture." Tanin rose up and circled around the tight floorspace of his office. "This is a death game, my dear Sophia, and the victors are those that live. Gather resources, forge connections, gain influence and power. anything to keep on living. It worked well enough for the Institute's regents, present and past. Some of them are horrible fighters. Some are horrible strategists. And yet, not a single regent had ever perished in Silvercreek. Many had gone up to Gold, but as far as anyone remembers, not a single one has ever died."

"You think it's because they're rich?" I asked.

"Who knows. They keep their secrets well."

As I spent my last two weeks as a janitor, I noticed one or two absences among my colleagues. They'd be here one day, then gone the next, and they never returned after that. When I asked Tanin about them in private, he told me they had probably died in the challenges.

"Or maybe they went to Gold," he said. "Or maybe they went off to a different guild. Excuse my non-answer; the Institute is quite horrible at keeping these sorts of records."

At the end of the two weeks, I transferred to the Research Division. Professor Phoenixcourt, my new boss, greeted me in my office. Yes, my office. It was on the second floor of the Institute's lecture hall. It scarcely had enough room for a desk, a sink, and a bookshelf, and it barely reached half the size of Tanin's. But it was mine.

The professor was a tall, middle-aged man wearing a suit and tie. He wore half-rimmed glasses and had spiky, jet-black hair.

"Already dressed like a researcher," he said when he saw me in my white coat. "If you ever damage it in an experiment, talk to Tanin Fatebreaker in the Logistics Division. He has a few trinkets that can patch things right up."

Huh. That had to be the same Tanin I knew, right?

Over the next few days, I settled into a comfortable rhythm with the professor. He talked little outside of debriefs and introductions, and he left me to work alone for the most part. A week into my job, I proposed to him that I'd like to write a book.

"It'd be about magecraft, but from a modern perspective," I explained. "For example, how you can stabilize projectiles by imparting spin on them."

"A similar book has been written by a psychic-sorcerer two years ago," Professor Phoenixcourt noted. "Though he approached magic from a psychobiological angle." He glanced up at my hat, with a dispassionate attentiveness toward my hat's ice crystal. "I'll assume you are an elementalist. If so, you could cover magecraft from the physics and chemistry angles. That would be a great contribution to the existing body of literature."

My ambitions were set high for the book. In the introductory chapters, I planned to provide a brief overview of the mechanics of destruction. You know, stuff like Newton's laws, momentum and kinetic energy, mechanical impulse and pressure, thermodynamics, and the likes. In the latter chapters, I planned to provide examples of how physics principles could be used to boost spell power. The only example I had right now was adding spin to my Frost Missile. One example honestly seemed underwhelming, so I took time during work to experiment with other ways of empowering my spells.

I tried shaping my Vortex Shield into blades of water when launching it, but I didn't have the necessary control to perform such a feat without Arcana Potions. I took a bunch of oranges from the cafeteria, so I could add citric acid to my Vortex Shields for burn damage. That didn't work either. When I spent an entire week optimizing the shape of my Frost Missile to minimize aerial drag, I finally boosted my Arcana Points by a measly two. And that week left me really, really tired. The next Monday, I barely had the energy to write anything while at my desk. So I decided to head outside and touch grass.

Literally. The autumn air felt great, and I indulged myself to wander on to one of the manicured lawns within the Institute campus. I sat down, breathed in the bright, earthy notes of the morning air, and stroked the soft, short grass. They still sprang green, though in a few weeks they'd wilt with the coming of winter. I plucked a few blades and held them close to my eyes, and examined the jewels of dew hanging on the green stalks.

And then an idea came to me.

Pykrete.