Chapter 205

◈ Chapter 205:

Red let out a groan of despair as he fell to all fours before the slight dip in the sand all that was left of his golden tower.

"If it matters Red, from what I understand it never would have been permanent. Quistis would have needed to maintain it to keep it as gold and not let it disintegrate back into sand."

Quistis sniffed. "This is true. Everyone who learns of my Class always thinks of what treasures I can create without thinking of their permanence."

"And you didn't?"

"Oh I did too, I made treasures and mountains of coin and lived the most lavish lifestyle this city has ever seen, I had parades so extravagant that they would make your teeth curl, I built palaces that would beggar empires, I— there was— so many people… and…" the lamia's words faltered, confused.

"And why did you stop?"

She blinked and continued as though the thread of thought had been placed back into her hands. "Because I was young and foolish, and didn't understand just how angry people would be with me when they discovered the coin I had paid them with had turned back into dirt. In the end it became unmanageable and everything came crashing down, culminating in a series of assassinations that killed dozens of my extended family, which was the last straw, and I was disowned, hated. These days I put a higher value on permanence, a cost delayed is still a cost, whether that's in coin or very very angry people coming for my head."

Once the golden tower had vanished they had been left once more in the expanse of clean flat sand.

Opal looked around. It seemed like an appropriate spot.

She turned to Quistis who was looking off into the distance, her eyes unfocused. She flinched as Opal spoke.

"I want to build a market."

Opal conjured the images in her head, walking through the market in Lynthia before it was destroyed, merchants bellowing their wares, greasy sidewalk foods, the warmth of so many crowded bodies, the smells, the the incense of a perfumery, the distant stench of a tannery, the burnt tang of a blacksmith, stalls selling dungeon diving equipment, pointies and stabbies.

A market was something that decidedly did not exist in a dungeon.

It… was part of what made a town a town, right?

Well, maybe. But it did feel like a good first step, all the best towns had markets, she had seen that as they'd travelled, and Florens had the biggest markets of all.

"Uh, so make a market stall, here."

Opal pointed at the ground.

She didn't have to wait for long, a weary sigh came from behind and then a structure started to rise up. In moments Opal was standing before a simple market stall with an embroidered blue and white cloth overhang. The stall was selling various goods, small nicknacks and decorations stacked together.

Opal put her hand to her chin and examined it.

"Good, but make it sell swords because swords are awesome."

An exacerbated sound and then the various goods transformed into racks and racks of swords in a billow of smoke.

"Much better!" she scampered behind and stood at the counter inside, appearing for all the world like a goblin about to start yelling out her wares to passersby.

The crowd of small monsters stared at the market stall, and at Opal standing inside of it.

Opal jabbed out a finger. "You!"

"M-Me?" squeaked a very small and nervous looking mouse like species, their plate like ears torn and scarred.

"Yes, come here, now."

The mouse licked his lip but hesitantly approached.

"I want you to give me something, and then I'll give you a sword."

"Uhm, I d-don't h-have anything… I- I can give you my l-loincloth b-but.." a blush came to his face and they glanced back at the crowd of monsters staring at them. "Uhm…"

Opal rolled her eyes. "Okay fine, here take this." She reached over the counter and thrust some coins into the mouse's paws. They looked down with round eyes at the pile of glittering gold.

"Th-thankyou?"

"Now give me some of your coins."

The mouse person, looking increasingly confused, handed over a coin.

In return Opal picked up an enormous longsword with both hands and thrust it into his paws. He dropped the coins and staggered back, struggling with the weight of the sword which likely weighed half as much as they did.

"That sword is now yours, you just made a transaction!"

"..."

"It means you get to keep it, it's like trading."

"Uhm, I know what trading is…."

"Have you ever traded with coins?"

"N-No, we usually trade with bits of meat or neat looking rocks."

"Exactly. This is the same. Look, the coins are just neat looking rocks, except better"

"...so what makes this different than regular trading?"

Opal paused. "Well… you have this stall… and an overweight person wearing colourful clothes yells really loudly… and that's all they do. They just… trade stuff."

The mouse didn't seem to grasp the concept.

"Look, let's do this again but with…" she looked around . A particularly grubby looking hobgoblin sneered at her, the coloured rags around his chest and hips half rotten. "You." she said, picking him out. "You look kind of like a merchant."

The hob snorted long and loud through his nose and spat the result on the ground. "No."

Opal set her lips in a line and then ducked from the stall. She grabbed hold of his wrist, and then to his shock, dragged him bodily back to it, the hob having to stumble to avoid falling.

He found himself promptly shoved behind the stall and he looked around warily at the many sharp implements surrounding him.

"Good. Now do merchant things," said Opal looking at her work. A seedy looking hobgoblin 'merchant' sitting in the stall, a nervous looking mouseling as an example customer.

The mouse hesitantly turned to the hob and shakily held up a coin in one small paw.

The hobgoblin leered at the mouse, and then snatched up a knife, holding it against the mouse's throat.

The mouse went wide eyed and trembled like a leaf as the hobgoblin snatched the coin from his paw, and then after a moment of hesitation, ripped his loincloth away, leaving the petrified mouse naked.

Opal frowned. This was not exactly going to plan. Already the dungeony-ness was taking over and it didn't help that things were so hard to explain. The mouse looked very upset as he watched the hob try his loincloth on over his own.

She stepped forward and grabbed for the hob, yanking him half over half the stall. She took the loin cloth from the hob's fingers and thrust it back at the mouse, then she then picked up the knife he had dropped and put it back into the hob's hand.

"Give the knife to your customer, he paid with coin. So now the knife is his. This is just simple trading stuff!"

"This is stupid," snapped the hob. "Why trade when I can roast him over a fire and keep everything plus have a full belly?"

"You wouldn't trade even if he was a gobbo in your own tribe?"

The hob looked like she'd just asked him a stupid question. "I'm an evolved. What do you think?"

It occurred to Opal that Florens' dungeon might be worse than Lynthia's, and some monsters were going to be more responsive than others. The hob seemed to think she was asking something nonsensical of him, her tribe had at least sometimes had trading, and sometimes that trading didn't even involve violence!

The hob looked between Opal and the knife, a rising anger at being so handled crossing his face. His hand gripped the knife and—

"If you even think about stabbing me then I'll feed you to Rain."

The grip loosened and the hob instead looked at the mouse and—

"Also if you stab him I'll feed you to Rain."

His gaze shifted to the crowd.

Opal let out an exasperated sigh. " If you stab anyone I'll feed you to Rain."

The hobgoblin gave her an annoyed look, but then dropped the dagger into the mouse's waiting paws.

"This is all a joke, she's toying with us," he spat.

"Nope. You are now a merchant. That's your new job now."

The hob stared at her.

"That means you trade things for a profit, and then get really overweight and wear colourful clothes like all the best merchants."

The hob continued to stare.

"Admittedly there might be some practice involved before getting to that point, but this is where things start! You couldn't do this in the dungeon because you would just get robbed and killed and eaten, but now you can. It's very simple really, if you do any bad stuff I'll feed you to Rain. Alive. Screaming."

"I'm not sure this is a very good foundation to build a social contract," mumbled Lyra looking at the scene with a sense of vague disbelief.

"Yes it is, it's a much stronger one than levelers have."

"I mean… is it?"

"Do you want to get eaten alive?"

"Well... no, but I mean—"

"No buts. Rule by getting eaten is much better. What's to stop you getting mugged in Florens? Only your own strength is what. But with rule by teeth you can go around without being bothered no matter what because all of the muggers will have been eaten already!"

"Uhhh…"

Lyra glanced between the enthusiastic Opal who clearly thought she had come up with a genius idea and Rain who was sitting cross legged in the sands, the few dozen or so monsters keeping a wary distance.

They did seem afraid of him… maybe… maybe it would be better in the immediate rather than the sheer chaos she was sure was coming from having so many wild monsters together.

"I… suppose…"

Opal gave her a pleasant smile and then turned to Quistis.

"Make me a market!"

Quistis let out a long suffering groan but got to work and soon stalls were rising from the sands as if they had always been there, selling all kinds of wares, potteries and metals, clothes and tools.

With Opal's encouragement the customer monsters in training were herded forward where she handed out coins for them one by one and picked out merchant monsters, directing them to wander around until they spotted something they liked, and then would give coins to the monster merchant stationing the stall.

So many small prey— small monsters milling around.

Like a shoal of fish, or a scattering of red blooded deer.

Rain watched them all, making purchases of objects made by Quistis, being directed by Opal, the monsters becoming ever more confused. Was this what she wanted, to copy a leveler town but for monsters? It seemed inane to Rain, a waste of time when he needed to hunt for Brax. To hunt him down, like a prey animal, fleeing from him.

There would be cold, and such pitch black darkness, the sound of frantic feet dashing through the snow, the sounds muffled against the powder, frantic breaths puffing in the air as the prey animal panicked and ran for his life.

Rain followed amongst the trees, silent, the snow muffling each broad pad, watching with yellow eyes as the small creature scrambled and stumbled. He could hear the pitter-patter of their heart in his ears, a contrast to his own which was steady and paced, a long breath escaped his nostrils, plumes of vapour.

The prey looked back, frightened eyes trying to see if he was being followed. Rain loomed from the trees nearby, a long terrible paw reaching out snapping around their chest. With a ragged scream they were ripped from the ground, and Rain's teeth came down, incising through the arm, ripping it from their torso in a spray of blood that splashed over his muzzle, drawing long lines of bright red over the snow, stark against the clean white sand.

Now blood filled his mouth, washing between his teeth, the flesh cutting apart. It was just natural for a killer and—

The prey was making an awful lot of noise, his ear twitched as the screaming grew louder and more insistent.

He blinked and the snowy forest vanished, gone between one between one moment and the next. Instead he found himself back in Opal's market. There was blood in his mouth. He glanced down to see the terrified mouse from before in his paw, screaming in agony as they clutched at their stump, their body sheeted with crimson.

"Rain! Stop! Rain! What are you doing?!"

He looked to the side to find Lyra punching him in the shoulder as hard as she could, Opal kicking at his crossed legs. He barely felt it.

Confused, he tongued at his mouth, only to his dismay to find something there.

He opened his maw and the mouse's arm flopped free onto his lap.

The crowd of small monsters who had been busy doing pretend market things were all frozen in place, staring at him in wide eyed horror.

There was now a much more keen sense of fear filling the air, and a few at the back of the crowd turned and fled.

He let the mouse drop and they scrambled back in a state of panic, leaving a stain of red across the sand. The mouse managed to find his feet and fled with a scream.

"Oh Rain…J-Just let me handle this, okay?" mumbled Lyra, as she gathered up the severed arm and went after the mouse.

Opal jumped into his lap, standing on his thighs as she slapped both hands on either side of his muzzle. Her amber eyes looked directly into his.

She lowered her voice.

"Those other gobbos, in the orc camp. They said they could never make a monster town with someone like you, because they said you're like a panthara. I know you're not like that." she lowered her voice to a bare whisper than only Rain's hearing could pick up. "But freaking snacking on random monsters out of nowhere isn't going to help me convince the others of that okay?!"

Rain blinked, he had?

The realisation struck hard, far beyond what Opal was saying. She thought he gave a damn about any of this? He didn't care, he couldn't care less about this 'monster town' she wanted, this pet project of Opal's, but the fact that he had mindlessly just—

…Who was to say that he might not have picked up Opal and bitten into her instead in his hallucination?

He suddenly felt unsafe just being near the goblin girl. What if he…?

His stomach snarled as if in response and a tingle of fear ran up his back.

Missing out on eating Eliza the water mage may have been far far more of a mistake than he had first realised. Losing control… losing his mind to mindless predation… an unthinking thing that just devoured all that was in reach.

"I… think I need something to eat," he mumbled, in a mild state of shock.

"Yah, no shit. You should have said something! You need to pay better attention Rain, you can't keep in control if you're hungry, you need to let us know so we can feed you, okay?"

She petted him comfortingly on the snout and dropped down from his lap. Already yelling at the monsters to get back to work doing market stuff.

Rain rose to his feet, a few of the smaller monsters nearby scampering back in alarm. They seemed afraid of him… okay more afraid, they were shit scared of him before, now they were doubly so.

…Probably for the best.

He strode from the market, the small monsters leaping out of his way like a shoal of fish around a shark.

He heard Opal catching up behind him and glanced down. The goblin girl smiled up at him, her eyes squeezed closed. Sometimes he did wonder how blasé she was with his problems, he supposed she never thought it might escalate as she could just keep him fed forever.

She patted him on the thigh.

"Well? Come on! You've got loads to eat!"

Rain followed, feeling a little unsure of himself, but then, he was ravenous.