There were a number of small events over the next week, but they all paled in comparison to my head finally not hurting, although there was just a hint of a ringing in my head remaining by the end of it. I did also get a notice from Harry saying that he was no longer being detained but he wasn't free to act for a little bit while he did some community service, which seemed to me an odd choice for punishment.

On the other hand, being able to compel a high powered Dungeoneer to do something for you was probably really, really useful. Putting him to work was probably a vastly better idea, as long as he is willing or they can force him, and he'd probably go along with it if it meant nothing worse happened.

There was also another attack from that assassin which was no more successful than the last two. It was, frankly, a little embarrassing. I wanted to capture the bitch and get some information rather than having to deal with the police if I killed her, but again, she slipped out of a telekinetic grasp with some kind of teleport skill or item.

Two days after that I received a wicker basket on my porch, which I was immediately suspicious of until I saw a nametag on it that read "Vladimir". Apparently, with some delay, Vlad had actually followed through on his promise of a gift basket, which I honestly wasn't expecting.

It was, mostly, fruit. Which, again, was what he said it would be. Good fruit, but not Dungeon items--pears mostly, a couple apples, some grapes, a cantaloupe. It was weird.

Underneath the fruit, though, was another layer of stuff. A pistol, three boxes of ammunition, two spare clips, a pair of sunglasses, three fragmentation grenades, and a note. Of all of them, only the sunglasses were a Dungeon item:

PERIL SENSITIVE SUNGLASSES - Lv 135 [ PER +20 ] [ AGI +10 ] [ Danger Sense Lv 50 ] [ Blank Face Lv 47 ] A pair of sunglasses designed to help you survive assassination plots. Perhaps you should try a different line of work? [ Danger Sense ] The wearer may become aware of Dungeoneers and Dungeon Monsters within range who are looking at the wearer with hostile intentions. [ Blank Face ] When activated, this skill makes it difficult for others to read your emotions and intentions.

The note was brief:

I heard you were targeted by an assassin. Congratulations.

I am temporarily in the area. Brother is mad about the thing where I tried to kill him and is trying to kill me. Also may be unrelated violence, family likes to play games like this.

Heard you were busy with some kind of shit quest. May be willing to assist in exchange for favor. Call this number: XXX-XXX-XXXX.

I studied the note, front and back, for a little while. Vlad was significantly higher level than me, enough that there was no way I could bring him into the Dungeon to help with the fight against Bo. As a person who had admitted to having ties to organized crime, I was also leery of accepting a deal with him "in exchange for a favor". Without calling him, though, I didn't even know what kind of assistance he could provide.

Anyway, before anything else, I started making plans to dip into Galveston's Wharf Dungeon to speak with Kalamitus, since that was a formal quest which had come with a very nice carrot and a very nasty stick. My level being above 40, with the Dungeon Pass I had, I could easily enter the Dungeon; Louise, though, was not level 50 yet, and I didn't want to go in without her.

Not to say that I had completely given up my pride as a solo diver, or anything. But the more I compared my runs through Pearland with my run through Armand Bayou, the more I could just feel a cold echoing loneliness from my time going through the beginner's dungeon. It felt like every wall reflected my own isolation, and I'd thrown myself at every encounter as though to quiet down the inner turmoil that came from ignoring the twisting ache in my heart. Even on my later trips through, when I had set the monster aside, it felt like... well, it felt different.

I was sending Harry a note asking if he knew any way to get our hands on something like the Dungeon Pass for Louise when there was a knock at the door. I flipped on my telekinetic sense and registered two people outside the door, one I thought might by Henry, the cook who'd been tasked with wrangling me when I left Armand Bayou.

I raised my shields before I answered the door (three brushes with an assassin will do that) and opened it to find him there, looking pretty much the same, along with a woman in a slightly-oversized cowboy hat, who tipped the hat at him amicably as soon as the door was open.

"Yeah, hey, sorry," said Henry, "I don't usually drop by unannounced, but uh, my friend here--"

"Susan Quiche," offered the blonde, sticking her hand out to shake. "But everyone calls me Susie. Can we come in?"

I glanced at Henry. He... he just kind of shrugged. I guess she was dragging him along?

I let them in and let the two of them sit on the couch. I considered offering them a drink, but Susie appeared a two beers from her inventory like it was Friday night, offering one to Henry, who turned it down. She offered it to me, already taking a sip of her own, but I waved her off as well.

She didn't really seem to mind, putting the other away without hesitation.

I pulled up the dining chair and sat down across from them. "So what exactly--"

"So we heard you were going after the killer," said Susie, and I stifled my irritation at being interrupted. For some reason, Merry seemed to find my reaction funny. "And we wanna help."

"Hey, hold on, I didn't say that," objected Henry, a moment after she spoke, as though he suddenly understood what she said.

Susie acted like he didn't talk, with was a kind of assholery that I wasn't very familiar with. "The problem is, the guy's stronger than anyone our level has any right to be. Henry and I, and some military guys, real serious, duty-bound types, went in to take a look, along with a guy whose power lets him measure others--you know, I forget what he called it, some kind of Sage job, I think. His stats were incredible--I think I heard someone say his strength was over 200, and that's not something you can just overlook."

That number did give me pause, too. Even my highest stats were all well under 100, since I hadn't bothered leveling most of them up. Equipment bonuses at my level tended to be in the range of 5-15 points, which wouldn't do a whole heck of a lot to close the gap... unless Enhancement Sage proved some miracle cure. Even then, I'd likely need to find some really good items and pile all their best features onto one or two.

Susie was still talking. She seemed to like talking.

"...all of my customized equipment wasn't nearly enough. And I was so proud! You should have seen the bonuses I was able to stack on a single piece of gear." She sighed, shrinking back for only a moment, not nearly long enough to make her look vulnerable or personable, before bouncing back. "Of all of it, though, the guy is just too damn fast. It's not just that he's faster than us. Tom--he was one of the military guys--he led off with a sword tech that's pretty good, you know? But this guy, the killer, he moved like the guy was standing still. I couldn't follow him. It was crazy."

I frowned. "What was his agility? Roughly?"

"160, 175, maybe. In that range. I forget which number was which."

"Cripes." I closed my eyes and thought about it for a while. My agility was good--over fifty, now--and I'd relied on it before. I'd never been so outclassed...

Actually, that gave me a thought, and I pulled up my inventory and summoned Julius on the spot. Henry and Susie jumped at his sudden appearance, and Henry started to reach for the guy before he realized that he was harmless. I... realized after a moment that the two had been through the same dungeon and doubtless fought the Caesarians.

Julius, though, observed the movements of both with a pleasant look on his face. One might even say his eyes were vacant; absent any combat instincts, he seemed like he would have taken a haymaker to the face and apologize for standing in the way afterwards.

I raised a hand at the two, quickly jumping in. "Sorry," I said. "I just need to check on something. Julius, what would you say your Agility is?"

"I don't typically put these things into numbers, Lord Jerald..."

I sighed. "Just show me your stat window, if you would." I could probably figure out how to fuss with the item to bring it up, but as a non-combat pet, Julius' status didn't default to showing me those details.

The Roman blinked at me for a moment, and then a window popped up, and I studied the statistics.

His stats were below Bo's, but he was easily two-thirds of the way to that point. His strength was 150, well above anything I should have been able to counter, and his agility was 120.

"How the hell..." Susie was walking in a tight circle around Julius, checking him out. "Where did you get this piece of... uh, Italian Sausage?" She glanced down at his waist, and an eager look came over her face.

"That's complicated. I beat a couple of the Barbarians and made a deal with the administrator."

"A couple." Henry, still sitting on the couch with one ankle resting on the other knee, tiled his head back and gave me some kind of down-the-nose stinkeye. "The chair fight?"

I blinked at him. "No. The pursuit section. I didn't trigger the chair fight."

Susie got entirely too close to Julius, almost cuddling him, although my pet didn't seem to object. "Why would you do that? And why would the administrator care? They have no loot and are easy to outpace."

"Like I said, complicated. I don't really want to talk about it." I crossed my arms and looked at my pet Caesar. "Julius, how much of your speed were you using when you fought me earlier? Roughly?"

"My speed, Lord Jerald? Maybe half by the end, I'd say," admitted the Caesar. "I think with more improvements to your technique alone, we could improve your effective speed by quite a lot."

I grimaced. In a way, that was worse. "Bo was a martial artist," I said. "He'll already be using more of his speed than I can, and he has more of it."

"Bo?" Susie stopped draping herself over Julius' shoulder and stood straight for a moment.

"Assuming my source is correct, that's his name. He was turned by a high level Faerie and is now forced to fight against his will."

Susie and Henry exchanged long looks. "The name field on his stats was blacked out," said Henry after a minute. "Class said, 'Heretic knight.' Never heard of that."

I just nodded without replying. Come to think of it, the harpy birdman had said Bo's name was stolen.

"And after all of this, you still think you have a shot?" Susie moved around until she could lean, shoulder-first, against Julius, and still face me. Julius, obligingly, shifted his weight just slightly so that she wasn't affecting his stance. It was honestly getting on my nerves how much she was taking Julius' Gentlemanly nature for granted; I considered unsummoning him just to screw with her, but eventually just let it be.

"I have just under six months to make an attempt," I said. "And in case we're unclear, I am a solo diver, and I've always been. I have to try as hard as I can to get as strong as I can before then while still being able to enter the Dungeon. If I don't, the quest that I got--basically directly from the Administrator--is gonna rob me of my Dungeoneer status and kick him out for good."

"If you want to tag along," I admitted, "I'd feel a little safer. But I'm putting all my eggs in one basket. I have to be capable of killing him solo, just in case... well, in case I need to." No point in saying that I was scared I wouldn't get his corpse if I didn't solo kill him. Did he count as a boss monster now? Or in any other way inhuman? It was hard to know what might happen.

Susie shrugged. "Well as you can see," and she gestured to the number above her head: 72, "I'm getting to the point where I can't grind for the strength to beat him. Mostly what I need are high quality items I can rework into customs."

I blinked at her. "You make custom items?"

"Yeah. Well, no. It's complicated." She appeared a giant (but still technically portable) brass Gatling gun and let the barrel end drop on the floor, barely bothering to catch the grip end and hold it up. It was a good four feet long. "It's a self-made class. I'm working on it, but most of the interesting shit is out of my reach. I scrap items for Forge Points and condense those into equipment that I imagine. It's kind of a lottery..."

"Stop." I raised a hand. "Forge points? Seriously?" In my head, I felt Merry perk up as well. Even though she wasn't where I could 'see' her, I could feel her start to grin.

Susie nodded earnestly, a little confused.

I felt a grin spread across my face, too. I'd encountered the same term when I was looking through my new Enhancement Sage skill. "I think you need to come with me when I go into the Wharf dungeon," I said. "Because I just spent an obscene number of Class Points on a brand new Tier 3 Skill that uses the same resource, and once I have enough experience, I'm gonna throw you a freshly minted Skill Book for it."

Susie barely had to hear the words come out of my mouth before a sly, wicked, ...almost creepy grin spread across her face. She didn't even bother to ask what the skill was.

"Why my dear, that sounds lovely," she offered, and stuck her hand out for me to shake.