Mercantile Violence 1.03

Standing outside Fugly Bob’s, staring at the dilapidated, grease-stained shack crouching on the edge of the boardwalk overlooking the beach, I made an executive decision. Since I was officially retired from the drug scene, I figured my body could handle a different kind of poison. I deserved at least this one small indulgence. Anyone with any sense usually waited a year between visits to give their heart a chance to recuperate, but my heart had just been magically scrubbed clean. It could take the hit.

I pushed the door open, greeted by the heavy, glorious stench of ancient frying oil and sizzling beef. The place was a bizarre hybrid of a fast-food joint, a dive bar, and a ramshackle beach shack. The floor was sticky enough to claim a loose sneaker, and the humming fluorescent lights overhead cast a harsh, unflattering glow over the empty booths.

It was surprisingly dead inside. My eyes immediately bypassed the vacant tables and locked onto a woman sitting by herself. She was staring with an expression of profound, quizzical disbelief at the Fugly Bob Challenger—a towering monstrosity of a burger so incredibly fat and greasy it would give even some of the fattest fucks this side of the states a heart attack.

My gaze quickly swiveled away to the few other occupants of the shack, desperately trying to look at anything else. There was a pair of exhausted dockworkers nursing cheap beers in a corner booth, their heavy jackets dusted with dried salt and grime, and a bored teenage cashier who looked like he was actively contemplating the sweet release of death.

They were distractions, or rather, my poor attempt at distracting myself from the woman sitting alone.

She was, without a doubt, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She looked to be no older than twenty-something, with striking features and a bright, effortless elegance that made the entire dingy diner look like a cheap, out-of-focus background set. Well, more than it already did anyways. My heart beat like a drum at the mere sight of her, hammering against my ribs as if it knew something I didn't—some deep, instinctual secret that my brain was unable to decipher.

There was only one logical thing to do.

I walked up to the cashier, ordered my food, grabbed my greasy paper bag—

And sat far, far away from her.

She was an absolute bombshell, and, on a good day, I would have needed to sniff at least a solid line of cocaine to muster up the courage to approach a woman like that.

Alas, since I didn't really want to use drugs anymore, I suppose I'd just never speak to a beautiful woman again for the rest of my life.

It is what it is.

I scarfed down my food, idly noting that the Grind bar didn't seem to be dropping at all. I had decided to take a break since I had just scored a Roll (and had been quite hungry), leaving the bar hovering at less than ten percent when I walked away from those half-dead Merchants. Yet, the moment I stepped inside Fugly Bob's, the decay had stopped. In fact, if I wasn't mistaken, it was actually rising—just a tiny, almost imperceptible fraction at a time.

I stared suspiciously at my burger.

Is this fucking thing poisoned or something? I wondered.

I shook my head, discarding the thought. I wasn't a Thinker, nor was I particularly smart, so there was no point in wracking my brain over it. I shoved the last of the burger and fries down my throat, washing them down with a heavy gulp of my soda, before crumpling the greasy wrappers into the paper bag and tossing it into the half-filled trash can.

He never did look back in the woman's direction, his conscious and subconscious fears keeping his eyes firmly locked ahead.

Because of this, he never noticed the gold ring adorning the fourth finger of her left hand. The ring's intricate pattern depicted a parody of The Creation of Adam. In the place of God stood the most famous female cape in the world. Anyone with less than 20/10 vision would have needed a magnifying glass to spot the details, but those who looked closely would notice the conspicuous absence of a scar—one that should have been visible from the depicted angle, dating back to when the heroine had clashed with William Manton’s projection.

On the ring's surface, she smiled softly down at the stand-in for Adam: a young, white-skinned boy with brown hair and browner eyes. The boy's face was frozen in an expression of pure wonder, of absolute worship, as if he were looking upon Heaven itself. And perhaps he was, since Heaven is God's domain.

The only fundamental deviation from the original masterpiece, aside from the identities of the participants, was the boy's hand. Unlike Adam's limp, hesitant reach, the boy's finger was fully extended—firmly touching the index finger of God, touching the digit of the Library of Alexandria herself.

The boy could be said, then, in that moment, to be Reaching Heaven.

What the fuck am I doing here?

"You gotta pay to enter, man," a gruff voice interrupted my thoughts.

No, seriously, what was I doing here? Shouldn't I be hunting down Skidmark? I was supposed to be telling that piece of shit exactly how useless his version of "Heaven" was right before kicking his ass six ways to Sunday and raking in those sweet, sweet Rolls.

Well, I supposed the "sweet, sweet Rolls" part of the plan could still be accomplished if I just slaughtered every single one of the chucklefucks waiting on the other side of the heavy doors in front of me.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, which was currently stuffed fat with the damp, crumpled cash I'd stripped off the shivering bodies of the Merchants back in the alley. I peeled off a couple of twenties and shoved them toward the guy blocking the entrance.

He was a big, burly white guy with a shaved head and a sour expression. As he took the money, his sleeve shifted, revealing a poorly inked tattoo stretching across his forearm that read Everlasting Eutopia Expedition in stylized, blocky letters. I thought to myself that it was a remarkably weird thing to get permanently etched onto your skin, but I wasn't the fashion police. I shrugged, disregarded it, and pushed past him.

I stepped through the threshold, immediately greeted by a wall of heat, sweat, and the stench of cheap beer. I'd followed the muffled, aggressive barking and watched a couple of sketchy-looking guys hauling muzzled, scarred dogs through a side door earlier, so I wasn't exactly shocked by what I found.

It was a dog-fighting ring. A raucous, bloodthirsty crowd pressed tight against a chain-link fence, screaming and throwing crumpled bills toward a blood-stained dirt pit in the center of the room.

I rolled my shoulders and cracked my neck. My back was still incredibly sore, but at least nothing was broken. I’d made sure of that by immediately Burning [A skeleton] right after my fight in the alley. Using its brief power-up I turned it into an Item that would heal and reinforce my skeletal structure. The rock-solid bone reinforcement had faded the second the Burn timer hit zero, but the actual healing—the knitting of fractures and sealing of cracks—remained. Still, the surrounding muscles were stiff as hell and throbbed with a dull, bruised ache.

Desperate for something to dull the throbbing, I nudged my way through the shouting crowd and made a beeline for the dingy, makeshift bar set up in the far corner of the warehouse. I slid onto a sticky stool, slapped a crumpled bill onto the counter, and ordered a drink, keeping my eyes moving as I began to size up the room.

Conflict Grind filled!

Parameters: Average - 0.655; Maximum - 1.31

Rolling…

[Salty Tears]

|Trash Trait (0.1)|

Your tears are now twice as salty.

"..."

"So," the bartender muttered, tapping his fingers impatiently on the wood, "what do you want?"

I blinked the system notification away. "Something that'll make me cry."

Guess this is just going to be a Sweat job all over again.

A shot glass containing a murky, viscous liquid slapped against the sticky counter. I stared at it quizzically, and the bald bartender merely nodded toward it with a malicious grin.

I slammed a ten-dollar bill on the counter next to the glass, picked it up, and threw the shot back in one swift gulp.

Instantly, my throat caught fire.

"ARGH! WHAT THE FUCK?!" I choked, my eyes watering instantly as my throat threatened to close up. "It's as if piss was marinated in jalapenos for ten fucking hours!"

The bald man roared with laughter, slapping his thigh. "Made you cry, didn't it?!"

I let out a wheezing laugh alongside him, using the back of my hand to wipe the stinging moisture from my eyes.

Before I could order a chaser to wash down the chemical burn, a short figure wrapped in a heavy, oversized hoodie approached the bar. Following close at his heels were three big dogs.

The bartender’s laughter died instantly, his brow furrowing into a deep scowl. "Hey. Participants are supposed to be down by the pits."

I glanced at the kid in the hoodie, stepping up and clapping a friendly, heavy hand on their shoulder. The kid went rigid as a board under my palm, a low, warning growl immediately vibrating from the chests of one of the three dogs.

"Bah, relax," I said to the bartender, ignoring the canine threats. "Maybe the kid just wants a drink too, right?"

I slapped another crumpled bill onto the counter, nudged the kid away from the bar, and gestured for us to head back toward the main floor before the bartender decided to make an issue of it.

"Hmph."

The disgruntled youth started walking, and I fell into step beside them, casting a wary glance down at the trio of mutts pacing beside us.

"You brought these guys to fight in rings before?" I asked casually.

"Yeah," came the flat, blunt reply.

I sighed. I was really hoping the answer was going to be no.

"They seem to like you, though."

"I take good care of them."

...Fucking hell, how annoying. Why did I have to run into some down-on-his-luck brat in a place like this? It made things so much more irritating.

"Look, kid," I said, stopping in a relatively quiet corner of the space and turning to face them. "I think you should take your dogs and get out of here today. I get it if you need the cash, but today is not gonna be a good day for that. Trust me."

I reached into my pocket, flipping through the thick wad of stolen Merchant bills in my wallet. "Tell you what. How about I give you fifty bucks to just turn around and go home, eh?"

The kid stiffened, narrowing their eyes beneath the shadow of the hood. Their entire posture coiled like a spring. "...Do you know what I'm here for?"

"Uh... to have your dogs chew each other up over there?" I replied, raising an eyebrow and pointing toward the screaming crowd surrounding the chain-link pit. "Wait, that voice... huh, are you actually a girl?"

Burn Times

While the duration of a Burn is technically entirely up to the user, choosing "rounder" increments tends to "feel" much better to utilize, for lack of a better term. More importantly, the most significant shifts and spikes in power scaling occur when crossing these specific thresholds: 1 second, 10 seconds, 100 seconds, 1000 seconds and 10000 seconds. To a lesser extent they also occur at 30 seconds (0.5 minutes), 60 seconds (1 minute), 30 minutes (0.5 hours) and 60 minutes (1 hour).

To illustrate: the difference between Burning an ability for 80 seconds versus 85 seconds won't feel particularly distinct. However, crossing a threshold makes a highly noticeable difference; Burning an ability for 97 seconds compared to 102 seconds yields a noticeable contrast in potency, as the former drops below the 100-second mark and receives a superior boost compared to the latter.

Author's Note

Posting twice to compensate for last week. This one for all Tiers, next one for Archon. I'm putting this one out for the public too since I think I have it decently planned out how I want it to go, and unless I take the step I'm always gonna be finding excuses not to put out something new to the wider internet.

As usual thanks for sticking around here. Godspeed my people.

Chapter 3 Build: https://avidusaureum.neocities.org/chaostracker/chaostracker.html#share=s3o42l08il&v=ms94fr06n5jv