Chapter 126: Sector 4

Chapter 126: Chapter 126: Sector 4

On the sixth day of Helena’s turn, Donald left the gold half-mask on his desk and took the tram down to Sector 4 by himself.

He told Evelyn where he was going, and nobody else. She didn’t ask why. She had watched him for three days, walking the halls of his own tower and looking at the people he passed, and she knew what it was doing to him.

The tram rattled down out of the bright towers of the center, past the Wall district and the old mining yards, until the streets outside the windows turned narrow and gray and the buildings leaned in toward each other overhead. Sector 4 hadn’t changed. The same smell of wet concrete and frying oil came through the doors when they opened, and the same tangle of power cables hung between the roofs. Before the System, he had lived in a room the size of a cupboard four streets from here, with three hundred credits to his name.

Nobody looked at him twice when he stepped off. Without the mask, he was just another young man in a plain jacket.

He walked until he found the laundry.

It was a narrow shop wedged between a noodle bar and a closed pawnbroker’s, with steam pouring out of its open front and wet sheets hanging on lines across the ceiling. When he was an F-Rank with nothing, the woman who ran it used to leave a bread roll on the counter for him on the mornings he came to drop off his one spare shirt. She had never said anything about it. She had just left it there, every time, until he started saying thank you.

She was behind the counter now, folding towels, and she looked up when his shadow fell across the doorway.

Her name was Clara Moss. She was perhaps thirty-six, a little shorter than Donald, and built soft and strong at once, the way women were when they had done heavy work all their lives. The steam had stuck her thick auburn hair to her neck in damp curls, and freckles ran across her nose and her bare shoulders, where the straps of her worn apron sat. The apron was tied tight at the waist, and above it her full, heavy breasts pressed against the thin cotton of her shirt. Below it her wide hips and round backside filled out a pair of old work trousers that had been washed so many times they had gone soft and pale. Her arms were strong from years of wringing sheets, and her hands were red and chapped.

She was leaning on a wooden crutch tucked under her left arm.

The System window opened before she had finished looking at him.

[Investment Target Detected.]

[Name: Clara Moss]

[Age: 36]

[Class: Unawakened. Latent core detected.]

[Status: Left leg crushed, healed badly. Chronic pain. Income falling.]

[Potential: B-Rank (Healer type).]

[Investment Recommended.]

"Donald?" Clara said slowly. "Little Donald, with the one shirt?"

"Hello, Mrs. Moss."

She laughed, surprised, and the sound filled the small, steamy shop. "Look at you. I heard you’d gone up in the world, that you’d joined one of the big Guilds in the center." Her eyes went over his jacket and his boots. "I didn’t think you’d ever come back down."

"Neither did I," Donald said. "What happened to your leg?"

Her smile faded a little. "The pump in the back room exploded last winter, and the boiler came down on it. The clinic set it as well as they could for what I could pay." She shrugged. "It works. Mostly."

Before Donald could answer, three men came in off the street behind him.

---

He knew what they were before he turned around. Sector 4 had always had men like them, and they always walked into a shop the same way, too loud and too close together, as if the place was already theirs.

The one in front was big and bald, with a tattoo of a dog’s head on his neck. The two behind him were younger and thinner, and one of them had a faint orange glow around his knuckles. Donald let Valuation Eye run over them without moving his head.

They were an E-Rank, a D-Rank and a C-Rank, Levels 9 to 21. The leader called himself Brick, and the young one with the glowing hands was a fire-type Awakener with a single cheap skill.

"Week’s up, Clara," Brick said, ignoring Donald completely. "Two hundred."

"I paid you on Monday," Clara said. Her knuckles had gone white around the crutch.

"That was last week’s. Prices went up." Brick leaned on the counter and looked at the towels. "Iron Dogs have to eat too. Since Silas died, it’s all been very hard on us."

Donald almost laughed.

"Silas," he said. "C-Rank, Level 24, ran the Iron Dogs until he chased the wrong people into the Iron-Vein Mines?"

Brick turned and looked at him for the first time. "You knew him?"

"I killed him," Donald said.

There was a short silence in the shop. Then Brick grinned, as if Donald had told a joke, and nodded to the young one with the glowing hands.

The young man threw a fireball at Donald’s face.

It was a small, wobbling thing, the size of an orange, nothing like the compressed sphere Donald could make himself. He didn’t step out of the way. He put up his right hand and caught it, and let his own Fireball skill take hold of it in his palm. The borrowed fire stopped spinning and went still, and then it went out, until there was nothing in his hand but a thin wisp of smoke.

The young man stared at him.

Brick swung a fist at Donald’s head. Donald turned his shoulder into it and let Bull Rush carry him forward, only a single step, not even half the skill’s strength. It was enough. He hit Brick in the chest, and the big man left the floor, went backward through the open front of the shop and landed in the street on his back among the puddles.

The third man drew a knife. Donald caught his wrist, squeezed until the knife dropped, and pushed him gently out of the door after his leader.

The young man with the glowing hands was still standing in the shop with his mouth open.

"Go home," Donald told him. "Tell the Iron Dogs that this shop is under the protection of the Investment Guild. If anyone comes back here for money, I’ll come down and collect it from them."

The young man went, fast, and helped Brick up out of the puddle on the way. Within a minute the three of them were gone down the street.

---

Clara hadn’t moved from behind the counter. She was looking at him as if she had never seen him before.

"The Investment Guild," she said. "The one on the news? With the man in the gold mask?"

"That’s the one."

"And you work for him."

"Something like that." Donald reached into his jacket and took out a small glass vial with a silver cap, which he had bought from the System shop on the tram ride down, without being entirely sure why.

[Purchased: Greater Restoration Potion. -50,000 Credits.]

[Current Balance: 4,680,000 System Credits.]

He set it on the counter in front of her.

"Drink this," he said. "All of it."

"What is it?"

"Something to fix your leg. Call it a bread roll." He smiled a little. "You never let me pay for mine."

Clara looked at the vial and then at him. For a long moment she didn’t move. Then she picked it up with her chapped red fingers, pulled off the silver cap, and drank it down.

Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then she gasped and grabbed the edge of the counter with both hands, and the crutch fell to the floor with a clatter. Under the old work trousers, Donald heard bone shift and settle into place.

Clara stood very still. Then, slowly, she put her full weight on her left leg, and stood straight on both feet for the first time in a year.

"It doesn’t hurt," she whispered. Her eyes filled. "Donald, it doesn’t hurt."

The window opened in front of him, and this one he read carefully.

[Investment Complete: Clara Moss.]

[Injury Healed. Latent core stirred: Awakening possible within 30 days.]

[Dividend Paid to Investor.]

[New Skill Acquired: Regeneration (B-Rank).]

[Description: Restores 1% of maximum HP every 10 seconds outside combat, and 1% every 30 seconds in combat. Passive.]

He felt it settle into him at once. The ache in his ribs from the Hanseong tower, which he had been ignoring for a week, began to fade.

Clara came around the end of the counter, walking easily, and hugged him hard, with her damp hair against his cheek and the warm weight of her pressed against his chest. She smelled of soap and steam.

"I don’t know how to thank you," she said into his shoulder.

"You already did. Years ago."

When she let go of him at last, she wiped her eyes on her apron and looked up at him with a small frown.

"Someone from your Guild was down here asking about you," she said. "Two weeks ago. Polite, quiet, wore one of your silver pins. They wanted to know what you were like before you went up to the center. Whether you’d changed." She hesitated. "I didn’t like how they asked. So I didn’t tell them anything."

Donald went very still.

"What did they look like?"

Clara thought about it for a long time. Then she shook her head, slowly, and looked puzzled.

"That’s the strange thing," she said. "I can’t remember their face at all."