“Outta me way!”

  The Mick swatted the banderlings out of his path, caring nothing for their cries and roars of alarm at invading their den. His bare hand cracked and whacked, and the two biggest males were slapped off their feet as he strode right through the middle of their camp.

  It looked like they were lairing the kids in one of the houses. This was a Villa settlement, meaning an extra-dimensional Dungeon had been attached to the place to store stuff, unlike the smaller Houses.

  The banderlings he was barreling through were protecting their den and territory, and he really didn’t give a damn.

  He really hadn’t thought through the implications if their damn trick with the MMD notes actually worked. Now, all the Freehold forces that could busy themselves were crawling all over the landscape, looking for more MMD notes.

  Sometimes they were scattered as junk. Sometimes they were stacked nicely in aging chests. Sometimes they were part of rats nests (but, they’d been told, those could be restored, too!), and sometimes they were ashes in old campfires, and those who burned them, like himself, could only feel a little green with regrets.

  Ah, well.

  He was on his fifth settlement of the day, heading up past Holtburg and west of Colier. This was the old New Colier Villa settlement, once a fairly picturesque and desirable location to set up a transitional base and place to lay your head.

  Now, it was overgrown, abandoned by everything except nesting shreth, reedsharks, rats, and wild tribes looking for easy shelter.

  The Villas generally had flooded basements, but that didn’t mean no Notes… and it was only a Cantrip to dry them out rapidly, stuff them into his Masspack, and move onto the next.

  He had about six hundred of them on him now, the rest too shredded, decayed, or dispersed to retrieve.

  Six hundred. Once that would have been a medium-size purchase to him. Now it was an amount to beggar kings!

  He leapt up the motte the Villa was on, formed when the Dungeon below it burst into reality, and without stopping vaulted the wall, then just rolled in through the shattered window there, completely ignoring the banderling kits who leapt away from his sudden presence.

  Gharu design, he thought, meaning the stairs down were there, turn here, turn here.

  The stairs extended down, sure enough, but the floor below them was shattered and mostly fallen into the greater Dungeon below, which took up much more area than the Villa above it proper ever had.

  The chests should be over there, he thought, skimming down the stairs with lightfoot so weightless it didn’t even sway under his weight, and ignoring the alarmed yowls above, he dropped into the darkness, Devilsight from his Mask of Clarity giving him all the sight he needed.

  A deft use of Detect Precious Materials assured him that there was salvage scattered about, something found in almost all of the Dungeons come back into reality.

  There was also about two feet of slimy, sludgy water, but Protection from Water, while not preventing him from getting wet when immersed, would dry him off almost instantly when he got out of there, and he bounced immediately to the top of the water as his Waveskating Steps lightfoot supported him.

  Damn, he did so love lightfoot.

  Two chests in Villa Dungeons. One was completely broken, contents spilled out into the water when the dimensional expansion of the chest was broken and things too large to actually fit within burst forth.

  No papers in his sight, or stirred up by his hand as he crouched.

  The other chest was still intact, although opening it up would likely crumble it immediately, so he’d have to be quick.

  A Waterproofing spell ready to go, he grabbed the lid and yanked it up, ignoring the creak and feel of rust.

  Paper!

  The spell went off and covered the contents instantly, even as the chest fell apart and the surrounding waters promptly flooded in.

  Ignoring the water, the Mick promptly fished out all the contents that had value… was that an uncharged Virindi Amulet, still glowing with faint magic?

  Yoink, he thought, putting that into his Vest.

  A single stack of MMD’s. Only a ransom to shame emperors, he thought. People had gambled away fortunes towards the end of the Fall, although having servants toting around bags of MMD’s no thief could break into or steal under Asheron’s Ward was the most popular way to store huge volumes of notes among the people who wanted their money easily accessible.

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  Dozens of those people had died when their MMD stacks ignited and turned them into walking bonfires. They either died and went to the Deathstones, there to die when the damn things blew up, or they simply died horribly, burned alive by pieces of paper worth no man’s life.

  He knew plenty of folks who would judge just one of these pieces of paper worth more than most anyone’s life now. Worthless scrip suddenly become insanely valuable because there still existed an NPC who would cash them in.

  The other papers might include things from quests, personal notes and observations, or histories. He’d had a Book of his own at one time, in which he’d noted down things of importance, a common thing by many adventurers. The scholars would get them all, and it cost him nothing to grab them.

  He sent the mental note into the Markspace that this Villa had viable salvage for a later Scour team to collect, and turned to leave the building.

  Running up the wall and springing off to the stairs that shouldn’t have held his weight as they rocked in the air over nothing was not hard. The banderlings that had gathered at the top of the place, Berserkers and Bandits forming the elite of this northern tribe, bellowed to see him, and then just blinked as he was up the stairs and coming right at them at a full run.

  He took three of the brutal wilders right off their feet with a Tidal Palm, the Ocean style being the best at pure force of all the styles, as well as the most flexible. He drove them back into the hall, a good half-ton of banderling warriors crashing through the wall there.

  He had no time to waste on things like this. Striding away from the warriors who scattered from his path on instinct, he flowed through the open window, glass long shattered, at the end of the hallway, as if was an open road, the smoothness itself a dangerous display to the banderlings starting warily after him.

  Next Villa, over there…

  The banderlings watched him run on to the next Villa, their outraged calls sounding rather like they were trying to puff themselves up for chasing him out, and that special note basically told the other banderlings outside not to chase after him.

  Which was a good idea. He didn’t have the time to waste on them, but if they wanted to press the issue, he would rip through them and let their blood speak for him...

  ---

  Whose idea was it to build housing settlements in the Olthoi North?, Princess Kristie Rantha wondered, sticking a Lacerator between the large eyeballs with Quaver ringing two-tones that were visibly unsettling the olthoi who’d been stupid enough to follow her into this Villa’s basement. The winged olthoi shrieked, death pheromones filled the air, and a Warrior who’d jumped from above surged through the waist-high water awkwardly in response, its pedipalps raised high.

  She was standing atop that water, and slid aside from its slowed rush, Quaver dipping in and out of the seam between head and thorax, acidic blood chased with vivic spurted forth. The weighty mass of the bug crashed against the wall with a shriek and fell over, dead before it hit the water.

  A dozen olthoi were Burning in the waters down here, clearing them up, although actually the olthoi ecology of the air had taken most of the nutrients out of the water and underlaid everything with jarringly wrong moss and mold, much of it glowing in ultraviolet colors.

  Whatever. She wasn’t here to grab everything, just the papers, and her Tremblesense would rapidly tell her if there was anything useful here, as it had the other Villas.

  Soul Magic wrapped her hand and made it over twice as big as it was, also wrapping around the stack of MMD’s floating in the water inside the chest all at the same time, not letting them fall apart.

  The Prestidigitation Cantrip from Quaver was perfectly capable of drying out the stack of paper perfectly and thoroughly, although it would probably still need a Mending to return to its best state, a fact she noted as she pulled up a second stack, noted the salvage on the ground for the future, and waited for her Sword to treat the paper before sticking it in her Masspack.

  There were a bunch of olthoi up above, but she didn’t have to fight them all, just lead them to the next house and let them stew and chase her.

  Grinning to herself at excitement mixed with the need for urgency, she headed up the wall and to a hole in the floor away from where she’d come down. There should be a window in that room she could exit through.

  ----

  A bit of preplanning I was not even aware was so, Oswald the Green Hunter thought, reaching into the chest and pulling out three stacks of MMD notes left there years ago by Naerbus the Clever, long dead and mostly forgot even before then.

  The message to him had been delivered in person by Briggs, crossing the entire island to do so, something that indicated the very, very busy man who’d became the most powerful and influential person among all Isparians considered this very important.

  If you were not a fool who could do some basic math, it had quickly become apparent why it was important.

  An NPC who would cash in MMD’s for pyreal coins. Pyreal coins that could be Burned to make magic items.

  He stared at the three stacks of MMD’s. He’d known they’d been here for years, because one of the ways he trained his apprentices was charging them to keep all the settlements of Cottages, Villas, and Mansions in the vicinity of Stonehold and the Plateau free of nesting or settling creatures. Many of them had taken that to the next level, wiping or chasing off any creatures from any settlement they moved through on their regular scouting missions.

  They were charged to take anything useful, but leave the rest… which normally meant leaving almost everything, since most of the contents were spoiled, exploded, decayed, or weathered.

  So, if the chest was still intact, there might well be stacks of worthless MMD’s in them, untouched by his operatives or anything else that had gone through.

  Like here in Naerbus’ Cottage.

  Time-sensitive, Briggs had said. Meaning hoarding these things was useless. He would have to trust the towering brute to treat him and his people fairly…

  Briggs had always impressed and somewhat annoyed him with just how fairly he treated people, and how immune he was to greed or temptations of power. Unlike so many leaders and politicians of his acquaintance, so eager for power and for none of the responsibilities of it.

  This wasn’t even the amount of a decent bribe before the Fall. The gambling houses had cleared more than this in a day, each! Now, one stack could potentially make Stonehold something truly great, and satisfy his own needs for cash for years.

  The Freebooter League was scrambling to react to this sudden shift from their artifact-grabbing missions, wondering what was going on. He wasn’t about to tell them, chuckling to himself as he knew whatever they recovered likely was going to be just more paper without access to that NPC...

  Laughing under his breath, he moved on to the next Cottage in this Thyrinn Cant settlement he recalled having some MMD’s in it, skipping the others for now. They could be, ah, Scoured at a later date, now that such salvage was more than pretty rocks once again...

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