As they walked across the courtyard heading to the armory, Sarah practiced using her inventory to store the weapons she had so that she wouldn’t have to carry everything with her at all times. “Inventory,” she said out loud, and a faintly glowing outline with dozens of boxes for items appeared in her field of vision. All of the boxes were empty, so she found it easy to practice as she walked, since her vision was mostly free. “Store small sword,” she uttered, and the cheap blade disappeared from her hand, occupying a space in one of the boxes for weapons. “Retrieve small sword,” she said, and the sword disappeared from the box and came to her hand again, as if by magic.

Maggot gave her furtive glances as she did this. The people they passed didn’t seem surprised, though. NPCs were trained to ignore these procedures players were doing all the time as part of the game mechanics. They just kind of assumed that the players had stowed their items away out of their view in a flash, or just plain forgot that there had been an item there one second ago.

“Store bow and arrows. Store big sword,” Sarah said, and she found herself holding just the small blade. Then she started practicing doing the storing and retrieval silently, issuing commands with her mind. She failed the first few times, but after a while, she got the hang of it. She even made sure she could retrieve her weapons whatever position her arms were in: if she had been holding a sword with her arm pointing down, but raised her arm before retrieving it, the weapon would still appear correctly held in her hand; if, however, the weapon had been hanging at her side from a belt or something, it would reappear there.

“Learn to do this,” she told Maggot smiling slightly. “It may be the difference between life and death when you’re in the middle of a battle.”

Maggot started practicing too. He failed quite a bit more than her, but he finally got it mostly right.

The armory was just beside the forge, which Sarah thought was convenient. She announced herself and entered the place when nobody answered. After a few seconds, a man wearing leather armor and holding a knife in his left hand came from the back.

“Hello,” he said. “You must be the Sajya everyone is talking about.”

“I guess I am,” she replied. “Does that translate to a discount or something?”

“I... I don’t think so,” the man said, taken aback. Then he seemed to give it a second thought. “You know what? Yes, I will make you a discount. You helped saving us from the dragon, so it’s the least I can do.”

“That’s good, because I only have—”

Sarah couldn’t finish the sentence. She had invoked her Inventory once more to exchange some experience points for coin, since her balance had been reduced to $90 in the game currency after renting Tristan. But now the screen looked different.

$ 10090

Mana 0060 ($30/x)

XP 0510 ($10/x)

Wow! Uberyn was right. The nobles can be generous if you help them. I got 10,000 coin just because they thought I had done something! I can pay for my horse and I’ll still have quite a bit of coin. Let’s see what we can get for my friend.

To get 10,000 coin on her own, she would have had to earn 1000 XP. Killing the giant had given her 100, so ten giants. Just hanging around Uberyn had been the equivalent of killing ten giants.

“Oh, forget that,” she told the man, who was staring at her, waiting for her to finish the sentence. “I have enough coin. We’re looking for a better sword than that.” She pointed at the sorry blade Maggot was holding.

“Any sword will be better than that,” the armorer said scornfully. “Where did you get it, little man?”

“I may have little friends but I have big fists,” Sarah said before Maggot had time to open his mouth. “You’ll realize it soon enough if you disrespect them again.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry. Please come and see what I have available.”

They went to the back room where the man showed them an assortment of swords, knives, sabres, pikes, spears, hatchets, bows, flails, and clubs. Sarah disregarded all big weapons. It made no sense to equip Maggot with something he could barely handle — much better to start training him with small blades, then (if he managed to stay alive) go bigger and bigger.

“What do you say?” she asked Maggot once she narrowed down her selection to a sword, an axe, and a set of knives. All the weapons glinted with a sharp, cold spark. The sword was just like the one Maggot already had, but sturdier, sharper, and shinier. It looked like it could stand in combat, unlike the old one.

Maggot grabbed his head, trying to make a decision. He looked overwhelmed by the situation, but after a while, his eyes seemed to clear. He raised his head and in a firm voice said: “I choose the knives.”

“Oh. Interesting.” Sarah was a bit surprised. Choosing the knives had been a smart move for Maggot. He knew his limitations and planned to work around them by using a weapon that was small, sneaky, and very fast. At the very least he had chosen the knives because they were the lightest weapon and didn’t require much Strength; perhaps he had also considered that he would need to avoid entering an already declared fight and use the element of surprise instead by throwing or sticking his knife into unsuspecting foes.

The set contained six knives in three pairs of varying sizes. They looked accurate, deadly, and expensive. They came with a double belt and six individual sheaths that could be secured in all kinds of overt or secret places through small broochs and stripes.

“How much for them?” Sarah asked.

“They cost a thousand coin. For you, half of that,” the armorer said, smiling obligingly.

“That’s fair.”

Sarah reached into her purse and found the coins there. She was down to $9590 now, more than enough for her immediate needs. She could afford buying stuff for Maggot.

“They’re yours,” she said, waving at the set of knives for her friend to grab them. She noticed that this was enough for the knives to become Maggot’s property: they did not appear in her own Inventory, while Uberyn’s bow and arrows did, since he had given them to her. The game was quite advanced in this respect, allowing the players to use everyday words and agreements to perform actions.

“Good choice, sir,” the armorer pointed out. “Will you need training with those?”

“Don’t worry,” Sarah intervened. “I will take it upon—”

For the second time in only a few minutes, she found herself unable to finish her sentence. Her Perception had started tingling furiously, filling the air with a weird electricity and making her feel dizzy and alert at the same time. She looked around and quickly found what had triggered it. On top of a table full of weapons of all sorts, bathed in a faint blue light, there was a book.

Sarah approached it with apprehension, wondering what was about to happen. Books could be lethal too, and this one could be part of the armorer’s catalog: a tool for killing in secret, a book with poisoned pages that would give you a horrible death when you least expected it.

But it was not that.

Written in large characters engraved in the middle of the leathery cover, there was only one word:

SAJYA

“That... that is valuable too,” the man said as he rushed behind the table, so as to present the book to her. “If you’re interested...”

Sarah looked at him with a mix of pity and anger.

“Oh, I think this is already mine,” she said, grabbing the book and pointing at the title.

“That’s not possible,” the man objected. Sarah could almost see the wheels turning inside his head trying to come up with a reasonable price for the book, which, she realized, he had never seen before.

“It is perfectly possible,” she retorted, “because this book wasn’t here a minute ago. It appeared on your shop through magical means.”

She opened the book. There was a short legend in the first page; nothing else. Nothing else in the first page, or the second, or in the rest of the tome, which was pretty sizable. There were perhaps four hundred pages in there, all of them blank save for that solitary legend:

Keep this book.

“It doesn’t make a difference, though, right?” the man insisted. “You found it in my shop; you must buy it. It will be two thousand coin. That’s already discounted.”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah objected. She could afford paying for the book, but something was telling her that she shouldn’t: this article had come to this world in a weird way, outside the rules of the game (which was admittedly pretty confusing in its rules), and she felt that paying for it would mess with her Inventory and currency balance. It needed to be separate from all other items.

She didn’t know how she had arrived at such a conclusion; it was a hunch. Maybe the product of her increased Intelligence.

Suddenly, her Perception started tingling violently once more. A small area of her visual field stood out to her. The armorer’s hand was now sneakily manipulating the knife. She caught a glimpse of the blade moving upward, getting in attack position, in a fraction of a second, and...

... and the next she knew was that her arms were raised and she was holding her bow with a nocked arrow. The point of the arrow was almost touching the tip of the man’s nose. He had frozen in place, his hand holding the knife midway, his eyes pushing out of their sockets.

Retrieve bow, Sarah had thought... but not quite. The thought had come to her as an instinctive flash, not in the form of words but just a concept, and the bow and arrow had materialized into her arms, ready to be used instantly.

This must be the product of the increase in Intelligence as well, Sarah reflected, without taking her eyes off the man, whose face was now a terrified mask. Going from ten to fifty is quite a jump.

“You were saying you were sorry?” she asked menacingly.

“And — and I am,” said the man, swallowing nervously. “I was just trying to put my knife on the table so that you could see that I’m not a threat to you. Take the book. It’s yours.”

“Yeah, let’s say I believe you. Throw the knife out there,” Sarah said.

Once the man complied, she thought Store bow and her hands were free again.

“We should go,” Maggot said nervously. It was the first time he talked after choosing the knives.

“I agree,” Sarah replied. Then, addressing the armorer, she added, “We might come again for more stuff. Try to be more polite and understanding should the time come.”

The man nodded vigorously and let out a sigh of relief when Sarah and Maggot exited the armory. Once outside, she couldn’t resist the temptation of opening the book again.

The original legend, Keep this book, was still there, written in the first page in an antiquated scripture. But now there was something else. A second sentence written directly below that one.

And that sentence almost froze the blood inside her veins.

She stopped dead in her tracks, holding the book as if expecting more words to keep appearing below those, but that didn’t happen. There were only the first recommendation, Keep this book, and now, right below it, the new sentence, so clear and direct that it looked out of place in this fantastic world of dragons and knights:

Victor Anderen is alive.