“This wasn’t what I wanted to come back to,” I complained. I glared at the mess marring my almost-library. I’d made it through the banquet, made meaningless chit-chat with who-knows how many people and even gotten a good night's sleep. I’d expected to be greeted by a fully recharged dungeon mana pool, not… this.

Rhis didn’t look too concerned with my displeasure. “I didn’t kill them, Mistress, as you wished. Have you changed your mind?” He looked hopeful.

“No.” I glared at my two problems. Two bodies bound in so much spider silk that they couldn’t speak or move. I noticed a detail.

“You bound their mouths, but kept their nostrils free?” I observed.

Rhis nodded. “I know that you need your airways clear in order to live, Mistress.”

“Well, good.” I suppose it was good that Rhis hadn’t ‘accidentally’ killed these intruders and claimed he hadn’t known about breathing. “I’m pleased, Rhis,” I added.

He grinned widely at the praise, showing all of his teeth.

“Ashmor’s Justice! Don’t let him smile too often, he’ll scare my hair white!” Janie opined from behind me. She was the only one of my companions accompanying me today. Given that I was going to be doing ‘dungeon stuff’ which mostly involved me looking at things they couldn’t see, most of them had elected to do other stuff. Only Janie had felt that her job meant that she had to come with me, no matter how boring it got.

“Can you cut them free? No, you probably can’t,” I realised. The Rhis that Janie could see was an illusion. “Actually, how did you get them down here? I know you didn’t let the spider out of its floor.”

“True. Fortunately, Phantasmal illusions, as they are not monsters, are not subject to the floor limits.” He briefly summoned a Phantasmal creature to show me, and then quickly dismissed it. It had the body of a hulking human man, but the head of a bunny rabbit, somewhat distorted to be more humanoid. The long white ears were a bit of a giveaway though.

“Sadly,” he continued, “They can’t be used to hurt people, but moving this refuse was within their capacities.”

I chose to ignore Rhis’s choices in beefcake and focussed on the job at hand. I could have asked Janie to do it, but I fancied myself as a hands-on leader. At least for things I was capable of.

The silk wasn’t actually that sticky, and it parted easily under my knife. Over my knife might have been a better way of putting it. Not wanting to stab my prisoners in the face, I slid my thinnest dagger under the bindings and pulled away from the skin, freeing them down to the neck. This allowed me to talk to them, but more importantly, it allowed me to recognise them.

“Oh shit, you two,” I said. “Where’s the other one?”

The one I freed spluttered and spat, trying to spit out a few stray threads, I supposed. I moved on to the other one, while… Digger got his act together. The other one was Winger, I was pretty sure. I didn’t care to remember them too clearly, and [Memorise] respected my wishes on this.

“Bigger stayed out to keep watch!” Digger finally spluttered. “He’ll have gotten help by now.”

“Oh? How long have they been here?” I asked Rhis.

“Eight hours and thirty-nine minutes,” Rhis said. “You were gone for much longer than was required to recharge the pool,” he added reproachfully.

“Think he waited for that long?” I asked. “Janie, can you go out and see if he’s lurking around? Or if he’s found another bunch of thugs and they’re building up the courage to storm the building.”

“A bunch of thugs? I’m shaking,” Janie said with amusement as she left. I called up the abbreviated Dungeon Status.

Dungeon Name

Tower of Learning

Level: 7

XP: 38,045,596

Next Level: 100,000,000

Floors: 2

Current Mana: 450

Mana Cap: 450

Mana Regeneration: 45.6

Upkeep: 0.746

Dungeon Traits

[Expand]

Invaders: 2/0

A quick use of [Memorise] told me that Rhis’s experience had gone up by a small amount from the capture. Also, the two of them were still counted as invaders.

"I guess your lives are worth point six mana an hour,” I mused. “That’s not much, but it is something.”

“Wait til I get free, bitch!” Digger said, as both of them struggled with their bonds. “Now that mage isn’t around, I’ll show you something!”

I watched, unconcerned, as they failed to make much headway on Digger’s threats.

“The bindings will need to be renewed in three hours, mistress,” Rhis said reproachfully. “We can’t leave them like this forever.”

“You’re going to suggest killing them, I suppose.” The two captives went still for a moment and then renewed their struggles with renewed fervour.

“That would be ideal, but I suspect it would not be an acceptable solution to you, mistress,” Rhis said mournfully. “Therefore, I have been working on a different solution!”

“Oh?”

“Dungeon Thralls!” he said brightly. “Just like we suspect the others of doing! Human minions to do my bidding!”

“You—” I said, and then stopped. I should have expected this, and I had to admit that it was a solution. Just not one I was willing to countenance. “No.”

His ears drooped. “I hope you haven’t decided to keep them prisoner.”

“You don’t like that idea?” I asked, surprised. “You’ll get that extra mana. Point six isn’t much, but…”

“Twice that if we move them to a higher floor,” he quickly pointed out. “But no… it just gives them an opportunity to learn more of our secrets and escape. We’re not yet as secure as I’d like.”

It was true. Almost any adventurer I’d known would go through our defences like wet cheese. I’d been thinking the building surrounding us would have offered some security, but it had been even easier to get through by this pair of thieves.

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to do that either. Which means the only thing left is to have them work for me.”

“With all respect, mistress— you can’t be serious! You can’t possibly trust such unsavoury characters!”

“Mnm,” I murmured noncommittally. “Not that you’re wrong, exactly, Rhis, but what do you think of Janie?”

“You can’t trust her, mistress,” he said immediately. “I’m sure she’s just waiting for her chance to kill you and steal me.”

“You don’t trust anyone, do you?”

“Only you, of course, mistress.”

“Right. So you’ll forgive me if I don’t take your advice on hiring decisions. It’s always going to be the same, regardless of the situation.”

“Yes, mistress.”

I turned my attention back to our intruders. They had stopped struggling and were both looking warily at me.

“So. Digger has done all the talking so far. Are you fine with that, Winger?”

“If you think we’re going to work for you, you got another think coming—” Digger spluttered.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “Look, Digger, you should know how this works. You’re tied up, and I’ve got a dagger.”

I stepped closer to him and raised the dagger threateningly. “—And I’ve got the [Intimidate] skill. Kiss my boots.”

You have defeated Shelby Smith in a Tier 2 Social Contest! You have earned 22 XP

I’d gone for the most humiliating demand I could think of to maximise the chance of it going to a Social Contest, but I guess there were some things that Digger would have been even more reluctant to do.

“Really? Shelby?” I said with amusement as he performed his required duty. I didn’t waive the contest penalty. I looked over at Winger.

“Um… I can speak for myself. Ma’am,” he said nervously.

“Just as long as we know where we stand,” I said dryly and started cutting Digger fully free. He had finished kissing my boots and didn’t try to resist as I freed him. Not that he could, at least for the next twenty-four hours. The muscles on his face worked furiously as he tried to find something that he could say to me.

It took him a while before he was able to speak, which said something about either his spite or his stupidity. During that pause, I was able to free his partner and conjure a desk and some chairs to negotiate over. Well, I had an Aaron chair. They had a bench to sit on.

They both looked askance at my summoning of furniture but didn’t comment on it directly. Winger went over to… Shelby, and offered him a hand up.

“Give it up, man,” he said. Shelby glared at him but accepted the help.

“This won’t last forever, you know,” he finally managed to say. The pair of them took the implied offer and sat down opposite me.

“I’m fairly sure I could make it last forever, or at least quite a while,” I said thoughtfully. “I’d just need to keep renewing it, and well, it wasn’t exactly hard to beat you with the least of my social skills. If I was so inclined, it wouldn’t be hard to take a minute out of every day to dominate you back into compliance.”

I let them wither under my disdainful gaze while they considered that.

“Of course, if I was so inclined, it would be even easier to get a pair of the slave collars that Rhis was talking about earlier.”

Rhis stepped forward and grinned, pleased to be included in the conversation. For once, his toothy maw suited the mood that I wanted conveyed.

“What… is that?” Shelby managed to ask.

“Haven’t you ever seen a beast-kin before?” Janie said, returning from the outside.

“That’s no beast-kin,” Winger said. “Not looking like that.”

“Quite right,” I told them. “This is Rhis, and that’s all you need to know. Janie?”

“It’s all quiet outside. There’s no sign of anyone else coming to get these shits.” She gingerly settled into the chair I conjured for her. Rhis remained standing. He was more intimidating that way and I didn’t have to worry about him spoiling the mood by spinning around.

Our two captives glanced at each other nervously. “What sort of shit have we gotten into?” Winger muttered to his partner.

“A good question,” I told them. “But we were talking about your future. As I said, I prefer not to mind-control or dominate you. I happen to believe that if the opportunity is obvious enough, people will cooperate to achieve it.”

They looked at each other again, a little less nervously. “Opportunity?” Shelby asked.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s negotiate.”

It was a difficult negotiation, even with my skill advantage. The problem was that they planned on agreeing with everything I said, and then making a run for it and selling me out the first chance they got.

Fortunately, [Bargain] could spot an insincere seller a mile off. The situation was a little different from the coachman before. Digger and Winger thought they had a pretty good idea of how much they could make from selling me out to various information brokers in this district. It probably wasn’t accurate— they didn’t know what they were sitting on— but it was their perception that counted here.

Balancing their expected reward with their imagined chances of getting away with it against the remuneration I offered was something that [Bargain] could manage without requiring any input from my opponents. With the coachman, I had been worried about someone coming along with a better deal, or threats that would override my deal. Here, I just needed to make the deal good enough that these two wouldn’t go looking for a better one.

The trick that I went with was to delay compensation. They’d get some money now, but I’d keep them on the line for a bigger payment in a couple of weeks. The risk of losing that would hopefully keep them in line, at least for a little while.

Now, of course, I needed to find something for them to do that would be worth the cost.