The basement of the abandoned Sector 4 brewery smelled of stale beer, rust, and old blood. It was a massive, underground concrete room that served as the headquarters for the Iron Dogs, the largest gang in the Slums.
In the center of the room, a thick steel support pillar was wrapped in layers of heavy, dense rubber.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Silas rhythmically punched the pillar. He didn’t wear boxing gloves. He wore a pair of heavy, black metal gauntlets that covered his hands and forearms. Every time his fist hit the rubber, a shockwave of kinetic magic rippled through the air, shaking dust from the ceiling.
Silas was a C-Rank Brawler. In the upper wards of the city, a C-Rank was just an average Guild soldier. But down here in the Slums, Silas was a king. He was a massive man, standing six-and-a-half feet tall, with a thick beard and a head shaved bald. Thick, angry scars crisscrossed his bare, muscular chest.
He pulled his right fist back and channeled his mana. The metal gauntlet glowed with a harsh, yellow light. He drove his fist forward with explosive speed.
KRACK!
The heavy rubber tore open. The steel pillar underneath actually dented inward.
Silas let out a hot breath and dropped his hands. He rolled his shoulders, satisfied with the warm-up.
The heavy metal doors at the end of the basement suddenly squealed open. Two low-level gang members walked in, dragging a third man between them. They dropped the man roughly onto the cold concrete floor.
It was Garek.
Silas grabbed a dirty towel and wiped the sweat from his bald head. He walked over slowly, his heavy boots echoing in the quiet room. He looked down at Garek.
Garek looked like he had been hit by a speeding train. His nose was broken, his face was covered in dark purple bruises, and he was clutching his ribs while coughing up blood.
"I leave you in charge of bridge tolls," Silas rumbled, his voice deep and gravelly. "And you come back to my basement looking like a chewed-up piece of meat. Who did this?"
"I-It was Donnie, boss," Garek wheezed, spitting a tooth onto the floor. "Little Donnie from the south block."
Silas stopped wiping his face. He stared at Garek for a long second, then let out a loud, booming laugh.
"Donnie?" Silas mocked. "The skinny F-Rank rat who scrubs armor for pocket change? You’re telling me that trembling little coward did this to you?"
"He’s not a coward anymore!" Garek yelled, panic rising in his voice. "He’s changed, Silas! He’s huge now. He moved so fast I couldn’t even track him. And... and he had a Guild weapon! A massive metal cannon on his arm. He didn’t even shoot me with it, he just smashed his shoulder into me, and I flew twenty feet!"
Silas stopped laughing. His dark eyes narrowed. A heavy kinetic weapon required serious stats just to carry, let alone use in combat. F-Ranks couldn’t lift them without breaking their own spines.
"He wasn’t alone," the thug who had brought Garek in added nervously. "He was with a woman. She was wearing trash, but she took out two of our boys in three seconds flat. Barehanded. Snapped their joints like dry twigs. She moved like a high-tier pro, boss."
Silas walked over to a wooden crate and sat down. He tapped his metal-clad fingers against his knee.
A sudden power leap. A high-tier military weapon. A highly skilled, unknown woman fighting alongside him.
"Awakeners don’t just jump in power overnight," Silas muttered to himself. "Unless he found a high-grade artifact. Or maybe a hidden Dungeon inheritance."
Greed replaced the anger in Silas’s eyes. If a slum rat had stumbled onto an artifact powerful enough to turn an F-Rank into a heavy hitter, Silas wanted it. And the heavy weapon alone would sell for thousands of credits on the black market.
More importantly, Silas ruled Sector 4 through fear. If the people in the Slums heard that a kid named Donnie beat up the Iron Dogs and got away with it, that fear would break. His control over the territory would collapse.
Silas stood up. His massive frame cast a long, dark shadow over the bleeding men on the floor.
"Call the enforcers," Silas ordered, his voice cold and flat. "Put the word out to every rat, beggar, and thief in Sector 4. I am putting a bounty on them."
"How much, boss?" a thug asked, pulling out his basic Awakener interface to send the message.
"Five thousand credits for the kid’s head and the weapon on his arm," Silas declared. "And ten thousand for the woman. Bring her to me alive. If she’s as skilled as you say, I want to know who she is before I break her neck."
Two miles away, Donald and Evelyn were sitting in a quiet, rundown noodle shop on the edge of the market district. The rain had started again, tapping gently against the dirty window.
They were eating hot bowls of cheap beef noodles. Evelyn ate quickly, her appetite massive now that her core was healing and her B-Rank metabolism was firing up again.
Donald ate slowly. His [Lesser Mana Perception] was acting up.
For the last ten minutes, the atmosphere in the street outside had been changing. The normal, chaotic buzz of the Slums was turning quiet. Too quiet.
He looked out the window. A group of three men with cheap swords on their belts walked past the shop. They didn’t come in, but they all stopped and stared through the glass, locking their eyes directly on Donald and Evelyn.
One of the men pulled out a communicator, whispered something into it, and pointed at the noodle shop.
Donald put his chopsticks down. His heart beat a little faster, but the panic that used to control him was completely gone. The SSS+ Investor class, along with his Level 4 stats, kept his mind sharp and focused.
"Evelyn," Donald said quietly, reaching down to grab his tarp-wrapped Pile Bunker from the floor.
"I see them," Evelyn replied without looking up from her bowl. She calmly drank the rest of her broth and set the bowl down. Her right hand rested casually near her waist, inches from the wolf-head hilt of the Bloodhound’s Fang. "They’ve been gathering at the ends of the street for the last five minutes."
"It’s the local gang," Donald said. "They must have put a bounty on us for what happened in the alley."
Evelyn let out a short, cynical laugh. "Street thugs. They are like cockroaches. You step on one, and a hundred more come out of the walls. We can kill the ones outside, but they will just keep coming. They know the alleys better than we do."
Donald frowned. "Then where do we go? We only have a hundred and fifty credits left. We can’t buy our way out of the Slums."
Evelyn stood up, her blue eyes flashing with that familiar, predatory excitement. She loved a challenge.
"If we stay on the streets, we get surrounded by numbers," Evelyn explained, pulling her dark coat tight. "If we want to survive, get rich, and test our new toys, we have to go somewhere the gang is too afraid to follow us in large groups."
Donald swallowed hard. He knew exactly what she meant.
"We are going into a Dungeon," Donald said.
"Exactly," Evelyn smiled. "Grab your cannon, kid. It’s time we do a real dive."