The Quarry Hound died with one clean cut through the neck, and Aren knelt in the moonlight and pulled out its core.
It was the size of a walnut, warm and faintly red, exactly like the ones he had absorbed a week ago.
A week ago, three of these had lifted him two whole levels.
He pressed it against his chest and felt it melt into his skin like ice into warm water, and waited for the rush of heat.
It did not come.
There was only a small, thin warmth, like a sip of tea on a cold morning.
[Experience gained: 1% of current level.]
[Note: Cores below the Host’s rank provide greatly reduced experience.]
He stared at the window, lost in his thoughts.
One percent.
A hundred Quarry Hounds for one level.
And Crane had warned them in class, in his bored voice, that each level would cost more than the last.
A hundred for Level 2.
Maybe two hundred for Level 3.
Four hundred for Level 4.
By the time he reached Level 10, he would need to kill every hound in the Old Quarry a thousand times over.
He had been an F-rank boy eating F-rank cores, and they had been a feast.
Now he was Rank E, and the whole first floor of the world had turned into crumbs.
He sat back on his heels on the cold stone and laughed quietly at himself.
He needed Rank E cores.
Rank E cores came from Rank E monsters.
And Rank E monsters were the kind of thing that had made a whole team of noble students run away screaming.
He found one two hours later, deeper in the canyons than he had ever gone.
[Quarry Brute.
Rank E: Level 4.]
It looked like a gorilla made of broken bricks, twice his height, with fists like millstones and a red glow leaking from the cracks in its chest.
It was eating something in the corner of a dead-end canyon.
Aren watched it from the shadows of a high ledge, and he made his list.
It is stronger than me.
It is bigger than me.
It has more levels than me.
But it has no brain.
That last line was the only one that mattered.
He spent twenty minutes preparing.
He found a narrow crack in the canyon wall, just wide enough for a person and much too narrow for the Brute.
He loosened three big stones on the ledge above the crack so they would fall with a single push.
He practiced the movement he had gotten from the System two days ago, over and over, on the flat ground in the moonlight.
Moonlit Step.
It was the Ashgrave family technique, the one the Duke had given his daughter after she was cleared.
Aren had felt it settle into his body like a new language that his legs already knew.
He did not understand it yet.
He only knew that when he shifted his weight a certain way and breathed out a certain way, he moved half a step farther than his body should have allowed, and his feet made no sound at all.
Then he threw a stone at the Brute’s head.
It turned, roaring, and charged.
Aren ran for the crack.
The ground shook under the creature’s fists as it came.
It was much faster than he had expected, and for one terrible second he knew he had done the math wrong.
Then his feet found the Moonlit Step without asking him, and he slid forward through the air a half-step farther than he should have, and threw himself sideways into the crack.
The Brute’s fist hit the stone where his head had been.
The whole wall shook.
Dust poured down.
The creature pushed its arm into the crack after him, fingers like broken bricks scraping at his chest, and Aren pressed himself flat against the back wall and reached up and pushed the loose stones off the ledge.
They fell on the Brute’s head and shoulders, three heavy stones, one after another.
It staggered, stunned.
Its arm went slack in the crack.
He did not waste the moment.
He came out of the crack with his knife and the Moonlit Step and the crescent he had been practicing every night for two weeks.
It came off his blade the size of his hand this time, small and controlled and brilliantly silver, and it went into the cracks of the Brute’s chest where the red glow was brightest.
The creature fell.
It took a long time to stop moving.
Aren sat on the ground beside it for a while afterward, shaking, with his back against the canyon wall.
His left arm was numb where the creature’s fingers had scraped him.
There was blood in his mouth.
He had used every single thing he had.
If there had been two of them, he would be dead.
He cut out the core.
It was the size of an egg, deep red, and much warmer than the hounds’ cores had been.
He held it in his hand a moment before he absorbed it.
[Experience gained: 34% of current level.]
A third of one level.
For a fight he had almost lost.
He looked at the eight small F-rank cores in his pocket that he had collected from the hounds on the way down, now nearly worthless to him.
Then he looked up at the huge moon over the endless canyons and thought, All right.
If I can’t eat them, I’ll sell them.
Old Mag’s shop was behind a fishmonger’s stall in the lowest part of the lower city, near the docks, where the streets smelled of salt and old nets and the river.
You did not find it unless someone told you where it was.
Aren had known about it since he was ten years old.
Every child in the lower city knew about Old Mag, the same way they knew about the crack in the wall beside the tannery.
She bought things nobody else would buy.
She sold things nobody else would admit to selling.
She had been doing it for longer than anyone could remember, and the city guard walked past her door every day without seeing it, which said a great deal about how much she paid them.
The shop was one small room with no windows, lit by three oil lamps.
Every wall was covered with shelves, and every shelf was covered with things: knives, jars of powder, bundles of herbs, monster teeth, broken swords, old books with no covers, and in a glass case behind the counter, a row of monster cores glowing faintly in different colors like sleepy jewels.
Old Mag sat behind the counter on a tall stool.
She was tiny and very old, with a face like a dried apple and one eye covered by a leather patch.
The other eye was black and bright and missed nothing at all.
“Well,” she said, when Aren came in.
“If it isn’t the little stone-seller.”
“You heard about that?”
“Child, I hear about everything.” She looked him up and down with her one eye, slowly, from his torn sleeve to the dried blood at the corner of his mouth.
“Polished quartz from Elric the stone cutter, sold to frightened noble brats as lucky river stones.
Two gold and four silver profit in two days.
I was very impressed.” She smiled.
Most of her teeth were still there.
“What are you selling me tonight?”
He put the eight F-rank cores on the counter in a neat row.
Mag picked one up and held it near the lamp.
She turned it slowly between two fingers.
“Quarry Hounds,” she said.
“Fresh.
Clean cuts.” She put it down.
“Two silver each.”
“Five.”
“Three, and only because I like your face.”
“They sell for a gold crown each in the student shop at the Academy,” Aren said.
“First-years buy them before every exam.
They’re all F-rank, and most of them can’t hunt.”
“The student shop,” Mag said, “does not buy from boys who walk in at midnight with blood on their clothes.”
“No.
But you sell to the student shop.”
Mag’s one eye narrowed.
Aren kept his face pleasant and calm.
Behind her, the cores in the glass case glowed softly.
“Four,” Mag said finally.
“Four and a half, and you throw in a sword.”
She laughed.
It was a cracked, wheezing sound, like an old door.
“Where did a gutter boy learn to bargain like a moneylender?”
“Selling rocks,” Aren said.
“Hm.” She was still smiling.
She reached under the counter and pulled out a short sword in a plain leather sheath.
It was old, with a worn grip and a few nicks in the blade, but the steel was good.
A soldier’s sword, the kind that had been to a few wars and come home.
“This was a deserter’s.
He doesn’t need it anymore.
Four and a half silver per core, and the sword, and you bring me everything you hunt from now on.
Not to anyone else.
Me.”
“Done.”
She counted the coins out on the counter, thirty-six silver, and slid the sword across.
Then, while he was putting the coins away, she reached under the counter again and pulled out a roll of grey cloth bandages and tossed it to him.
“For the arm,” she said.
“Wrap it before it goes bad.
And wash your face before you walk home, you look like a corpse that forgot to lie down.”
He caught the bandages.
“How much?”
“Free.
Call it an investment.” Her eye glittered.
“I have a feeling about you, little stone-seller.”
He paid the healer house before he went back to the Academy, even though it was past midnight and he had to wake the tired nurse to do it.
Thirty silver, enough for a whole month of Nell’s medicine.
The nurse looked at the coins, then at his face, and did not ask.
He walked up the stairs and stood in the doorway of Nell’s room for a moment.
She was asleep by the window, curled up small under two blankets, the farmer’s book with no cover open on her chest.
Her breathing was slow and even.
The grey shadows under her skin were lighter than last week.
He did not wake her.
He closed the door very quietly and went back down.
On the way out, he passed the old fishmonger’s stall again and stopped.
Old Mag was standing in her doorway in the dark, smoking a thin pipe.
She had not been there a minute ago.
“One more thing, stone-seller,” she said.
“Free advice, since I’m feeling generous tonight.”
He waited.
“Those lucky stones of yours,” Mag said.
“Before the ceremony, every year, the frightened brats of the Academy buy blessed charms.
Real ones, supposedly, blessed by a priest.
They pay a gold crown each.
It’s been going on for ten years.” She blew out a thin line of smoke.
“This year, they didn’t buy them.
This year, they bought polished river rocks from a commoner for half the price.”
“Whose charms were they?”
“A man named Rook.
He runs the docks now.
Used to be a noble, once, before his family threw him out.
Rank C.
A grade A class, they say, though I’ve never seen him use it, and I hope I never do.” Mag looked at him with her one bright eye.
“He lost a lot of money this year, and he lost a lot of face.
He’s been asking around for weeks about the stone-seller.
Nobody’s told him your name yet.” She paused.
“Yet.”
Rook, Aren thought.
Seventy-two percent.
So that was the name on his Investment Board.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Don’t thank me.
Walk home a different way.” Mag tapped her pipe against the doorframe.
“And keep that arm wrapped.”
She went back inside and closed the door, and it disappeared into the wall as if it had never been there.
He took a different way home, as she had said.
He went up through the narrow alleys behind the old rope-makers’ sheds, where the streets were dark and empty and twisted like a knot.
He was halfway through the third alley when he heard footsteps behind him.
He did not turn around.
He kept walking at the same pace, listening.
There were two sets of footsteps, heavy boots on wet stone, keeping exactly the same distance behind him.
He turned left at the next corner.
They turned left too.
At the far end of the alley, where it opened onto the street by the canal, a third man was waiting.
He was big, with a shaved head and a short club hanging from his hand, leaning against the wall as if he had all night.
Aren stopped walking.
The big man pushed himself off the wall and smiled.
“Evening,” he said.
“You the stone-seller?”
Well, Aren thought.
That was quick.