The Stag's door groaned open and warmth rolled out over me, bacon fat and woodsmoke and beeswax polish, a wall of it after the cold street. Inside was exactly what the outside promised: low black beams, a dog asleep by the hearth, three early customers hunched over porridge and ale, and a taproom scrubbed within an inch of its life. My kind of room. Nobody looked up. Nobody was close enough yet.
The man behind the bar was built like his own beer barrels, late forties, ham forearms crossed on the wood, a brown-grey beard going silver at the chin.
Around his neck, on a leather cord, hung a plain wedding band.
INNKEEPER, HOBB, LV 3, said the small grey letters.
"Morning, miss." He was already reaching for a pint pot. "Rooms are four coppers, six with breakfast, and it's market week, so I'll be honest with ye, the cheap ones are—"
He poured.
And kept pouring.
Ale foamed up over the rim of the pot, ran down his scarred knuckles, puddled on the bar, and he didn't notice a drop of it. His nostrils flared. The black at the centre of his eyes spread and ate the brown whole, and his gaze tracked down my body and back up like a man losing a fight with gravity. The bandit leader had lost his sentence to me. Hobb lost his composure.
PROXIMITY PRIORITY ENGAGED
PRIMARY ENTITY: INNKEEPER "HOBB," LV 3 — MATERIAL THREAT
SECONDARY ENTITIES QUEUED: 2
Queued. Like a waitlist. In the corner, one of the porridge men had frozen with his knife hovering over the bowl, mid-bite never completed, and I was fairly sure he'd been chewing when I walked in. Queue member one, visible. Number two was somewhere in the building. The system was now organising men into a line on my behalf, and I chose to find that efficient rather than horrifying, because the alternative was finding it horrifying.
"Best room," I said. "Please."
He came around the bar like a sleepwalker. He led me up a stair that creaked in a different key on every step, fumbled the key at the door twice, and showed me in: a real bed with a feather mattress, a washstand with a jug, a window over the square with the morning sun coming through in bars. It was the most beautiful room I had ever seen, and I had been standing in a marsh two days ago.
He turned to go. Made it two steps toward the door. Stopped.
His back heaved. His hands opened and closed at his sides.
"Miss," he said to the door, "I can't leave."
"I know."
"Been trying this whole while. Legs won't; they won't obey me."
His head dropped.
"Four years since my Marta passed. Four years, and I've not once looked at a woman the way I can't stop looking at ye now, and I'm so—"
"Hobb," I said it gently, the way you'd catch something falling. "Come here."
He turned around. He crossed the room like a man walking to the gallows and the altar at once, and I met him in the middle of it. This one wasn't for a gate, or a quest, or a locked door. This one was because a widower was standing in his own hallway with his legs mutinying and his heart broken in a way the game had no tooltip for. The ledger of my reasons had a new page, and this was the first line on it.
I undressed him. That was the difference, I decided, taking the apron off over his head: I was running this one from the first button. Me standing, him trembling, my hands steady on laces that had tied themselves for decades. I pushed him gently down onto the edge of the feather bed, and he sat like the planet's most reluctant king.
His cock was already fighting his small clothes, and I drew them down and freed it.
Thick, blunt, ruddy-dark, Bram's weight class exactly, with a broad crown weeping steadily and heavy balls hanging low in their sack.
He smelled of ale and bread and honest morning work. When I wrapped my fingers around him, he flinched as if I'd branded him.
"Miss," he rasped, "I don't have coin enough for whatever this is."
"I'm not charging."
I stepped back and stripped while he watched, shirt off, boots, the works, and when I stood bare in the sun, his chest made a sound like a landslide in a quarry. His hands came up, and gentle for their size, astonishingly gentle, they cradled my hips, my waist, weighed my breasts like he was checking produce, mapped me like a blind man learning a room.
"Marta, forgive me," he whispered, to nobody in the room.
"Just feel," I told him, and climbed onto the bed and sank onto him.
Inch by generous inch, my own pace, all the way to the root, and the stretch of him wrung a long low moan out of both of us in harmony. Then I rolled my hips, slow grinds, dragging my clit through his rough hair, and I leaned down and fed him my breast, and this barrel of a man nursed at my nipple like a starving thing, both hands clamped to my waist, eyes shut, forehead furrowed, somewhere between prayer and sob.
His hips started rising to meet me. Then rising to pound.
He flipped me. Mid-grunt, mid-apology, one huge arm under the small of my back, and suddenly I was on the mattress under his whole vast weight, and he was covering me, pinning me, hips driving between my spread thighs, and my brain went quiet as the inside of a cathedral.
There it was. The troll had taught it to me and the bandits had confirmed it: covered, held, stuffed, and now this, a human furnace of a man blanketing every inch of me at once.
The bed frame slammed the wall in rhythm, thump, thump, thump, the headboard knocking out a beat the whole floor could keep time to. He buried his face in my neck and came with a sound like tearing canvas, six, seven long spurts pumped deep while I clung to his back and moaned into his beard.
And he didn't soften. Not a flicker.
"It won't, I'm sorry, it won't—"
"Don't apologise." I put my hand on his cheek. "We're not done."
I rolled him, all nineteen stone of him, onto his back, and mounted. This round was mine, and I rode it that way, tits bouncing, my hands flat on his chest, his huge paws greedy on my cheeks, gripping, spreading, steering. And I decided, consciously, on purpose, that I was going to finish first and take his second load with me when I went. I ground down hard, fast circles, his rough hair on my clit, that thick crown dragging the spot, and when it crested I bore down and came, gushing around the root of him, spraying his belly, my juice running down into his pubic hair, and my cunt clamped and rippled and milked him.
Minutes later, groaning like a man being paid too much, he flooded me a second time. Note to self, I thought, slumped on his chest: that. That works. My body had been steering creatures for three chapters. Now I was holding the wheel on purpose.
For the finish, I got on my hands and knees, dropped my shoulders to the quilt, and presented.
All the gentleman burned out of him at once. He gripped my hips with both hands and drove in, and I heard him mutter it, "gods, look at it bounce," watching my cheeks ripple and clap against his belly in the morning light, and a huge palm cracked down on one of them, once, twice, pink handprints blooming warm. My kink, apparently, had a front door and a back door, and I got loud and honest.
"Harder, Hobb. Fuck me like you mean it."
He roared, slammed home, and flooded me a third time, and the heat of it set off my last finish, a soaking, drenching thing, and I shrieked into the feather pillow while it ran out of me and down us both to mid-thigh.
Silence. Breathing slowed. He blinked, once, twice, and his eyes cleared as fog wiped off glass.
And the door rattled open.
Pell, the porridge man from the corner, stood panting in the doorway, linen half-unlaced, moustache crooked with sweat, knife presumably still hovering over his abandoned bowl downstairs.
"I've been waiting," he announced, with tremendous dignity for a man purple in the face, "nineteen minutes."
The queue had fired. The system, ruthlessly organised, had kept him on hold in his own breakfast.
So I took care of him too. Faster, greedier, bent over the washstand with my fingers wrapped on its edge while he hitched up my hips and pushed in, watching us both in the spotted little mirror the whole time, moaning about what a picture it was, what a picture. He babbled an escalating ladder of bribes between strokes, triple, no, quadruple whatever the room cost, a horse, he had a cousin with a boat, and he finished twice inside me in fifteen minutes flat, threw coins on the floor like a man fleeing a fire mid-lace-tying, and delivered his exit line from the doorway:
"My wife must never hear of this."
The door banged. Two wrecked men, one of them under me and one of them fleeing down the stairs, and late morning burning toward midday outside the window.
Hobb, cleared-headed and mortified, went scarlet to the beard-line and then some. He left, and came back, and what he came back with was a basin of warm water and clean linen, and he set it on the washstand and tended me himself, huge careful hands, warm cloth, no coppers asked, none accepted.
"The room's yers, miss." He pressed the iron key into my palm, and it was still warm from his hand.
"Long as ye want it. Breakfast's forever on the house."
And then he fled downstairs before either of us could make it worse.
The ledger grew. Garrik had dressed me. Dolv had given bread. Hobb gave me a building.
The chime arrived, chipper as ever.
QUEST COMPLETE: A ROOM AT THE STAG
TIME REMAINING: 3 HOURS, 41 MINUTES
ACCOMMODATION QUALITY: BEST IN HOUSE
NOTE: ECONOMIC EXPLOIT DETECTED. EXPLOIT TOLERATED.
"Tolerated," I repeated, dripping politely into the basin. The system had moved from itemising me to judging me, and had decided, in its dry little way, to let the crime stand. I chose to take that as respect.
EXP: +100 — TOTAL 210/200
LEVEL UP! LV 2 → LV 3
Trumpets, over a woman sitting in a basin of grey water. The fanfare hit, and the stat screen rolled out.
HP MAXIMUM: 50 → 60
HP: FULLY RESTORED — 60/60
Sixty hit points, every one of them present and accounted for, and two days of strain wiped off the books in one bar of level-up music. The level itself still handed me nothing I could hit anybody with.
STR Lv. 1.
DEF Lv. 1.
AGI Lv. 1.
CHARM Lv. 99.
My build remained a dead end with a body count, and the body count remained mine, and I was starting to make peace with the arrangement because the arrangement kept paying out.
SKILL ACQUIRED: VELVET GRIP (ACTIVE)
CONSCIOUSLY TIGHTEN AND RIPPLE YOUR INNER MUSCLES.
DRASTICALLY ACCELERATES CLIMAX. SATISFIES ENTITIES FASTER.
COST: MODERATE STAMINA.
I read it twice, and then a third time, and somewhere in my chest a small cold calculator woke up and warmed over.
Twenty minutes ago I had milked Hobb's second load out of him with my own climax, on purpose, and it had worked, and now the system had handed me the same trick with a button on it.
This was an encounter speed-run. Satisfy entities faster.
Under MAX difficulty, faster was the entire economy, and the stamina cost meant the bill came out of me. A tool. A real one, aimed and manual, and it needed testing before whatever came next came next. Tomorrow, a keep. Best to know my own equipment by then.
ITEM ACQUIRED: STAG ROOM KEY — PERMANENT LODGING
ROUTE B — STAGE 3 OF 6
Three down. Three to go.
And the next one had a shape already.
NEW MAIN QUEST: THE VISCOUNT'S SUMMONS
REGISTER FOR THE TRIAL AT ALDERMOOR KEEP BEFORE TOMORROW'S MIDDAY BELL.
REWARD: 120 EXP, ITEM UNLOCK.
FAIL CONDITION: REGISTRATION CLOSES WITHOUT YOU.
I lay back on the feather bed, sun crawling across the floorboards toward midday, and inventoried my estate. A room with a lock. Bread for life. A healing bakery on retainer. Perfume that made men docile. A coin pouch, a spare pouch from Pell's panic, an active skill with my own muscles on the trigger, and sixty hit points, fully charged. Somewhere east of this bed was a keep, and the keep had a Viscount, and between him and me stood a court, and a court was a building full of men, and men, as of this morning, were a renewable resource.
"Stage three of six," I told the ceiling. "Let's see the guest list."
The menu unfolded in the sun bars, patient as ever.
[REST] / [BREAKFAST + GOSSIP] / [KEEP NOW]