Ben sat with Jane and Adam in the inn to have dinner.

  “How are things going for your family?” Ben asked after ordering from the menu – that was great progress in his eyes, when they had started, there had been just one meal for everyone.

  Jane nodded slowly. “It’s good. Some still struggle with adapting to this new lifestyle, this new world. Particularly the middle generation is affected. The old ones like me have known deprivation and change, so accepting all of this…” she pointed around them, “as luxury and a new way is easy. The young ones are adaptable by nature. They miss the friends that haven’t joined us yet, or their social media, but finding their way through all of this is second nature to them.

  “Those that just established themselves, their personalities, their jobs, have responsibilities for their children, they struggle because dealing with the uncertainty that comes with all of these changes is not easy.

  “But I believe that overall, we have adjusted well and have contributed to the Protectorate.”

  Over the last month or so, Ben’s interactions with the broader population had become fewer and fewer. For one, he had been very busy, and two, the share of people he knew had naturally reduced and he wasn’t necessarily the type to just approach people he didn’t know without reason. So getting such an insightful perspective on a large family was thought provoking.

  “Do we need to do more for the middle generation? If so, what?”

  Jane laughed. “I think you just did. If I counted correctly, and I am pretty good at counting, you just built 15 new workshops and 5 stores. The new mine has opened. Barry has recruited people for the Academy and your mother for the Guild Hall. The mission system is slowly taking off as well and I heard that you are strengthening our defense. All of that is what people need: a perspective for them to become productive and safety for themselves and their families.”

  Ben was glad to hear that their actions had a concrete impact on people. The new workshops and stores had been part of the first Protector Fund spending spree.

  There was a lot more to do but having spent 100k in Credits and cores to get people going had made a small dent. Madeleine’s original estimate of 80k had not included the buildings and their population was growing quite quickly, so he estimated that they would need probably 2.5 times what they had spent so far just for the current citizens.

  “That’s good to hear. And there is more to come.”

  “Like the auction house…” Jane said with a smile.

  “Like the auction house…” Ben replied, mirroring her. You were a driving force behind this and convinced Adam, who convinced me – and by the way, having had a first glimpse at a Tier 2 dungeon, I think it makes a lot of sense given all the resources that we can potentially extract.

  “But what I would like to understand better is why you don’t just want to take it over and operate it independently. Why do I need to own it?”

  Jane took a bite of her Protectorate-grown tomato salad before answering. “Independence, really. If you own it, you guarantee the independence of the auction house as a platform, and if you get rich, you are independent to take decisions without taking your own wealth into account.”

  Ben scratched his head. “I’m not sure I buy those arguments. If I want to, I can take all the income of the Protectorate and spend it on golden chandeliers, nothing is going to stop me. So I don’t think you need to worry about my wealth. Regarding independence of the platform, we can just audit the place to ensure compliance…”

  Adam cleared his throat. “More revenue for the Protectorate is better…”

  “Yeah, but I don’t have the headspace for this, you could run it, but it seems like it would become a full-time job over time, so why not have it be run by someone who is truly motivated by it and we take a cut via the rent and the transaction fees?”

  Adam looked to Jane to get her reaction.

  She just shrugged. “I thought it would be nice for you to have this prestigious asset owned directly, but if you don’t want it…”

  “Good. In that case we will auction—fittingly—the lease. I have thought about it some more and I want there to be a stipulation that the transaction fees need to be low on raw materials and high on crafted goods. This should start as a great place to make sure we efficiently allocate our resources, especially those coming out of the dungeons. I don’t want to make life for merchants hell by monopolizing everything.”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  Adam gave a thumbs up and Jane nodded slowly.

  “Will you bid for it?” Ben asked the woman.

  “I think so. It sounds very exciting – but of course it depends on the lease agreements…” she said with a grin and wink to Adam.

  ***

  Ben’s apartment in the HQ was large, even if you took into account that his whole family, including Adam, were living there.

  Just the inner sanctum had more space than he knew what to do with – until now.

  He had always used the office in the public space for work, so there was no need to have another one up here. He had cleared out the furniture and was now sitting in the barren room that held nothing but a nice view and an old rug that he had saved from the wooden lodge that had been his home until a couple of months ago.

  He sat cross-legged in the middle of it, eyes closed and taking a few deep breaths. He had already participated in the morning [Meditation] which had been led by the Abbot of the Buddhist monastery that had been one of the first places they had ever added to the population of the settlement.

  This session was not about that – it was about finally making progress on his fighting technique.

  Ben opened his eyes and reached for the latest dungeon reward he had received, the manual that held the almost intoxicatingly promising title of Protector’s Axe Mastery.

  He opened the book and the first page held just a single sentence.

  Execute all techniques before proceeding further.

  Ben quickly flipped through the book to make sure that future pages held more content and was relieved to see that that was the case. So he put the book to the side, grabbed his axe and went through all the forms that he had learned from and refined with Barry over the last few months.

  These days this exercise could no longer exhaust him or make him sweat, which freed up his mind to focus on every movement.

  Once done, he repeated the exercise, this time trying to recreate some of the insights he had garnered from the fights prior to and during their latest dungeon run.

  He felt where he was close to something better and where there were inefficiencies in his movements that kept him from exercising his full strength and dexterity.

  He went through this a few more times until he felt confident that he was fully aware of where he stood with his existing techniques.

  Back on the red-and-white patterned rug Ben turned to the second page of the manual.

  The page just held a headline and a drawing.

  Mortal… or more?

  The drawing was black ink and displayed a grove of trees, and a huge humanoid monster, an ogre if Ben had to guess, fighting against someone with an axe.

  Ben squinted and looked closer and closer at the picture, until the world around him seemed to fade away. With a start, he found himself back in the Frozen Wastelands in their first fight against an ogre. Specifically, he felt his axe colliding with the ogre’s attack. Felt how the crash reverberated through his body. Felt how his bones withstood the pressure. Felt how micro tears in his shoulder muscles emerged and faded away.

  Felt, deeply, how that feat would have ripped him apart just three months ago.

  He reemerged in his repurposed office, gasping from the shock of the deep immersion.

  The ink drawing faded away, leaving only the question, mortal… or more?

  Ben had been at a similar situation earlier in his journey. He was still clinging to the self-image that had been shaped over his whole life of what he, what his body was capable of.

  Since he had discussed this with Barry, he had gained a lot of Body attribute points, broken through the barrier of what ‘normal’ humans could do, and reinforced his Constitution.

  He was more.

  That didn’t make him a better person. But definitely a stronger, more resilient, dexterous, and fast one.

  His fighting style was, despite their attempts to adjust, still largely rooted within the human realm. He could definitely see that and he felt something shift in his mind.

  He didn’t have the answers, but he was ready to receive them.

  He turned the page to find a number of smaller drawings.

  The first one brought him back to a fight against one of many Ice Howlers in the dungeon. He abandoned a strike, because his instincts told him that he would not be able to exert sufficient strength as his arm was slightly overextended.

  The second one showed him how he had hesitated against the Tundra Prowlers before they had even entered the dungeon, afraid that he would stumble on the rough terrain.

  The third showed him pulling back his axe after successfully hitting one of the enemies from the Rings of Return dungeon, when he could have cleaved through and taken out a second one.

  The fourth, fifth, sixth… showed him stepping back or dodging, where blocking or even taking the hit would have led to a quicker, and ultimately safer, conclusion of the fight.

  And so it continued until a dozen images had made it clear, not only what the problem was, but which areas he would need to work on to take things to the next level.

  Instead of mixing a mortal martial arts approach with an axe handling competency he needed to take a radically different approach.

  He needed to build a fighting technique that was built around his physique—his Body, his Constitution.

  Of course, that didn’t make the martial arts wrong. Not at all. Leveraging all his progress with it and what people like Barry or the SEALs could teach him would be essential, but the starting point would have to be his physical abilities.

  His ability to exert strength even if slightly out of position.

  His ability to withstand damage.

  His ability to brute-force attacks that would be inconceivable otherwise.

  In a way that was the opposite of what he and Barry had tried to do when redesigning the fighting style. It had all been about controlling his strength; this was about embracing it.

  He saw a slight risk that it would end up looking like a berserker, but that was not it. It wasn’t about losing his head, it was about unleashing his strength and controlling the fight.

  He turned the page.