Chapter 270
Fitting In
Alexander moved deeper into the city.
The streets narrowed as he worked his way downhill toward the bay. More torches here. More noise. Voices carried from open windows above. Laughter from somewhere ahead. The smell of cooking and woodsmoke and salt air.
A man stumbled out of a doorway and weaved past, close enough that Alexander caught the jingle of a coin pouch tied to his belt. His senses mapped the contents automatically. Mostly bronze. A few silvers. The man reeked of ale and didn’t glance twice at the fat stranger waddling in the opposite direction.
Alexander watched him go. The pouch would have been easy. A twitch of Metallokinesis and every coin would slide free without the man feeling a thing.
But he was no thief.
He turned into an alley and narrowed his focus. He filtered out the weapons, the tools, the hinges and nails and belt buckles, and searched for small, flat, circular pieces of metal within 222 meters. And only those that appeared lost.
There were a lot.
Wedged between cobblestones. Half-buried in the mud of alleyways. Caught in drainage channels. Sitting in the cracks of market stalls shuttered for the night. Even a few that had somehow found themselves on rooftops, lodged between tiles.
Alexander raised them. Gently. A steady pull that lifted each coin from wherever it had been lost and drew it upward into the night sky, where the darkness hid the stream of metal converging above his head. He kept walking, taking another turn, cutting through a narrow passage between two buildings, senses tracking three people on the next street until they passed.
The coins gathered into a rough clump above him. Dozens. He guided them lower as he walked, and as they crossed into his Domain range, the control sharpened. The clump separated into three neat streams that floated down slowly in front of his chest.
Bronze. Silver. Gold.
Alexander vibrated each coin individually, shaking loose the grime and mud. Flecks of muck fell away like dust, leaving clean metal spinning in the air before him.
The majority were bronze. Scuffed and chipped from years of circulation, but the hard alloy held its stampings. A smaller collection of silver, clearer, less worn. And a single gold coin, bright and polished.
Every coin bore the same face. An imperious woman in profile with a crown on her head. She had a sharp nose, and a sharper chin. It was the kind of face that somehow looked down on people even from a flat disc of metal.
The Empress, presumably. Maybe he’d get to meet her in person one day.
Alexander turned the gold coin between his fingers without touching it, rotating it with Metallokinesis. At a guess, it looked like a new minting. Barely used. The city was impressive next to the people of the Earth and their village. He’d seen a few sailing ships and smaller boats in the bay from a distance, which meant the coin might have arrived here through trade, carried by a rich merchant wizard.
He stuffed the coins into his pockets. They clinked together as he rounded another corner, belly leading the way, heading for the lights and noise closer to the bay.
The streets grew busier as he neared the center. More people moved in groups of two and three, talking loudly. Street corner lamps began to appear, casting warm light across the cobblestone. Even the alleyways were paved, clean and well-maintained.
Alexander kept his waddle steady and his hands in his pockets, jingling his newly acquired coins. Just another local heading somewhere unimportant.
A tavern caught his eye ahead. A wooden sign hung above the door, painted with a foaming mug. The swarm of bioelectrical signatures packed close inside confirmed it even without the sign.
The door swung open before he reached it. A group of three stepped out and paused on the threshold.
Alexander slowed.
The one in front carried a staff. He wore leather armor over a dark tunic, practical and well-fitted, with a blue and gold badge pinned to his chest. The two behind him were armed. One had a sword at his hip and a shield across his back, chainmail glinting beneath a heavy cloak. The other carried a bow and a quiver, leathers worn soft from use.
Both wore the same blue and gold badge.
If he didn’t know any better, he’d think one of Augustus’s tabletop adventuring parties had stepped off the board and into the street.
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All three were barely Tier 2. Easily missed among the crowd. But the wizard’s bioelectrical signature hummed with mental activity. The other two ran hotter through the body.
The wizard glanced at him.
Alexander’s fingers tightened around the coins in his pocket.
The gaze lingered for a beat. Then he turned, said something to the swordsman, and the three of them headed up the street without looking back.
Alexander kept walking.
A woman stumbled out of the tavern door, catching herself on the frame. She squinted at Alexander, hiccupped, and lurched sideways to let him pass.
He stepped around her and through the door.
The noise hit him first. Conversation layered over music layered over laughter, all of it bouncing off stone walls and low wooden beams. The common room was packed. Tables and benches filled most of the floor, occupied by people in various states of drunkenness.
A band of three occupied the far corner. A stringed instrument Alexander didn’t recognize, a drum, and something that looked like a flute made of bone. The music was lively, and small bursts of colored light drifted from the instruments with each note, floating upward like sparks from a fire before dissolving against the ceiling.
A waitress threaded between the tables, a wooden tray hovering beside her at shoulder height, guided by a glowing hand that wasn’t attached to anything. She plucked mugs off the tray and set them down without breaking stride.
At a table near the door, a man with a lizard the size of a cat draped across his shoulders was arguing loudly with two companions over a dice game. The lizard watched the dice with more interest than seemed natural.
Further back, a card game was underway. Coins changed hands. Someone slammed a fist on the table. Someone else laughed.
Alexander crossed the room and stopped at the bar. The innkeeper was a broad man with thick forearms, wiping down the counter with a rag that didn’t appear to be winning its war against the stains.
Alexander waited until the innkeeper looked up, then Droney’s muffled voice emerged from somewhere around Alexander’s midsection.
“Greetings. I am Xander. I wish to wet my thirst and get a room.”
Alexander’s eyes widened slightly. That was not what he’d expected Droney to say.
The innkeeper didn’t even blink. “Aye. A drink’ll run ye a bit, and the room’ll cost ye seven fer the night.”
Alexander tossed a silver piece onto the counter. The fastest way to learn the exchange rate was to give imprecise change and see how the other person reacted.
The innkeeper swept the silver into his apron without comment and pulled five bronze coins out. Then he turned, filled a mug from a cask behind him, grabbed a key from a hook beneath the bar, and slid all three across in one motion.
“Room 7. I’ll send one of the girls up to clean it while ye drink.”
“Thank you.”
Alexander pocketed the key and the coins, then grabbed the mug, turned, and leaned against the bar, surveying the room with one of his mental threads.
So a silver was worth twelve bronze. Or the innkeeper couldn’t count. Either way, that gave him a baseline.
He glanced down at the mug suspiciously. The liquid was amber and slightly cloudy. It smelled like a mixture of sharp and sweet. He didn’t have a way to test it.
Another item for the upgrade list.
He’d put off modifying Droney ever since the Solo Combat Challenge. What had happened there had made him realize that the little machine wasn’t just a machine anymore. Droney had sacrificed itself to buy him time. For a brief moment, he’d felt the true extent of Animachina. It was the Life, Spirit, and Breath of the Machine. Creation, preservation, and restoration. And through it, Droney had rebuilt itself when Alexander brought the little machine back to life.
The soul fragment he’d gifted Droney had made it more, and he’d been cautious ever since. He hadn’t even shut it down for a maintenance pass.
But he had plans with the M.G.S. that would require something to act as its core, as its brain, and Droney was the obvious choice. He’d been hesitant to discuss it, though, because he didn’t want Droney to agree just because he asked.
It was a paradox he still didn’t know how to resolve. Droney wasn’t exactly a living entity, but it certainly wasn’t just a machine either. It had the ability to express itself, and he was beginning to see more and more that it possessed something akin to its own will, even though it could never have true freedom so long as it was bound to him.
There were other options. The processing unit taken from the OACS would be a powerful intelligence if Ensouled, assuming it awoke. He still didn’t understand the process behind it, though he was looking forward to meeting Sleipnir for the first time. He could feel the ship’s existence at the back of his mind now.
The problem was that Ensoulment didn’t guarantee sapience, and the M.G.S. needed a sapient core. Not simply a machine. Without it, his goal would remain out of reach.
Still, maybe it was worth a try. He had one slot left, at least until he reached Tier 3, which would grant him three more. The combat suit was another option, once he retrieved it, but that was fraught with its own problems.
Similar to Droney, if the OACS achieved sapience, would he be comfortable modifying it as needed? What about sacrificing it to save himself?
He already knew the answers.
Alexander sighed quietly, and took a sip of the drink. It was honey mead, with a warmth that spread through his chest on the way down. Better than expected. Considerably better than the stew, though he’d never tell the shaman that.
He considered the people spread across the tavern carefully.
What he needed now was someone local to interrogate without appearing like he knew nothing at all. Someone that might know about the local politics and who exactly ran the city.
Because he’d already identified the where.
His senses had revealed a large structure further north built out of the same metal as the gateway fortress, including a basement that completely blocked his senses. The bioelectrical signatures included a powerful Tier 2, roughly as strong as Keda had been, and a dozen Tier 1s stationed in a way that felt like guards.
Once he knew both who and where, he just needed to decide the what and why of his next step.
He couldn’t help but wonder what was being kept in the basement that warranted protections not even the fortress had.
