Luke waved behind himself, motioning for everyone else to stay back. He only had enough mana left to try this once. There was a particularly obvious slime hiding in the branches of the tree ahead of them. The slowly moving branches of the alien tree weren’t hiding the monster nearly as well as it thought. Behind that slime in the next tree up was another slime. This one was hidden slightly better, but still obvious enough that he could see them both.

  More importantly, they were lined up from his position. He moved forward a bit more and activated Phantom Shot. A huge spectral bullet, gray and violet, appeared around his forearm and shot forward. As quick as a blink, it streaked through the first and second red slimes and then on into the blue sky. It dissipated into nothingness about three hundred feet away.

  He threw up his hands and yelled, “Yeah baby! One shot, two kills!”

  When he turned around, he expected to hear a few cheers, or at least a nod at the accomplishment. No one was even looking at him. They were all looking at something above him. He immediately assumed there was a monster up there and instinctively activated Frictionless Slide. Nothing happened. He belatedly realized he didn’t have that skill anymore and jumped out of the way.

  It was just in time to avoid a third slime falling out of the tree. It splatted to the ground, leaking acid from huge rents in its rubbery skin. Luke looked up to see Jinx sitting on a branch above his head. She looked down at him, giving him a look that said so much.

  “Thanks for saving me, Jinx. I really appreciate it. I bet the alchemists appreciate it too. They have three slimes to process without having to move their cauldron.”

  When his suit automatically translated into elvish, Tofel turned to Jinx and gave her a little bow. “Thank you for your overwatch, spirit companion.”

  “He says thanks too.” Luke translated for her.

  She got the message when Tofel pulled something out of his pocket and held it out to her. It was a small dried fish. Jinx jumped down and scarfed the snack in a single bite. She licked her chops and meowed for another. Her eyes were wide, her cuteness overwhelming.

  Tofel agreed and gave her another dried fish. “That’s the last one I can spare. This was supposed to be my lunch. Although, I suppose I can just eat lunch at the estate village. With these three slimes here, we are already above quota for red slimes.”

  “Really? I thought you said you were worried about meeting quota today, and it hasn’t even been half a Kalibutan day yet,” Luke asked.

  “There are far more red slimes than I was expecting. You must have done something right in your culling and shepherding duties.”

  “Just doing what we were told. We patrol the area often, and leave the corpses and cores of any monsters we kill.”

  “You don’t harvest the monster bodies?” Tofel said with mild surprise. “That is likely the difference. Most cullers harvest monster parts and sell them in the estate. It’s part of their compensation.”

  “Huh. I remember someone saying something about that, but I never learned which monster parts were valuable. I’ll have to look into it.”

  “Angela already bought a book,” Gina said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, she wants a...” Gina trailed off. She looked embarrassed and said, “Nevermind.”

  Luke nodded. He knew what she was going to say. Angela was trying for a ranger or harvester class. But they weren’t supposed to let the elves know how many humans were getting classes these days.

  Tofel gave them a weird look and then went back to work. He processed the last three slimes and gave them to his assistants to carry. Luke offered to carry the baskets instead, but the elves politely declined.

  They escorted them back to the estate village and made arrangements to meet up a few hours after lunch. That would be after 8AM on Earth. Luke would have the second squad escort them to the purple slime and yellow slime territories. He had something else he needed to do tomorrow.

  ???

  “Ten bucks say they show up late as part of some bullshit power play,” Luke said and leaned back.

  Allen, Vanessa, and Luke were waiting in a large conference room on the first floor of building B of the Norfolk Complex. It was where the important deals relating to portal commerce were made. The three of them had gotten there a few minutes early to set up. When they got here Atticus Adelson and his lawyers were going to make an offer for Monster Jaeger Inc.

  “No bet,” Vanessa said with a nervous laugh. She smoothed out her blouse and adjusted her hair.

  “I’ll take that bet. This deal might be worth millions to them. They are going to take it seriously,” Allen said.

  “You’re taking things seriously, that’s for sure. You’ve got a PowerPoint presentation, stacks of printed out prospectus and your suit is obviously new.”

  Allen straightened his tie. “Not my fault I like to look good. Besides, you are wearing a suit too, if you put on a tie you would look just as good as me.”

  Luke shrugged. He had dressed up but couldn’t bear to have something choking him for a meeting that might last hours. “Sure. I guess it’s hard to take this too seriously. I’m thinking we are going to go with plan B anyway. Speaking of which, is it ready to go?”

  Allen looked towards the door nervously. When no one appeared he said, “Yeah, I got word from the people in Sweden that it’s ready. But I really don’t know if I want to go that route.”

  “Why not? It will solve our problems neatly.”

  “Neat? That’s not neat. That’s dropping an atomic bomb to cut down a forest. Sure, the forest will be gone, but you’re gonna have a lot of people mad at you.”

  “Nothing we can’t handle.”

  “Let’s just see how this meeting goes, please? Give them a fair chance. It would be best for everyone.”

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  Luke shrugged. It was just after 10AM, when the meeting was supposed to start. He decided to change the subject to something safer in case they walked in. “So, Vanessa, how have Kalibutan negotiations been going?”

  “Good, good. I’ve talked to the seneschals and lords of both Monta Hejmo and Fekundaj Kampoj. Those guys really hate Lord Edobar. I mean, hate, hate. According to them, Lord Edobar is a devil incarnate. And I mean that literally. They are way more religious there, and don’t like how Lord Edobar doesn’t force his staff to worship the gods.”

  “Huh. I wouldn’t have guessed. Did they tell you anything interesting?”

  “I’ve learned all kinds of important stuff. We need to have a sit down debrief this afternoon. You never know what will turn out to be important later."

  Luke leaned forward and said, “What do you think might be important?”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the door opening and people in suits walking in. Last in line was the man himself, Atticus. Even if his wispy hair and distinctive wrinkles weren’t immediately recognizable, he was the oldest person in the room, by far.

  “Sorry we are a bit late,” Atticus said boisterously. “Even when you have your own private jet, you can’t avoid traffic once you are on the ground.”

  They all filed in, with the four lawyers opening up laptops to either side of their boss. Atticus leaned forward and slapped the table. “Well, I must congratulate you boys. You managed to catch my eye in record time. And there aren’t many people that can get a sit down with the man himself. But my schedule is packed, so we’ll have to get right into things. Sorry to skip the pleasantries. Marcus, I believe you have an offer written up for them?”

  The lawyer to his right pulled out a stack of paper, about forty pages, and handed it to Luke. He handed it off to Vanessa without even reading it.

  Luke cleared his throat and said, “Although this is my company, I’ll be having the professionals handle the negotiations. This is Allen Conrad, our CFO, and Vanessa Staggers, COO and our lead negotiator.”

  Vanessa flipped through the contract and stopped at the last page. She looked up and brightly said, “Well, this is far too low of an offer. Which is no surprise, you don’t know anything about our financials, let alone what our projected yearly EBITDA is. If you’ll please sign this NDA, Mr. Conrad will walk you through his presentation on our valuation.” She handed over ten copies of the one page NDA they had found on the internet. She also slid the contract over to Allen so he could look over it as well.

  Atticus looked like he had swallowed a lemon. “Is this all really necessary? I want to make you rich, not get bogged down in the little details.”

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Adelson. Our presentation is short and our documentation thorough. I’m sure we can get a deal hammered out quickly,” Vanessa said warmly. She was in her element now, her earlier nervousness forgotten.

  The lawyers discussed the NDA and agreed that it made sense to sign. Once they did, Allen clicked a button on his laptop and the PowerPoint slideshow started up. He wasn’t nearly as comfortable talking in front of a group as Vanessa was. At one point he said “um” three times in a row. But he did know his stuff, so he was able to get through the presentation and easily answer any questions they had.

  Allen ended the presentation with, “I understand your initial offer was just a conversation starter, but I think it's important to note that it valued our company at 2.5 times yearly EBITDA, but I think the industry standard is 8 times valuation. That would put us in the neighborhood of 32 million as a starting point. I personally believe 40 million would be a better valuation, since half of our taxes are already paid, we owe no debt, and our Kalibutan connections are irreplaceable.”

  Luke leaned in and spoke up for the first time, “Just so we are clear, my mech designs aren’t part of the 40 million valuation. We were thinking of selling the patents to the US military. If you want, we can include them in the deal too, but it would naturally drastically increase the total valuation.”

  Atticus sputtered. “But those designs are part of the company. You can’t sell the company without the one thing that makes it unique. I can send fifty men into the portal tomorrow and take over your market share in a single day.”

  “Well, no. I have an exclusivity agreement with the Kalibutan government. I’m the only one allowed to operate in this portal. But yes, you could attempt it in other portals. You’ll just need to protect your hunters, and we are back to my designs. We’ll just have to come up with a price that includes everything.”

  The lawyers fired back with some complex sounding legalese and the negotiations started in earnest. They refuted Allen’s every point and Atticus told him he wouldn’t be able to sell his designs to anyone in the military. He had contacts in every branch.

  The negotiations dragged on until Vanessa ended it by saying, “I think we’ve discussed everything salient. Please draw up a new agreement and send it over for review.”

  Atticus was fully checked out at that point, fiddling on his phone. The lawyer to his right replied, “We can have a new offer by the end of the day. We’ll send it through docusign so you can sign it right away.”

  Luke spoke up for the first time since the beginning. “We won’t be making our decision today. We need to have a lawyer review it. If everything looks good we’ll sign by next Friday.”

  The man’s right eye twitched. “We’ll get that offer to you soon.”

  Atticus stood up. “Sign the damn thing when it gets to you. It’s the only offer I will ever make. If you don’t, I’ll get someone else to make me my mechs and we’ll run you out of business.”

  Everyone else stood and there was a round of awkward goodbyes.

  As they were walking across the complex back to their warehouse, Luke said, “You know they aren’t going to give us an offer we can accept.”

  Allen softly said, “We should wait to see what they have to say.”

  Vanessa shook her head, “We can wait, but that won’t change anything. They are way off. They want to pay us less than what we’ll make in a year.”

  Allen didn’t really have a rebuttal, but still insisted they should wait.

  Waiting quickly became boring. Luke scrolled through his phone for a bit before putting it down. He had gotten out of the habit since he spent most days without internet access now. He decided to put the waiting to productive use.

  “Hey Vanessa, how has your progress been with cutting off the oath?” Luke asked.

  They had both been working on implementing Cormac’s advice over the last few days.

  “It’s taking forever. I get what he meant, but moving your internal mana around is tough, let alone cutting something metaphysical with it.”

  “I had a new idea I’ve been working on. Instead of solidifying a mana knife, I’ve been stretching it out into a thin line and then pulling back and forth at it like a wire saw.”

  “I guess I can try that too, it’s just weird doing this. Mana isn’t something physical, and the oath is more metaphorical than actual.”

  “You can do it!” Luke said with a goofy grin.

  She rolled her eyes and they got to work. Time passed slowly. Luke cut away the tendrils of the oath, one at a time. It was boring, mind-numbing, work, but they didn’t have anything better to do while they waited for the offer. Around 4PM Luke made a new mana saw only to realize he had no more tendrils to cut.

  He was out. He was free of the oath from SPEAR. After all this time with it hanging over him, he was finally out from under their thumb. And since he hadn’t broken the oath, the magic parchment with his name still showed it as active. As far as the government was concerned, he was a model citizen. He had all the freedom and none of the restrictions.

  Vanessa was encouraged by his success, but didn’t have as much progress as he had. She kept at it, slowly removing the oath’s connection to her.

  Shortly before 5PM, the offer from Atticus Adelson’s company, ManaTek, arrived. Five million dollars for everything. It was more money than Luke had ever seen, but also insultingly low.

  Vanessa was just as insulted, and Allen was disappointed. Vanessa wanted to send back an immediate rejection, but Luke suggested they wait until next Friday. He wanted to buy time for plan B to take effect.

  Luke nodded to Allen and he clicked a single button on his laptop. That made the website live and started the ad campaign. Soon enough, people were going to discover an anonymous website full of rune diagrams and their accompanying intents. Luke had amassed dozens of runes and every single one of them was available on the internet for free now. WikiRunes.com was about to change the game completely.

  Who are your favorite side characters?