Chapter 156: The Welcome Party

The Fae have a very short list of seven names that they won’t make deals with. Each and every Climber on that list has caused their people untold suffering and has been shunned for life and beyond.

William Oh’s name is on that list…seven times.

• Jason Salazar

Will poured the whisky out so that the tiny person didn’t drown or die from poisoning, uncorking the bottle, but leaving the undead hand just outside the bottle, ensuring it couldn’t run away.

Then they came to an arrangement: Every time Will asked a question, the fae would answer him, or Will would chip away a bit of the bottle’s neck with his hatchet, opening making the entrance just a bit easier for the hand to try and stuff itself in.

Each chip risked shattering the entire neck off and allowing the hand to press its way in and kill the fae. Will was using his terrain control abilities to prevent that outcome but the creature didn’t need to know that.

It only took three chips off the neck before the little creature stopped trying to trick him into a deal or speak in vague half-truths.

Strangely enough, the entire time they were making this arrangement, Will’s undead hand never lost focus on the fae, even when other things were closer, or easier to reach.

It seemed as though whatever magic had been woven out of the thick Miasma around them, it had bound the fae and the hand together. The fae really did own the hand, in the eyes of the Floor.

It just wasn’t working out well for him.

In the lulls of conversation, when the fae wasn’t screaming, the caravan was quiet, and the road wasn’t particularly bumpy, Will thought he could feel a faint connection between the hand and the fae. A gossamer cobweb similar to what he felt when he tried to yank relics off of people.

Similar, but not the same.

This felt…more natural than the connection between a Climber and Relic, somehow.

The two were bound together by the terms of the creature’s ‘deal’, and the hand would never stop hunting it until those gossamer threads were unravelled.

Will wondered if he could sever a ‘deal’ with Phantom Hand the way he could the connection to a relic. The same way he could counterspell by scattering magic before it had a chance to fully form.

It was possible.

But…there were still a lot of variables. Other fae might create stronger threads, and if those threads were on Will, they might self-protect, rendering him incapable of considering the act of cutting them.

Something that nagged at the back of Will’s mind, though, was whether it was the fae who created the sensation of the miasma in the Floor tightening around him when he offered his hand…or if the fae had simply taken advantage of something that was created by the Floor itself. The environment.

Will’s fingers twitched as a thought occurred.

…The terrain?

He took the Amulet of the Homefield Advantage out of storage and looked at it.

If the force that seemed to enforce verbal agreements on this Floor was part of the terrain, could the effect be copied? Could the corrupted Miasma of the 8^th Floor be copied?

Better yet, could the amulet create a sphere without their influence by overwriting the nearby terrain?

Will carefully inspected the glass vial with a cube of clear blue ice inside, taken from the 2^nd Floor.

If that is the case, I definitely underpaid for this trinket.

…And if it’s not the case, how can I change that?

It was critical that Will test it, especially because it could be an excellent way to bypass his hand getting infected every time he went through the 8^th Floor.

Will would rather sleep on a bed of solid ice for over a week. It didn’t even feel cold, because of Aspect.

But how to test it?

Will’s first instinct was to get some of their caramel candy, and offer it to the surrounding fae in exchange for…whatever, while the Amulet was creating the 2^nd Floor ice terrain around him.

If the Floor forced him to follow through and give them candy, that was fine, but it was more of a headache if his ploy succeeded and he was able to avoid the enforcement of a deal.

Reason being: Now the fae knew he could do it, and it lost the majority of its element of surprise.

The obvious solution was to drag the captured fae off into the wilderness, ensure that they were alone, perform the test, and if it worked, kill it where no one else could see, preserving the secret for use with more important fae.

That felt…icky.

The fae were monsters, for sure, whose basest desire was to bedevil Climbers. But they spoke. They looked like people.

Will had killed a lot of people thus far. All of them out of necessity in the heat of the moment. To save his life.

Will didn’t want to cross the ‘killing people in cold blood for a slight advantage’ river yet. Even if rationally, it was the same thing. Slight advantages saved lives. It just felt icky.

An easier way to test it without any witnesses would be on the 8^th floor. See if the bubble of terrain protected his hand. Or Abyss, bring a bit of livestock up on the way through and kill a rat or chicken or something on the 8^th Floor. See if it turned.

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This isn’t the first time I’m coming through this Floor either. I’ll just play it safe and not fiddle around with the amulet too much this time through. I can test this somewhere else and return to the idea later.

Will donned the necklace and slipped it under his shirt, then went back to prying information out of his ‘guest’.

The stronghold to their south was indeed under the control of Lord Bakton, and actually boasted a sizeable population. Not as big as Akul, but pretty big. It was an excellent place for trade and industry to bloom, also a great place to buy and sell because crime and fraud were nonexistent, which kept prices low.

Visitors couldn’t commit crime if they wanted to because in order to enter the city you had to verbally agree to not cause trouble while they were within the walls.

And it was magically binding.

Further south was the ‘climber’ Key Site, where Climbers typically would go and clear a fledgling boss monster, securing their Door up or down.

To the east of the stronghold was a river bisecting a sea of farms, and to the west was the ‘grinding’ area, a forest filled with monsters driven there by the fae, where most Climbers liked to gain the levels they sorely needed.