Despite all the elixirs, every inch of my body ached.

  Not from injuries, but sheer bone-weary exhaustion. I’d been pushing myself too hard for too long and I needed to take a break. Needed a full night of uninterrupted rest. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an option. Not yet. I had a whole lot of shit to do before I could even think about crashing. Thankfully, Jakob had provided me with a specialty potion, Eine gute Nachtruhe, which was meant for moments like these—when stopping just wasn’t an option.

  I grimaced as I pulled a vial from storage and knocked it back. The stuff was basically magical speed and worked better than a whole bottle of truck-stop caffeine pills. It also tasted like stale coffee and burnt rubber and left me jittery from head to toe. Still worth it. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I stashed the empty test tube and got busy.

  Before making any adjustments to the store’s layout, however, I needed to take care of all the bodies piled up like cord wood in the reserve lounge. After all, I didn’t want shoppers randomly walking in on the scene of a mass slaughter. So, I put Baby Hands and the rest of my Horrors to work, hauling all the usable mimic corpses into the giant walk-in freezer inside the pharmacy.

  Originally designed for food storage, the cold room had long since been repurposed into a makeshift morgue—a space that now looked like a serial killer’s dream come true. The shelves were lined with arms, legs, and assorted appendages, while massive meat hooks dangled full corpses and partial torsos like slabs of beef. I had a little bit of everything in here: the gangly remains of fifth-floor bellhops, pieces of humanoid rats, hulking kiosk crabs, several mostly intact Kannibal Kids, and an assortment of dead Sunnysiders.

  It wasn’t pretty, but it was damn efficient.

  Originally, I hadn’t bothered with the Sunnysiders—their bodies were riddled with infectious spores, making them more trouble than they were worth. But with the HOA gone, the spores had withered and died, leaving the Kevins and Kathys ripe for the picking. Physically powerful, high-level, and nearly unkillable, they were prime material for my Taxidermied Army. The hatchling parts went onto the shelves, while I took extra time to sort the harvested Mimicore Nodes into separate storage bins.

  No sense wasting good resources.

  That process alone took several hours and by the time I was done, I was covered in so much gore and ichor that I’d need to drop my gear off at the laundromat for a thorough cleaning. The Laundry Brownies—lead by High-Priest Bertrim—would be more than happy to help, though I hated going in there. They’d erected a shrine to me, cobbled together from upcycled detergent bottles and empty beer cans, and they now worshipped me as some sort of heaven-sent messiah.

  The whole situation made my skin crawl, but I endured it for clothes that didn’t reek like an Iraqi port-shitter.

  When I finished with the bodies, I headed over to the fancy new breakroom, opened my shop interface and pulled up the store layout. A ghostly 3D version of the shop appeared in the air in front of me, showcasing the current configuration with all its various rooms and attachments. I rotated the schematic with a quick twist of my fingers, then zoomed out so I had a perfect top-down view.

  I grunted and pinched the bridge of my nose.

  Sweet baby Jesus, but this place was a giant clusterfuck.

  The entrance to the Loot Arcade was located in the pharmacy. The lounge and spa had been randomly grated into the frozen food section, while the new breakroom and office had been separated during the transition and were now by the front checkout. I needed to fix this before it caused utter chaos. At the same time, I didn’t want to rush things—rearranging the layout too drastically could cause even more trouble.

  Slow is smooth, smooth is fast I reminded myself.

  Taking a deep, calming breath, I started painstakingly rearranging my new acquisitions, dragging them into proper place. First off, I amputated the bar and kitchen from their original location and grafted them onto the derelict Loot Arcade. I’d been so wrapped up dealing with the fallout from my battle with the HOA that the Arcade had been left untouched, sitting empty and cordoned off from the rest of the shop.

  That was about to change.

  With the bar and kitchen in place, I could finally transform it into a proper restaurant. I also added on the breakroom and office, figuring they’d serve as a solid base of operations for my employees. I’d still need to find a few people to staff the place, but I already had a plan brewing for how to handle that. With that done, I relocated the newly combined Loot Arcade Bar and Grill from its current location to a prime spot near the front of the store, which would generate a decent amount of foot traffic.

  Next, I knocked out a section of wall from the overflow storage area, which currently doubled as our sleeping quarters, and tacked on the lounge with its assortment of tables, chairs, and work areas. It was the perfect spot for customers looking to kick back and relax while waiting for their gear to be cleaned or for a shower stall to open up. With only thirty public showers, I figured we’d end up with a waiting list a mile long, so having a comfortable place to loiter was a no-brainer.

  As for the spa, I added a short section of unused corridor then installed that next to the Spin Cycle laundromat—currently positioned near the shop’s hygiene section. I made sure to keep the spa reception area intact and planned to create a new Golem to man the counter. I didn’t want to be a dick, but I intended to charge a small access fee to use the spa and showers. I was running a business, after all, not a charity. That said, I planned to keep the price low enough that even fresh-faced Delvers could afford to scrub off the dirt, grime, and gore without breaking the bank.

  Not having a lingering cloud of BO would be worth charging less.

  Hell, I might even add a complementary “free shower” coupon to the basic Delver kits we handed out to the recently no-clipped survivors who managed to find their way here.

  I sliced off another short section of hallway and connected it to the end of the lounge, then repositioned the front reception desk and the elevator shaft. After tinkering with the Store Interface a little more, I was finally able to reposition all of the additional hotel rooms to their own “floor,” accessible only by the elevator. They would serve as high-end living quarters for all the Delvers who wanted permanent residence inside the store and were willing to pay a premium for it.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  As the population continued to grow, I could always head back to the fifth floor for additional rooms. The only reason I hadn’t done so already was that the rooms ate through a lot of my available square footage, and there was no telling what other badass things I might find below.

  There was one final change I made before finalizing the layout—the extra Progenitor Monolith from the spa. Although we already had a Monolith located near checkout, I hated waiting in line to use it and there was almost always a line. So, even though I felt a little guilty about doing so, I cut away the second Monolith with the precision of a surgeon and added it directly to my personal living quarters. That way, I wouldn’t need to haul my ass all the way down into the main store whenever I wanted to update my stats or tweak my titles.

  Was it selfish? Sure. But, in the end, I didn’t really give a shit.

  There had to be at least a few perks for owning this place and I was the one putting my ass on the line over and over again. Access to my own room and a private Monolith seemed like a small ask in the grand scheme of things.

  Stifling a yawn, I closed out of the 3D overlay and left the breakroom behind, making my way through the store and over to the security office I’d installed next to the original breakroom.

  The office was little more than a glorified broom closet—a box, ten feet by ten feet, with a clunky metal desk that held an outdated computer and a bank of CCTV surveillance monitors. I wasn’t at all surprised to find Camo Joe, my chief security golem in the room, watching the monitors like a hawk waiting for his next meal. As with all my golems, Camo Joe was pieced together from a variety of different odds and ends, then powered by a Relic just like my Horrors.

  Stitched together from assorted camping gear and cloaked in hunter’s camo and patches of inky darkness, no one would ever mistake Joe for a human, though he was the most humanoid of all my golems.

  The creature seemed to sense me coming and turned away from the monitors, regarding me with a pair of unsettling purple eyes that peered out from behind the visor of a riot helm, which served as his head.

  “You’ve changed the store’s layout again,” the golem stated without preamble. It wasn’t a question but a statement of absolute certainty. The creature cocked its head to the side for a moment before continuing. “My sensors indicate an additional 10,500 square feet of new material, plus significant configuration adjustments to current assets.”

  I shot him a finger gun and nodded in confirmation. “Yep.”

  The no-nonsense golem was quiet for a moment.

  “Very well,” he finally said. “I’ll need to redeploy several of the internal security cameras and adjust the situational scenario SOPs to account for these new additions.” Camo Joe paused, clearly thinking. “Based on the new spatial considerations and my current patrol routes, I’m afraid we won’t have full coverage without additional security personal. We were already pushing against the edges of acceptable operating parameters, but with so many new areas to patrol and so many new Delvers to keep tabs on, I would like to file an official request for two additional security personnel golems.”

  He’d been pestering me on and off about extra security guards for a while now, so I’d already been expecting his request. Something else the golem said had given me pause, though.

  “New Delvers? How many new Delvers are we talking about?” I asked.

  The golem moved over to a metal filing cabinet and quickly retrieved a thick ledger, filled with tightly scrawled notes and spreadsheets.

  “We’ve had a large influx over the past two days. Thirteen new Delvers, most of whom are still within the store.”

  I whistled and dragged one hand through overlong hair.

  “Holy shit,” I mumbled. “Thirteen? In two days? Are you sure?”

  The golem just looked at me like I sprouted a dick on my forehead and started speaking in Pig-Latin. “Yes,” he said flatly. “I am quite certain. The new job board is proving to be very effective.”

  I grunted noncommittally and nodded. That was one of the other big changes I’d made since killing the HOA—though it had actually been Ed’s idea, not mine.

  “You’re trying to do everything yourself,” the old Delver had told me over a slice of pizza liberally covered in Doritos. “Running yourself ragged like the whole world’s on fire and you’re the only one who can put it out. But the truth is, you’ve got a lot of talented folks here who would be more than happy to help. You just need to give ’em a way to do that.”

  “That’s easier said than done,” I’d replied. “Don’t suppose you have any suggestions?”

  The paranoid Delver had considered the question for a few minutes while slowly demolishing his pizza. “A job board,” he’d finally responded. “Nice and easy. Post the shit that needs to get done and reward people for doing it. Keep it simple stupid. If it works for the Researcher, there’s no reason why it can’t work for you too.”

  The solution was so elegant and so painfully obvious that I was surprised I hadn’t thought of it before. Between Ed, Temp, Jakob, and Croc, we’d come up with several key tasks that Delvers could do to earn in-store credit, which we were now calling Croc-Coins, which could be redeemed for food, items, or lodging. There weren’t a ton of tasks yet, but we’d add more as new things came up.

  The first standing item on the job board was an “Escort Mission.”

  Scour the Lobby and upper floors in search of recently No-Clipped Delvers then safely escort them to the store. Reward: 10 Croc-Coins, a free meal from the concession stand, and one night’s complementary lodging.

  The Howlers, who were used to patrolling the seventh floor, had taken that job as a challenge and had been working in shifts around the clock to rescue all the fresh meat. Still, thirteen in two days? I figured those numbers would start to drop off eventually, and if not… Well, I’d just need to make the store even larger.

  But that was a bridge I could cross when I came to it.

  “Speaking of the job board,” Joe added, “we also have new brands to add to the wall.” He retrieved several gallon-sized zip-locked bags from the cabinet and laid them out on the desk. The contents of each bag were enough to turn my stomach.

  Flaps of bloody skin, each inscribed with the brand of the Skinless Court.

  The other standing assignment we’d added to the board was a bounty on all Aspirants of the Skinless Court. Each kill entitled the bounty hunter to 25 Croc-Coins, a free meal, a free trip to the laundromat, and a week of lodging. The whole “brand” thing hadn’t been my idea, but we needed some way to prove that Aspirants were actually dead and that seemed to be the easiest way to do it. All of the Aspirants wore the mark of their Sovereign, so cutting it off seemed as good a way to confirm a kill as any.

  Collecting the brands was, without a doubt, brutal and barbaric but we were at war. The Aspirants would happily gut any one of us like a lau pig, so it was only fitting we did the same.

  “Let me guess,” I said, pulling my eyes away from the grisly trophies, “Temperance?”

  “And the rest of the Roomkeepers,” Camo Joe confirmed.

  That was the other big change that had happened over the past few days.

  Although Jackson—one the Hold’s other tribunes—was still technically in charge of the Roomkeepers, he’d lost a metric ass-load of clout since we returned victorious from the twenty-fourth floor. Last I checked, Temp was officially at level thirty-two, a full seven levels higher than Jackson, and if there was one thing the Roomkeepers respected, it was power. And Temperance was more powerful than anyone else in the Hold, save for me, Ed, or Jakob. Even Wraith, the last of the tribunes and the de facto leader of the Hold, couldn’t hold a candle to her.

  Not anymore.

  Temperance had used that power to launch a personal war against the Aspirants who’d been plaguing the shop and she’d recruited every Roomkeeper who would listen to help her. Turned out, they were only too happy to lend a hand.

  “Good,” I said, sounding ruthless even in my own ears. “Post the trophies on the brand board and make sure they get paid.”

  The golem nodded. “And my request?” he asked. “For additional security personnel?”

  I sighed, “Yeah, okay. Let’s make it happen.”