Ashley didn’t want to think about how much those tentacles looked like something out of an anime. She was going to need a damn shower after all of this.

  All she could really hope for was that the city didn’t shut off her water.

  There were some things that were always true for Ashley, and one of those was that when she couldn’t rest; she wanted to go for a little walk. The problem in New York City was that the lights were always on. So what she did was order blackout curtains for her room.

  A pretty standard model. The curtains worked as advertised, and she could easily close her eyes and get exactly nowhere near close to enough sleep. After her dungeon run, and the time that she spent cooking and eating dinner, because, of course, she got even more hungry. After doing that, she found herself not tired, but wired. She didn’t even know what was going on. She checked her phone and checked her work app, and the work app still had her working the next day, so she guessed she was up. Her agent hadn’t even emailed her after her performance. Maybe she thought that Ashley’s performance was so abysmal that she shouldn’t need to do anything about it

  It wasn’t like Ashley was going to become a pop culture character in Times Square, where people took photos of them for cash. She considered it.

  But because her current boss was still asking her to come in to work at the comic book shop, she might as well. Midtown East comics were apparently going to have a whole day at work just two days after the apocalypse began. And if that was an indicative of the current problems with society at large, she didn’t know what it was. In fact, when she logged onto Blue Sky, there were more and more complaints about how little things had changed, except for all the annoying regional cards that had popped up.

  She followed a thread of a guy who had created a card of just local creatures after beating them to death repeatedly, and it seemed entertaining. It was what she shamelessly let herself get dragged into. And then she saw he had posted a video about it, and the production value was incredible. Wherever he was—she was guessing the middle of Florida—he had found a serpent-based card, and he had a deck full of them.

  In his accent that clearly indicated his lack of travel outside of the South, he told people how he made a living by killing escaped exotic pets that had been eating too much. Tomorrow, he promised his audience that he would look for some new cards.

  As she watched, she could see some differences there. The Omega Rats she could summon using her forge had a slightly buff color, compared to the wild ones. Even the ones that she had seen other people summon had a blue tint.

  She was putting together a list of things, as more and more Blue Sky people posted about this deck inspector website, where people were posting stats of their cards and looking for trades, and she took about five minutes to create an account, and posted that she found a Healing card, and all of its effects. She had debated putting it back in her deck, but right now, she wasn’t sure. All the cards in her deck related back to her living forge, and her ability to create more and more mobs without having to use them in an enduring manner.

  All she had to do was keep providing it with scavenging materials. If there were more dungeons, which now she wanted to call Kate and figure out her dungeon ability, then Ashley would look for dungeons when she was off duty.

  Her other concern was that her Bodega was now selling cards, and she might not be the first one to get a good deal there. She was going to have to butter up the cat. They had already sat in her lap and melted, which felt very intimate. Despite it being a relationship between a girl and a cat, it would not have been so if the cat had spoken. It sounded like the cat had just inhaled in an encyclopedia over a day and now was trying to find its way in the world.

  She thought back to every time that she’d seen the cat there before the System had arrived, and if it been there for at least as long as she’d been renting the Little apartment. Maybe it not only lived there, but maybe it never left. That made her sad, because she was thinking about all the experiences that she’d had outside of her apartment.

  Sure, she might live in the city and have a tiny ass apartment, but she liked this, and she wanted to live in a place where she could walk around and get everything she wanted. She sat up with a start. What if her grocery store was closed for good?

  The Amish market was only a few doors down from her Bodega, and she frequented both. They didn’t stock her Blue Ox drinks at the Amish market, but she could go there and get something crunchy. That was how she wrapped herself up again to go out for a little walk to clear her mind. A girl needed to have a calm, cool outlook of mind in order to plot the future expansion of her Evil Empire.

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  The staff of the Amish Market was still there, except for the deli guy. And this was only because it was so late in the evening. She cursed her luck, but she had got a sandwich with one card that had provided a more than adequate chicken parm. She felt at peace when she unlocked her jaw to swallow a sandwich. She had been so hungry that she barely chewed.

  It was only going to be another block until she could find her spot, and thankfully, it being late enough, there were precious few businesses that were even open. She was pleased to see that all the food places were still selling stuff, and none of them had been taken over by a card mob or monsters.

  She oddly wondered if the comic book shop was going to have more or less traffic than normal. Now that people could escape their lives and go build decks, were they going to do that en masse? Or was it truly only one in a hundred that had gotten card decks? She could readily see that people’s obvious craze for cards lead them to collect these cards and make strong decks, as evidenced by the number of Pizza Rats others had slain on her way, two or three blocks from her apartment.

  If only she could reliably figure out a way to get better cards, then she might get somewhere. But then, that all went back to would a bank take credits, or could she pay for her food with credits? The new monetary system that came with the System was strange on its own.

  But as she got to the boba shop underneath her work, she realized that yeah; she was going to have to go to work if she wanted to keep paying for an apartment. It seemed like her landlord was still going to want her money, and it wasn’t like she could just run off and go have an adventure. Real life was still there. It just so happened that Pizza Rats were spawning all over the place.

  It would have just been cooler if she’d had a dragon or something. She turned, making sure that her swarm of creatures was following, and began plodding back to her apartment. Even in the apocalypse, a girl still had responsibilities.

  People kept coming into Bagel’s shop, surprised that he was still open. Bagel didn’t understand why, he just kept one of the cell things. But the most surprising thing was the large truck that arrived on the morning of the third day. He’d been there for the day that they restocked. People would come in with these large machines and wheels and deliver stacks of cardboard boxes. The workers would unload them and put them in the right spot. Then the delivery guy would give him a pat, and he would be off.

  “Hey, I got a delivery here for 45 Deli?” The man said. “Can you sign for this, or can someone sign for this? Usually Raul does.”

  The worker behind the counter shrugged. “You can ask the boss. He’s that little guy over there.”

  The delivery guy took a second to take in the majesty of Bagel. There had to be no other explanation as he sharply inhaled. When one came to see the handsomest boy, one paid tribute in whatever way befit them.

  “I guess we need to work on a deal now, as I am the owner of the shop.” Bagel eyed him curiously, seeing if he would take this all in stride. Apparently, this was not uncommon for the man. After all, he was delivering things to New York City.

  “All right, not a problem. Do you want us to deliver the same stuff that was normally asked for? It looks like you’re really leaning into the ‘grill’ aspect of the store.”

  No less than four humans were waiting for orders. Bagel had a hungry crowd and very little competition. Apparently, a lot of the businesses had just decided that, not the Korean laundry or the Thai place, of course, and the Chinese food place behind him continued operating as if nothing had even happened. He admired that. Continuing down Forty-Fifth Street, after the Chinese restaurant, was a parking garage he was going to have to send Janet to. He even had her fly around to identify monster spawns the humans neglected. And regarding the parking deck that went underground, they regularly had one or two Pizza Rats coming up from it, causing the humans to do that regularly as well.

  Janet had told him something about if he could purchase the land as a block. He could stop monsters from spawning there, but he didn’t know what would happen for the next monster to spawn. Would they remove the spawn point, or just make it inaccessible? Apparently, they didn’t allow Janet to tell him, forcing him to figure it out. He’d ask her how much it would cost to buy a block, and she said to first buy his place, and then he could start buying places next door.

  He could only buy the land with credits, and right now, it looked like he was going to need about a hundred-thousand credits to buy his own place. This caused a fair bit of concern, and Bagel was now trying to sell as many cards as he could so that he could buy his own shop from the System. Or at least have the System recognize that he was the owner. It would be much easier if he could sell his cards to the shop, but no, he needed to sell them to humans, and humans got about ten credits every time they killed a mob. They had to go through their interface, which wasn’t available until they had a full deck, in order to pay somebody with cards, which was kind of frustrating, as many of them were looking for a way to optimize their decks, despite not getting one when the apocalypse began.

  That was another thing that Janet was holding from him. She wasn’t telling him what the System was forbidding her from saying. Sure, he could ask oblique questions, which he frequently did to understand humans, their customs, and why his cat form attracted such strange looks, even after other animals had become deck-bearers. Thousands of people lived in the immediate area around him. There had to be dozens of deck bearers. And that’s not including dozens of people, if not hundreds, that had also built decks from cards that were created by killing other mobs.