The main hall of the Argentis Grand Exchange was a symphony of chaos, and Zane was its conductor. He stood on a second-floor balcony, looking down at the trading floor—a swirling vortex of panicked merchants, shouting brokers, and frantic players. The air hummed with the energy of a collapsing market, but for him, it was the sound of a plan reaching its perfect, brutal crescendo.

  For the past three months, Phantasm had been a ghost, its only activity a silent, relentless acquisition of a single, universally derided resource: [Crawler's Silk Gland]. It was a disgusting, sticky organ dropped by low-level cave crawlers, useful only for crafting the weakest tier of cloth armor. It was vendor trash, and they had bought hundreds of thousands of units for fractions of a coin each.

  Then, two days ago, the Adamantine Union’s top engineering guild announced a breakthrough in personal flight—lightweight, system-assisted glider wings. The core stabilizing component, the one material that could handle the magical stresses without tearing, was a refined fiber derived from [Crawler's Silk Gland].

  The market didn’t just stir; it erupted.

  “One thousand gold coins for a stack of five hundred!” a broker screamed into his comms device, his face slick with sweat.

  “Fifteen hundred! I have a buyer at fifteen hundred! Do you have the supply?” another shrieked, his voice cracking.

  Liam stood beside Zane, his eyes wide with disbelief. He watched the price ticker for the glands—an item he’d once thrown away to make inventory space—climb with a speed that defied logic. “Zane… this is insane. We paid… what? A few silver for a thousand of them?”

  “Patience,” Zane said, his voice a low murmur, his eyes fixed on the chaos below. His gaze wasn’t on the brokers, but on the representatives from the major guilds—Dragon’s Fang, the Silver Lions, the Crimson Vanguard. They were the real prize. They were desperate, their pre-orders for the gliders were massive, and they had been caught completely flat-footed.

  Evie materialized on his other side, a silent shadow. “The last of our holdings have been moved to the primary exchange account,” she reported, her voice barely a whisper. “The total supply is consolidated.”

  Zane nodded. It was time. He opened a private channel to the auction house’s prime broker, a man he knew from his first life would buckle under pressure but wouldn’t dare to cheat a major client. “This is Phantasm,” Zane’s modulated voice commanded. “Release our full stock. Set the starting bid at two thousand gold per stack.”

  The broker on the other end choked. “Two… two thousand? Sir, that’s… that’s market-breaking!”

  “I know,” Zane replied, a cold, thin smile touching his lips. “Break it.”

  The announcement dropped like a bomb. A single seller, the anonymous entity ‘Phantasm,’ had placed a hundred thousand stacks—fifty million units—of [Crawler's Silk Gland] up for auction. The entire world’s known supply, and then some.

  The trading floor fell silent for a heartbeat, then exploded into a bidding war of epic proportions. The major guilds, forced to outbid each other for the survival of their new ventures, drove the price to astronomical heights. Zane watched, dispassionate, as the numbers on his private terminal climbed into the millions. It wasn’t just money; it was power. It was the capital he needed to fund an army, to buy secrets, to build a war machine capable of fighting gods.

  When the final gavel fell, the silence that followed was one of pure shock. The guilds had their materials, their pride was in tatters, and Phantasm was legendarily, incomprehensibly wealthy.

  [System Notification: Transaction Complete.] [Total Earnings: +14,750,000 Gold Coins.]

  Liam let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. “Fourteen million…” he whispered, the number sounding alien on his tongue. “We could buy a fortress with that. We could buy ten.”

  “We will,” Zane said, turning away from the balcony. The victory was absolute, the execution flawless. “But first, we get our armor.”

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  As they descended a private lift to a discreet exit, the mood was electric. Liam was already planning the upgrades for his shield, and even Evie had a rare, almost imperceptible glint of satisfaction in her eyes. Their struggles, the risks they’d taken, had paid off in a way none of them could have imagined.

  They stepped out into a mid-tier market street, away from the opulence of the Grand Exchange. The air here was filled with the smell of roasted street food and the chatter of everyday players. And it was here that Liam’s elation hit a snag.

  He was the first to notice them. A small group of three players, barely out of their teens, were huddled around a closed crafting stall. One of them, a young woman with the calloused hands of a tailor, was openly weeping. Her brother, or perhaps her friend, kicked the stall’s shutter in a fit of helpless rage.

  “It’s all gone,” he spat, his voice thick with despair. “Everything. We invested every coin we had in silk, just like the forums said. A safe bet, they called it.”

  “The price…” the woman sobbed. “It went up by ten thousand percent in an hour. We were supposed to craft novice cloaks. Now… now we can’t even afford a single spool. We’re ruined.”

  Liam stopped walking. The celebratory warmth in his chest turned to ice. He looked from the crying tailor to the fourteen million gold figure still burning in his mind’s eye. He saw the direct, brutal line connecting the two. Their fortune was built on the ruin of people like these.

  He turned to Zane, his expression troubled. “Zane,” he began, his voice low and heavy. “Those people. We did that.”

  Zane’s pace didn’t slow. “They made a bad bet in a volatile market. It’s not our concern.”

  “It wasn’t a bet for them, it was their livelihood!” Liam insisted, stepping in front of Zane to stop him. “This wasn't a fluctuation; it was a manipulation. You knew this would happen. Was it necessary?”

  Zane finally stopped, turning to face him fully. His eyes weren't angry; they were cold and sharp, like a surgeon's scalpel. “Necessary? Liam, the Gravewood Behemoth is coming. After that, gods will start rewriting reality for their amusement. The guilds you saw in there, panicked and flailing? They are the ones who will lead thousands of players to their deaths because of pride and incompetence. The money we just made will buy us the gear to kill a monster that can wipe this entire city off the map. It will fund the intelligence network that will keep us one step ahead of a goddess who sees us as her personal playthings.”

  He took a step closer, his voice dropping to an intense, unwavering whisper. “Their bankruptcy is a tragedy. The alternative is their extinction. I am not choosing between good and evil. I am choosing between a lesser and a greater tragedy. In this war, their ruin is the price for everyone else's survival. There is no other way.”

  Liam stared at Zane, the raw, chilling logic washing over him. He hated it. Every fiber of his being, the very core of his Protector class, recoiled from the idea of sacrificing the weak to save the strong. But he couldn't refute the truth in Zane's words. He had seen Zane's "predictions" come true too many times. He remembered the glitched wolves, the assassins, the Sunken Temple. Zane wasn't just playing the game; he was fighting a war on a level Liam could barely comprehend.

  The troubled look on his face didn't vanish, but it hardened into something else: grim acceptance. He was a shield. And a shield’s purpose was to protect people from the greatest threat. Right now, the greatest threat wasn't market manipulation; it was the future Zane was fighting against.

  “I understand,” Liam said, his voice quiet but firm. He stepped aside, rejoining the formation. The moral debate was over. The mission came first.

  Zane gave a single, sharp nod of acknowledgment. The moment of friction had passed, the team's focus reforged and stronger for it.

  They walked in a new, purposeful silence, leaving the market and its minor tragedies behind. Their path took them into the industrial heart of Argentis, a district choked with the smoke and clang of a hundred forges. They stopped before a building made of soot-stained basalt, a massive, rune-etched anvil serving as its sign. This was the workshop of Borin, the master craftsman they had rescued from the Dungeon of Echoes.

  They entered the forge. The heat was a physical blow. Borin, a mountain of a man with a beard braided with copper wire, looked up from a glowing ingot. He recognized them instantly, a slow grin spreading across his face.

  “Well, well,” his voice rumbled like grinding stones. “The ghosts decide to show themselves. I heard you made some noise at the Exchange.”

  “We have the capital,” Zane’s modulated voice cut through the din. He placed a heavily enchanted satchel on the anvil. It clinked with the sound of a king’s ransom. Then, he laid out the legendary materials they had acquired—the heart of the Soul-Eater Specter, the Aegis of Recursion, the core from the logic puzzle. “And we have the components. We need your skill.”

  Borin’s eyes widened, his professional greed overriding his surprise. He ran a calloused finger over the pulsating Specter heart, his expression turning from avarice to awe, and then to a healthy dose of fear.

  “By the Forge…” he breathed, looking from the impossible materials to their bottomless funds. He stared at the three of them, clad in their mismatched, low-level gear that belied their newfound power. “With this much gold, and components like these… what in the gods’ names are you planning to build?”

  Zane met the master craftsman’s gaze, the fire of the forge reflecting in his cold, grey eyes.

  “Armor,” he said, his voice flat and absolute. “The kind that kills gods.”