I pushed through the tavern door, stepping into the common room where conversation died the moment I appeared. The same pattern as before: eyes dropping, bodies shifting, people suddenly fascinated by their drinks. A path cleared without anyone actually moving, just a collective lean away that opened space around me like I carried plague.

  Cool.

  I'd dressed with purpose this time. The blue overcoat hung heavy on my shoulders, worn but well-made, the kind of thing that marked me as someone who'd climbed a few rungs above common thuggery. The bandana covered the lower half of my ruined face, hiding the worst of the damage. My sword belt sat at my hip, the long sword's weight familiar despite this being a borrowed body.

  But the real find had been under the bed: a black hooded cloak, thick wool that smelled of pipe smoke and damp nights. I pulled the hood up as I walked, letting shadow swallow what the bandana couldn't hide. Between the hood, the bandana, and the dim lighting, my face became almost invisible. Just two pale eyes staring out from darkness.

  Perfect for the aesthetic.

  The pig-faced thug from earlier watched me pass, his expression carefully neutral. I gave him nothing, no nod, no acknowledgment. Roxam wouldn't waste recognition on underlings.

  The moment I stepped outside tavern, which had a sign that named it the Salty Locust, the smell hit me like a physical blow.

  Christ.

  I'd forgotten about this. Forgotten that medieval cities (well, pseudo-medieval fantasy cities) didn't have proper sewage systems. The game had never bothered to simulate smell, obviously. Graphics, sound, physics, sure. But not the absolute reek of thousands of people living without modern plumbing.

  It was foul.

  The stench of human waste mixed with rotting garbage, standing water, and something else I couldn't identify but suspected was dead animal. My stomach lurched. The impulse to gag hit hard, but I forced it down, breathing shallow through my mouth.

  This was my life now. Better get used to it.

  I surveyed the street, blinking against the late afternoon sun. All around me sprawled the architecture of poverty, with dilapidated buildings leaning against each other like drunks, their walls patched with whatever materials came to hand. Crude wooden structures squatted between brick buildings that had seen better centuries. Thatch roofs sagged. Windows gaped empty or were covered with oil cloth instead of glass.

  The streets themselves were packed dirt, rutted and uneven, with puddles of questionable liquid collecting in the low spots. People moved through the mess with practiced indifference, their clothes as worn and patched as the buildings.

  I recognized it immediately.

  Western Zenas City. The slums. The forgotten half of the Duchy's capital, where the game's developers had dumped all the criminals, poverty, and atmospheric grime they could muster.

  I'd walked these streets dozens of times in-game, mostly during Roxam's storyline or when completing various criminal faction quests. But experiencing it in person? Completely different. The game had captured the visual squalor but missed the smell, the oppressive heat, the way the poverty felt like a physical weight pressing down.

  Zenas City was the main location for Act 1 of Path of Exemplar. The player spent probably thirty to forty hours here, attending Allstone Academy, building relationships with companions, exploring the merchant quarter, dealing with various plot threads. It had shops filled with gear upgrades, luxury homes belonging to noble families with their own questlines, and of course the Academy itself, that massive campus where the story's central conflicts began.

  But all those nice things existed in Eastern Zenas.

  The city was built on the River Dredge, a massive waterway that cut straight through the settlement's heart like a knife dividing spoils. The river literally bisected everything, creating two distinct halves connected by a series of bridges.

  Eastern Zenas got the Academy, the merchant quarter, the noble mansions, the guard barracks, the cathedral, the proper shops. Everything clean, well-maintained, prosperous. Streets paved with actual stone. Sewers that mostly worked. Lamplighters who kept the night safe.

  Western Zenas got the rest of us.

  The slums. The factories. The tanneries and butcher yards. The criminal organizations. The desperate and the dangerous, all crammed together in streets the city guard barely bothered patrolling. This was where the Viper Syndicate operated, where Roxam had landed after being expelled from the Academy.

  Two bridges connected the halves: North Bridge and South Bridge. Yeah, the developers had really stretched their creative muscles with those names. Not like they bothered with the street names either. Everything was just "Slum District" or "Warehouse District" or "Noble District." Functional, if uninspired.

  Still, I knew the layout. I'd memorized it across eleven playthroughs, learned every shortcut, every vendor location, every place where random encounters spawned.

  Knowledge was power. And I had more knowledge about this city than probably anyone living in it.

  I started walking, letting instinct and game memory guide my feet. I needed to get my bearings, figure out exactly where I stood in the timeline. The meeting with Angus suggested this was early in Roxam's criminal career, but I needed specifics.

  But more than just wandering aimlessly, I had a specific goal in mind. A target I needed to locate before anything else.

  Marcos Smith. Blacksmith. Artisan. And future companion to the hero party if things played out like they did in-game.

  The guy lived somewhere in these slums, running his own smithy out of what I remembered being a glorified shack. But here was the thing, Marcos wasn't just some random NPC vendor. He had talent. Real talent. The kind that let him craft weapons and armor that rivaled anything you could buy in the fancy merchant quarter across the river.

  His business model was actually brilliant in its simplicity. He'd forge quality gear here in Western Zenas where rent was cheap and materials were accessible, then sell his finished products to the rich merchants in Eastern Zenas. Those merchants would mark everything up and sell to adventurers, nobles, and Academy students who wouldn't dare set foot in the slums. Everyone made money. Classic supply chain.

  But if you knew about Marcos directly? You could cut out that middleman entirely.

  In the game, you could befriend him after completing a series of fetch quests. Pretty standard stuff: retrieve this rare ore, find my missing apprentice, kill the bandits threatening my supply routes. Generic JRPG busywork, but it paid off. Once you maxed out his friendship meter, Marcos joined the hero party as your dedicated blacksmith. After that, you could commission custom weapons and armor, choosing exactly what you wanted forged instead of relying on random shop inventory or loot drops.

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  The prices were way cheaper too. You were buying at cost instead of retail. Plus, as your friendship deepened, he'd occasionally throw in discounts or craft special items using legendary materials you'd collected.

  It was honestly one of the best deals in the entire game. Most players who discovered Marcos early got a significant power advantage over those who didn't.

  And right now, I needed that advantage.

  I wasn't planning to use whatever Marcos forged for me forever, just long enough to get my hands on the unique sword that would form the backbone of my planned build. But for now, I needed a saber. A good one. Something I could train with, something that would let me level up my Saber proficiency from Adept to Expert rank.

  That was the key. The prerequisite. The foundation upon which everything else would be built.

  So I made my way through the streets of Western Zenas, keeping my hood up, my face hidden, my steps purposeful. I navigated by memory, recalling the route I'd taken dozens of times in-game. Left at the tannery, straight past the fountain with the broken basin, right at the building with the red door...

  And promptly got completely, utterly lost.

  Nothing looked right. The streets didn't match my mental map. Landmarks I remembered weren't where they should be. The tannery was there, but three blocks further than I expected. The fountain existed, but instead of being at a crossroads, it sat in the middle of a plaza I didn't recognize. The building with the red door? Nowhere to be found. Instead, I found myself staring at an entire row of identical structures with peeling gray paint.

  I stood in the middle of an unfamiliar street, surrounded by unfamiliar buildings, with absolutely no idea where I was.

  What the hell?

  Then it hit me. The realization crashed down like cold water.

  Of course the city was bigger. Of course it didn't match my memory. This wasn't a game anymore.

  Back when I'd been sitting at my desk, controller in hand, Western Zenas had been a carefully curated game environment. The developers had created an impression of a sprawling city while keeping the actual playable area manageable. You got maybe twenty or thirty buildings you could enter, a handful of distinct streets, some NPCs with dialogue trees. Enough to feel immersive without requiring the computational power to render an entire city.

  But this? This was real. Or at least, real enough that it followed real-world logic instead of game logic.

  A city the size of Zenas would house tens of thousands of people. Maybe more. It would sprawl for miles, packed with hundreds of streets, thousands of buildings, countless businesses and homes and workshops. The game version had been a tiny, compressed representation of that reality.

  I'd been trying to navigate a real city using a theme park map.

  "Stupid," I muttered under my breath, my voice muffled by the bandana. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

  A few passersby gave me wide berth, probably assuming I was some dangerous lunatic talking to myself. They weren't entirely wrong.

  I needed to adapt. Stop thinking like a gamer and start thinking like someone who actually lived here. Which meant asking for directions like a normal person, no matter how much it bruised my ego.

  I spotted a panhandler sitting at a street corner, his back against a wall, a battered tin cup in his lap. He wore layers of filthy rags and had the weathered, leathery skin of someone who'd spent years exposed to the elements. But his eyes were sharp, alert, watching the foot traffic with the attention of someone who survived by noticing details.

  Perfect.

  I approached, and his gaze fixed on me immediately. Tracked my movement. I saw him tense slightly, probably reading the sword at my hip, the quality of my coat compared to the surrounding poverty, the deliberately concealed face.

  Dangerous. That's what his body language said. This one is dangerous.

  Good. That saved time on establishing pecking order.

  "Marcos Smith," I said, my voice pitched low and rough, barely above a growl. Roxam's voice, not mine. "The blacksmith. Where's his smithy?"

  The panhandler's eyes flickered. Recognition, followed by calculation. He knew who I meant. Now he was weighing whether telling me was worth whatever consequences might follow.

  I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out two silver coins, letting them catch what remained of the afternoon light. Not a fortune, but more than a beggar would see in a week of pleading.

  His hand moved before he could stop himself, fingers twitching toward the money.

  "North and west," he said quickly, his voice rough with disuse. "Follow this street to the old mill. You can't miss it, tallest building for blocks. Turn left, go three streets, then right at the well. Big shack with a chimney, always smoking. That's Marcos."

  I flipped him the coins. He snatched them out of the air with surprising dexterity, made them disappear into his rags like a magic trick.

  "Appreciated," I said, then walked away before he could respond.

  The directions were solid. Within twenty minutes, I'd found the old mill (he was right, impossible to miss) and followed the route exactly as described. Three streets, turn at the well, and there it was.

  Marcos's smithy.

  The panhandler had called it a shack, and that wasn't an exaggeration. The structure looked like it had been cobbled together from spare lumber and wishful thinking, attached to a slightly more substantial house that still wouldn't pass any building codes I knew. But the chimney was real enough, belching dark smoke into the dimming sky, and through the open front I could see the orange glow of a working forge.

  The heat hit me before I even got close. After hours walking through the cooling evening air, the furnace's blast felt like opening an oven directly onto my face. Inside, a short, stocky figure hammered away at something on an anvil, each strike sending sparks flying in bright arcs.

  Marcos Smith. Had to be.

  He was exactly as I remembered from the game's character model: compact and powerfully built, with shoulders that seemed too broad for his height and arms like tree trunks. No beard, which would've made him look like a stereotypical fantasy dwarf, but he sported a truly magnificent mustache, bushy and dark, that bristled with each breath.

  I waited. Partly because interrupting a smith mid-strike seemed like a bad idea, but mostly because Roxam wouldn't rush. Roxam had patience. Roxam didn't ask, he took. So I stood in the doorway, silent and still, until the work demanded acknowledgment.

  Marcos finished whatever he was doing, plunging the red-hot metal into a quench bucket with a violent hiss of steam. Then he turned, and his eyes found me immediately.

  The temperature dropped despite the forge's heat.

  I saw recognition flash across his face. Then something darker. Contempt, maybe. Or just barely restrained anger. He wiped his hands on a rag, took two steps toward me, and spat directly at my boots.

  The glob of saliva hit the worn leather and slid down slowly.

  Okay. Rude.

  But I let it slide. Getting into a pissing contest with my potential blacksmith wouldn't serve my goals. I kept my expression neutral behind the bandana, my posture relaxed but ready.

  "Marcos Smith?" I asked, even though I knew damn well who he was.

  "I know who you are," he cut me off before I could continue. His voice carried the rasp of years breathing forge smoke, but it was steady. Unafraid. "Skullface Roxam. One of Angus's main lackeys."

  He said 'lackeys' like the word tasted foul.

  "I already paid the protection money this month," Marcos continued, his tone hard as the steel he worked. "So you can fuck right off."

  Not the warm welcome I'd hoped for, but not entirely unexpected either. I raised my hands slightly, a placating gesture that hopefully read as non-threatening.

  "Not here to collect anything," I said. "I want to hire you. Need a sword forged. Custom work."

  Marcos's expression didn't soften even slightly.

  "Don't do custom work," he said flatly. "You want a sword, go buy one from the shops in East Zenas. They've got plenty."

  What?

  This wasn't how the dialogue was supposed to go. When the player character first approached Marcos, he was gruff but open to conversation. A few friendship points, maybe a small quest, and boom! You were on track to recruit him.

  But this? This was hostility. Pure, undiluted dislike.

  Maybe it was the Angus connection. Marcos had mentioned protection money with obvious resentment. If the Viper Syndicate was shaking him down regularly, of course he'd hate anyone associated with them.

  And I was more than associated. I was one of Angus's top enforcers, according to the lore.

  Damn it.

  I shifted tactics, trying to remember the quest trigger dialogue from the game.

  "Is there something I could do for you?" I asked. "Some kind of job, maybe? In exchange for taking my commission?"

  Please work. Please activate the quest-giving tree.

  Marcos's mustache bristled as his lip curled into a sneer.

  "Don't need anything from your kind," he said. "Now get lost before I decide your face ain't ugly enough."

  The words hit like hammers. Cold, final, absolute.

  No quest. No dialogue tree. No friendly blacksmith recruitment arc.

  Just rejection.

  My mind raced through options. I could intimidate him, my Charisma was negative fifty-five, which apparently translated into fear-generation instead of likability. With my Intimidation skill, I could probably terrify Marcos into compliance.

  But that felt wrong. Mechanically wrong, strategically wrong. If I threatened him, what would that do to my reputation scores? Would it permanently lock me out of his friendship path? In the game, certain actions closed off entire questlines. Real life probably worked the same way, except with higher stakes and no reload option.

  Plus, forcing someone to craft weapons seemed like a great way to get substandard work. Or sabotage. Or a knife in the back later.

  No. Bad plan.

  I stood there for a long moment, weighing my options, feeling the weight of failure settling onto my shoulders.

  Finally, I nodded once.

  "Understood," I said simply.

  Then I turned and walked away, Marcos's glare burning into my back with every step.

  Well. That could've gone better.