I was just starting to worry about the long-term optics of hosting a welcome mat made of a thousand corpses at the foot of my nice, newly fortified village, when the dead began to vanish.

One by one, they dissolved, folding in on themselves and being quietly deleted. And where each had fallen, the System saw fit to leave behind a little apology bundle: gear, gold, and various odds and ends, all neatly arrayed as though the dead had thoughtfully emptied their pockets before vanishing.

The whole thing had the atmosphere of a post-Glastonbury cleanup orchestrated by an indifferent god with a fondness for loot tables. Weapons gleamed where throats had been slit. Trinkets twinkled beside bloodstains. There were even a few snacks, which were all wrapped and seemingly fresh.

I stood at the edge of it all, watching the carnage dissolve into convenience, and thought, not for the first time, that the laws of Bayteran had a very specific sense of humour.

If Scar's Unmerry Men and Women thought there was anything even vaguely unusual about the glistening remains of several hundred enemies evaporating into organised heaps of loot, they kept that observation buried.

Without needing any sort of briefing or a need for orders, they fanned out and swarmed the field like carrion crows with very clear KPIs. If one of them had pulled out a clipboard and started tallying sword-to-coin ratios, I wouldn't have blinked.

They sifted through gore-slicked relics like Metal Detectorists on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Lost Property. Shields were banged against knees to test integrity. Rings were sniffed. Everything remotely shiny or suspiciously magical was lobbed into sacks already bulging like an encumbrance warning in progress.

I climbed down from the battlements, casting a glance at Scar, who was still locked in a torrid love affair with his stat sheet.. I figured he'd still be standing there at sunset, whispering sweet nothings to his Agility modifier.

Down at the Storage Shed, I pitched in with the yard clearance. I was keen to make sure none of it ended up lodged permanently in my inventory. I added whatever gear had decided to imprint on me like I was some kind of loot duckling, and tossed it into the communal pool.

Each deposit made a nice, weighty clink, which was all very satisfying. The little meter on the side of the Storage console ticked up each time, and I got a thrill out of it for the first few times. Progress, after all, is still progress. However, that thrill faded fast when I noticed how the needle kept creeping toward maximum capacity.

There's something existentially dreadful about watching a storage bar fill up. You know it's just numbers, just data, but it starts to feel like a timer on how long you can keep pretending things are under control.

Finally, just as I reached for another handful of resources to toss in, a bright message pinged up

[System Alert: Resource Storage at Capacity] You have exceeded Anchorfall's current storage allocation.

Available Storage Slots: 0/0 Temporary Overflow Buffer: 12 items pending sort

Auto-Sort Enabled: Prioritising rare, bound, and class-compatible items. Low-tier items (Common | Damaged | Redundant) flagged for auto-salvage in 60 seconds.

Recommendation: Access Threshold Inventory Node or construct additional dedicated storage facility within Anchorhold boundaries.

System Advisory: Please address your rampant loot-hoarding tendencies.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Well, that's less than ideal," I said.

The Storage meter had tipped over into the red. I scanned the village for someone who might know how to stop it exploding… or imploding…or doing whatever it is magical infrastructure does when pushed past sensible limits. However, every Unmerry soul was elbows-deep in the post-slaughter tidy-up and looked far too busy sorting axes from cloaks to answer my questions. Scar was still making bedroom eyes at his stats. Lia and Dema were... somewhere. Probably up to something useful, dangerous, or extremely annoying. Possibly all three.

I gave it a few more seconds, then sighed and opened the upgrade menu. I might as well see what brand of financial despair we were offering today.

Option One: Standard Upgrade. Price? Pretty much all the resources we'd just lovingly funnelled in. You know, the ones we might need if another army turned up tomorrow and fancied a go.

Option Two: Instant Upgrade. All it wanted was 180 gold. Which was a tidy little sum. Pretty much exactly all I had left in my pockets. Which was a bit suspicious.

I stared at it for a bit longer than I needed to. Because there's always that tiny, hopeful part of your brain that thinks: maybe if I react slowly enough, a third option will appear. One that doesn't involve burning through all the cash I currently have.

It didn't.

I checked my personal inventory. As I'd suspected, I had just enough gold to cover it. Barely. It felt a bit as if the System was pretending this was some sort of reasonable business transaction and not a back-alley shakedown with loot as collateral.

There was something bitterly poetic about it, really.

The last thing I'd done on Earth was dump the last of my real-world money on a bunch of train tickets to help me sneak out of London. And hadn't that effort at subterfuge gone well? And here I was again—somewhere new, somewhere stupid—about to throw away the last of my currency all over again. Trading what little I had left… Some things, apparently, you couldn't level out of.

"Alright then," I said, tapping the gold option. "Poppa's going to make it rain."

The response was immediate.

The storage building let out a chime, as if I'd just made a blood offering to the spirit of responsible village management. Bars rose. Numbers scrolled. Slots rearranged themselves like obedient children at inspection. The overflow cleared from red to green, and my screen dutifully updated to reflect my new, wonderfully expanded capacity.

Also, my gold total was now sitting at a nice, round zero.

Again.

Then, with a gusty whoosh like a giant exhaling after holding in bad news, the Storage Shed shuddered, groaned, and promptly outgrew its own skin. Itpuffed outward and upward, its timber frame stretching with a series of wooden creaks that sounded far too vertebral for comfort.

Walls doubled in height. Roof beams rose like they'd been yanked by invisible crane hooks. What had once looked like a sad garden outbuilding now loomed over the village like a barn with ambition. An industrial-sized Dutch monstrosity, complete with buttresses and what might well have been a loading gantry.

Reinforced iron flowed through the new architecture, threading threw the beams and crossbars. The whole thing took on a grim, fortress-like appearance, as if it had been designed by someone with a siege complex. Which, considering what we had just been through, wasn't too far off the mark. I got the impression we could now store enough provisions to outlast the apocalypse twice and still have room left over for recreational cheese.

I took two steps toward it before the hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

Silence.

Every single Unmerry Man and Woman had stopped in place, expressions frozen, loot sacks half-slung, and weapons resting mid-clean. All eyes were firmly, absolutely, undivertibly on me. And not in a friendly, "oh good, he's helped" sort of way. More like "did he just press the big shiny red button and summon a fourth faction?" kind of way. Which, in fairness, was not entirely outside the realm of possibility.

And, just to add that extra sprinkle of dread to my day, like a garnish of regret atop an already overcooked disaster, I finally spotted Lia and Dema striding toward me.

They moved in sync, boots crunching on the gravel with crisp purpose, expressions carved from the same block of 'we need to talk.' That special, soul-curdling look reserved for interventions, disciplinary hearings, and the moment someone finds the search history.

Whatever they had in mind, it didn't look friendly. Dema's jaw was set and Lia was doing the slow blink of someone deciding between sarcasm and violence. Somehow, I sensed she'd pick both.

I sighed, gave my freshly-upgraded loot stash one last fond, pre-memorial glance, and straightened up, brushing off the front of my newly upgraded armour like that might somehow make me look more prepared for whatever came next.

It didn't. But at least I'd go down cleanly.

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