Crossing the threshold turned out to be a little anticlimactic for Terry. He'd expected the interior of the mine tunnel to be a well of impenetrable darkness containing unseen but terrible horrors. What he got instead was just a tunnel with the kind of timber reinforcements he'd seen in pictures of old mines back on Earth. The fireball over his head was enough to make the immediate area visible and cast some dim, reddish light perhaps twenty feet down the tunnel. That wasn't exactly what Terry had expected from the fireball. Then again, he had made it small and not given much thought to what kind of light it might cast.

Terry glanced up at the floating ball of fire. It was merrily burning a red and yellow color with an emphasis on red. He focused on the fireball and tried to change its color. He was aiming for something close to daylight, but was willing to settle for a yellow that reminded him of those old, incandescent light bulbs. Once he got the right color, he tried to up the intensity a little at a time. It took a lot more tweaking than he expected, but Terry finally got it shining a bright yellow that lit the tunnel ahead nicely.

"Huh," said Kelima.

Terry glanced over at her and found her frowning down the tunnel. He looked a little harder, wondering if he'd missed some obvious threat. Nope. It still just looked like an empty tunnel. There were even a few loose cobwebs.

"What is it?" he asked in a quiet voice.

"It's just a mine tunnel. I expected something a little more, you know, terrifying."

Terry nodded, but said, "This is just the entrance. Don't get too comfortable with the idea that this place is safe. There is some kind of monster in here. One that's scary enough that most other monsters don't want to even get near this mountain. Hell, I don't even remember seeing a single bird on the climb up that path."

"So, what's the plan?" she asked.

"Here's what I'm thinking. We go and quietly find the unobtanium rocks, er, I mean the orichalcum ore. We gather as much as we can, quietly. We quietly put it into my storage ring. Then we oh so very quietly tiptoe the fuck out of this place. All while doing our level best not to bother the monster that lives here in even the tiniest way. Then, we go back, collect the demons, and head to the blacksmith. That's the plan."

Kelima looked at him with a baffled expression and asked, "You don't want to fight the monster?"

"Of course, I don't want to fight the monster. I will if I have to, but only if I have to. I'm not going to go looking for a fight if we can avoid it."

"But shouldn't we kill it?"

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"Oh, no, no, no. Back in my world, that's what we call scope creep. It used to happen all the time at my job, and it's infuriating."

"What in the world does that even mean?"

"It's when the goals of a project swell beyond their original bounds. In this case, the only thing I want here is the orichalcum. If we get the ore and get out, we've finished the job and can declare success. We weren't sent here to fight the monster. There's no bounty or contract on it that I'm aware of. We were sent here to get ore for the blacksmith. That's it."

"But it's a monster," said Kelima. "A dangerous monster that prevents anyone else from mining here."

"And if someone cares enough to post a ludicrously profitable contract with the Guild, I'll think about coming back. Until then, however, it's not our problem. Think about it. On our way here, aside from the last murder-bird, did we ever go looking for monsters? Or did we just fight the ones that attacked us?"

Kelima's eyes narrowed as she concentrated.

"I guess, we really did just fight the ones we ran across."

"Exactly. And most of that was just for training and to get some convenient cores. I don't mind doing the occasional public service monster slaying, but you need to remember that killing monsters is an adventurer's job. You should get paid for doing your job. Don't ever work for free unless it's unavoidable."

"So, you're saying we should just ignore the monster as long as it ignores us?" asked Kelima, not seeming to really believe it.

Terry pointed at her and gave an enthusiastic, "Yes! That is exactly what we should do."

"What if it attacks us?"

"Well, then we're back to the old standby of punch, stab, slash, and see how it goes from there. But for now, let's go with the quiet approach."

Terry could tell from Kelima's expression that she really thought they should fight the monster, but he wasn't game for that. It was largely for the reasons he gave her, too. There was going to be limited profit in it. The Guild might pay them for bringing back its head, but that was never going to pay the kind of money a contract generated. Even if it was some super-rare monster with a huge bounty on it, a contract would still pay more. Why? It was the only way to entice people who had already decided not to go looking for that monster.

In the back of his head, though, Terry was also thinking about his battle with the Kongotaur. That had been way too close, and it was because he hadn't known what he was dealing with at the time. If he'd known in advance that it had that berserking ability, he would have taken a different, more conservative approach in that fight. Especially at the beginning. That narrow miss with mortality had taught him a lesson. While he wasn't opposed to trying to punch up if he had to, he didn't intend to attempt it blindly again.

And that was the exact situation they were in with whatever monster had claimed the mountain. He knew it was powerful, but not how powerful or what kind of abilities it had. Picking a fight with that was a sucker's bet in his opinion. No, better to just snatch the unobtanium on the quiet and run like hell. After all, like the old saying goes, he who steals and runs away lives to steal another day. Terry wasn't sure that this was actually stealing, so much as co-opting, since the monster wasn't the actual owner. But co-opting didn't fit neatly into a rhyme, so stealing it was.

"Why are you grinning?" asked Kelima. "It makes me nervous when you grin."

"I just had a clever thought, is all," said Terry.

"Now, I'm really nervous, but I guess there's a first time for everything."

Terry gave her a half-baked glare and gestured down the tunnel with an axe.

"Let's go. That ore isn't going to steal itself."

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