The Succubus

4

2

“Matt, I need you to check the staff bathroom. The water is really slow,” Beatrice called out as she passed by.

“Is it the hot, the cold, or both, Bee?” Matt shot back from the maintenance room, where he was assembling a table. He got no response. Apparently, Beatrice had already returned to the slow lunch crowd.

Matt decided to finish the table first. They needed it more. Last week, a bar fight had destroyed nearly half of the tables in the common room before it was brought under control.

The problem was, they had a limited number of spare tables in reserve. It’d been just enough to keep the common room from having too many gaps, but just barely. To make the room feel less empty, they had spread the remaining ones out, which only worked because they hadn't been slammed yet. But with the weekend approaching, they needed the seating. So, Matt had been making tables in all his spare time to refill the common room, and then get their surplus back.

If Benny wasn’t such a tight ass with money and just bought better tables instead of treating them as disposable, I wouldn’t be playing amateur carpenter every other week. Or if he just hired a bouncer.

Matt finished the table and grabbed his plumbing bag. As he walked through the common room, he looked for Beatrice, but she was nowhere to be seen. He sighed. Of course, two customers were already at the bar, clearly waiting to be helped. Matt didn’t recognize them, which meant they were probably new customers.

Where is Beatrice? Must be nice to be able to slip out for a dozen smoke breaks just because you sleep with the boss.

That made him pause. Maybe she did earn the extra breaks. After all, no one else wanted to be near the man longer than absolutely necessary.

If Matt didn’t help the new customers, Benny would have his ass despite it being Beatrice’s job to man the common area.

Matt hurried over to the front desk part of the bar and greeted the guests. “Hello! How can I help you this afternoon, sir and ma’am?” Benny expected unfailing politeness to his guests and would side with any paying customer over his staff on any issue.

The man answered, “We’d like a room, please. But we don’t know how long we’ll be in the area. So, what can you do for around, umm…say a two-week stay, with the option of it going longer?” As he leaned forward, Matt got a better look at him under the bar’s brighter lighting.

He was tall. Based on Matt’s 5’10”, he was at least 6’2”, possibly up to 6’4”. Dark hair and gray eyes with a face that, while hard, looked used to laughing. The woman next to him was probably 5’9”. The ponytail of copper-colored hair made her green eyes pop even more in the dim lights in an almost disturbing contradiction to her classically attractive face.

What took Matt by surprise wasn’t their good looks, it was that these two felt far stronger to his spiritual sense than the normal Tier 2s and Tier 3s that usually frequented Benny’s Inn. Even stronger than the Tier 4s that came around, though that was beyond his ability to get a good sense of. He pegged them at the peak of Tier 4 or possibly even Tier 5.

It made Matt nervous. If these two wanted to start trouble, no one here could stop them. No one would even want to try.

Who knew what an enraged pair of Tier 5s could do?

Matt didn't want to find out.

If they felt slighted, no one was there to greet them… I don’t want to think about what Benny would do to me to keep in their good graces.

Being fired would be the least of his problems in that situation. Rumors still circulated about former employees who were never seen again. Supposedly just rumors, but Matt wasn't interested in testing their veracity.

“Yes, sir. We have several packages that might suit your needs. If you’d like, we can offer a room for a week and, after that, you can just pay by the day at about the same rate. It comes with unlimited access to the training room and three meals a day. It would all be for just four hundred credits the first week and then sixty credits a day going forward. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

The woman answered, “We’ll take it. Can you show us to our room, please? Then to the training room.” She swiped her hand at the payment reader, and Matt saw ‘accepted’ immediately appear.

That was a pleasant surprise. Despite Tier 1 mana stones being worth one hundred credits, the price was still enough that most people complained and tried to haggle.

“Yes, ma’am.” Matt did as requested.

The duo only stayed in their room long enough to drop off their bags. Then Matt led them to the training room, where the woman looked around at the training dummies in obvious disappointment.

Why is she disappointed? The training aids are only years old and updated with the newest software for attack and defense patterns of Tier 4 speed. It’s one of the few actually nice things this place has.

“Is there something wrong, ma’am? The training aids go up to Tier 4, and the software was just upd—”

Before Matt could finish, she waved him off and sighed. “No, it’s fine. I just forgot where we were for a moment.” Her flashed smile took the sting out of the comment.

Matt decided to leave before she could take her obvious disappointment out on him. He had a sink to fix anyway.

Just one more year. Keep your chin up. You got this.

 

   

The alarm started blaring at 3:55 a.m., and Matt was down at the training room by 4:00 a.m. He could squeeze in two hours of practice time before Benny was up and assigned him tasks.

Matt started with a few warmup stretches, then used the variable weight bar to do strength training. Today was legs, which meant he would be walking like a newborn until tomorrow, but Matt had to admit he liked the tingle.

Using part of the PlanetNet vouchers Miles had given him, he had long ago found a training routine good for a young man looking to be a melee delver. It wasn’t amazing, but it was free and didn’t require proprietary supplements or a subscription to a sketchy netsite like so many others did.

As he completed each set, he recorded his weights and sets while trying to keep the fatigue at bay. For the last year, he’d put in as much physical training as he could manage while still needing to work twelve-hour days. While he had clear results to show for it, he was perpetually bone tired. Even when he slept, he felt tired.

Each rep was paired with the mantra, ‘One more year.’ When the time came, he had to be ready to delve a rift with only his physical abilities.

After weight training, Matt took his usual practice-longsword down and started a Tier 2 combat sequence on the training dummy. It was faster and stronger than him at this setting and, with his wobbly legs, his ever-rotating collection of bruises would grow again.

Matt practiced in rounds of five minutes, trying to inflict damage while avoiding being hit as much as possible. Everything he read on the CityNet said injuries were what retired most low Tiered delvers.

With few Healers on the planet and fewer still who had their skill as public knowledge, most injuries could only be healed with mundane methods. That meant months of recovery if it was serious. Which meant months of not delving and not progressing. It meant months of wasted income and increased debt.

I can’t afford to get injured. Literally.

This sucks. Living on a low Tiered planet means anyone with a healing Talent or an innate healing skill immediately gets snatched up by the guilds and shipped off planet. It leaves only the lucky few who get a healing skill as a rift reward and don’t take that opportunity to join a guild and do the same. Or the few idiots insane enough to sell such a valuable skill shard.

Can I blame them for bailing, though? I was going to do the same. Am I just bitter I couldn’t escape this backwater shithole?