Both Don and Kira turned to look at Lily with the sa expression at the sa mont.
Lily patted herself on the chest with complete confidence. "Leave it to . No problem whatsoever. Top quality, guaranteed."
She took the unsealing stone, set it against the equipnt without hesitation, and struck. The light that followed was imdiate and total, all five seals breaking open at once in a single clean flash.
Silence.
The helt, which by rights should have been the weakest of the three, ca back with a passive health regeneration effect of three points per second. Don blinked at it.
Then they read the silver-grade items.
[Malan’s Sword] — Rank: Silver. Type: Longsword. Required Level: 30. Physical attack: 315–370. Strength 50, Agility 40, Constitution 50. (Unsealed): Physical attack cap 75, physical attack 35...
[Bone Ring] — Rank: Silver. Type: tal Ring. Required Level: 30. Physical attack 60. Strength 15, Agility 15, Constitution 15. (Unsealed): Critical hit rate 1%, Critical hit rate 1%...
Don clicked his tongue. "Your hands are twenty-four karat gold. That’s settled."
Kira swallowed. "You’re unsealing all my equipnt from now on. That’s not a request."
Lily scratched the back of her head, looking genuinely pleased with herself, then tilted toward Don with a thoughtful expression. "Brother Don, I’ve always wondered about sothing. Can you explain it?"
"Go ahead."
"What’s actually different between equipnt crafted by dwarf players and equipnt that drops from bosses? Sister Diana and Elias Finch both seem to prefer crafted weapons. Why?"
Don considered it for a mont. "It cos down to the unsealed attributes. Dwarf-crafted equipnt never rolls duplicate unseals, every bonus is unique. Boss drops are different; duplicates are normal, which is what you just saw with the ring’s double crit." He paused. "The trade-off is that crafted gear sotis cos back with useless attributes, extra durability, mana bonuses, because the crafting process is more controllable but less surprising. And the final grade fluctuates with luck during production."
Diana held up the blueprint scroll and turned it over in her fingers. "Take this leather shoulder blueprint, for example. Under normal conditions it produces bronze-grade. With good luck, silver. With exceptional luck, extrely rarely, gold."
Lily’s eyes went wide. "Sister Diana, could you make gold boots?"
Don reached over and flicked her chin lightly. "Did you just hear what she said? Exceptional luck. Extrely rarely. To get one gold piece you’d need to make fifty, minimum."
Diana smiled. "Don’s estimate is conservative, actually. Elias Finch has a gold longsword. It took approximately a hundred and thirty attempts to produce it."
Lily looked genuinely stricken. "A hundred and thirty?"
"And blueprints are already difficult to obtain in the first place," Diana continued. "I’m grateful to everyone for what we brought back today." She looked between Don and Lily with a practical expression. "I’d like to make a pair of boots for each of you leather armor players. If you want to help, the blueprint lists the material sources, wolf hides, mostly. Whenever you have the opportunity."
Both of them nodded imdiately.
The group began to wind down toward log-off, the easy quiet of exhausted people who had co out the other side of sothing genuinely difficult. The night had given them losses and then returned most of them, and added sothing extra on top of it.
Then Don rembered the gauntlets still sitting in his inventory, the quest reward he hadn’t looked at once since the system had dropped them in.
He opened his bag with quiet curiosity and pulled them up.
With the group watching, Don pulled the Courageous Gauntlets from his pack and turned them over in his hands. Dark brown leather, heavier than they looked, with a surprising elasticity when he pressed the palm. He checked the stats.
[Courageous Gauntlets] — Rank: Silver. Type: Leather Armor. Required Level: None.
Physical Defense 120, Magic Defense 120. Strength 9, Agility 15, Constitution 9.
(Additional): Physical defense 60, attack speed 2%...
The two percent attack speed bonus was modest, on a fast weapon like a dagger, the practical difference was marginal. Stack it to twenty percent and the story changed entirely, but two percent on its own was a footnote. The rest of the stats, however, were clean. Don equipped the gauntlets alongside the Bone Ring and pulled up his character sheet with the quiet eagerness of soone who genuinely could not help himself.
Human. Apprentice Thief. Level 30. Health: 4,895. Physical Attack: 2,823–3,048. Physical Defense: 704. Magic Defense: 569. Critical Hit Rate: 3%. Reputation: 8,200. Luck: 0.
His defenses were still the weak point, and he knew it. Everything else, though, sat in territory that he found deeply satisfying to look at.
The group leaned in to read over his shoulder. There was a collective exhale. Lily looked at the numbers, looked at Don, and appeared to be restraining herself from grabbing his arm and demanding an imdiate wolf-hunting expedition.
Diana saved her the trouble, pulling out the blueprint and reading off the coordinates, northwest of the Arican region, a location called Fierce Wolf Canyon.
"Cheerful na," Don remarked.
Nobody disagreed.
They logged off. The mine, the boss, the deaths, the recovery, a full day of it, had settled into their bones, and nobody argued about sleep.
Don pulled off his light-sensing glasses. On either side of him, Kira and Lily were already yawning, making no effort to hide it.
"Midnight snack?" he offered.
Kira shook her head with her eyes half-closed. "Sleep."
"We’re back online in seven hours, then."
Lily made a sound of protest. "Why so early?"
"First month after launch, everyone’s schedule flips. Seven in the morning is the lowest population window. Highest efficiency."
"...Fine. I’ll suffer."
The three of them walked back to Don’s apartnt, showered, and went to bed. Don in his room, Kira in with Lily. The arrangent required no discussion.
Don was up just after six. He started frozen wontons, woke the other two, and had breakfast on the table by the ti they’d finished washing up. They ate quickly and walked to Henshaw Tower in the early morning quiet.
Grade-A office buildings like Henshaw Tower had once kept strict opening hours. That convention had quietly dissolved in the week before Realms Online launched, replaced by twenty-four hour security rotations that nobody had bothered to reverse. The studio floor was nearly empty when they arrived, just the hum of equipnt and the faint blue glow of idle screens.
Don checked the level ranking chart first. The survival line had climbed. Players below level twenty-three were now eliminated. He counted carefully. Nineteen remained.
He wiped imaginary sweat from his forehead.
When he logged in and checked the active roster, only Faye was online besides the three of them. He glanced at her level out of habit.
Thirty-three.
He stared at that for a mont longer than was strictly necessary.
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