Brand-Bound: Hallowed Be The Menu [Rivals-to-Lovers Slowburn Fantasy Romance]

Din of battle receded into the distance as the party rushed away from the multi-sided melee of thieves, avenging swordsmen, auxiliary arbiters, and cathedral guards.

"Well, this is getting exciting," Jelena said as she skipped through the halls.

Certainly, the other dungeon raids had not come with a five-way fight to them.

"The Arbiters are coming in from the southeast," Calaf said. "If they get here, it'll be harder to fight our way out."

They ran through halls carved through sheer granitelike Demonbone. Every chamber in the grand cathedral was buried deep in the corpse of the Demon Lord. It was part of why the sanctum was so hard to infiltrate. All the while, that Target mark grew ever closer.

Zilara had informed Calaf of their target during the mad dash. There would be no sudden surprises.

They passed a few sentinels, all ignoring them in a frenzied rush for the meeting annex. When they reached a demonbone door to the church's vaults, they found it unguarded.

"Hmm?" Zilara prepped the Lockpicks of the Thief, but found the doors already unlocked.

The holy child knelt and found three spent lockpicks on the floor. The Target notification pointed to a figure within the vault room, some thirty paces past this door.

Calaf kicked the door in. They entered a five-pronged annex, each passageway blocked by less sturdy barred doors. The walls were fleshier here, repurposed from some calcified organ of unknown purpose.

"This is a church treasure room?" Jelena asked. "Suppose the grand cathedral would have a larger reliquary than the others."

With five doors to choose from, they had to pick wisely. The Target arrow beckoned through the centermost door. The doors were labeled: Statuary Collection, Church Records, Tithes, Holy Armory, Vestments Tailor.

"Last of those is underwhelming," Zilara said. "Doors two, three, and four seem useful, though. Your buddy is in 'Tithes. '"

"Let's go get him." Calaf nodded.

Again, Calaf kicked down the door. There was no need for stealth; there should be only one way in and out. The party approached as a golden gleam grew brighter from around a winding hall…

Pits full of gold— hundreds of thousands of individual gold coin items— sat sunken into the ground. Calaf noticed that his mouth was agape but failed to close it. Even Jelena appeared impressed.

"This is more gold than I've ever seen," Zilara said.

"It's more gold than anyone's ever seen." Jelena picked up a single coin and pocketed it.

The combined maximum sum of Zilara and Calaf's gold stores was over 40,000, boosted after slaying high-level dire-beasts in the Fellmarsh. Prior to resupplying in the capital, they'd had over 100,000 individual gold pieces. Abstracted and compacted in the Inventory. Piled up, it could fill their treehouse hideout.

That hefty sum would be a minuscule drop in any individual money pit of the cathedral vaults. Stealth was impossible as millions of gold coins littered the ground.

The target icon (and the human figure it hovered over) appeared from behind a pile of coins.

"Mikail." Calaf had not yet summoned his spear or shield.

Mikail was at the center of a party of four. Calaf and company had discussed this coming in; his former comrade always traveled in a small party of between three to five. The high-level thief summoned his daggers.

"You again." Mikail scowled. "How'd you track me? Can't help but notice you followed me through stealth back at the watering hole."

The Target icon hung over Mikail's head as he spoke.

"We have our ways." Jelena shrugged, poker-faced. "Now, it appears that Honest John fellow was right on the money."

On cue, a handful of coins appeared as if from nowhere near the ceiling. These coins landed in a pool of gold to their right.

"Huh." Zilara examined another clump of gold as it was summoned in from nowhere. "Clever. The church takes ten percent of the gold earned from every battle. Like a tax, but it 'generates' here on dire-beast kill. Rest generates in your inventory. The process by which it's hashed out would take possibly days to explain. But it has to do with an advanced proof of—"

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"When did you get your eye back?" Mikail asked with a scowl.

It took a moment for Jelena to notice he was referring to her. "Oh, me? It's a colored contact. Just a disguise."

Mikail's party brandished their knives. Calaf and Jelena were between them and the only exit.

"I was hoping you'd be distracted by all this gold," Mikail said. "Still, there's not enough of you to catch us all."

Mikail used a smoke bomb. Thief-based passive stealth abilities turned his party invisible. Footsteps through the gold piles still ruined the stealthy retreat. Mikail remained marked – Calaf could have shield-bashed him as he walked right past, but chose not to. Instead, Jelena and Calaf let the rival thieves filter out, then returned their attention to the gold hoard.

Zilara wasted no time in pulling in as much gold as possible.

There was no established church doctrine regarding this tithe; worshippers gladly contributed an additional ten percent of their gold monthly at the altar pew. With no mint in the land, slaying dire-beasts was the primary method of inserting coins into the economy. It made sense… but where did the gold come from? Zilara babbled out the short-short version of the description, whereby the act of slaying under the Menu generated potential energy to be 'hashed' in some form of proof-of-slaying system. The resulting 'decryption' was represented by gold coins, sent directly to the Inventory. Calaf had no context to understand any of this, at all. But he didn't need to understand how each coin was constructed or how ten percent was siphoned directly to the Demon Lord's Fall to grasp that centuries of accumulated gold were being hoarded in this vault, shaved off the bounty of each kill.

Gold pieces had weight. They didn't have a designation for it in the inventory, but it was about .001 units per piece. Zilara's Inventory reached its weight limits around 2 million gold. This was but a sliver of the treasury. Another tithe fell from a suspended point high near the ceiling. The theft would be recouped by day's end.

Pilfering a pile of gold in the church treasuries was conduct unbecoming of a Paladin. Then again, if this gold pile was syphoned off from each slain dire-beast, true ownership was in doubt. At Zilara and Jelena's behest, Calaf took as much gold as his Inventory would handle – another 100,000, leaving some room for any additional loot they'd have to carry. It was roughly the weight of an additional pair of greaves.

Mikail's mark was back near the front of the cathedral edifice. His party hadn't even checked the other four segments of the cathedral vault. The gold vault was a nice boon; both parties would be set for life, presuming they made it out of here alive. Jelena's party was here for something more than just money. They went to the church records room, barging down the barred door, same as the last one.

This vault was smaller, but dense with records.

"These are all boring employment contracts," Zilara said, nose wrinkled. "Not a vault of forbidden knowledge."

They left Zilara and Enkidu to see what they could dig up here in the records room. Jelena and Calaf went to the armory.

This chamber was even smaller, chiseled into an alcove under the vault room. Bare racks once held swords, shields, and even a dainty holder for a mithril ruan. These were meant for the arbiters – the big four. With the arbiters out, the racks were empty. There wasn't much left to loot, but that wasn't important right now. What did stand out, however, was a placid pool of black ink dead center in the armory room.

"Hey. Enkidu." Jelena yelled back through the vault annex. "Got a weird pool of black stuff in here. Know what it is?"

"Spawning pool," Enkidu's grumbling voice echoed back. "It will be inactive now that the lord is slain. Still, don't touch it."

The pair quickly left the sickly, mirror-slick tar pool behind and returned to the annex.

"Still nothing in here," Zilara reported down the records hall.

Jelena exhaled. "Well, we may be out of luck. The documents we're looking for are very secret. Keep expecting to see some illusory wall to where all the real goods are located."

Now, Calaf was a stand-and-fight knight, still new to the world of burglary and subterfuge. But he'd picked up on Jelena's tricks and had a lifetime of knowledge of church doings. If there were no restricted section of the archives, hidden behind another door or trap, perhaps the solution lay in misdirection.

Calaf tried the door to 'priestly vestments.' It was locked tight but gave way with a bash or two from his shield. Jelena said nothing but followed along, letting him work.

A second door awaited just past a bend. This was different even than the gold vault.

Vaulted, secured chambers for church garb were curious enough. But a second layer of security was unnecessary. Unless…

A third door, solid and made of imported steel, blocked the final chamber. Calaf did not have the Lockpicks of the Thief on him, as that was in Zilara's inventory. But he did have his towering shield, and he bashed the door until its hinges gave out.

Beyond was not a closet full of priest robes or a garment maker's facility. Instead, there was another treasure vault.

"Of course. No thieves would ever think to raid the wardrobe," Jelena said.

Artifacts were mostly rusted bits of demonbone chitin and swords from the great battle of the Fellmarsh. Descriptions were arcane and written in a verbose ancient church liturgical dialect more ornate than even the untranslated gnostic gospels. There, near the back of the vault, was a scroll.

"Hmm? Is that?" Jelena began.

Calaf checked the description, and then [Used] the scroll to get a bead on it contents. While the description was written in the verbose older prose of the testaments, they'd been searching for all month.

"This is it."

Jelena rushed back to call Zilara into the room. They would parse this in the Interface and then read it together.

Whatever church-shattering revelations could be held within? Calaf steeled himself, then prepared to read the hidden testament…