James walked through the TRB's front doors in the same faded jacket and scuffed boots he'd worn six days ago when he registered, and the lobby looked exactly the same — polished floors, white walls, cold light, and signs pointing to REGISTRATION, LOOT APPRAISAL, CURRENCY EXCHANGE, LEGAL SERVICES, GUILD LICENSING.
The people in it were different.
The plastic chairs were full of Challengers in coordinated guild colours, matching jackets with emblems on the chest, gear bags that had been packed by someone who knew what they were doing. Two of them stood near the door comparing weapons — a short sword and a dagger set, both sitting at D-rank by the look of the metal. They glanced at James when he walked past and looked away again without stopping their conversation.
He took a number from the LOOT APPRAISAL dispenser and sat down.
—--------
Counter four had a young man in a brown cardigan with a TRB lanyard and his reading glasses pushed to the top of his head, moving through the queue at a pace that said he'd been doing this since the building opened. He processed the person ahead of James without looking up — scanned a handful of goblin claws, read the result, named a price, slid a receipt through the slot, called the next number.
James sat in the chair across from him and set the ring on the counter.
"Wolf hides and goblin carcasses. Floor 1."
The appraiser — his lanyard said BYRNE, S. — pulled the ring toward him and opened the inventory display. He started scanning without speaking, running the handheld reader across each item entry in sequence, and the first six goblin carcasses came back with numbers that made him nod slightly and keep moving. Then the first dire wolf entry came up on his screen and his scanning hand slowed.
He ran it again.
"Premium condition," he said, and his voice had dropped out of its earlier pace. "Floor 1 dire wolf." He looked at the screen. "A hundred and sixty credits each."
"For all eight?"
"All eight." He typed something. "Twelve-eighty Tower Credits for the wolves alone." He moved to the goblin entries and scanned the rest. "Eleven goblin carcasses — these are seventy credits each. Seven-seventy." He set the scanner down and looked at his screen. "Combined total — twenty fifty Tower Credits. Bank transfer or cash?"
"Bank."
[TRB LOOT SALE — 2,050 TC RECEIVED] [TOWER CREDIT BALANCE: 2,865 TC]
Seán slid the receipt through the slot and James picked it up and folded it into his jacket pocket.
"Next item?"
James reached into his System inventory and set the Apostle's Radiant Circlet on the counter. The white stone caught the fluorescent light above the counter and threw it back in a clean pulse that had no business coming from something sitting under office lighting.
Seán picked up the scanner and ran it across the circlet.
He went still.
Not the small pause of someone confirming a number — a full stop, hand on the counter, eyes on the screen, the scanner sitting where he'd set it down. Three seconds. Five. He read something on the monitor twice, then set the scanner down carefully, like he was putting down something that might break, and picked up the phone beside his keyboard. He pressed a single button and waited.
When it connected he said, quietly and without any expression at all: "Fourth floor. Now."
He put the phone down and looked at James for the first time like he was actually looking at him. "Don't go anywhere."
James sat back in the plastic chair and kept his hands loose on the arms and did not look at the door.
A Legendary item in a Level 5's possession. He was trying to work out whether the System flag on the scanner read as theft or just as unusual, and whether those two things would look different to whoever was coming down from the fourth floor.
His hand moved toward the sword at his hip and he stopped it and set it back on the chair arm.
—------
Niamh Doyle arrived at counter four in under four minutes. She had dark hair pulled back tight, a navy blazer, and a lanyard with three keycards on it, and she moved at one pace — not fast, not slow, just steady, like nothing had changed her pace in years. She looked at the circlet on the counter. Then she looked at James.
"Come with me."
She led him through a door marked STAFF ONLY, down a short corridor that smelled like coffee and printer paper, into a lift that opened on the fourth floor without her pressing anything. The carpet up here was a different quality from the lobby — thicker, quieter underfoot. She walked him to a room at the end of the hallway and opened the door.
Glass table. Four chairs. A window that filled the far wall and framed Dublin Tower from base to where the spire disappeared into the grey sky.
Niamh set the circlet on the table and sat down and opened her legal notepad. She wrote something and underlined it twice, and James didn't catch what it said before her hand moved to cover it. He sat across from her and looked at the Tower through the glass and waited.
O'Shea arrived three minutes later, moving fast, Seán a step behind him. He was in his late fifties with silver-grey hair cut short and a dark navy suit with no tie, and his eyes went directly to the circlet on the table as he crossed the room. He picked it up and turned it over and spoke to Seán without looking at anyone else.
"Apostle's Radiant Circlet. Level 80 requirement, Healer or Support class only." He turned it again. "Last confirmed sighting was eleven years ago — Singapore. Sold at eight hundred and twenty million at private auction." He set it down. "These stats are better than that one."
He kept talking to Seán. His hand moved to adjust his glasses.
James watched him for two seconds.
Then he stood up and reached across the table and picked up the circlet.
"I want my item back."