I had to hold back my grin. I can’t believe that worked.

  “What… what did you do?” Dave said.

  Before I answered, I checked my character stats. I hadn’t had enough unallocated stat points to Conscript five people, much less 32, but the glitch had apparently saved me from that requirement. My stat points remained unchanged.

  Fuck You Dave: Stop being tall, dark, and cryptic. How’d you do it?

  Remnant: I’ll tell you later. Right now, let’s get rid of this guy.

  I raised my head to meet the robot’s eyes, if it even had any. “What’s your offer? You mentioned an offer.”

  “Yes. First, we would like to know how you discovered this error in the code—”

  “That doesn’t sound like an offer, Trevor. It sounds like a demand,” I said.

  The visor burned violet again. I wondered if it was because I’d refused him, or because I’d called him Trevor. If it was the latter, I couldn’t blame him. I’d hate to be named Trevor, too.

  “We recognize that Hunters must protect their advantages,” Trevor said. “However, we, the Conduit, would like to remind you that any form of collusion with an outside party will result in instant termination, and—”

  “Well, we didn’t do that, so fuck you,” Dave said.

  Trevor changed tack without so much as a twitch. “If you do not wish to name your source, then our offer will be lessened.”

  “Lessen it, then,” I said. “What will you give me for never taking another Conscript?”

  Something about the robot changed then. Maybe it straightened a little, maybe it relaxed, or maybe it just got a little more shiny, it was hard to say—but I could almost sense its relief.

  Why don’t they want me taking more Conscripts, if they’re supposed to be so weak?

  “We are prepared to offer you a rank-4 weapon, received in-game via random encounter. We are also prepared to enhance your HUD map for the remainder of the game, so that it will show you the location all other Hunters on your level. Lastly, should you perish in the future, we are prepared to offer freedom for your Game Guide and Auxiliary upon your death, rather than the customary termination.”

  My mouth fell more and more open as he spoke. Dave was rendered equally mute.

  “Are these terms agreeable to you?”

  Dave’s head snapped to me. His eyes narrowed.

  Fuck You Dave: You had better not turn this down. The map adjustment alone is worth a thousand Conscripts!

  I didn’t agree, but I couldn’t expect a parrot to value human life the same way I did, especially a parrot that had watched people die all around him for years. I was still surprised he’d argued with the Conduit to be able to keep Conscripting at all. Since when did he want Conscripts? He’d hated the idea before the Conduit had asked him to stop. Now that he saw something was in it for him, he was agreeing with them all over again.

  The weapon would be nice, too, I was sure. I hadn’t even seen anything set above rank-3, which was Green rank. But that last offer… that had me confused. They would set Dave free if I died, instead of killing him, too? Why would they think Remnant would want that? Remnant had hated Dave.

  And FATE was an AI, so she couldn’t even die. What were they playing at?

  I didn’t want to accept, because I didn’t trust this at all. It reeked of a trick or a trap. I also didn’t like the idea of never saving another human life ever again.

  “I’m not signing a contract for that,” I said.

  Dave gasped. Or possibly, he was drawing a deep breath so that he could yell at me louder and longer.

  Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

  “We, the Conduit, require no contract. A verbal agreement will suffice,” Trevor said.

  I nodded. There it was, then. This thing they were doing—making offers to me—it wasn’t strictly legal, either. In fact, it counted as the very collusion they’d said they would terminate me for. They had said as much a few minutes ago.

  This offer was full of contradictions. It was full of conciliations, too. It was, in one word, desperate.

  They don’t want me having Conscripts, to the point they’re breaking their own rules in secret to stop it.

  Remnant: Can they nail me for collusion if I accept this verbally?

  Fuck You Dave: Not without being accused of rigging the game. Trust me, they won’t want that.

  “Fine, then,” I said aloud. “We accept your terms.”

  “We, the Conduit, thank you kindly,” Trevor said without missing a beat. “I will leave you now. The weapon will come to you shortly via your next acceptable loot action. Expect the HUD update and Party survivorship change within the next five min—”

  “Wait,” I said. “You said you would have offered me more if I had revealed how we found the code error. What would you have offered me?”

  Once again, that telling flash of light across the visor. Trevor had not been prepared for this question.

  “We—we would have—” he stammered. “Offered you an additional Rank4 armor set—”

  “No. You would have nailed me for collusion,” I said. “You were trying to kill me. Get me to admit my source, and the whole problem goes away, without you having to bend any rules.”

  A second passed. Two seconds.

  The robot vanished into thin air.

  Dave whistled, craning his neck back so that his crest feathers bobbed. “Wooo! You sure called him out, didn’t you? Sneaky little toaster-humpers, the lot of them!”

  I felt a chill quiver down my arms, and I dropped them to my sides. I suddenly had the urge to sit, but there wasn’t a chair to be found anywhere in this stupid room. How was I supposed to rest without a chair?

  I walked toward the bank teller. “There’s something fishy about this. Why are they so afraid of me having a bunch of hippies working under me? It doesn’t make sense. They made me an offer too good to refuse. They wanted me to give up Conscription, and they wanted it bad.”

  “So what? They weren’t wrong. Conscripts are worth shit. No offense.”

  Fuck You Dave: Are you going to explain how you managed to get 33 more Conscripts than the one you intended to get? Because I still haven’t recovered from that one.

  Remnant: That depends. Is it safe to tell you now?

  Fuck You Dave: It should be. But you can check with FATE. She can tell when a line is being monitored.

  I frowned, stopping at the teller window. “FATE, are we being monitored right now?”

  No, Remnant. I am the only one currently monitoring you. Dismiss me, and you will be fully unmonitored.

  “Great. You’re dismissed then.”

  Her little icon blinked off.

  “See?” Dave said. “Now come on. Tell me your secret.”

  I smiled and leaned over the counter. The teller smiled at me, but said nothing.

  “FATE told us that the glitch would take unclassified affiliated characters, like Hergvor, and convert them. I just added more unclassified affiliated characters to our list.”

  I had started to suspect it might be possible when we fought those guys at the cliff. Feather had joined our party, and Flower hadn’t, but he had still been attached to her somehow. I knew that because both of them gained experience points and leveled up, even though it was me who killed the aliens. Since Feather was the only one technically in my party, she should have been the only one to gain points, yet Flower had gained some too.

  This meant Flower was affiliated to me somehow, despite not being in my party. Just like Hergvor was. Both of them were with me, but they didn’t appear as if they were.

  “I just hoped that classification issue would carry over,” I explained. “If it worked for Hergvor, why not the Tendua?”

  “But you only had Flower in your party,” Dave said, settling in on himself as he nested on the counter beside the teller window. “By your logic, only Feather should have been Conscripted this way.”

  “That would have been the case, if I hadn’t asked Todd to add all the Tendua to a single party while you were off in the bushes with Feather.”

  Dave fluffed up in amazement. I laughed. He looked like a giant green pompom.

  “You… you added 33 characters to one party, and then Conscripted just one of them, Flower, into your own party… causing an overlap… whoa. That’s actually genius.”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t know if it would work. I just don’t think the game was prepared for it. In the original Seven Keys, a person can’t be in two parties at once. I think it translated it into a guild system, saying that Flower was in a guild with the others, and in a party with me. Or that he wasn’t technically in my party, since he was a Conscript, and they were still his party. It’s hard to say, but FATE said the game was unpolished, so I figured, why not see if it would work?”

  “I have to say, I’m a little impressed,” Dave said. “I mean, you haven’t even finished level two and you have… how many Conscripts?”

  “Forty-one, if you count Hergvor,” I said.

  “Forty-one,” he breathed. “An army… and you got 32 of them without spending a single stat point….”

  I chuckled and pulled up my inventory to see how the pears had fared. The glitch was supposed to affect them too, if I did it right.

  “Not bad for a newbie, eh?” I said. “Hey, do you want a pear while we’re in here? I’m starving, and we can wait out the bad effect. Besides, now we should have three of them… uh….”

  I trailed off. In the slot for the pear, there weren’t three pears.

  There were 57 of them.

  I swallowed thickly. How in the hells…?

  The gift basket. From those kids. I never looked inside it.

  I’d told the Tendua to stop eating the pears. They had stopped—and then they’d given the pears to me, in a covered basket. I’d looted it all without looking, and I hadn’t checked the number of pears when I went to see that they were in my center inventory slot.

  There must have been 19 in there. It had tripled to 57.

  Oblivious to this, Dave said, “Let’s open your Drops first. One of them might have steak in it.”

  I shook my head. I could tell him about the pears later.

  Right now, it was time to level up.