Chapter Three
Supply and Demand (Mostly Demand)
The first rule of not dying, James had decided somewhere between the gate and the second alley, was to move like you belonged somewhere even when you manifestly did not.
It wasn’t a strategy he’d invented. He’d read it in three different isekai and heard a variation of it from a history lecturer talking about resistance movements in occupied France. The principle was the same regardless of context: uncertainty reads as threat, and threat invites response. Move with purpose. Don’t look at things too long. Keep your hands visible and unremarkable.
He was doing reasonably well at it, all things considered.
Ebonvale, from the inside, was the kind of town that had clearly been functional and almost certainly unremarkable before this evening. The streets were narrow and logical — the kind of layout that evolved rather than was planned, buildings pressed together like people on a cold night, upper floors jutting out over the cobblestones until the sky above each alley was reduced to a thin irregular strip. The stonework was dark limestone, almost black in the firelight, and the mortar between the blocks had the softened edges of something a century old at minimum.
Market stalls stood abandoned along the main road, some overturned, produce scattered — he stepped over a mound of something root-vegetable adjacent, purple and dense, that had rolled from an upturned basket. A bolt of rough cloth lay draped across the cobblestones, soaking up whatever the stones were soaking up. A child’s wooden toy, a horse with one wheel missing, sat upright in a doorway with a surreal tidiness, as if someone had placed it there carefully in the middle of everything.
He didn’t stop to look at any of it for more than a second. [KEEN EYE] registered the details anyway, filing them without being asked.
The fires were confined to the western quarter, as far as he could tell. Everything else was intact and locked and silent. He could hear, occasionally, sounds from behind shuttered windows — a low voice, a child being hushed, once what he was fairly certain was quiet weeping from somewhere above him, muffled by two floors of stone and the practiced discipline of someone who had learned to cry quietly.
He kept moving.
His original, loosely-formed plan — insofar as plan wasn’t a generous overstatement — was to find somewhere to spend the night that wasn’t a road, wasn’t on fire, and didn’t involve the armoured men he’d seen through the breach. He needed to be horizontal before he could think clearly, and he needed to think clearly before he could do anything useful. That was the sequence. That was all he had.
The knights were further in than he’d expected.
He heard them before he saw them — the particular sound of armour on cobblestones, not the clanking nonsense of badly-written fiction but the real sound of it, which was more like a steady, dense percussion, metal-on-leather-on-stone, rhythmic and businesslike. He pressed into a doorway recessed perhaps thirty centimetres from the street face and waited, barely breathing, while two of them passed at the alley’s mouth.
Dark iron, like the man at the road. No insignia he could read at this distance and lighting. Swords sheathed. Moving unhurried, the way the man at the road had moved — with the specific calm of people who had already done the part of the evening that required urgency and were now doing the administrative portion.
They passed. He waited a full thirty seconds after the sound of their boots faded before he moved.
[DANGER SENSE] was doing something he didn’t have language for yet — not quite a sound, not quite a physical sensation, something closer to a change in the texture of his own attention. A slight sharpening. A directional quality, vague but present, like a compass needle that hadn’t fully committed to north.
He noted it. Filed it. Kept walking.
The alley he chose ran between what looked like a cooperage and a building that smelled of tallow and rendered fat — a candlemaker, probably. The alley was narrow enough that he had to angle his shoulders slightly to move through it comfortably, and the darkness in it was close to total, the twin moons contributing almost nothing from their current angle. He moved by touch and the thin strip of firelit sky above, one hand trailing the cooperage wall.
He was perhaps two thirds of the way through when [DANGER SENSE] stopped being vague.
It went from compass needle to a full-body alarm, sudden and sharp and very directional — behind him, close, and he had just enough time to register it and start to turn before something hit him.
The wall arrived with no warning he’d been able to act on.
One moment he was turning, the next something had his collar — not his collar, the whole back of his blazer, a fist closing in the fabric — and he left the ground briefly before the cooperage wall introduced itself to his left shoulder, his cheek, and most of the left side of his ribcage in rapid sequence.
The impact was not like anything he had a prior reference for. It wasn’t cinematic — there was no slowing, no dramatic pause, no moment of floating. It was sudden and total and the sound of it was wrong, too loud in the narrow alley, stone against bone and meat, and then he was on the ground with both knees on cobblestones and one hand braced against the wall and his vision had gone sideways in a way that required some urgent processing to correct.
He breathed. Or tried to. His left lung was doing something complicated.
Something had happened to his shoulder — not broken, he thought, not quite, but the word wrong applied strongly to the way it felt against the wall when he tried to push himself upright. His cheek was wet. The cobblestones under his palm were slick and his wrist was shaking with the effort of holding the rest of him off the ground.
A boot came down next to his hand. Heavy. Iron-capped.
James looked up.
The knight standing over him was large in the way that suggested it wasn’t just the armour — the armour was merely emphasising something that would have been true in plain clothes. He had the visor up, and the face underneath was unremarkable in every feature except the expression, which was the flat professional assessment of someone evaluating whether a thing was worth additional effort.
Apparently James was not immediately compelling, because the man said something short and contemptuous in the local language and raised his boot.
James moved — not tactically, not with any trained intention, purely because his body made a decision without consulting him and rolled sideways. The boot came down on empty cobblestones with a crack that he felt through the ground. He got one knee under himself, got upright by degrees, shoulder screaming, vision still doing something unreliable at the edges.
The knight turned toward him with no particular hurry.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ◈ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◈ ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ [DANGER SENSE] — Rank F: ACTIVE ║
║ Immediate lethal threat detected. ║
║ Recommended action: Evasion ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝Yes, thank you, James thought savagely, enormously helpful, very glad we have that skill.
The knight had drawn his sword. Not dramatically — it came out the way tools come out when you reach for them, practiced and without ceremony. The blade was dark steel, not polished, and the edge caught the thin moonlight coming down the alley’s gap with a quality that suggested it had been maintained very recently.
James had his back to the cooperage wall and nowhere useful to go in either direction — the alley was too narrow to get past the man’s reach without getting through the man first, and that was not a transaction he could win with a Strength of 9 and one functional shoulder.
He put his hands up. Not as a fighting stance. Just — up. The universal human declaration of I have nothing and I would prefer not to find out what happens next.
The knight looked at him. Looked at the hands. Looked at the blazer, which was, James supposed, the single most contextually incongruous garment in the history of Ebonvale.
Then he said something over his shoulder.
Footsteps from the alley mouth — two more sets, and then a figure that was different from the others. Not in the dark iron. This armour was better, the pauldrons heavier, a cloak of deep burgundy over the left shoulder held by a clasp James couldn’t resolve in the dark. The helmet under the man’s arm was crested, which James knew from enough military history to understand meant officer. The face underneath was middle-aged, weathered, with a close-trimmed beard going grey at the jaw and eyes that moved over James with an efficiency that had nothing to do with aggression and everything to do with calculation.
The captain — James had decided that was the word that fit — said something to the knight with the drawn sword. One short sentence.
The knight paused.
The captain said it again, the same sentence, and the quality of repetition made clear that the first time had been an instruction and the second time was a reminder that instructions were not optional.
The sword went back.
James lowered his hands a few centimetres, which felt appropriate.
The captain studied him with the focused patience of someone who was very good at assessing things quickly and had no particular incentive to share his assessments. His gaze moved from James’s face to the blazer to his hands to his shoes — modern, rubber-soled, grotesquely anachronistic against Ebonvale cobblestones — and back up to his face.
He said something that had the cadence of a question.
James said, “I don’t speak whatever that is. I’m sorry. I genuinely don’t.” And then, because it seemed relevant: “I’m not from here.”
The captain’s eyes did something slight — not surprise, more a micro-adjustment, a small recalibration. He said something to the two knights flanking him, and one of them produced a length of rope with the practiced ease of someone who kept rope ready because rope was regularly useful in their line of work.
James looked at the rope.
He looked at his Status Screen.
He looked at his Strength of 9 and his zero combat skills and the four armed men in an alley with him and his shoulder, which was sending him regular updates about its condition and none of them were positive.
He put his hands out in front of him, wrists together.
It wasn’t surrender, exactly. It was arithmetic.
The rope was rough and tied competently — not cruelly tight, but with zero slack for anything interesting. His wrists were bound in front of him, which he noted as a small mercy, and then the second knight took a position at his right side, one hand resting on James’s bound wrists with the light but absolute grip of someone who did this regularly.
The captain had already turned and was walking back toward the alley mouth.
James followed, because the alternative was being dragged, and his shoulder had issued a clear statement about its preferences regarding additional trauma.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ◈ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◈ ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Status Effect Applied: [BOUND] ║
║ Agility reduced by 4 while active. ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Experience Gained: +8 XP ║
║ [Survived direct combat encounter] ║
║ ║
║ Current XP: 20 / 100 ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝Eight experience points. For surviving being thrown into a wall and tied up.
Fantastic, he thought. Eighty more of those and I can level up. Truly the system is working as intended.
He dismissed the screen before the knight beside him noticed his eyes doing something strange.
They emerged from the alley into a wider street, and James got his first proper look at the occupying force in any meaningful number. A column of perhaps thirty knights was staged in the market square — horses tethered to stall posts, men eating from provisions they’d brought themselves with the self-sufficient ease of a professional army that didn’t rely on the hospitality of towns it had just finished sacking. Torches had been planted at intervals, and in the torchlight James could see the insignia he hadn’t been able to read earlier: a black tower on a deep crimson field, the same as the pennant on the ruined wall.
He catalogued it without staring. [KEEN EYE] logged the details — the number of men, the quality of the horses, the way supplies were distributed, the position of what appeared to be a command tent erected at the square’s far end.
There were other bound people.
Not many — eight, perhaps ten, seated along one side of the square with their wrists tied and expressions that covered the full spectrum between shock and the particular blank stillness of someone who had used up shock some time ago. Mostly men, mostly working age. One woman in better clothing than the others, merchant class possibly, who was holding herself very straight with the rigid dignity of someone using posture as the last fortress available to them.
James was steered to the end of the line and sat down, back against the stall’s support post. The knight released his wrists and walked away without a backward glance.
He sat. His shoulder pulsed. His cheek had dried and felt tight — split along the cheekbone, he thought, not deep but wide enough to be uncomfortable for the foreseeable future. He tested his shoulder carefully, moving his arm by degrees, and determined that while something was very unhappy in there, it was functioning. Probably bruised at the joint rather than broken. Probably.
The man seated next to him was perhaps forty, broad through the chest, with calloused hands and the general weathering of someone who worked outdoors. He glanced sideways at James when James sat down, and the look he gave the blazer was almost identical to the look the captain had given it — a genuine pause, a recalibration.
James met the man’s eyes and gave what he hoped was a contained, communicative shrug.
The man looked away.
Across the square, the captain stood at the entrance to the command tent with another man — older, in robes rather than armour, carrying something that looked like a ledger. The robed man was pointing periodically in the direction of the seated captives, and the captain was listening with his arms folded and an expression of attentive patience. At one point the robed man pointed specifically at James, then made a gesture that communicated something James couldn’t parse but which prompted the captain to look over with the same calculating focus as before.
Whatever James was, he was apparently worth noting.
He did not find this reassuring.
He sat quietly and took inventory. His wrists were tied but his hands were free enough for basic movement. His phone was still in his blazer’s inside pocket — he’d felt it when they tied him, and whoever had done the tying hadn’t searched him, which was either professional overconfidence or the considered decision that a man in strange clothing with no visible weapons wasn’t carrying anything dangerous. His shoulder was manageable. His cheek was annoying. His ribs on the left side were bruised but not broken.
The Status Screen sat at the edge of his vision. He called it up, making the gesture minimal, looking at it through slightly lowered eyes like a man staring at the middle distance.
║ Level : 1 ║
║ Experience : 20 / 100 ║
║ HP : 61 / 80 ║
║ SKILLS : ║
║ [DANGER SENSE] — Rank F ║
║ [KEEN EYE] — Rank F ║
║ MANA : ∞ [UNCLASSIFIED] ║He hadn’t noticed the HP display before. Eighty base, current sixty-one. The wall had cost him nineteen points. He didn’t know what the regeneration rate was, or if there was one, or what happened when it hit zero — the novels varied wildly on this point and he wasn’t eager to run empirical testing.
He closed the screen.
The torches burned. The horses shifted and stamped. The man in the better armour who was apparently the company’s logistics officer finished his conversation with the captain and moved to the captive line, walking slowly down it, noting each person with the unhurried assessment of a man with a mental spreadsheet to complete.
He reached James last.
He looked at James for a long time — not threatening, just thorough, the way you’d look at something that appeared on a list but not in the expected format. He said something, slowly, as though pacing it might help.
James shook his head once.
The logistics officer made a small noise that was not quite a sigh and wrote something in his ledger. Then he moved on.
James leaned his head back against the stall post and looked up at the two moons, which had climbed higher now and sat together in the southern sky, the large silver one and the small red one, their light mixing on the cobblestones in a way that had no equivalent he’d ever seen.
Right, he thought. So. Slave. That’s where we are.
He worked through it methodically, the way he’d worked through essay problems — strip it down to components, address each one. He was captured, bound, and would be transported to a larger city to be sold. That meant he would be moved, which meant he would leave Ebonvale, which meant he would see more of this world. That had its own value. More exposure meant more System recognition of repeated actions, which meant more skills, which meant incremental improvement. He couldn’t fight his way out of this. He couldn’t talk his way out. But he could observe, accumulate, and wait for the arithmetic to shift in his favour.
He had infinite mana and nothing to spend it on yet.
Yet.
Something in the word had a quality he hadn’t felt in a long time — not quite hope, which was too soft for what he wanted, too passive. More like appetite. The specific hunger of someone who has just understood that there are things worth wanting.
He closed his eyes. His shoulder ached. The cobblestones were cold through his trousers.
He slept, in small shallow intervals, the way you sleep when you hurt in several places and the world keeps making sounds.
In the morning, they would move.
In the morning, things would begin properly.