Chapter 321: The Winning Bid Was Extremely Wet

The collection boss announced the price for my head with the confidence of a man standing beyond immediate biting distance, which remained the only sensible decision he had made all evening.

I asked whether the auctioneer had approved the change. He said approval was a matter of presentation, so I sent his exact statement through the public lot-question channel and let the man upstairs decide how much fraud he wanted attached to his sale.

The reply came quickly. The live-capture lot was canceled, all pending bids voided and no replacement bounty accepted through that auction account without a separate review.

That didn’t make my uncle stop wanting me caught. It did invalidate the false listing we had come to remove, giving me one completed objective without pretending a corrected website solved my entire family.

[System: Nice work, mate. You’ve beaten a scam by making two arseholes argue over which one was legally responsible for being the bigger fucking liar.]

I still wanted the fish before celebrating my brief career in customer disputes.

The collector lunged when I moved toward the cargo controls. I slid beneath his arm, caught his ankle with a tendril and pulled just enough to send him stumbling into the empty restraint crate stored against the passage wall.

I didn’t stop to finish him. The storage case mattered, Lukas waited outside and Horass had given me no reason to believe this corridor was becoming safer with time.

The cargo partition opened through the same latch sequence I had watched earlier. I checked the case seal, confirmed the tank’s circulation light remained active and attached the loading cradle’s existing straps to its marked lifting points.

Lukas brought the tender closer only when the hatch cleared. He stayed inside the dry cabin, using the powered cradle and the boat’s position controls while I worked from the larger vessel’s cargo threshold.

The case moved out over the water. Its weight pulled steadily against the straps, with no help from wishful thinking, and I kept the lift slow enough that it didn’t swing into the tender’s cabin.

A shot struck the hatch frame above my head. The collector had recovered a small weapon from inside his coat and was firing past me toward the loading mechanism, apparently willing to destroy the cargo rather than lose another argument.

I used Hold My Bloody Beer on the next visible projectile when it entered range. The resulting can gave me ten seconds, which I spent opening it toward the empty upper passage wall to keep the shot away from Lukas and the suspended tank.

My timer started. I moved behind the steel hatch edge before the collector could fire again and pulled the emergency divider across the corridor with its own control.

The next shot struck the divider. It held because it was ordinary heavy cargo shielding against a small weapon, not because I had secretly recovered my old physical immunity.

Lukas lowered the case onto his cradle and secured it. He confirmed the transport tag, the intact seal and the fish moving inside, then backed the tender away from the larger hull.

That completed both conditions. The false live listing was canceled, and the marked case was physically recovered beyond the auction crew’s immediate control.

Three thousand EXP raised me to five thousand five hundred toward one hundred thousand. Twenty IP brought the balance to two hundred and fifty, and Old Mate congratulated me on successfully rescuing property I should never have trusted to a man with a clipboard.

"Take the case to the guarded dock, mate," I told Lukas. "Don’t wait alongside if this gets louder, and tell Bridget the fish were out before you tell her what an idiot I was about to be."

He told me I could simply join him. The tender remained close enough to reach, the recovery had worked and every sensible part of the plan pointed toward leaving.

Through the divider’s small window, I saw the collector trying another control. He glanced toward the lower crew passage, smiled and spoke into his phone about sending people back to the club while I was busy aboard.

I could have reported it and left. I knew that, which mattered more than pretending the next decision belonged to duty or necessity.

I wanted him frightened. I wanted the man who had threatened Bridget, attacked our doorway and repeatedly treated our lives as removable stock to understand what it felt like when the problem came after him personally.

[System: You’ve got your prize, champ. Next bit’s a choice, so don’t dress it up as the only road left when you explain the bloody damage later.]

I knew exactly which sort of choice it was, and I wasn’t asking you to polish it for me.

I told Bridget through the call that I was staying aboard to stop the collector’s next attack and confront Horass. She swore, asked for my exact deck position and told me Lukas would move to the protected dock rather than become collateral beside the hull.

I gave her the exact position and kept the phone line available for her. Hearing her anger hurt more than being called an idiot by strangers, but I had earned it and refused to pretend she was wrong for caring. Then I closed the loading hatch behind the departing tender and moved through the lower passage toward the collector’s voice.

Horass waited at the next junction, launcher held low and his koala patch perfectly visible beneath the corridor lights. He had left me the escape, watched me recover the case and correctly guessed which part of my personality would drag me back inside.

"I thought you might choose that," he said, stepping between me and the route to the collector. "You were considerably easier to predict when someone made it personal."

I let my lure brighten just enough to show him my smile, while the empty skill timer reminded me that my next clever drink trick remained six long minutes away.