Chapter 59

The awkwardness did settle eventually, Sofia regaining her composure. Natalie’s exposing of her body had left the girl briefly a disaster, but she’d pulled together. That was Sofia, much in the same way as Jordan—hard to ruffle, and even when it happened, quick to recover. Natalie herself fared poorer. Her head spun in circles. She’d seriously just flashed Sofia? And why had the always-composed girl turned so red at it? More than made sense?

And, she was disoriented for other reasons. All the other stuff nagging at her hadn’t disappeared. Camille, and her very-possible-knowledge of Natalie’s bathroom escapades. Then the developments with Jordan, their ‘training sessions’ that would shortly become a staple in her life. In short, Natalie’s head was a mess.

So, continuing her tried-and-true tactic, she focused on the present. The Exchange.

After spars, the three girls set out. Though they wouldn’t be allowed into the dungeon until the start of next week, it would be smart to get a feel for the marketplace. And, as Sofia had mentioned, it was an interesting place to visit just for curiosity’s sake. The Exchange was, objectively speaking, a fascination. A curiosity similar to the dungeon, if obviously less crucial—though still important—to society.

Valhaur wasn’t the only country with an Exchange. Each of the thirteen dungeons had one situated nearby, and, rather than using any man-made currencies, items were bought and sold through a marketplace of monster cores. Not just that, but the Exchanges were linked, somehow. Items from halfway across the world could be dissolved into the Exchange, then reformed thousands of miles away at a different one.

Setting out from the Tenet campus, too, was nice. Getting to see more of Aradon. She’d walked her way through a few streets on the trip from the train station, first arriving to Aradon, but she hadn’t explored the sprawling capital city of Valhaur. And, with the Exchange and dungeon entrance not far from Tenet, she didn’t do much exploring now, either, heading straight there. But the colorful bustle of the city was enjoyable on its own merit, for what little of it she saw.

Soon enough, they’d arrived. The Exchange was—as she’d expected it to be—unlike anything she’d ever seen. Four stories of marble arches and cool gray slate accents, it stood out from the rest of Aradon’s architecture, the bright vibrancy that was the trademark of northern Valhaurian fashion. Run by the automatons, the Valhaurian Exchange made only marginal efforts to blend with the architecture of their human counterparts. Automatons were congenial folk—subservient by their nature—but only to an extent. In the aesthetics of the Exchange’s construction, they paid little mind to ‘fitting in’. Cool, gray, stalwart. Just like them.

Trailing through the entrance, surrounded by a veritable stream of other bodies, Natalie gaped around at the immaculate interior. While not adhering to the rest of Valhaur architecture, the building was as grand as the best of what Aradon had to offer. A decent chunk of the world economy flowed through these elegant archways and beneath these enormous domes, and the Exchange’s importance gleamed from polished tiles to delicate, three-story-tall windows.

It was also crisply organized, the defining trait of automatons. Clearly marked signs funneled the various clientele to appropriate locations. The Exchange was—outwardly if not inwardly—organized into floors, where each successive one catered to more and more distinguished delvers. Natalie, Jordan, and Sofia were naturally restricted to the base floor, the one intended for levels one through five, or ‘low-rankers’ in colloquial terms.

Natalie had heard all sorts of stories about the fourth floor, intended for levels sixteen through twenty. That the Exchange even had a floor dedicated to top rankers seemed a bit silly when they were so rare. Even Aradon, where delvers congregated, the floor had to be a ghost town, considering its size and infrequency of visitors.

She’d like to sneak in, see which of those tales were truthful, but security at the Exchange was strict. It was as much a bank as a marketplace. Monster cores flowed like rivers between human and automaton hands. And beneath Natalie’s feet, mountains of those valuable, crystalline orbs laid in piles, organized into racks behind enchanted, foot-thick metal vaults. Undoubtedly, there was wealth enough to make a Beaumon’s eyes water, not more than a hundred feet away.

Natalie had never heard of someone successfully robbing the Exchange, not in its millennia of existence. How that was possible, she hadn’t a clue. Eventually, she would’ve figured, a particularly enterprising group of top-rankers would’ve pulled it off. But no. Was it the automaton’s defenses, she wondered, or Aradon’s?

The event went well enough. The three of them gawked around at the sights, accustoming themselves to the layout of the enormous building. Though the Exchange ran on some inscrutable, certainly magical logistical system, it was split up into sections the way most marketplaces were: armor, weapons, trinkets, and so on. Automatons were stubborn about their ways. Organization was a virtue they held above all others.

And speaking of automatons—what a curiosity those were, and in such numbers at the Exchange. Some could be found in other places, but nowhere in such density.

Natalie had seen one, of course, though whether The Bestower, that strange entity in charge of doling out classes, was a true automaton was up for debate. Still, their alien physiology wasn’t a complete novelty. They were more uniform than humans, with most being strictly androgynous, of roughly similar height and build, and composed of silver metal-like skin and cobalt-blue accents.