"They are probably dead, Brother Mute."
Big Mute didn't answer. He stood as he always did—solid, immovable, a quiet wall beside a noisy world.
He stared at the crooked sign hanging from his wooden pushcart.
STAMINA BAR EX – TWO COPPER
Random weird thing.
He pulled the sign down.
***
He stopped trying to sell Stamina Bar EX the next morning.
There was no announcement, nothing dramatic—just pride swallowed whole. He gave the remaining bars to Big Mute and the other dockworkers.
Dead stock management.
He did not return to the dungeon entrance. Instead, he and Big Mute walked toward the docks where the air tasted of salt and tar and old rope, and men solved problems with muscle instead of persuasion—a place where ambition goes to sleep.
The foreman spotted him immediately.
"Well, if it isn't Mister Entrepreneur," the man said, squinting as if at a story he already knew the ending to. Not cruel. Just certain. "Dungeon didn't appreciate your genius?"
He kept his face neutral.
The foreman stepped closer and clapped his shoulder, firm but not unfriendly. "Happens. Big ideas are expensive. Manual labor isn't."
A small pause.
"Lift."
Big Mute had already hoisted a crate meant for two men.
So, he lifted.
Ore. Timber. Salted meat in leaking barrels. The rhythm was brutally simple: bend, grip, rise, carry, drop. By midday his back throbbed in hot pulses and his palms split along old calluses that had hoped never to return. Sweat blurred his vision and stung his eyes.
This is stable, he told himself.
Simple. Predictable.
Big Mute moved beside him like gravity had personally endorsed him. He himself had been built for margins and leverage and invisible advantages. None of those helped when a crate shifted unexpectedly and slammed into his shoulder hard enough to bruise bone.
Margins did not lift weight.
Three days passed in repetition. Wake before dawn. Lift until dusk. Eat without tasting. Sleep without dreaming. He forced himself not to replay the dungeon in his head. He forced himself not to calculate whether the F-rank trio had died because his ratios were off by a decimal.
Data required survivors.
The dungeon entrance had never frightened him. Not exactly. It was the math that did. Floor one had shown him enough—how quickly noise became silence, how fast confidence turned into weight someone else had to drag out. He preferred margins to miracles. Margins were controllable. Miracles required luck.
***
On the fourth morning, fog rolled low over the docks, thick and gray, swallowing outlines and muting sound.
He heard it before he saw them. A wet drag across wood. Not rope. Not cargo. Flesh.
He turned.
One goblin corpse scraped along the planks. Green skin dulled by drying blood.
Behind them—
The F-rank party.
Alive.
The black-haired girl's armor was dented inward at the shoulder. The mage's cloak hung torn and stiff with blood. The cleric's scalp bore a fresh, uneven stitch line that looked done in haste and necessity.
They looked wrecked.
But they were upright.
The smell of goblin blood hit him—copper-thick—and the dock blurred at the edges.
***
Floor two.
They would later describe it in fragments, breaths between words, as if speaking too fast might summon the failure they had avoided.
The corridor narrowed into a choke point slick with old stains. Goblins did not roar; they rushed. Small bodies, too many, knives flashing in torchlight.
The black-haired girl raised her shield. The mage kept his spells measured. Then the strain crept in, subtle and familiar—arms growing heavier, breaths shortening, chants thinning. It was the moment they all recognized, the one just before everything started to fail.
Her shield would dip. His spell would misfire. The cleric's knees would tremble.
Collapse never announced itself. It simply arrived.
That was F-rank—the slow, familiar slide toward failure.
But this time the burn came and did not spike out of control. Her forearm trembled under impact, yet the shield did not fall. Sweat ran into her eyes, but her vision held long enough to see the next blade.
The mage cast a third spell.
He braced for nausea.
It didn't come.
He cast a fourth.
The cleric waited for dizziness, for the familiar hollowing in his chest.
It didn't come.
They expected the drop—the moment when lungs turned to fire and limbs to sand.
It did not arrive.
A goblin slipped past her guard. She pivoted late—too late—and still had enough left to crush its skull against stone.
Another wave crashed into them.
They bent.
They did not break.
When the corridor finally fell silent and goblin bodies lay scattered at their feet, they stood in the dark breathing hard, waiting for the failure to come late and claim them anyway.
It never did.
When morning came, they dragged six goblins to the Adventurer's Guild bounty counter. They sold five and kept one. Adventurers whispered openly. "How'd they manage to kill six?"
"They're F-rank."
***
The dock snapped back into place.
The black-haired girl was already striding toward him, dragging the last goblin by one ankle. She let it drop at his feet. The thud echoed across the planks. Dockworkers paused mid-lift.
She stopped close enough that he could smell dried blood on her armor.
"Why didn't you tell me it works like that?"
He lowered the crate slowly. His arms trembled—not from fear, but from hours of lifting.
"20% stamina recovery, my friend" he replied.
"That's not what it does."
"What does it do?"
"It helps you last longer."
She shook her head. "No. It's more than that. We didn't get tired."
The mage rubbed his face with a dirty hand. "And our wounds healed a little bit. We were sure we were done."
The cleric nodded. "We didn't."
"Then why didn't you say it does that?" she demanded.
Because he hadn't known.
Because he'd been afraid to promise what he couldn't prove.
"I wasn't sure," he said.
She grabbed his vest. "You should've been."
Their eyes locked.
Around them, ropes creaked and waves slapped wood, but the dock felt held in place.
The foreman's voice cut across the moment. "If you're done arguing, those crates won't lift themselves!"
The world resumed.
"We want six bars. How much?" she asked.
"Twelve copper."
The cleric paid without hesitation.
They had been looking for him for three days.
"My friends, when are you going back in?" he asked.
"Tomorrow." She stepped back.
"I'll meet you at the entrance."
***
That night he did not sleep.
A goblin corpse lay on a tarp behind the warehouse. He worked by lantern light, knife steady despite the ache in his hands. The smell was sharp and metallic, and it clung to his skin no matter how often he wiped it away.
The flesh was leaner than expected. Muscle fibers dense. Minimal fat. High mineral scent.
One of the dockworkers passed by, slowed, frowned at the sight of him cutting strips from a goblin thigh, and kept walking without comment.
He sliced thin strips, testing resistance. He measured drying time against airflow. He adjusted for chew duration versus oxygen demand during combat.
The protein density was higher than that of dock rations and even dock rat meat.
The iron content was promising.
The first batch was wrong. Too dense. Too bitter. The compression held like dried leather between the teeth. He chewed, swallowed, and waited. His stomach disagreed. It was too rancid.
This batch is not viable.
He wrapped the remaining bars in cloth and set them aside.
Big Mute's eyes followed the movement, shifted to the failed batch, then returned to him.
He frowned. "Are you sure, Brother? This batch is really bad."
Big Mute held out his hand.
Big Mute ate it without complaint. Slow, deliberate bites. No expression.
He recalculated ratios with fresh inputs, increasing sodium balance for prolonged engagement, reducing compression to prevent jaw fatigue mid-fight.
He bit into one of the bars from the second batch.
This batch is viable. For now.
---
Stamina Bar EX Lite v1.03 (Common)
Hunger: -40% | Stamina Regen: +22% | Health Regen: +0.5% | AGI +1
Side Effects: nausea, diarrhea, jitteriness
Taste Profile: moderately bitter with a slightly rancid undertone.
---
It was iteration, not guesswork.
This time he had proof.
He drafted a new sign.
STAMINA BAR EX. THREE COPPER
DON'T BE THE FIRST TO FALL
No explanation. No apology.
If it worked, it was worth more.