Earth's SSS Pornstar to SSS Combat God in Another World-Chapter 49: The Second Mission’s True Reward

Joji let the first rush of triumph burn off before he trusted his own thoughts again. Hype felt good, but it made men sloppy.

He paced the length of the room, mind working the problem from every angle.

He had thought he could summon the dungeon in an instant, a blink and a door.

It was not like that. It was channeling. A spell that took at least five minutes if he did it clean.

Using it as an escape route meant he needed time to prepare.

Worse, he could not close it from the inside out. If someone found the opening while he was inside, he would be trapped in a box of his own making.

He sat on the granite floor and forced himself to ask the question the right way.

"Sir System. Enlighten me. How much does dungeon creation consume?"

{From your second attempt, it would seem the working consumed ten points each of Aura, Mana, and Stamina. That is why you were left with that hollowed, bottomed-out sensation.}

{Yet your constitution, bearing the Embryonic Storm Bringer, multiplies your rate of recovery according to those points. Each single point answers to the measure of one healthy man, and by that same count your regenerative power is increased.}

Joji nodded. He could feel the sense in it right away. Ten points was not nothing, but it was not ruin either. The problem was not the cost.

The problem was proficiency. He needed to get stronger to shake the exhaustion faster.

He needed to shorten the channeling time until five minutes became one, and one became a breath.

While he sat there thinking of strength and speed and ugly ways to buy them, Walter sat with his father behind stone walls, in a room with no tea and no servants and no warmth.

Just father and son, and silence heavy enough to bruise. Walter broke it first.

"Father. I would like you to disown me and cut me off your will."

Jonas stared like the words had slapped him.

"What are you saying, Wally? Has your mind gone to the gutters?" Jonas snapped, too loud.

"It’s not that," Walter said. His voice stayed flat, but his eyes did not. "I know Melchor was behind my assassination."

Jonas went still. His color drained.

"What?" he whispered, then louder as disbelief tried to protect him.

"How would you say such insinuating words against your own brother."

Walter swallowed. He chose a lie that would keep secrets from spilling.

"Father, you know Simon," Walter said. "He confessed when they cornered me, not knowing Joji and Alaric were knights."

Instead, he reached into his bag and produced papers.

Transaction lists. Receipts. Names. Dates. Money trails that did not care about blood ties.

He handed it over. Jonas flipped through the pages. Each turn stole more color from his face.

Then he reached the part that truly gutted him. Melchor was not only paying for one dirty knife.

Melchor was supporting multiple militia forces inside and outside the Kingdom of Vicario.

He looked at Walter. One glance was enough to tell him the papers before him were genuine.

His son was not so witless as to hand over documents that damning only to have them proved false, and with this much in hand, it would be easy enough to set Martin to verifying the rest.

At that conclusion, the strength seemed to run out of Jonas. He slumped back in his chair like an old man.

Tears welled and fell. Not the tears of a merchant losing coin.

The tears of a husband and father realizing he had been blind.

"Corina," Jonas whispered to the stone ceiling. "I have failed you."

"Father, I don’t want this either," Walter said. "I don’t want us brothers fighting over riches."

"I still think Melchor can change once he matures."

Deep inside, he did not believe it. He had stopped believing a long time ago.

Silence returned. Dead and simple.

At last Jonas spoke, voice rough.

"What do you have in mind? I will support you."

Walter did not hesitate. He had been building this plan on the road.

"You need to say I am a prodigal son who failed your expectation," Walter said. "You need to officially dub Melchor as your successor."

Jonas looked like his world was collapsing twice. The real prodigal was Melchor.

Walter had never been the loose one. Jonas had been stricter with him, not kinder.

Melchor squandered money on drinks, women, and violent games that produced no return.

Scandals about dead brothel workers followed him like flies.

Jonas had cleaned up so much mess that the Cutler name should have drowned in it.

Still, Jonas was a merchant. He understood misdirection. Sometimes you fed the wolf the meat you could afford, while you sharpened the spear in the dark.

"I will agree," Jonas said at last. "One condition. Give me a grandson. The Cutler bloodline must go on, even if it has to wear another surname."

Walter forced a grin and patted his chest like a clown trying to ease a funeral.

"Of course," Walter said. "I will find myself a wife."

Jonas rubbed his temples.

"I will give you a few shops. Will that be alright?"

"That wouldn’t do," Walter said. "If I move under another identity, I will only attract attention."

"Best I can think of is give me the titles of our closed shops and empty lots. We have a lot of those, right?"

Jonas gave a bitter laugh. He did have a lot. Failed ventures. Lands that never paid back.

Shops crushed by local gangs because there was no noble backing.

All of it still carried Cutler ink on the deeds, and all of it was a headache.

"I will have them prepared," Jonas said. "But you still need an identity. What about that."

Walter’s answer came out clean, almost too clean.

"I think it’s best if I leave all of it named under Knight Joji."

Jonas blinked.

"Why would you say that."

Walter steadied his breath. He needed to sound grateful, not frightened.

"Father, remember the steel creature I told you about," Walter said.

"Joji did not even consider erasing me after I saw such a thing. But when I spoke to Mary Cathryn Lacrosse, she told me to write a will back to you because I shouldn’t be seeing those things. Joji still brought me home."

Jonas’s mind spun. Joji looked straightforward on the surface, but this was not the mercy of a simple man.

It was a decision. A choice. That meant Joji saw something in Walter, or saw something in the Cutlers, or saw something worth keeping alive.

"Martin," Jonas said, voice sharp.

Martin had been standing behind him the whole time, silent as a shadow. He moved at once.

Soon Joji was brought into the stone room.

One glance at their faces told him he had stepped into a deal, not a conversation.

He sat and listened, eyes steady, hands quiet.

Walter and Jonas laid the plan out. The disowning show. The successor declaration.

The titles shifted into a new name. A new identity that could walk without dragging Cutler wealth behind it like a banner.

Joji felt it like a jackpot hitting. The system had not marked his mission complete.

The reward was not only survival. It was a lever, and the lever was Walter himself.

Joji did not reach for the whole pie. That was how men got poisoned.

"How about this," Joji said. "Since I am a knight, I cannot attend to all these businesses all the time."

"I can appoint Walter as half owner when the shops are flourishing."

Walter and Jonas exchanged a look. It sounded too fair, which made it suspicious, and still it sounded too good to refuse.

Jonas probed anyway.

"Why not keep it in your name entirely."

"I would like that," Joji said. "But my main goal is strength. I do not want limelight. It would hamper my work as a knight."

They could not refute it. Knights ran on missions and blood and vows. Business demanded time and attention and the slow cruelty of numbers.

Everhart was ancient. Everhart was strict. They did not know all its traditions, but they knew enough to understand that a knight’s life was not all gleaming armor and glory.

So they signed.

Thirty seven documents. Thirty seven closed shops and vacant lots across Vicario, not random scraps but strategic placements meant for commerce.

In a handful of minutes, Joji became a rich man on paper, and Walter became a man with a new skin ready to be worn.

Jonas swallowed and added another weight to the deal.

"I will give my son three million gold coin as capital," he said. "Do you have anywhere we can get help moving it."

Joji nodded and began laying a lie that would protect his real truth about his job as a Dungeon Master.

"I have treasure transference magic," Joji said. "I cannot explain the details, but it can transfer gold anywhere."

Martin and Jonas both stiffened. Their merchant instincts flared. If that existed, trade changed forever.

Joji poured cold water on the spark before it turned into a fire.

"It is made by a Pinnacle Rank-5 High Mage," Joji said. "Consumable. Something we carry. I was going to use it to send evidence about the steel creature we encountered."

Rank-5 was not something you argued with. Martin himself was only Pinnacle Rank-4. Jonas did not breathe right for a moment.

They talked a little more. Joji called Alaric over. The man’s splinter was gone, and Joji had been ready to scold him for taking risks with a healing wound, but the bones were already mended.

They went down to a vault. Gold was stacked in barrels.

Alaric stared.

"Why in barrels?"

Jonas managed a smug smile that did not quite hide his stress.

"Rolling barrels is easier than dragging chests."

Joji glanced at Martin, then back to Jonas.

"We will need time alone," Joji said. "We do not want you investigated for staring at secret magic."

Jonas nodded, then took charcoal and marked barrel after barrel with clean lines.

When he finished marking over thirty, he said nothing more. He shut the stone vault door and turned the key.

The lock clicked. Silence settled.

Only Joji and Alaric remained inside, staring at the barrels like men standing in front of a storm they had invited into their own house.