By Sunday afternoon, there was a flag on the ledge.
It was a real flag, or as real as anything in Vael. A pole of grey ash wedged into a crack at the top of the ramp, with a square of grey cloth hanging off it, and on the cloth, in black, a picture of an anvil sitting inside a hole. Under it, someone had pinned a sheet of paper with a knife.
SUNKEN QUARRY - LEDGE & 3RD TERRACEIRON HOLLOW. CLAIMED.
Shifts 24/7. Pulls by roster only.
Questions → ask for Tor.
Complaints → also Tor.
"Bro," said Theo, standing next to him at the top of the quarry, "is that legal?"
"It's a piece of paper."
"Is the piece of paper legal?"
"There's no claiming in the Riverlands," said Owen. "It's Sheltered. No PvP, no territory, no nothing. That's just a guy with a flag."
On the ledge, under the flag, three Iron Hollow players in grey tabards were working the seam in a tight, boring, professional rotation. One Knight held the lip, an Arcanist baked each mudling Brittle as it came up the ramp, and a Duelist shattered it. Forty seconds. Over and over. Two more sat on a broken crane above them with their legs dangling, waiting their turn. Tor wasn't there. Brannagh wasn't there. These were just staff.
They were good, too. Owen had to admit it. Pod-smooth. Every swing landed on the beat, and none of them looked at the water.
"So that's it?" said Theo. "We just... don't get the ledge anymore?"
"We were never going to keep the ledge."
"You knew?"
"She told us," said Owen. "Last Sunday. Wednesday, she said, and it was Wednesday." He looked down the terraces. "Come on. We're going to the cart."
He'd told Theo at lunch, over text, what he wanted to do today, and Theo had sent back bro thats so petty and then, a minute later, im in.
The Sunken Quarry had two mudling spawns that mattered at their level. The ledge spawn under the crane chain, which fed the seam, and the second one by the drowned cart, on the fourth terrace, which didn't feed anything. The cart spawn was worse. No seam, no free hits, mudlings came at you from the water and you had to fight them honestly on a wet shelf. In his first life, nobody had farmed it, because the ledge existed.
But Owen wasn't the Owen who'd needed the ledge anymore.
He logged in at 1:25 PM.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 54%]
[Base 51% | Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 57m remaining]
ROOK - Level 10 Vanguard (unclassed)HP 290/290 | Stamina 239/239
STR 11 | AGI 23 | END 24 | FOC 8 | SPI 4 (+1)
SYNC 54% (Drift) - dodge window 108 ms - input lag ~138 ms
Form tolerance: ±56 ms | Crit 4%
Forms: Rising Cut (45) ✓ | Back Step (40) ✓ | Taunt Strike (40) ✓ | Breath Guard (50) ✓
XP to Lv11: 3%
Fifty-four, at the quarry, for the first time. Two points better than last week. The cart terrace was wet, the footing was bad, and the mudlings hit like bags of cement. He was very much looking forward to it.
The first hour was good.
Theo had figured out by now that his job was to get the Brittle on before the mudling got a fist up. Owen's job was to be where the fist wasn't. At fifty-four, with a hundred and eight milliseconds to work with and his input lag down under a hundred and forty, he could see a mudling's wind-up start, take one short step to the side, and let the clay fist go past his shoulder with room to spare. Last week, at forty-eight, he'd had to guess.
He didn't have to guess now.
The cart spawn bubbled every forty seconds, like the ledge, but there were two mudlings each time instead of one. So they took them in pairs. Theo baked the first. Owen Taunt Struck the second off Theo and held it. Rising Cut on the Brittle one, shatter, turn, Breath Guard on the second one's punch, clean, minus thirty, and then Theo's bolt came in over his shoulder and the second one cracked, and Owen cut it in half.
"Sexy," said Theo, every single time.
Owen tried the exhale on impact, too. The thing that wasn't a thing. He got it once in forty tries.
[Breath Guard: -51%]
Once, he thought. Last week it was three times in a hundred. He didn't know if that counted as better. He wrote a tally in the notebook at his 2:25 break anyway, on the inside cover, next to WHO KNOWS BREATHING?
[Break: 3 min. Hydration check-in ✓]
It was at 2:40 that the first train came.
The pod user's name was Mercer.
[Mercer - Level 12 - Iron Hollow]
He came down the ramp from the third terrace at a jog, a big Knight in polished plate with a kite shield, the kind of avatar that had clearly been made by someone who'd spent forty minutes on the jaw. He didn't look at Owen or Theo. He jogged past them, waded into the water right on top of the cart spawn, and started hitting everything that came up.
"Oh no," said Theo. "Oh no, oh no. It's the Tor thing."
It was the Tor thing.
Mercer waited until he had six mudlings on him. Then he turned and ran out of the water, straight at them, and past them, with six wet mudlings in a line behind him like baby ducks.
On the ledge, a train failed at the seam. Down here, there was no seam.
"Run," said Owen.
They ran. They ran down the fourth terrace and around the corner of the quarry wall and up a slope of loose scree, and the mudlings, which had lost Mercer when he jumped down a terrace, decided Owen and Theo were the next closest thing and came after them. It was legal. That was the worst part. In Sheltered zones, you couldn't hit a player, but you could absolutely bring the monsters to them. The forums in his first life had called it the Iron Hollow welcome mat.
They lost the train behind a rock after a minute. The mudlings stood there for ten seconds, evaded, and walked home, healing as they went.
When they got back to the cart, Mercer was standing on it with his shield on his back.
"Hey," he said pleasantly. He had a nice voice, a little bored. "Ledge is claimed, terrace is claimed. Thought you guys might not have seen the sign."
"The sign's for the ledge," said Theo.
"The sign's for the quarry," said Mercer. "Brannagh's call. Find somewhere else, it's a big game." He jumped off the cart and walked back toward the water, whistling. This chapter was copied from novelping . com without permission.
"I hate him," said Theo. "I want you to know that. I hate him so much. I have never hated anyone so much. Not even Jake Brimley who stole my trading cards in fourth grade."
"Theo."
"Not even Jake Brimley, Owen."
Owen was looking at the rails.
There were old mine rails all over the Sunken Quarry, rusted iron lines running down the terraces where the quarrymen had once pushed carts of stone up to the top. The drowned cart had come off one of them. It ran down the fourth terrace from the scree slope at the corner, past the cart, and straight into the water. It had a gentle, even slope. It was about forty meters long.
The author's publication supplied this text without permission. Reading the story on its official page supports the person who created it.
In his first life, in week two, Owen had died on that rail.
He hadn't known why at the time. He'd been running from three mudlings, nothing serious, and he'd cut across the rail, and suddenly the three mudlings had sped up. Not a little. A lot. Like they'd been dropped down a slide. They'd caught him at the bottom of the rail and beaten him into the water. It was on a forum a month later. Clay mobs that stepped onto wet iron lost their footing, and the physics engine didn't know how to make a clay elemental slip, so it made them slide. Down the slope. At roughly three times their walking speed. Until they hit something.
The community had called it the tram. It had been patched in 1.3, because people kept using it to feed mudlings into the Foreman's room.
He looked at the rail now. It was rusty. It was dry.
Dry.
"Oh," he said out loud. "Shit."
"What?"
"It has to be wet. I forgot it has to be wet." He'd died on it in the rain. Week two had rained for three days straight in the Riverlands, a weather event that he'd always half-assumed was scripted. Today was sunny. Today the rail was just a rail.
"What has to be wet?"
Owen opened his inventory.
[Water Flask x6]
He'd bought them for the ridge, five copper each, because Edda's Bell and Lattice Companion were both right about the same thing: if you were going to be out in the hills for hours, you should have water. In-game water didn't do anything to your actual sync. It was just a thing Vael let you drink, so the Thirsty debuff didn't pop. But a flask of water was a flask of water.
"Theo," he said, "how much water do you have?"
"Like four?" Theo looked at him. "Why? What are you doing? Why does your face look like that?"
It took them six minutes. They walked up and down the rail with their water flasks like two old men watering a garden, and Theo kept saying "I don't get it, I don't get it," and Owen kept saying, "You will," and down in the water Mercer kept killing mudlings off the cart spawn and ignoring them, because they were clearly idiots.
[Rail (old iron): Wet]
The tooltip came up when Owen put a hand on it. It hadn't been there before. He'd never once, in his first life, put a hand on a rail.
Then they went back to the cart and started farming, like nothing had happened.
Mercer gave them four minutes.
At 2:58, he waded into the spawn again, picked up eight mudlings this time, and came running out of the water with his shield up and a big pod-smooth grin on his face. And this time Owen didn't run down the terrace.
He ran up the rail.
Up. Toward the scree at the top. With Theo behind him and Mercer behind Theo and eight mudlings behind Mercer, all of them on the same line, the way the rail made you run because the shelf was narrowest there.
"Owen, this is a dead end!" Theo shouted.
"I know!"
At the top of the rail, there was a rusted bumper, a block of iron where the carts had stopped. Owen hit it and jumped. Not over it. Sideways, off the rail, onto the scree. Stagger-step, the move he'd been practicing for a week. A short step one way and a long step the other, and at fifty-four his body went where he told it to, right now, with no gap. Theo, who'd been told about the jump exactly once, at the cart, jumped too and landed flat on his face in the gravel.
And Mercer, at ninety-eight percent sync, Level 12, the best-reaction-time player on the terrace, did exactly what a man running at a wall does.
He stopped.
He stopped at the bumper, turned around with his shield up, and faced eight mudlings who were walking up a wet iron rail at him with their heavy clay feet.
They took one more step.
Then they slipped.
It was, Owen thought later, the single funniest thing he had ever seen in either of his lives, and that included Theo setting a house on fire with Ember Bolt. Eight mudlings, uphill, tipped over backward and slid down the rail at three times walking speed, in a long brown chorus line, all the way to the bottom. They hit the drowned cart. The cart broke. They kept going. They slid into the water in a great brown splash and came back up a second later, Soaked, healed to full, and absolutely furious, and looked around for the person who had hurt them.
It was Mercer.
Mercer had tagged every single one of them. He was their target. He was the only one they had ever been angry at. And he was standing at the top of the rail, forty meters up a slope that was now wet and covered in clay, which was, in game terms, also a slide.
"Oh," said Mercer. "Oh, no."
The mudlings started back up the rail, slipped, slid back down, got up, tried again, slipped. They couldn't reach him. Mercer, very carefully, started climbing down the scree the long way, toward the terrace, where there was no rail.
They could reach him there.
Owen and Theo sat on the scree and watched it happen. It took about thirty seconds. Mercer had a shield and great plate and ninety-eight percent sync and the reactions of a professional athlete, but he was one Level 12 Knight against eight Soaked mudlings that healed every time they touched the water, and he was standing in it.
[Mercer has been defeated.]
There was a soft little puff of light in the shallows, and then a grey ghost floated up and stared at them across the quarry for a long, long time.
"Mob training's legal," said Owen, to nobody.
Theo was crying. He was laughing so hard that he was actually crying, lying flat on his back on the scree with his hat over his face. "The tram," he wheezed. "You said the tram. Owen. What's a tram?"
"It's a—it's a thing they called it. Later."
"Who's they?"
"People," said Owen. "I'll tell you. I promised."
They farmed the cart spawn for another hour, undisturbed. Nobody came down the ramp. Once, Owen looked up and saw two of the Iron Hollow players from the ledge standing at the top of the third terrace, looking down at the rail. One of them crouched and put a hand on it. Then they went away.
At 3:47 PM, on a Brittle mudling with a crack straight down its middle, it happened.
[+5 attribute points available. Class skill points: 2 (banked).]
Owen sat down on the drowned cart's broken axle and spent them while Theo, Level 9 now, and very proud of it, guarded him with a staff.
Strength, two, because the cart mudlings were teaching him that his cuts were too light. Endurance, one. Agility, one. Focus, one.
ROOK - Level 11 Vanguard (unclassed)HP 300/300 | Stamina 247/247
STR 13 (+2) | AGI 24 (+1) | END 25 (+1) | FOC 9 (+1) | SPI 4 (+1)
SYNC 53% (Drift) - dodge window 106 ms - input lag ~141 ms
Form tolerance: ±58 ms | Crit 4%
Class skill points: 2 (banked)
Traits: Reedwalker
Trinkets: Gnasher's Molar | Edda's Bell
It was at that moment that Brannagh came down the ramp.
She was alone. Same grey tabard, same short dark hair, same spear on her back, and that face that never seemed to be doing anything. She walked straight past the farming and stopped at the top of the rail. She looked at the broken cart. She looked at the clay smeared all the way down the iron. She looked at the wet, which was starting to dry in the sun.
Then she crouched down and put her hand on it, the same way Owen had.
[Rail (old iron): Drying]
She stood up.
"Mercer says you trained eight mobs onto him," she said.
"Mercer trained eight mobs onto Mercer."
"Mm." She didn't argue. She looked at the rail again. "Clay mobs on wet iron. It's a physics fallback. They don't have a slip animation." She said it the way she'd said no leash from the ledge a week ago: not to him, to the box in her head where she put things. "That's a good one. Who told you?"
"Nobody told me."
"Somebody always tells you." She turned and looked at him. Grey eyes, very steady. "I told Tor you knew things you shouldn't. After the ledge. Corran thought I was being paranoid. Corran thinks a lot of things." She paused. "The rock-throw on the alpha. The bells. And you're Level 11 with no class. You're the only Level 11 in the Riverlands with no class. Did you know that? I checked."
Owen said nothing.
"Nobody skips the class," said Brannagh. "Unless they know something about the class."
It was quiet on the terrace. The cart spawn bubbled under the water, two seconds early. Theo, beside him, had very wisely stopped breathing.
"It's a big game," said Owen at last. "That's what your guy said."
Something happened in Brannagh's face, then. It was very small. The corner of her mouth moved, maybe a millimeter. He'd known her for fourteen years in a different life, as an enemy and an officer and finally a guild leader. He'd never once seen her smile. He wasn't sure he'd seen it now.
"It is," she said. "And we're going to walk all of it." She turned to go. "The cart's yours. Tell Mercer I said so. He won't like it."
"Why?"
"Because it's a bad spawn," said Brannagh, over her shoulder, "and you just made it worth more than the ledge."
She went back up the ramp. Halfway up, she stopped and looked down at the rail one more time, and then she went on.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 53%.]
LATTICE COMPANION - Session SummaryDuration: 2h 51m
Baseline in: 54% | Baseline out: 53%
Breaks: 2 ✓ | Hydration check-ins: 2 ✓
Physical adaptation: logged
Two levels in one weekend, Rook! Remember to stretch.
Owen took the headset off and lay on his bed staring at the ceiling with his heart going hard, though not with stress this time. It was something closer to the way it went after a good run.
He'd won. He'd beaten a pod user at ninety-eight percent with a water flask and a rusty rail. In his first life, he'd never won anything against Iron Hollow. Not once. Not a fight, not a ledge, not a market.
And Brannagh had walked down a ramp and put her hand on the rail and understood the whole thing in about three seconds, and next week, maybe tomorrow, every Iron Hollow Arcanist in the Riverlands would know that clay doesn't slip. Then they'd use it. He'd given it to them.
Every time you use the map, he thought, you draw them a copy.
He picked up the notebook off the floor and wrote on the inside cover, under WHO KNOWS BREATHING? and EDDA'S COUNT:
BRANNAGH KNOWS ME.
Then he crossed out knows and wrote is learning, because he was trying to be accurate. Then he went downstairs, because it was a little after four and his father had asked him, very nicely, if he wanted to come watch a man take apart a 1971 pickup on TV, and the answer, in this life, was yes.
His phone buzzed on the stairs.
Theo: bro
Theo: bro
Theo: BRO
Theo: what's a tram
Theo: you said you'd tell me
Theo: i'm coming over tuesday after your dads thing and you're telling me everything or i'm telling your mom you trained a mob onto a guy
Owen: that's not even illegal
Theo: SHE DOESN'T KNOW THAT