The healthy chili was brown.
Not the deep, angry red of the chili his father had made every Sunday of Owen's childhood, with two pounds of ground chuck and half a block of cheddar melted on top like a lid. This was ground turkey, three kinds of beans and a spice packet from Renata the dietitian that said LOW SODIUM in green letters, and it was the brown of a wet cardboard box.
"It's good," said Maddie, with the face of someone being held at gunpoint.
"It's fine," said Owen's mother. "It's honestly fine, Rick."
His father stared into his bowl like a man looking down a well. "I put cumin in it."
"I can taste the cumin."
"There's no salt in it, Dana. I looked for the salt and the salt was gone. Somebody moved the salt."
"Somebody did," his mother agreed, and ate a spoonful without any expression at all.
Owen ate his. It was actually fine. He'd once lived a whole winter on gas-station burritos. Turkey chili was a five-star restaurant.
In the middle of the table, in the fruit bowl, his phone was buzzing.
Maddie's rule, not technically in the contract yet: phones went in the fruit bowl at dinner, face down on the bananas. Owen had put his in first tonight without being asked, and his mother had noticed and very carefully not said anything. It had buzzed eleven times since. It buzzed again now. The bananas trembled.
"Somebody wants you," said his father.
"It's Theo."
"What's Theo want?"
Owen thought about lying, and then didn't. "There's a world boss," he said. "In the game. It's the first one. A giant moss monster in a sinkhole in the middle of the marsh. It spawns at seven. Half the server's already camped on it. Whoever kills it first gets a world-first. Their names go up on a big board forever."
"Forever," said his father.
"Until the servers shut down."
"And when's that?"
"Twenty-forty-something," said Owen, which was true, and which his father took as a joke. Owen let him.
Maddie had put her spoon down. Maddie knew exactly what a world-first was; she had watched four hundred hours of other people's videos. She was looking at him like he'd walked into the kitchen wearing a hat made of spaghetti.
"You're here," she said.
"I'm here."
"There's a world boss and you're eating brown chili."
"Hey," said their father.
"Sorry. Healthy chili."
The phone buzzed. The bananas trembled. Owen ate another spoonful and kept his hand on the table.
In his first life he hadn't been at this dinner. He knew that for a fact, because he remembered exactly where he'd been: on his bed, with a sandwich, watching Iron Hollow's stream of the Gravemoss Warden on his phone because he was only Level 8 and nowhere near good enough to be in the hollow. He'd watched them wipe and wipe, figure it out at 8:14 by accident, and kill it at 8:31, and he'd felt like he'd been there. He hadn't been anywhere. He'd been in his room with a sandwich while three people he loved ate chili one floor down.
"Okay, but," said Maddie, who had a law degree in her heart, "technically, is Sunday after dinner a school night? Because if it's a school night, clause one says three hours max and done by nine-thirty. And if it's a weekend, it's get up every hour, be at dinner, and he's at dinner, so then it's no limit, and that's a loophole."
Everyone looked at their mother.
"It's a school night," said their mother.
"Since when?"
"Since there's school tomorrow."
"Then it should say that," said Maddie darkly, and wrote SUNDAY = SCHOOL NIGHT?? v2 on her napkin with a pen she produced from nowhere.
His father was looking at Owen over his bowl. Not his work look or his TV look. Something quieter.
"How long's it take?" he said. "The moss thing."
"The guys trying right now are going to be at it for an hour and a half," Owen said. "They're going to keep dying. It's got a trick."
"You know the trick?"
"I think so."
"Huh." His father ate a spoonful of the brown chili. "When you were five," he said, "you had a play. Kindergarten. You were a carrot."
"Rick," said his mother, smiling.
"He was a great carrot. That was the week Doug Pruitt and I were both up for shop foreman, and old man Tessler said whoever's still here at six Friday gets it. Play was at five-thirty. I went to the play. Doug stayed." He shrugged. "Doug's been foreman thirteen years. Good guy. Bad back."
"Are you saying I should go," said Owen, "or that I should stay?"
"I'm saying I'd do it again," said his father. "The carrot was the right call." He pointed his spoon at Owen. "But you're not five, and that's not a play, and you've got a trick. So finish your chili, do the dishes, and go show those guys the trick."
"After dishes," said his mother.
"After dishes," his father agreed. "That's the law."
He did the dishes properly, which first-life Owen had never done without being asked twice, and Maddie leaned in the doorway and counted the minutes out loud, which was not helping.
"Seven-twenty-eight. Seven-twenty-nine. They're probably dead again."
"They are definitely dead again."
"How do you know that?"
"Because the boss heals," said Owen, drying the chili pot, "and they can't hit it hard enough to beat the healing, and they won't figure out why for another forty-five minutes."
Maddie stared at him. "Okay, you're being creepy," she said. "That's the third time this week."
"Because I'm smart."
"Because you're creepy."
At 7:40 he mixed a fresh Clear Draft at the counter, the lemon and the salt and the scoop of whey, shaking it in the bottle like a cocktail, and his mother watched from the table with her tea and said, "Two in one day?"
"Renata said up to two a day is fine."
"Renata did say that." She sipped. "Go on, then. Done by nine-thirty."
Upstairs, he did the stairs twice and the squats and the doorframe and the hip thing, and opened the window, and lay down at 7:48 with the cold March air on his face.
[Base 51% · Modifiers active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 52m remaining · Primed +2%]
[SYNC: 56% (Clear)]
Twice in a row, he thought. It's not a fluke. It's a lever.
He was still standing on the cliff at the end of the wolf ridge, in the stone ring, where he'd logged out. It was daylight again in Vael, and the shrine was just a statue now, and the wolves were somewhere else.
The Fenwild was ten miles away.
[Waystone Return]Channel 10 seconds to return to your bound waystone (Harrowgate — Fountain).
Cooldown: 1 hour. Interrupted by damage.
He used it. Ten seconds of blue light winding up around his boots like smoke, and then he was in Lantern Square by the fountain, in an evening crowd that was all talking about the same thing.
[Zone — Riverlands] Gristle_Pete: gravemoss just wiped IH again lmaooo
[Zone — Riverlands] Tamsin_of_Nowhere: its healing faster than they can hit it. is it even killable
[Zone — Riverlands] Gristle_Pete: devs said every boss is killable
[Zone — Riverlands] Tamsin_of_Nowhere: devs said a lot of things
Owen ran. Get faster updates on g.com.
Out through the South Gate and into the Fenwild, where the light was going gold on the water. Most people took the boardwalk that wound around the big channels on stilts. It added four minutes. Owen took the channels.
[Reedwalker: active]
The Mill Race Ring had been paying him back every day since his first afternoon. Everyone else waded through shallows and reed beds at half speed. In the Fenwild, where half the map was shallows and reeds, Reedwalker made him a man on a bicycle in a town full of pedestrians. He went straight across the east pools, through Old Gnasher's empty reeds, through a heron that tried to spear him and missed by a foot, and came up the soft rise on the far side at 7:59 and saw the hollow.
Gravemoss Hollow was a hole in the world.
That was the honest description. The Fenwild was flat for miles, all reeds and black water and mist, and then the ground just ended. A sinkhole two hundred yards across, its walls ringed with old roots and hanging moss, dropping forty feet to a floor that was a perfect, unbroken, glowing carpet of moss, pale green, soft-looking, the kind of green that made you want to lie down in it. Which was, Owen knew, the point.
Through the middle of it, in a broken ring, ran a line of old grey flagstones. The Fenfolk called it the Drowned Causeway. The wiki called it flavor. It was the remains of a road that had once crossed the marsh, before the marsh sank, before the hollow, built by somebody whose stones didn't take moss. Nothing grew on them. Nothing ever had.
This chapter was taken from the author's story page without permission. Readers support the writer by reading the published version.
And in the center, rooted, sat the Warden.
It was about thirty feet tall and looked like somebody had taken a dead oak, wrapped it in moss and drowned bones, and taught it to be angry. It had no legs. It didn't need them. It sat in the dead center of the hollow with a hundred roots spread out under the moss in every direction, and when it moved, the whole floor moved with it, a slow wave going out through the green like something breathing under a blanket.
[The Gravemoss Warden — World Boss — Level 15]
[HP: 120,000 / 120,000]
Around the rim, there were maybe two hundred people. Standing, sitting on roots, eating in-game bread, watching. A couple of them had the little red recording dot over their heads that meant they were streaming. Down in the hollow, there was nobody alive. There were twenty grey ghosts, scattered across the moss, slowly fading.
"Rook!" Theo came running along the rim, his hat bouncing. "Rook. Dude. They wiped twice. They had it to eighty percent and it just healed. Corran's yelling. Like, actually yelling, I can hear it from here. Their whole raid's running back from Harrowgate. They said they're pulling again at like 8:10."
"8:09," said Owen.
"Why do you know that."
"Lucky guess." He looked at the clock in the corner of his vision. 8:00. Night fell at 8:14. "How many people up here are Level 8 or better and not in Iron Hollow?"
Theo looked around at the rim. "...A lot?"
"Then we need nineteen of them," said Owen, "and we need them in the next five minutes."
[Zone — Riverlands] Rook: LF raid for Gravemoss NOW. Pulling at 8:06. Lv8+, any track. I know the mechanic. You will stand where I tell you and you will not die. Whisper me.
There was a pause of about four seconds. Then zone chat lost its mind.
[Zone — Riverlands] Gristle_Pete: lol who
[Zone — Riverlands] Tamsin_of_Nowhere: isnt that the rat guy
[Zone — Riverlands] Gristle_Pete: RAT KING?? the gnasher clip guy?
[Zone — Riverlands] Hobnail: what's the mechanic
[Zone — Riverlands] Rook: whisper me and find out. 4 minutes.
The whispers came in like rain on a tin roof. Owen read levels and nothing else. For all he knew he was about to fight a world boss with nineteen twelve-year-olds, but the Gnasher clip had two million views, and that bought you about four minutes of trust from strangers.
He took Hobnail first: a Level 13 Knight with a big tower shield and the calm, flat voice of a man who had a toddler and a mortgage and very little patience left for anything. He took a Level 12 Cleric named SoupGoblin, whose first words on raid voice were "if anyone stands in fire I'm not healing them," which Owen respected. He took Theo. He took a Ranger, two Wardens, five more Vanguards, three more Arcanists, a Knight with one hand who had clearly just started and said so, a kid named xXReedLordXx who was Level 8 and so excited that his voice cracked when he said hello.
[Raid formed: Rook's Raid (20/20)]
8:04.
"Okay," said Owen on raid voice, and twenty people went quiet. In fourteen years he'd led plenty of raids, but never one where nobody knew who he was. "Here's the whole fight. I'm going to say it once and then I'm going to say it again while we're doing it."
He told them about the moss.
The Warden had two abilities that mattered. The first, Rootdrink, was the one that had just beaten Iron Hollow twice: in daylight, while anyone was fighting it on its moss, it healed half a percent of its health every second. Six hundred hit points a second. Iron Hollow's pods put out maybe seven hundred, which meant twenty minutes of perfect play against a thing that kept spawning adds. A pickup raid of headset players at this level might do a hundred and fifty a second on a good night. In daylight, it couldn't even scratch it.
The second was the Hum. Every forty-five seconds, the Warden made a sound like a cello the size of a church, and anybody standing on moss when it rang got hit with Desynced, minus ten percent sync for thirty seconds. Iron Hollow had ignored it, because their pods ran at ninety-eight and ninety-eight minus ten was still eighty-eight. A headset player at fifty-five who stood on moss when it rang dropped to forty-five, and forty-five was where your forms started falling off, and that was how pickup raids died.
"So we don't stand on moss," said Hobnail.
"You stand on the old road. The grey stones in the ring. Nothing grows on them. The Hum can't touch you there. If it Root Pulls you onto the moss, you walk back to the stones before the next Hum. That's all. That's the whole first phase."
"And the healing?" said SoupGoblin. "You said there's a trick to the healing."
Owen looked up at the sky. The light over the Fenwild was going from gold to orange.
"We wait," he said.
"For what?"
"Rootdrink only works in daylight. The moss closes at night." He watched the clock. 8:05. "Night's at 8:14. Until then, we don't try to kill it. We just hold it. We put enough damage on it to keep it tagged, we stand on the stones, we kill the adds, and we don't die. At 8:14 the sun goes down, the moss closes, and it stops healing. And then we kill it."
There was a pause on raid voice.
"That's either genius," said Hobnail, "or the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
"It's both," said Theo loyally.
"How do you know that?" said xXReedLordXx.
"I read the moss," said Owen, which meant nothing, and was the best he had. "8:06. Hobnail, you're with me. Pull."
They went down the roots into the hollow, twenty people in a long nervous line, and spread out across the broken ring of grey stones like pieces on a board, and Hobnail stepped off the causeway and onto the moss and put a sword into the Warden's side.
[Rook's Raid has engaged the Gravemoss Warden.]
The whole floor rose up like a wave.
The first eight minutes were the strangest fight Owen had ever been in, because the whole point was not to win it. Nineteen strangers holding a thirty-foot moss tree at ninety-something percent while it tried to kill them, every gamer instinct screaming hit it harder, and Owen saying no.
"Don't burst it. Don't burst it. Theo, stop."
"It's right there."
"It heals six hundred a second. You're wasting mana. Kill the adds."
Every ninety seconds, the moss coughed up Spore-wights, little hunched things made of fungus and old bones that shambled toward the healers, and the Arcanists burned them. Every forty-five seconds, the Hum came. The first time it rang, half the raid was standing on the stones and the other half wasn't, and the half that wasn't went grey around the edges of their health bars and started missing forms.
[Desynced: −10% SYNC (30s)]
"STONES," Owen said. "Stones, stones, stones. Thirty seconds. Breathe."
The second Hum, only one Vanguard was off the stones, Root Pulled at the wrong moment, and he walked back at forty-four sync, swearing steadily. The third Hum, everybody was on the stones.
Owen's job was the lash: a thick black root that broke out of the moss behind the tank and swept the causeway at knee height. Nobody could block it. But you could read it. Two seconds before it came, the moss rippled outward from where the root would break through, like a fish under the surface.
The first time, Owen Back Stepped it. The second time, his heart did something stupid, and he stepped back, breathing out, held, pivoted short on his lawn-chair hips, and the root went through him like smoke. He lunged, low and careful, not like a god, and came up behind it with a normal-damage cut.
[Threefold Step — Imprecise (56% / 60%)]
"Did you see that?" said xXReedLordXx on raid voice. "Did everyone see that? What was that?"
"Kill the adds," said Owen. His face was hot.
[Flow: SYNC 57%]
At 8:09, as promised, Iron Hollow came over the rim.
Thirty grey tabards stopped at the edge and looked down at a pickup raid holding their boss on a ring of old stones.
Owen heard Corran before he saw him. You could always hear Corran. "That's our boss!"
"No claims in Sheltered," said somebody in zone chat, which was the funniest thing Owen had seen all week.
He didn't look up. He knew anyway: Corran yelling, Tor beside him with the axe on his shoulder saying something reasonable. And somewhere in the line there was a woman with short dark hair and a spear on her back, not yelling, looking at the stones. At the sky. At the clock.
The thing Owen had been planning around since dinner was training. Iron Hollow had thirty people on the rim of a marsh full of mire rats and herons, and Sheltered zones didn't stop you from dragging a train of mobs down a root wall into a raid. In his first life, Corran had done exactly that to a rival guild in week three. It had been a whole drama thread.
"Yeah," said Owen. "I know."
He looked up then. Just once.
Brannagh had her hand on Corran's arm. She was saying something. Owen couldn't hear it from the hollow floor, but he could read it, because he could see what she was looking at: the little red recording dots floating over the rim. Six of them. Seven. Two hundred spectators and seven streams, watching Iron Hollow lose a boss to a pickup raid led by the rat guy.
You could train mobs on a pickup raid. It was legal. You couldn't do it on seven streams and still be the guild that everybody wanted to join.
The guys heading toward the reeds stopped. Came back.
Brannagh looked down into the hollow, and for a second she looked straight at Owen.
Then she looked at the sky.
She just figured it out, Owen thought. She's looking at the light. She's about to know it at 8:14 instead of finding it by accident, which means next time, she'll know before she gets here.
Every time you use the map, you draw them a copy.
8:13.
"Okay," he said on raid voice. His voice was shaking a little. He let it. "One minute. When the sun goes down, the moss closes and the bar stops healing. That's the signal. Every cooldown, every bolt, everything you've been saving. Don't stop. Stay on the stones."
"Copy," said Hobnail.
"Copy," said SoupGoblin.
"COPY," said xXReedLordXx, at a volume that made several people flinch.
The light went red, and orange, and grey, the way it does in Vael at the end of a day, like somebody pulling a sheet over a cage. And all across the floor of the hollow, the glowing moss folded in on itself, closing like a field of flowers at dusk, and the pale green light went out.
[8:14 PM — Night falls over the Fenwild.]
[The moss of Gravemoss Hollow closes. Rootdrink: inactive.]
"Go," said Owen.
It took them thirteen minutes.
The bar went down and stayed down, and every time a chunk came off, zone chat lit up like a stadium. At seventy percent the Warden started lashing twice. At fifty it started Root Pulling two people at a time. At thirty it stopped Humming and started screaming instead, a long, low sound that made the raid's real-world hair stand up, and spat Spore-wights in fours, and the healers started to fall behind.
Owen stopped thinking about stat sheets and fourteen years. He thought about ripples in moss. Ripple, breathe out, hold, short pivot, careful lunge. Behind the root. Cut. Taunt Strike, pull the Warden off SoupGoblin, Breath Guard, eat a wight's claws at minus thirty percent, back to the stones. Ripple.
[Flow: SYNC 58%]
At ten percent, xXReedLordXx died, and said "NOOOO," with his whole chest, like a soldier in a movie, and everybody laughed, including Owen, in the middle of a world boss.
At four percent, Theo, who had been told he was a bad Arcanist for nine days straight, landed six Ember Bolts in a row without a single fizzle, flick-Kaal, flick-Kaal, flick-Kaal, screaming "WHERE, WHEN, WHERE, WHEN" the whole time.
At one percent, Hobnail said, very calmly, in the voice of a man with a toddler and a mortgage, "Rook, it's yours," and stepped back.
Owen saw the ripple. Stepped. Breathed. Pivoted.
Lunged.
[Threefold Step — Imprecise (58% / 60%)]
It wasn't pretty. A short, slightly sideways lunge from a guy with tight hips. Normal damage was all it needed.
[8:27 PM]
[WORLD FIRST: The Gravemoss Warden has fallen to Rook's Raid!]
[The Fenwild remembers.]
The message went out server-wide, gold letters across the top of the sky, so that every one of the however-many-hundred-thousand people in Vael looked up from whatever they were doing and read the word Rook.
Four minutes earlier than Iron Hollow, in another life. Twenty people, nineteen strangers, and one of them was Theo.
[Level up! Rook is now Level 12.]
[+5 attribute points available. Class skill points: 3 (banked).]
[Title earned: Mossbreaker (World First)]
[Loot: Gravemoss Heart (Rare, crafting reagent)]
The rim was screaming. xXReedLordXx's ghost was doing what looked like a dance. SoupGoblin said, "Okay, that was actually fun," in a tone that suggested she'd been wrong about something for the first time in years. Hobnail said, "My kid's awake. Good raid, Rook," and logged off, which was the way of pickup raids, and which made it perfect.
Owen sat down on the grey stones of the Drowned Causeway and spent his points while the moss stayed closed around him in the dark. Agility, two. Focus, two, because the windows had been everything tonight. Endurance, one.
ROOK — Level 12 Vanguard (unclassed)HP 310/310 | Stamina 258/258
STR 13 | AGI 26 (+2) | END 26 (+1) | FOC 11 (+2) | SPI 4
SYNC 58% (Clear) — dodge window 116 ms — input lag ~126 ms
Form tolerance: ±62 ms · Crit 4%
Class skill points: 3 (banked)
Title: Mossbreaker (World First)
Traits: Reedwalker
When he looked up at the rim, Iron Hollow was gone. All of them, except one.
Brannagh stood alone at the edge, with her spear on her back, looking down at him in the dark. She didn't wave. She didn't whisper. After a while she turned around and walked away into the reeds.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 56%.]
LATTICE COMPANION — Session SummaryDuration: 0h 57m
Baseline in: 56% · Baseline out: 56%
Breaks: — · Hydration check-ins: 1 ✓
Physical adaptation: logged
Big night, Rook! Wind down before bed. Screens off by 10:30.
He took the headset off at 8:45 and went downstairs in his socks and found his father asleep in the recliner with the TV on mute and an empty water glass on the side table, and his mother on the couch with her feet in Maddie's lap and Maddie asleep against her shoulder.
"Well?" said his mother softly.
"We got it."
"You got it?"
"First in the world."
His mother looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled, the tired, real one, and reached out without moving her feet and squeezed his hand. "Good," she said. "Good. Now go to bed. School tomorrow."
His father didn't wake up. Owen stood there for a minute anyway, watching him breathe. Slow and even. In, out.
He'd forgotten his phone in the fruit bowl. It was so full of notifications it had given up trying to show them. The top one, from Theo, sent at 8:29, said:
Theo: BRO YOU'RE ON THE FRONT PAGE
Theo: someone clipped the last hit
Theo: it has your FACE dude. your avatar face. it looks just like you
Theo: also i'm level 10 now. i can pick a CLASS. WHERE WHEN
Owen sat on the stairs in the dark and laughed until his mother told him to shut up and go to bed.