LATTICE COMPANIONAdaptation threshold reached. Your physical baseline has been updated: 56%. Five in nine days, Rook! You're on fire. (Not literally. Please hydrate.)
Monday, 6:12 AM. Owen read it in the dark and grinned at the ceiling like an idiot.
Fifty-six. Plus three for Clear Draft, plus two for a warm-up, plus whatever flow he could squeeze out of a wolf. That was sixty-four on a good night. Sixty-five was one more threshold away, and thresholds had been coming every other day like buses.
He did the math in his head, the way he used to do raid cooldowns. If he got another point Wednesday, he could be standing in front of Ser Odran by Thursday night. Four days early. Four days ahead of a schedule he'd made up himself.
Marguerite had said three days a week. Walk the others.
Marguerite had also said treat them like a rental, and people put way more miles on rentals than on their own cars. Everybody knew that.
He put on his shoes.
The track at 6:30 on a Monday was a different country from the track on Saturday. No Dad. No Marguerite, who did her laps at seven. Just fog lying on the infield and a guy from the cross-country team who went by Owen so fast it felt like a personal comment.
He ran two miles. Then, because his legs felt fine, he ran a third.
It wasn't fast. A third mile at Owen's pace was less a run than a strong opinion about walking. But by the end of it he was soaked and shaking, and he stood with his hands on his knees by the long-jump pit feeling amazing. Like he'd stolen something.
His left shin had a small, hot spot in it, about the size of a quarter, right on the inside edge of the bone.
He decided that was what progress felt like.
Chemistry was stoichiometry again, which Mrs. Okonkwo described as "the part where we find out who was listening in February."
"Mr. Callery," she said, stopping at his desk with the beaded chain on her glasses swinging. "Your homework is correct."
"Thank you."
"All of it. Even number nine." She held the paper up to the window like she was checking a twenty for a watermark. "Number nine has broken stronger men."
"I went to the Thursday thing."
"I know. I was there." She put it back down. "Quiz is this Thursday. Same material. I'm telling you because your mother emailed me, and your mother is frightening, and I respect that."
"She emailed you?"
"Twice. The second time was to apologize for the first time. Then she asked about limiting reagents." Mrs. Okonkwo moved on down the row and said over her shoulder, "Sleep Wednesday night. Tired kids make arithmetic mistakes and blame the moles."
Theo leaned across the aisle. "She said 'moles' like it was a threat."
"It's always a threat."
He logged in at 6:40 that night, after dinner and homework, with three hours on the clock and the contract on the fridge saying DONE BY 9:30.
[SYNC 56% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 58m) + 2% (Primed) = 61%]
Sixty-one before he'd touched a sword. He stood in the square and actually laughed out loud, and an NPC flower seller turned and looked at him like he'd done something unhygienic.
He took the Cairn Road at a jog. Theo was on a study call for history and wouldn't be on until eight, which suited Owen fine. He wanted the ridge to himself. He wanted to spend two hours doing the same three beats on the same grey wolves until his hips gave up the last seven degrees.
They didn't.
[Threefold Step - Imprecise (motion)]
[Pivot: 84° / 90°]
Eighty-four. One more degree than Saturday. He did it forty more times, and it was eighty-four, eighty-three, eighty-four, eighty-two, eighty-four. The number didn't move. He did, a lot, and the number sat there like a cat on a keyboard.
At 7:50 a pack came over the crest, four of them, and he took them clean, beat by beat, the flow climbing up his spine the way it did when everything lined up.
[SYNC 64% (Flow +3)]
Sixty-four. His best number ever, in either life. He stood on the ridge with dead wolves dissolving around him and stared at the top-left corner of the world until the flow decayed, one point at a time, back to sixty-one.
One more point of base. That was all. One.
When he logged out at 9:24, the shin was there again, and it had a friend in his right knee.
He did his eleven pushups. Then twelve, because Saturday had been twelve. Then he lay on the floor and looked at the plastic stars Maddie had stuck on his ceiling when she was six and he was twelve and he'd yelled at her for it, and wondered why it felt so much like he was running out of time when he'd literally been given fourteen extra years.
Tuesday he ran again.
He told himself it was fine because it was a short run. Two miles. Then on the way back to the car, he did the stadium stairs, because the stairs were right there, and stairs were basically a different sport, which meant it didn't count.
The Companion said nothing at 6 AM about thresholds. It said Good morning, Rook! Big day? Remember to stretch.
[SYNC 56% (base)]
Fine. The thresholds didn't come every day. He knew that. Monday-Tuesday back to back had been a fluke. He'd get one tomorrow.
Wednesday he ran twice.
That was the part he couldn't explain later, even to himself. He ran two miles at 6:30 AM, then went to school, then went to the track again at 3:30 instead of going home, because he'd lain awake at 5 AM doing math and decided that if thresholds came from training, more training meant more thresholds. It was the kind of logic that had made him buy three hundred Copper Bells once.
Marguerite was there at 3:30. He hadn't known she came in the afternoons too. She was walking, not running, in her purple windbreaker, a water bottle in each hand like dumbbells.
She watched him do one lap. She watched him do a second. On the third, she stepped into lane four and held up a bottle like a crossing guard's sign, and he had to stop or run her over.
"You ran this morning," she said.
"How do you—"
"Your shoes are still wet from the morning dew. Also your face." She looked at his legs. Not in a gross way. In the way his dad looked at a truck that was making a noise. "Point to it."
"Point to what?"
"Whatever hurts. Everybody's got one by the third week. Point."
He pointed at his left shin. She nodded like she'd known all along.
"Shin splint. Medial. Small one, so far." She handed him one of the water bottles. "What did I tell you."
"Three days a week."
"And?"
"Treat them like a rental."
"And what are you doing?"
He thought about it. "Treating them like a rental."
"You're treating them like you stole them." She took a long pull of her own water. "Here's a thing I told kids for thirty-one years, and three of them listened, and one of them went to State. Your body doesn't get stronger when you train. It gets stronger when you rest after you train. The training is just the question. The rest is where it writes the answer." She pointed the bottle at his shin. "You keep asking the question and never giving it time to answer, you're not going to get a better answer. You're going to get that."
"I have a—" He stopped.
"A what? A deadline?" She smiled, and her whole face folded up like a paper map. "Honey, everybody your age has a deadline. Go home. Walk tomorrow. Don't run till Saturday."
He went home. He did not run till Saturday. But he did a hundred air squats in his bedroom that night while the hotfix countdown ticked on the forum, because squats weren't running.
Hotfix 1.0.5 had gone live at 6 AM that morning, on schedule, on Wednesday, as promised.
Owen had checked the Exchange on his phone between second and third period.
HARROWGATE EXCHANGE - Copper BellLast sale: 3c | 24h high: 9c | Vendor price: 2c (Cairnfolk)
Three copper. A month of zone chat, a meme, a chant, a girl in Gilded Ledger saying lol, and it had all come down to three copper and a vendor with an endless crate.
The forums were exactly what he remembered from his first life, except this time he was reading them from the outside, like a guy reading his own obituary and finding it accurate.
bought 1400 bells at 31c. ama can we talk about how lattice WARNED us and people still bought the rat guy sold on saturday. the rat guy is a prophet. we should have listened to the rat guy who even is the rat guy Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
This text came from NovelPhoenix.com without permission. The author's story there is the place that supports its creator.
some unclassed vanguard. he was also in the gravemoss clip. the tree guy wait the rat guy and the tree guy are the same guy??
Owen closed the app and put his phone in his pocket and sat through the rest of third period trying very hard to look like a person who had never been a rat guy or a tree guy.
His session Wednesday night was the worst one he'd had since launch.
[SYNC 56% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft, 3h 59m) = 59%]
No Primed. The room was fine and he'd warmed up like always. He frowned at the corner of his vision, and a small grey line he'd never seen before slid under the number.
[Note: recent hard exercise detected. Primed unavailable.]
He took the wolves anyway. He fought like a guy wading through syrup. His legs, the in-game ones, were fine. But the thing between him and the legs had gone foggy. The pivot came in at eighty-one, eighty, seventy-nine. Theo, who'd logged in at eight and was hitting things with ice, watched him fizzle a Rising Cut (sync high enough, motion sloppy) and said, "Dude. Did you get worse?"
"No."
"You look like me."
"Thank you, Theo."
"That's not a compliment, I'm telling you as your manager. You look like a guy playing on a laptop in a car."
He logged out at 9:10. He didn't even fight for the last twenty minutes. He lay there with the headset on, waiting out the ten seconds, and every one of them felt like a judgment.
Thursday morning the calibration took twenty-five seconds instead of twenty, which had never happened. He lay on his bed at 6:45 AM, headset on, not for a session, just to check. A thing he'd started doing that he knew, objectively, was the behavior of a man who weighs himself four times a day.
[Calibrating... ]
[Modifier active: Overtraining (accumulated) -3%]
[SYNC 53% (base 56)]
Fifty-three.
He took the headset off and looked at it in his hands for a long time.
Fifty-three was his first-life ceiling. Fifty-three was the number he'd fought fourteen years to touch once. He'd beaten it in a week this time, and now he was back on it, and he'd done it to himself by trying harder.
He walked to school. It was the walking day anyway. The shin hurt at every step.
The chemistry quiz had six questions. He knew how to do all of them.
He made an arithmetic mistake on number three because he'd slept five and a half hours, which was about as many hours as Mrs. Okonkwo had told him not to sleep. He caught it with four minutes left. He fixed it with two. He walked out of the room with his hands shaking a little and no idea whether he'd passed, which was exactly how he'd walked out of every chemistry quiz in his first life, except in his first life he'd been sure he hadn't.
Mrs. Okonkwo graded them during the after-school session, while he and three sophomores worked through practice problems. She did it with a green pen. She said green was "less violent."
At 3:51 she put his quiz face down on his desk and kept walking.
He turned it over.
6.4/10. Number 3: nice catch. Get some sleep. — O.
Sixty-four.
Not under sixty. Clause 2a did not activate. Three hours a night, not two.
He stared at it. It was the same number as his best sync ever, which seemed like the universe being cute. Sixty-four percent at chemistry, after a D-minus life. He wanted to take a picture of it and send it to every version of himself he'd ever been.
He sent it to Mom instead. She was on shift. She replied with one word, which was GOOD, in capitals, and then, a minute later, We're talking tonight. Not about chem.
His mother had seen his shin.
That was the thing about having an ER nurse for a mother. You couldn't limp anywhere in her eyeline. She'd seen it Wednesday morning, at breakfast, when he'd come down the stairs one at a time. She'd said nothing. She'd been on nights; she'd slept through Wednesday; she'd come home Thursday at 7 AM and seen him leaving for school with the walk of a man trying not to step on his own left foot.
She was waiting in the kitchen when he got home, in scrubs, with a cup of tea and a face he recognized from his first life. It was the face from 2031, the Thanksgiving he'd skipped. The face you made when you'd already decided to say it.
"Sit."
He sat. She put her hand out, palm up, and he understood and put his left leg on the chair next to her, and she rolled up his jeans and pressed two fingers along the inside of the shin bone, gently, moving down, until he flinched.
"Medial tibial stress," she said. "Shin splint. You're lucky. Another week and that's a stress reaction, and then you're on crutches and not running till June." She rolled the jeans back down. "How many days did you run this week?"
"Some."
"Owen."
"Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday." He looked at the table. "Wednesday twice."
"And Saturday. And Thursday last week, and Tuesday last week. And the stairs." She'd had a call from Marguerite. He could see it on her face. Of course Marguerite had her number. Marguerite had probably taught half the hospital to run. "Six runs in eight days, for a kid who couldn't do a mile three weeks ago."
"I'm fine."
"Your sync's down."
He looked up. She shrugged. "Theo told Maddie. Maddie told me. This family is a wire service." She wrapped both hands around the tea. "Down how much?"
"Three. Overtraining modifier."
"Huh." She almost smiled. "The game's smarter than you."
"It's not about the—"
"It's about the game for you right now," his mother said, "which is fine. I don't care if it's about the game. I care that you're doing a thing where you think if one is good, four is better, and if four doesn't work, you do eight." She put the mug down. "That's not discipline, kiddo. That's the other thing."
"The other thing."
"I see it every shift. The guy who goes from couch to marathon in six weeks and comes in with his kidneys failing. The girl who's down to eight hundred calories because a little was working. They all say the same thing. I'm just being disciplined." She was quiet for a second. "Discipline knows when to stop. That's the whole point of it. Otherwise it's just being scared with a schedule."
It landed somewhere he didn't have armor.
He said, "You don't understand," which was the stupidest thing he'd said since he was fourteen, and he heard it come out of his mouth in his fourteen-year-old voice, and he couldn't stop it.
"Then explain it to me."
He couldn't.
That was the whole problem. He couldn't say Dad dies when I'm twenty-eight and I was in a raid. He couldn't say I spent fourteen years being the guy who knew everything and couldn't do any of it, and now I finally can, and I'm afraid if I slow down for one week it'll turn out this was all a dream and I'll wake up in Tacoma with cold hands. He couldn't say there's a deadline and I don't even know what it is.
So he said, "You don't get it, it's not a hobby," louder than he meant to.
"I know it's not a hobby." His mother's voice was perfectly even, which was so much worse than loud. "I watched you make your father a spreadsheet. I watched you read the back of a cereal box like it owed you money. I know it's not a hobby. You've been doing something since the day that game came out, and you won't tell me what it is, and I've let it go because it looked like you were getting better." Her eyes were wet, and she was angry about it. "This week you didn't look better. You looked like somebody I'd triage."
The kitchen was very quiet. The fridge hummed. The contract sat under its lobster magnet.
Upstairs, Maddie's music turned down, and then off. The wire service was listening.
"I'm sorry," Owen said, and meant it, and it still wasn't enough, and they both knew it.
His mother picked up her tea again. Her hands were steady. Twenty years of ER nights.
"Here's what we're doing," she said. "It's called a deload. Every real athlete does it, every three or four weeks, and nobody does it on their own, because it feels like quitting. Friday and Saturday, nothing harder than a walk. You sleep nine hours tonight and tomorrow night; I don't care if it's Friday. Ice on that shin, twenty minutes, twice a day. You keep the Clear Draft, you keep eating. And the game—" She sighed. "Play. But no wolves until Saturday."
"What do I do in a video game with no wolves?"
"I don't know. Fish?"
He opened his mouth to explain why fishing was a terrible use of a level-fourteen Vanguard's time, and then closed it, because he could hear exactly how that was going to sound.
"Okay?"
"Okay. Deload."
She looked at him for a long second, like she was checking a wound for infection, and then she reached across the table and put her hand on his head, the way she used to when he was small, and left it there.
"You're doing great," she said. "You're doing so much better than great that it scares me a little. That's all."
He fished.
Friday, after school, three hours on the clock and nothing to spend them on, he went down to the Harrowgate docks and bought a Common fishing rod for twelve copper from an NPC named Old Wim, who said "Patience is a river, lad," like he'd been waiting his whole programmed life to say it to somebody.
[SYNC 56% (base) + 3% (Clear Draft) + 2% (Primed) = 61%]
No overtraining line. He'd slept nine hours Thursday night, which felt like an act of civil disobedience. The modifier had cleared at calibration, the way Mom had said it might.
He sat on the end of the dock and cast into the Harrow. The bobber sat on the brown water. A heron did heron things across the river. Bread smell came off Bakery Lane. Somewhere upstream, the great wheel groaned around.
Theo found him there at 7:30 and stood behind him for a full minute in his robe before he said anything.
"Are you okay? Blink twice if you're being held hostage."
"I'm deloading."
"Is that a sex thing?"
"It's a rest thing."
Theo sat down on the dock next to him. He looked at the river. "Maddie said you and your mom had a fight."
"Maddie needs a hobby."
"Maddie has a hobby. It's tomorrow." Theo kicked his robe-covered legs over the water. "For what it's worth, I'm on your mom's side. You've been weird all week. You keep looking at the corner of your eye like there's a bug in it."
"There's a number in it."
"Yeah, I know, dude. I have one too. Mine's fifty-one." He leaned back on his hands. "It's not going anywhere. Neither are you, I hope."
Owen caught a fish. It was a Fenwild Perch, Common, and it was worth one copper, and Theo applauded so loudly that a guard came over.
[Fishing - Skill 1 → 2]
At 8:15, while Theo was trying to catch a fish by casting Frost Lance at the river, a whisper chimed.
[Whisper] Varga: hey tree guy. you fish??
[Whisper] Varga: i can see you on the docks. i'm on the bridge. don't look
He looked. There was a figure on Harrowgate's stone bridge, leaning on the rail, in plain leathers with her hood up. She did a small, sarcastic wave.
[Whisper] Rook: I'm resting.
[Whisper] Varga: in a video game
[Whisper] Rook: It's a whole thing.
[Whisper] Varga: lol. respect honestly. my coach would die
There was a pause. The bobber dipped and came back.
[Whisper] Varga: so update on the feet thing. i went up to the cairn hills like 4 times this week. found a guy in a hut. old knight guy. very dramatic
[Whisper] Varga: he won't talk to me. like literally won't. he says "the crofts don't know you, walker" and looks at the fire
Owen sat very still on the dock.
Cairn Crofts reputation. Odran's hut sat inside croft lands. The hermit wouldn't speak to anybody below Known. Owen had gotten there from Edda's cairns and a dozen croft quests, back in week one, mostly by accident, because he'd been grinding the ridge anyway. In his first life, Varga had come to the Cairn Hills in month three, after the Thornmarch, already Honored with half the continent. She'd never had to grind crofts.
This time she'd come in week three, straight from a viral clip, with nothing.
[Whisper] Varga: and THEN my coach pulled me. after the quarry thing halcyon wants me on circuit prep full time. "no side quests." so the knight guy can wait
[Whisper] Varga: i'll get the rep eventually. sheep quests. so many sheep quests
[Whisper] Varga: is it the knight? you don't have to say. it's the knight right
He typed unavailable for comment. He deleted it. He typed nothing for a while.
[Whisper] Rook: The ram on the croft roof quest is the good one. Trust me.
[Whisper] Varga: LMAO that's not a no
[Whisper] Varga: ok tree guy. go rest. i'll find it myself. still more fun
She pushed off the bridge rail and walked away into Lantern Square, and Owen watched her go and felt two things at once, which was becoming his whole personality.
The first was relief so big it made his hands go loose on the rod. Halcyon had benched her. The crofts didn't know her. He had time, a week at least, maybe two, maybe more if the sheep quests were as long as he remembered.
The second was the feeling of watching somebody walk toward a door he'd just told them how to open.
The ram on the roof is the good one. Why had he said that? He'd helped her. Some part of him that didn't care about deadlines had just wanted to be nice to a girl who was funny on a bridge.
"Who was that?" said Theo.
"Nobody. A fan."
"You don't have fans. I have fans. I'm the manager." Theo squinted at the bridge. "Was that Varga? Like, Quarry Thing Varga?"
"She likes fishing."
"Dude."
"Catch a fish, Theo."
He logged out at 9:20. He iced the shin, twenty minutes, sitting on the kitchen floor with a bag of frozen peas, because that's where Mom was, reading on the couch with her feet up, and it seemed important to be in the same room.
"How was fishing?" she said, not looking up from her book.
"I caught a perch."
"Big?"
"It was worth one copper."
"Proud of you."
He thought she was joking, and then she looked up over the book and he realized she wasn't.
He went to bed at 9:45 on a Friday. He wrote in the notebook first.
Fri 4/3. Base 56 since Mon. Peak 64 (Mon). Ran 6 times in 8 days. Shin splint. Overtraining -3 Thurs → 53 (my old CEILING, by trying HARDER). Chem quiz 6.4!!! Not under 60.
Mom: "Discipline knows when to stop." Marguerite: "Training is the question, rest is where it writes the answer."
Varga found Odran. Crofts don't know her. Halcyon benched her for Circuit prep. Time: 1-2 weeks? I told her about the ram. WHY.
Hotfix live Wed as promised. Bells 3c.
Deload is a RULE now. Write it down so you can't argue with it later.
He underlined the last line twice. Then he turned off the light and lay there in the dark, waiting to feel like he was wasting time. It never came. What came instead, around 9:50, was sleep, sudden and enormous, like falling through ice into warm water.
Tomorrow his sister turned thirteen.