[Baseline synchronization estimate: 48%]
"Forty-eight," Owen told the ceiling, and the ceiling, being a ceiling, took it well.
He'd eaten a second sandwich. He'd drunk most of a liter of the new, less-honey bottle, which tasted like a sad lemon. He'd stood up every hour like a man in a commercial for office chairs. Forty-eight. In his first life, his best ever login number in his first year had been forty-nine, and that was the morning after a wedding where he'd accidentally slept nine hours because he'd danced.
The river came up. Harrowgate came up. Lemonwedge was already waiting by the fountain waystone, bouncing on his toes.
"I ate a chicken thing," Theo announced. "And I drank two waters. I'm at forty-three. Is that because of the chicken thing?"
"It's because you went to bed at four. The chicken thing is helping."
"Two percent from a chicken thing." Theo looked at his hands like they'd betrayed him. "Dude. This game is a health app with swords."
You have no idea, Owen thought, and said, "Market Street first. I need to spend money."
The Vanguard trainer in Harrowgate was a broad, grey-bearded woman named Marshal Kettering who stood under a striped awning at the top of Market Street and looked at every new player like they were a horse she'd been asked to buy and had concerns about.
"Rook," she said. "Level seven already. Hm. You still hold that sword like it owes you money."
"It does owe me money."
She snorted. That was about as warm as Kettering got.
The Gnasher had dropped a silver and twenty copper on top of the Molar, and Owen had sold every rat tail and leech gland he owned to a fellow at the Exchange Board for whatever he could get. Three silver, fourteen copper, total. It was the most money he'd ever had in Vael, if you didn't count fourteen years of first life, which he was trying hard not to.
[Taunt Strike] - 50c. Vanguard form. Sync required: 40%.
A short, insulting jab: x0.8 damage. The target must focus you for 6 seconds.
Movement: weight forward, blade tip leads, a sharp stamp of the lead foot. Stamina 10. Cooldown 8 s.
[Breath Guard] - 1s 50c. Vanguard form. Sync required: 50%.
A rooted guard stance. Damage taken -30% while held.
Movement: feet planted shoulder-width, blade across the body, steady breathing. Stamina 15. Cooldown 10 s.
He bought both.
"You can't use that one," Kettering said, tapping the Breath Guard scroll. "Not properly. Not with your eyes looking like that."
"My eyes?"
"Tired. Twitchy. Half-asleep, like a man listening to two conversations." She shrugged. "Trainer's eye. The good ones look like they're right here. All the way here."
Owen thought about that the whole way down Market Street. NPC flavor, he decided. Lattice had written every trainer a little speech about form and focus. It was a nice way of saying your sync is low without breaking the fantasy.
Still. Right here. All the way here. Fourteen years he'd been listening to two conversations. Maybe she had a point.
He opened his status, because forty-eight was worth looking at.
ROOK - Level 7 VanguardHP 240/240 | Stamina 199/199
STR 10 | AGI 18 | END 19 | FOC 4 | SPI 4
SYNC 48% (Drift) - dodge window 96 ms - input lag ~156 ms
Forms: Rising Cut (45) ✓ | Back Step (40) ✓ | Taunt Strike (40) ✓ | Breath Guard (50) ⚠ Imprecise
Traits: Reedwalker
Trinket: Gnasher's Molar
Breath Guard at forty-eight would do half its job. A fifteen percent reduction instead of thirty. Better than nothing. Barely.
What none of the screens told you, and what Owen had spent most of year nine figuring out, frame by frame, from the hoarded footage of a man who never explained himself, was that Breath Guard was named that for a reason.
He filed it away. Not today.
The Cairn Road climbed out of the river valley through green hills stacked with old stone cairns, and every shepherd's gate they passed had a copper bell hanging from it that rang when the wind moved. Theo wanted to fight a ram. Owen told him no. Theo fought a ram. The ram, a Level 9 bellwether with horns like two bent hubcaps, charged him in a straight line, and Theo stood there, and Owen yelled, "Sideways!" and Theo went sideways about a quarter-second late, and the ram clipped him and launched him into a sheep.
[Lemonwedge has been knocked down.]
"They can't turn while they're charging," Owen said, while Theo lay in the grass and a sheep looked down at him. "You step sideways and you get free hits. That's the whole fight."
"You could have told me that before I fought it."
"I told you not to fight it."
"That's not the same as telling me how!"
Fair. Owen made a mental note. Things he knew were not things other people knew, and don't was a worse instruction than here's how. His dad had taught him that, sort of, about engines. He'd forgotten. He'd forgotten a lot of things his dad had taught him.
They left the ram alone. On the far side of the hills, the ground fell away into the Sunken Quarry.
It was huge. A great grey bite taken out of the hillside, cut in terraces like a stadium for giants, with old wooden cranes still leaning over the edges and rusted rails running down into the pit. At the bottom, the quarry was full of water so green it looked fake, still and flat and faintly glowing.
"Okay," said Theo. "That's cool."
"Quarrymen were digging for some special stone. Broke into an aquifer, the whole thing flooded, the town that worked it died." Owen started down the switchback path. "There's a questline about it. It's mostly about water rights. Very dull. There's a guy named Foreman at the bottom you don't want to meet yet."
"Is he a foreman?"
"He's a nine-meter clay giant wearing a hard hat."
"So, yes."
As they came down to the first terrace, something rose out of the green water. It came up slowly, like a man getting out of a bath, all dripping brown clay and two dim glowing holes for eyes, and it looked around with its head at a slight angle, and then it slid back under.
[Mudling - Level 9]
"Nope," said Theo.
"They're slow. They hit hard but they're slow. Come on. Third terrace."
The ledge was just how he remembered it, which was a relief so strong it almost made him dizzy.
The third terrace ran around the quarry wall in a broad stone shelf, and at its far end, a ramp of broken stone sloped up toward a narrow lip of rock. Right where the ramp met the lip, a dark seam of harder stone cut across the floor like a line on a court. Mudlings pathed up the ramp to the seam and stopped. Something about the stone. The community had argued about it for years: lore reason, path-mesh bug, a developer's grudge. Owen didn't care. What he cared about was that a mudling standing at the seam couldn't step over it, and a Vanguard standing exactly one long step behind it could reach the mudling with the tip of his sword, and the mudling couldn't reach back.
And they came back. Every forty seconds, a fresh one rose out of the water at the bottom of the ramp and walked up to die.
"Okay," Owen said. "Stand there. No, there. Behind me. You never step past this crack. Ever. If you step past it, they reach you, and they hit like a truck."
"How do you know all this?"
"Some guy's video."
"The game came out yesterday."
"He's very fast," Owen said, and stepped onto the ledge.
The first mudling came up the ramp at a heavy walk, clay sloughing off its shoulders, and stopped at the seam, and swung at him. Its fist went past his nose, close enough that he could feel the cold coming off it. Owen didn't move. He didn't need to. One long step. He'd measured this with his feet a thousand times in a different life.
He hit it with a Rising Cut and it barely noticed.
"Okay, now you," he said. "Ember Bolt. Flick, then word."
Theo flicked. "Kaal!"
The ball of fire hit the mudling square in the chest and the clay hissed and steamed and went pale, cracking across the surface like a dropped plate. A new icon popped over its head.
[Mudling - Brittle (next physical hit x1.5)]
Someone reproduced this passage from the NovelPhoenix site without the author's permission. Reading the original publication supports the writer.
Right foot back. Sword low on the left. Push off, rotate, cut up and across, exhale.
[Rising Cut - weak point!]
Rising Cut was already x1.5. The weak point under the arm was x1.5 on top of that. Brittle was another x1.5. Owen didn't need to do the math, because the mudling did it for him: it came apart. Not killed, shattered, chunks of baked clay bouncing down the ramp like pottery thrown off a roof. Something small and round rolled to a stop at his feet.
Theo made a sound like a teakettle. "Did we just—did that—"
"Fire bakes them. Then you break them." Owen picked up the round thing. "Every forty seconds. Until we get bored."
[Mudling Core] (Common, crafting material)
A dense knot of quarry clay, still faintly warm. Used in alchemy and pottery.
"The quarrymen dug until the stone went soft, to where the world wears thin. What came up out of the dark remembered being something else."
Sells: 6c.
"That's creepy," Theo said, reading over his shoulder.
"It's flavor text." Owen tossed it into his bag. "The whole quarry questline's about an aquifer. The 'something else' is water. It used to be stone, now it's mud. They were very proud of that line."
He was almost sure that was right. Someone had explained it on the forum, with diagrams.
The next mudling rose, right on time, at the bottom of the ramp.
They found the rhythm in about ten minutes. Bolt, Cut, shatter, loot. Forty seconds. Theo learned to hold the flick until the mudling hit the seam so it didn't step back into the water; water made them Soaked, and Soaked mudlings regenerated, and on the fourth pull a mudling turned around, waded in up to its knees, healed itself to full and came back looking smug. "It's cheating," Theo said, outraged. "It's a puddle that cheats."
"So keep it dry."
By 2:50, Owen was Level 7 and three-quarters. Theo, getting a share of kills four levels above him, had gone from five to six and was halfway to seven. Every time he leveled, he screamed. Owen had stopped asking him not to.
At the hourly mark, they both logged out for two minutes, stood up, drank water, and logged back in. Theo complained the entire time. Then he logged back in at forty-four.
"...Okay," Theo said. "Okay, that's actually stupid. I stood up and I got a percent?"
"You got a percent because you stood up and drank water. Next you're going to tell me you want to do a push-up."
"I will literally never do a push-up."
He'd do one in about a month, Owen guessed. Then he'd do forty a day and talk about nothing else.
At 3:31 PM, five figures in grey tabards came down the switchback.
Owen saw the white tower first. He felt his stomach turn over in a slow, heavy way, like a ship changing course.
No. No, no. You come in on week one, Wednesday. Thursday. Not day two. Not day two.
There were five of them, moving in tight formation, and they moved right. That was the thing about pod players: every step landed where they meant it to. No float, no lag, nothing loose. At ninety-eight percent sync, the avatar didn't follow you. It was you. Watching them walk down the quarry terraces was like watching dancers among a crowd of people in rubber boots.
[Brannagh - Level 10 - Iron Hollow]
[Tor - Level 9 - Iron Hollow]
Brannagh was in front. She was the woman who'd waded into the reeds yesterday. Pale, dark hair cut short, a spear on her back and a face so calm it seemed slightly bored. Tor, the big guy with the two-handed axe, was behind her, already grinning.
"Oh, cool," said Theo. "More people."
"Not cool," Owen said. "Bad people. Stay behind the crack."
Brannagh stopped at the edge of the third terrace and looked at the ledge. She looked at the seam. She looked at the mudling that was walking up the ramp at that moment toward Owen, and at Owen, standing exactly one long step back. And Owen watched her work it out in about two seconds flat, and saw her face not change at all, which was worse than if it had.
"Rook," she said. "You're the rat guy."
He blinked. "...The what?"
"Nilo Faust's stream. This morning. The guy who soloed Gnasher in the reeds at Level 6." She tilted her head. "My guild leader watched the clip nine times. He's very interested in how you knew where it was."
Oh, you idiot. Oh, you absolute goblin.
So that was why. Not Wednesday. Today. Because Owen had gone and been interesting, on camera, in front of forty thousand people, and somebody at Iron Hollow had looked at the clip and asked what else this weird Level 6 knew. He'd pushed a domino at 9:51 that morning and here it was, at 3:31, walking down a quarry in a grey tabard.
"Lucky guess," Owen said.
"Mm." Brannagh nodded at the ledge. "We'll take it from here."
"No, thanks. We're good."
"That wasn't a question."
"Sheltered zone," Owen said. "No PvP. You can't make us leave."
Tor laughed. It was not an unfriendly laugh, which was somehow worse. "Nobody's gonna make you do anything, man."
He went down the ramp.
Owen knew what Tor was doing about three seconds before Theo did, because in his first life, he'd watched Iron Hollow do it to a hundred players.
You couldn't attack another player in the Riverlands. But you could pull monsters. And if you happened to pull eight monsters at once and run them into a group that was already fighting, and those monsters decided they liked the new group better, then that was a tragic accident and nobody broke any rules.
Tor waded into the shallows at the bottom of the quarry and started hitting everything that came out of the water. Mudlings rose behind him, one after another, five, six, eight of them, a wall of dripping brown clay. He turned and sprinted up the ramp toward the ledge, axe on his shoulder, laughing, with a train of clay elementals behind him.
"Owen," said Theo, very fast. "Owen."
"Stay behind the crack."
"There's eight of them!"
"Stay. Behind. The crack."
Tor ran up the ramp, past the seam, onto the ledge. He was fast. Ninety-eight percent fast. He went straight past Owen and Theo and off the far side of the lip and dropped down onto the terrace below, rolled, came up, and turned around to watch.
Eight mudlings walked up the ramp after him and stopped at the seam.
Then they stood there, in a neat, sad row, unable to cross, glaring at the two players on the ledge with their dim little eyes. The man who'd pulled them was on another terrace now, out of their path. For ten seconds, they did nothing. Owen counted. Then, as one, they turned around and walked back down the ramp into the water, completely reset, healing as they went.
[Mudling (x8): Evading - returning home.]
There was a silence.
"I swear to God," Theo said, "that's the funniest thing I've ever seen."
Down on the lower terrace, Tor stood with his axe on his shoulder, looking at the water. Up at the edge, Brannagh still hadn't moved. But something about her eyes had gotten sharper.
"No leash from the ledge," she said quietly. Not to him. To herself, putting it in a box.
Yeah, Owen thought. That's the one you were supposed to figure out on Wednesday. You're welcome, I guess.
She was better than Tor. That was the problem.
She didn't try to pull mobs. She walked down the ramp herself, quietly, and stood in the shallows by the spot where the mudlings rose, and when the next one surfaced she put her spear through it before it was even all the way out of the water.
First damage. The kill was hers. The experience was hers. It never got to the ramp.
Forty seconds later, she did it again.
"That's—she can just do that?" Theo asked.
"First hit owns the kill," Owen said. "It's called tagging. She's standing where they spawn, so she'll tag them first."
"So we're done?"
Owen didn't answer. He was looking at the water.
The pod gave Brannagh ninety-eight percent. It gave her perfect timing and perfect movement and the reflexes of a person who wasn't fighting her own body. It didn't tell her where to look.
A mudling surfaced about two seconds after the water above its spawn point started to bubble. Very faint. You had to know. And the spawn point wasn't the spot where Brannagh was standing; it was three meters to the left of it, under the old crane chain, and the mudlings walked under the water for a moment before they came up where she was. Owen had stood on this ledge for most of a summer, fourteen years ago, losing exactly this fight to exactly this woman. He'd had a lot of time to stare at the water.
He took a stone out of his pouch and put it in the sling.
Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Bubbles under the crane chain. Thirty-eight.
He threw.
It was a long throw. At forty-eight percent, the stone went where he wanted it to go about seventy percent of the time, which meant he'd have to be a little lucky. The stone dropped down the length of the quarry and smacked into the water just as the mudling's head broke the surface under the chain, three meters from Brannagh, and hit it on the forehead with a hollow tok.
[Mudling - tagged by Rook.]
The mudling turned around, saw the person who'd thrown a rock at it, and walked straight past Brannagh and up the ramp.
Brannagh turned her head and looked up at the ledge for a long moment.
"Theo," Owen said, very calmly, "Ember Bolt, please."
"Kaal!"
Shatter.
He missed the next one; the stone went wide. Brannagh got it. He got the one after that. She shifted three meters left, under the crane chain, and got the next one before he could throw. He switched to sling-tagging the second spawn point on the far side, the one by the drowned cart, which she didn't know about either. She found it on the third cycle. He went back to the first one.
For forty minutes, it was the strangest fight Owen had ever been in. Nobody hit anybody. Nobody even talked. It was just a woman standing in green water with a spear and a guy on a ledge with a sling, splitting a forty-second clock, one mudling at a time, with Theo cheering every time they won one and booing every time they didn't. Tor sat on a broken crane and ate an apple and watched like it was sports.
Around 4:10, Owen hit Level 8.
[Level up! You are now Level 8.]
[5 attribute points available.]
He put two in Endurance, one in Strength, one in Agility, and one, after a second's thought, in Focus. Focus widened your form tolerance, the margin of error on your timing, and he'd been thinking about breathing all afternoon.
ROOK - Level 8 VanguardHP 260/260 | Stamina 212/212
STR 11 | AGI 19 | END 21 | FOC 5 | SPI 4
At 4:40, Brannagh came back up the ramp. She stopped at the seam, one step from Owen, on the wrong side of it, where the mudlings stood. She was a little taller than him. Her avatar's eyes were grey, like her tabard, and very steady.
"Who taught you the bubbles?"
"Some guy's video."
"The game came out yesterday."
"He's very fast."
Something happened at the corner of her mouth. It might have been the start of a smile. It went away before he could be sure.
"Iron Hollow will be running this ledge by Wednesday," she said. "We'll have people here in shifts. Twenty-four hours. You won't get a pull."
"I know," Owen said, and she gave him a strange look, because he'd said it like he was remembering it instead of guessing.
"Corran's going to want to talk to you." She turned and walked back down the ramp. Over her shoulder, without looking back: "Nice throw, under the chain."
Tor got up off his crane, waved at Theo, and followed her.
They stayed until 5:35, when Owen's sync was down to forty-six and his Rising Cut had started to flicker on the second hit of each pair. Theo was Level 7. He'd screamed so much his voice in the headset had gone hoarse.
"Dinner," Owen said.
"Dude. One more."
"Dinner."
"You're dad-ing me."
"I'm dad-ing myself. You're just nearby."
Theo grumbled, and then from somewhere very far away, through the walls of a real house across town, a woman's voice yelled Theodore!, and Theo said, "Oh no, she full-named me," and logged out so fast his avatar flickered.
Owen stood alone on the ledge for a second, watching the next mudling rise out of the green water and walk up toward him.
He thought about Gnasher at the east pools, not the north. About Hobb the miller coming out at seventy-one seconds instead of ninety. About Iron Hollow at the quarry three days early, because of a clip that shouldn't have existed. Fourteen years of knowledge was a map. But the map was drawn from the wrong angle, and the territory was starting to shift under it, and every time he used it, it shifted a little more.
The mudling stopped at the seam and swung at him and missed by an inch.
Fine, Owen thought. Then I get better at the parts that don't come from a map.
He logged out.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 46%.]
Dinner was spaghetti, with a salad his mother put in front of him and watched him eat the way a zookeeper watches a new animal adjust to its enclosure.
After, he went out to the garage, pulled the tarp off his dad's rusty bench, and pressed the bar with the smallest plates. Nine. The ninth one took everything he had, a long, shaking, ugly rep, and when it was over he lay on the bench with his arms on fire and laughed at the rafters for no reason.
Then he went upstairs and got the notebook out.
Sun Mar 15.
Login 47 / 48. Out 46. Lv 8.
Bench: 9. Less pathetic. 10 tomorrow.
Gnasher: EAST pools, not north. (Watched it from Nilo's camera. Everything I know, I watched from someone else's camera.)
Miller: 71 sec, not 90??
Iron Hollow at quarry DAY 2. Because of the Nilo clip. My fault.
Brannagh knows the seam now. Knows the bubbles by Wednesday.
Corran wants to "talk."
He looked at it for a while. Then, underneath, in bigger letters:
THE MAP IS NOT THE TERRITORY. CHECK EVERYTHING.
And then, because he was eighteen and also thirty-two and both of them were tired:
Theo screamed every level. Best day in 14 years.