Chapter 2: Blessed by a Goddess, Still Hungry
The welcome package arrived with a cheerful chime, and Liam accepted it, watching iron gear materialise piece by piece before equipping everything in order. The armour had been designed for a standard adult male Vanguard.
Liam was currently three and a half feet tall.
The chest plate hung off his small frame like a poncho, the greaves clattered against each other with every micro-movement like two loose pipes banging together, and the helmet dropped down over his eyes the moment it settled, plunging him into complete darkness. He had to tilt his entire head back at a forty-five-degree angle just to see the sky.
He stood like that for a moment, chin up, visor resting on his nose, chest plate slowly sliding south. Camouflage, he told himself. A passing player took one look at him and walked faster.
Perfect.
Across the plaza, players were already forming guilds with names like Godslayers and Shadow Legion, shouting about territory and early grinding and who was going to hit level 10 first. Someone was attempting to livestream himself eating dirt. He had seventeen viewers, and they were all telling him to stop.
Liam waddled left the armour made a sound like someone dropping cutlery down a staircase with every step, which was unfortunate but manageable. He found the herb stall at the edge of the settlement, crooked and sagging, built by someone who had clearly only ever heard a stall described secondhand.
The NPC behind it was arranging dried weeds with the focused energy of a man who had been doing this since the server launched and fully intended to keep doing it until the server died. He looked up when Liam clanked to a stop in front of him.
Liam didn’t use voice chat because his voice coming out of this body would raise questions he didn’t have time for. He typed:
[How are you doing?]
The NPC blinked, and something in his expression shifted, softened. Apparently, player manners were rare enough to be genuinely disarming.
"Well enough," he said. "First time I’ve been asked."
[What do I need to do to cook something here?]
The man glanced at the starter sword on Liam’s hip, then at Liam’s tiny face. "Cooking? Most folks are out there trying not to get eaten by a Level 1 Slime."
Liam stared at him with the patient, hollow-eyed calm of a man who had once stood over a stock pot for sixteen consecutive hours and felt absolutely nothing.
The NPC caved immediately. "Alright, alright. There’s no kitchen here, so you’d have to source your own ingredients: frogs by the water, chickens behind the houses, nobody officially owns them." He leaned in. "Just don’t make a scene."
[Thank you. What’s your name?]
"Spring."
Liam’s fingers hovered over the floating screen keyboard.
[Is Spring an ingredient?]
"It’s a season," the man said flatly. "Or a name, not a food."
[Understood. Nice to meet you, Season.]
"That’s not what I— I said Spring, not—" Spring pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
Liam was already waddling away. He found the chickens behind the third house on the left, a fat [English Chicken] pecking at the dirt like it owned the property, carrying the energy of a creature that had never once considered its own mortality. Liam checked his surroundings, found them empty, drew his starter sword, stepped forward, and tapped the bird cleanly at the base of the skull with the hilt. One hit, professional and quiet. The chicken became loot.
He crouched over it, and that’s when something strange happened. The [Absorption] skill didn’t announce itself like a menu option but arrived like an instinct, a deep, unreasonable hunger that bypassed every rational thought he had and went straight for something older and more basic. His fingers tingled and his mouth watered. I should pluck this, he thought. Season it, find a heat source, render the fat, and get the skin properly crispy. His stomach growled. It sounded geological Liam looked at the chicken.
The chicken did not look back.
"Whatever," he muttered, voice muffled by the helmet. "This is what I am now." He picked it up and took a massive, committed bite, feathers and all.
[Absorption Skill Triggered.]
[You have consumed: 1x English Chicken.]
[Recipe Unlocked: Chicken Soup]
[User Effect: +50,000% Melee Resistance, 24hrs]
The taste hit Liam like a memory of every good meal he’d ever made, savoury and electric and impossibly complete, not raw bird but pure concentrated data wearing the flavour of something real. Fifty thousand per cent, Liam thought, the number rotating slowly in his mind. Melee resistance from soup, I wouldn’t just tank a hit, I’d be the thing hits broke against.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
Liam froze.
He looked up with the chicken still hanging from his mouth and one feather stuck to his visor. Standing at the alley entrance was a girl with long pink hair, cat ears, and pink eyes that were currently wide enough to be medically concerning. She was maybe 5’4", wearing starter leather armour that fit considerably better than his did, and her cat tail was puffed out to approximately twice its natural size. Liam’s brain ran a two-second assessment. Pretty, filed and immediately discarded, not relevant. Chicken is relevant; the 50,000% is relevant.
Elizabeth Kim.
He’d recognise her anywhere, different ears but the same bone structure and the same posture of someone who had never once in their life been caught unprepared. She was currently being caught unprepared, staring at a three-and-a-half-foot armoured wolf-child crouched in an alleyway, eating a raw bird in the dirt.
"Mmmf," Liam said. "Hi."
"WHERE ARE YOUR PARENTS?" Elizabeth’s voice cracked. "ARE CHILDREN ALLOWED IN THIS GAME? YOU CAN’T JUST... IT STILL HAS FEATHERS—" She lunged forward on pure instinct, grabbed the chicken, and yanked it clean out of his mouth.
Liam’s hands were suddenly empty.
My chicken, he thought, with the calm, focused displeasure of a man watching someone walk off with his mise en place.
"This is raw!" Elizabeth held the bird at arm’s length as it might detonate. "You just BIT it! You ate the feathers! What is wrong with you? Are you okay? Do you need an adult?"
Liam looked at her, then at the notification still floating in his peripheral vision showing +50,000% Melee Resistance, then back at Elizabeth.
"Good soup," he said in his natural voice, low and unhurried, the baritone of a man three times the size of the body it was coming out of.
Elizabeth recoiled, and her cat ears pinned flat. "What did you
just say? Why do you sound like that? You look like you’re eight years old, and you sound like you’ve been smoking since before I was born."
[The soup,] Liam typed, gesturing vaguely at the air beside him.
"WHAT SOUP?" She looked around the empty alley. "There is no
soup! There’s just you and a dead bird and a serious hygiene situation!"
Liam was not listening. He was staring at the recipe notification and mentally building the prep sequence because he needed a pot, needed water, and needed to figure out whether the game’s cooking mechanics ran on real culinary logic or simplified RPG shortcuts, since that distinction was going to matter enormously in about ten minutes.
Elizabeth waved a hand directly in front of his visor. "Hello? Anyone home?"
He focused, looked at the chicken in her hand, then at her face.
[Can I have that back?]
"Are you serious right now?"
He reached out, plucked the chicken from her grip with a calm, efficient motion, and turned. Then he waddled away at maximum speed, which was not fast given the greaves’ situation but was extremely purposeful, and disappeared into the gap between two houses like a very small and very loud ghost.
Why her, he thought, once he was clear. Two billion players in this game, and the one who catches me with feathers in my teeth is National Rank Number One. He stopped, shoved the chicken into his inventory, and breathed. She didn’t recognise me. She thinks I’m a feral child, which is actually ideal.
He looked at his small, pale hands and thought about the 50,000% sitting dormant in his skill queue, waiting for a pot, water and twenty minutes of simmer time. One chicken, one recipe, one notification the developers hadn’t caught yet.
I’m going to need a lot more of these.
He straightened up as much as the chest plate would allow and ran through his priorities.
Find a pot. Avoid Elizabeth Kim. Find more chickens than Elizabeth Kim has seen in her entire life. He started waddling, and the armour clanked.
Somewhere behind him, faintly, he could still hear her yelling about hygiene.