Chapter 7: If Found Dead, Please Blame Hestia
The ground didn’t just shake. It groaned, the way old infrastructure groans right before someone files an incident report. The forest tore itself apart in real time, textures flickering between lush greenery and raw, unrendered voids like the world was trying to reboot mid-sentence. The rabbit toads fused together in a way that clearly hadn’t been playtested, limbs overlapping and skin stretching across multiple torsos into a writhing, twitching mass of mismatched eyes and too many mouths.
Rogue’s stream chat detonated.
[BobaLady]: WHAT IS THAT
[StoneArrow]: BRO WHAT DID YOU DO
[Draco]: DAY ONE BTW??? HELLO???
"That’s not a mob," Elizabeth whispered, her sword hand not quite steady. "That’s a mistake." Liam looked at it the way a man looks at a fridge full of ingredients when he hasn’t eaten since morning. Oh, he thought. This is going to be good.
He lunged before anyone could suggest a strategy.
"Kid, WAIT—" Rogue’s shout hit empty air.
The corrupted mass surged forward with a stuttering, teleport-like movement, bodies separating and reforming mid-lunge as green poison built up in a dozen gaping mouths at once. Mirra screamed for everyone to spread. Elizabeth spread. Rogue spread.
Liam planted his feet like he was load-bearing. The first wave hit him like a full trolley in a supermarket car park. Poison splashed across his armour, hissing and sizzling, coating him head to toe in toxic film.
"MOVE," Elizabeth’s voice cracked. "WHY AREN’T YOU MOVING?"
I am eighteen years old, Liam thought serenely, watching the damage numbers float past. I have permanent poison immunity. I have 10,000x buff multipliers on a skill these developers have never heard of. And I am currently being used as a human lightning rod by a corrupted toad horde on Day 1.
Life is good.
Rogue, realising the kid was not in fact dying, made the only logical decision available to him and threw himself into the chaos. His daggers carved through the exposed flanks while Liam absorbed everything coming from the front, and the whole disaster began to look less like a wipe and more like an accidental strategy.
"New plan," Rogue panted, sliding under a leaping toad. "We use the child as bait."
"I’ll keep him healed," Mirra said, already casting, "but honestly, I don’t think he needs it."
The mass reformed, larger and angrier, stacking bodies on top of each other and trying to crush Liam through sheer accumulated weight. Poison hit him in rolling waves. He didn’t pop his invincibility skill. He didn’t dodge. He just stood there with his shield up while the numbers ticked by, doing math.
Defence at 95, he noted. With the buff multiplier that’s effectively 950,000 against physical. Against poison, its function is irrelevant. I could stand here until the server maintenance window.
Elizabeth stared at him from across the clearing with her jaw somewhere near her collarbone "That’s illegal," she said.
"Oh, this is content," Rogue replied.
[KikiKitten]: IMMUNE???
[Sundaes]: IT’S IMMUNE TO THE POISON???
[MrBlack]: DAY ONE AND HE’S JUST STANDING THERE???
"Yeah, chat," Rogue muttered, rotating around a leaping body. "I don’t think this is a normal player."
Elizabeth found her rhythm after about thirty seconds of watching Liam work. Her academic brain mapped his movement patterns with the same efficiency she applied to exam prep, identified the openings his pushes created, and started hitting them with surgical precision. She didn’t have to think about it. She just had to follow the small clanking figure and stab whatever he staggered.
It was the most irritating thing she had ever been good at.
"Left cluster reforming," Mirra called out, her panic fully converted into coordination. "Rogue, rotate. Elizabeth, push on his next Bull Rush."
"Calling it," Elizabeth confirmed, and stopped thinking about how much she shouldn’t be here.
The mass shrieked with a sound like tearing metal, condensed, and hardened into something with a health bar and a title above it.
[Corrupted Feast — Mini Boss]
"Of course," Elizabeth said.
"Obviously," Rogue agreed.
Liam looked at the health bar and felt the warmth in his chest tick up a notch.
[New Recipe Detected.]
[Hestia: "There it is."]
He triggered Bull Rush directly into the boss’s centre of mass. The shockwave rattled the ground hard enough to make Mirra stumble, and as the creature staggered and destabilised, Liam finally popped his invincibility, stepped into the middle of it, and held his position while Elizabeth and Rogue converged from both sides. The grotesque mass collapsed in a shower of light and fragmented code.
[LEVEL UP]
[LEVEL UP]
[LEVEL UP]
The chime played several more times than any of them were expecting. Rogue didn’t catch his breath. "Drops, drops, check the drops."
The loot scattered across the grass was not starter-zone loot. Rogue picked up twin daggers and made a sound that wasn’t quite a word. Mirra got a grimoire with an actual attack spell in it and looked personally offended by how good it was. Elizabeth picked up a ring that felt warm the moment she touched it.
[Ring of Hestia’s Friends — +10% Drop Rate, +30% Drop Rate when partied with a Chosen of Hestia.]
She stared at the description. Then at Liam. Then back to the description. "...Hestia?" she murmured, and slipped it on anyway because the alternative was leaving it on the ground.
Liam picked up the last item. It felt like holding a fresh loaf of bread straight from the oven. [Ring of Hestia — Vanguard Variant. Kills count as x10.]
"Kind of mid," Rogue noted, glancing over.
"Good for quests, I guess," Elizabeth agreed.
Liam did not respond because he was busy applying the ring to his absorption counter and watching the numbers move.
[Quest Complete: Spring’s Request]
[Corrupted Mini-Boss: 300 kill credits applied.]
[Level 13 reached.]
He opened his stat panel with the calm satisfaction of a man who had just found out the restaurant was giving out free dessert.
200 points. He put all of them into Defence and Attack, ignored Speed entirely, and closed the panel.
[Defence: 95]
[Attack: 100]
Every capped player still grinding Level 5 content had 100 points total to work with. Liam had just passed that number in a single stat while standing in a starter zone forest because a cooking skill broke the game’s fundamental balance, and nobody had noticed yet. He adjusted his helmet, which had slid down over his left eye during the boss fight, and turned toward the village.
Spring was exactly where they’d left him. He looked up as the party clanked back into the settlement, took in the bloodstained armour, the rare loot, and Elizabeth’s new ring, and was quiet for a moment longer than usual.
"Well," he said slowly. "You’ve been busy."
Rogue pointed at Liam. "He ate the forest, and it fought back. We got rare drops out of it. I have six hundred new stream followers. All in all, tremendous Day 1."
Spring looked at Liam for a long moment with an expression that was difficult to read.
Liam looked back with the expression of someone who was already thinking about what to cook next.
"...Right," Spring said finally, and went back to arranging his herbs.
Behind them, Rogue was already typing up his stream title.
’I found a broken Day 1 build, and it looks like a toddler — GONE WRONG (NOT CLICKBAIT)’
He looked at the thumbnail preview, nodded once, and hit upload.