Chapter 10: Kneel for a Bowl of Soup.
The plaza had gone quiet in the way that only happens when something deeply wrong has just occurred, and everyone present is still processing whether it was real.
The PKer’s icon floated grey above the rubble. No respawn timer. Just grey, the colour of something that wasn’t coming back.
Liam picked up a potato from the dirt, brushed it off, and handed it to the old merchant without looking up.
"I’m sorry about the mess," he said. "I’ll pay for what was bruised."
The old man stared at him with actual tears forming in his coded eyes, the kind of NPC response that wasn’t supposed to exist on Day 1. "You speak to us," he said quietly. "Most players just shout or steal."
Liam opened his mouth to answer.
Then the sky went purple.
Not sunset purple. Not pretty purple. The colour purple went when something was very wrong, and the people responsible didn’t particularly care.
The fireworks died. The temperature dropped in a specific way that had nothing to do with the weather.
[World Message: The Creators are bored.]
[The starting zones are too crowded. The weak must be culled to make room for the strong.]
A massive digital eye opened in the clouds and looked down at the town with the contempt of something that had never once considered the things below it to be important.
[Event: The Exodus of the Weak.]
[A Level 25 Lava Golem has been spawned in the Plaza.]
[NPCs are not exempt from the culling. Clear the zone or be deleted.]
The cobblestones exploded.
The Golem came up from underneath the market in a shower of stone and liquid rock, thirty feet of obsidian and living magma with eyes like voids and arms that were actively on fire. The heat hit the crowd like opening an industrial oven. HP bars across the plaza started ticking down from environmental burn damage, and the Golem hadn’t even swung yet.
It turned its massive head toward the old potato merchant.
Players ran. Not some of them, all of them, a full stampede toward the gates, trampling stalls and each other in equal measure, the NPCs invisible to them now, just background assets flagged for deletion.
Elizabeth grabbed her sword. "Liam, it’s a level 25; we have to go the system spawned this specifically to wipe the town. There’s nothing."
Liam was looking up at the Eye in the sky.
He picked up the stockpot from the cobblestones, checked that the soup hadn’t spilled, and set it back on the stove with the unhurried focus of a man who had not yet encountered a problem that couldn’t be approached through cooking.
"Move," Elizabeth said, grabbing his arm with both hands and achieving nothing. "LIAM."
"Not now," Liam said, pulling small bottles of purple liquid out of his inventory alongside a container of carbonated water. His brow was furrowed in the specific way it got when he was doing culinary maths. "I’m trying to remember if it’s two shakes or three. The fizz-to-resistance ratio matters more than you’d think."
Elizabeth stared at him, "you are making SODA."
"I’m finishing a recipe," Liam said. "There’s a difference."
The Golem, apparently offended by being ignored, pulled back its fist and brought it down on Liam like a falling building.
The sound it made on impact was not the sound of a person being hit. It was the sound of an unstoppable force meeting something that had quietly opted out of the laws of physics. The shockwave blew out every window in the surrounding block and cratered the cobblestones in a perfect ring around Liam’s feet.
Liam hadn’t moved. Hadn’t bent his knees. He was using the Golem’s glowing red fist as a work surface.
"Perfect," he muttered, pressing the purple liquid against the Golem’s knuckles with practised efficiency. "The surface temperature is exactly right for a quick reduction."
The Golem tried to lift its arm. It couldn’t.
It tried the other fist. Liam absorbed that one too without looking up, the bottles in his hands never wobbling. It tried kicking him. It tried breathing fire directly onto his head. Liam’s hair moved slightly in the updraft.
"A bit more carbonation," he said to himself, pouring the water over the Golem’s glowing thumb.
[System: You are using a Field Boss as a Kitchen Tool.]
[The Gods are watching in stunned silence.]
[Goddess Hestia has covered her face with both hands.]
"There." Liam held up the finished bottle of Grape Soda, shook it once, and checked the colour against the light. "Recipe complete."
"YOU ARE ANKLE DEEP IN LAVA," Elizabeth shouted from fifteen feet away, where she had been standing this entire time, unable to leave because her legs had apparently made a decision without consulting her.
Liam looked down. He was, in fact, ankle deep in molten slag. The Golem was sagging badly, its stamina bar nearly empty after forty-seven hits that had done nothing measurable to its target. Liam’s HP had not moved.
He looked up at the Golem.
"You finished?" he asked.
The Golem wheezed steam.
"Good." Liam put the soda away and looked at the Golem’s chest, where the core pulsed white-hot through cracked obsidian like a heartbeat. He tilted his head. "If I can eat monster parts to unlock recipes," he said thoughtfully, mostly to himself, "does that apply if the monster is technically still alive?"
"LIAM!"
He reached into the Golem’s chest cavity.
[Warning: Environmental temperature 1,200°C.]
[User Resistance: 50,000%.]
[Result: Feels like a warm bath.]
His hand closed around the core.
"Hey Elizabeth," he called back over his shoulder, red eyes reflecting the magma, hand wrapped around a white-hot elemental heart. "Do you think lava cake is supposed to be crunchy or chewy?"
In the sky, the giant Eye narrowed. The gods had sent a culling event. They had accidentally sent a grocery delivery.
Liam pulled.
The sound that followed was the Golem’s chest tearing open and also, simultaneously, the complete structural failure of the starter iron set, which had been holding on by increasingly desperate margins since the appearance sync and had now encountered a load it could not survive. The chest plate departed at speed. The greaves gave up entirely. Every buckle, strap, and joint that had been fighting a losing battle against his actual proportions surrendered at once.
What remained was a barefoot six-foot-six man standing in a pool of liquid rock holding a pulsing volcanic core, wearing what could generously be described as armour-adjacent debris.
[System: Durability of Starter Iron Set has reached negative 5,000%.]
[Equipment size mismatch is generating a Presence debuff in all nearby observers.]
[Goddess Hestia has logged off to scream into a pillow.]
Elizabeth had stopped shouting. She was just standing very still with both hands over her mouth.
Liam looked at the core, looked at the sky, looked at the Eye that had started this whole thing, and took a bite.
[CALAMITY-GRADE INGREDIENT CONSUMED.]
[10,000x BUFF ACTIVATED.]
The multiplier hit the raw elemental energy of a world boss ingredient, and the result was not subtle. A pillar of white light came out of Liam and went straight up through the clouds, through the Eye, and apparently through whatever server infrastructure was hosting the gods’ observation feed, because the Eye flickered, glitched, turned to static, and went dark.
[System Error: Event log corrupted.]
[Reason: Unexpected graphical anomaly.]
[The Culling has concluded. Result: Unknown.]
The plaza was silent except for the cooling hiss of slag and the distant sound of the last fleeing players stopping at the gate because the threat notification had disappeared.
Liam swallowed, considered the flavour profile for a moment, and reached for his notebook.
Crunchy, he thought. Definitely crunchy and notes for next time: needs salt.
Elizabeth lowered her hands from her mouth very slowly.
"You just," she said, and stopped. Started again. "You ate the raid boss."
"Field boss," Liam corrected.
"You ate it. While it was hitting you and while your armour exploded, while the gods watched."
"I also finished the soda recipe," Liam said. "It was a productive afternoon."
Elizabeth looked at him for a long moment, at the steam rising off his bare shoulders, at the cooling lava around his feet, at the notebook he was now writing in with complete calm.
She sat down on a piece of rubble.
"I need a minute," she said.
"Take your time," Liam said. "I need to find a shirt anyway."