Chapter 13: Free Loot
The stream was Rogue’s idea, technically, in the sense that Rogue had demonstrated it was possible to point a camera at Liam and have people watch. Liam had filed this information under monetisable and moved on.
He tapped the [Go Live] icon while standing over the basalt kitchen island, arranging toad legs by size with the focused calm of a man who had exactly one priority and it wasn’t the camera.
[System: Stream Initialising...]
[Current Viewers: 5]
The floating eyeball-shaped camera popped into existence at chest height, because Liam hadn’t accounted for the fact that the interface had been calibrated for his old avatar and nobody had updated it for six-foot-six.
"This is Liam," he said, voice dropping into the natural baritone it had settled into since the sync. "Tonight I’m covering how to process monster meat using residual volcanic heat."
On the screens of five players, mostly people hiding in bushes or silently crying in alleys, the stream flickered live. One side showed his POV: gloved hands moving over obsidian shards with surgical efficiency. The other side, the face cam, was pointed directly at his chest.
[Draco]: IS THAT THE GUY FROM ROGUE’S STREAM
[FarmerBob]: WHY WAS HE A TODDLER BEFORE
[FootLover]: BRO ALL I SEE IS MUSCLE MOVE THE CAMERA.
Liam didn’t look up. He was explaining heat distribution. The viewer count hit 50 when someone dropped the link into a guild chat, and then 200 when that guild’s discord picked it up, and Liam was still talking about toad connective tissue because that was what mattered.
He reached out to adjust the camera with the Vulcan gauntlets, which were not designed for precision work. He bumped the lens. It spun once and settled on a high-definition shot of his elbow.
"There," Liam said. "Better."
[WhipMe]: WE ARE WATCHING AN ELBOW TOP TIER CONTENT.
[GamerGurl]: his elbow is actually extremely well-defined. 10/10.
[BobaLady]: WAIT IS THAT A GIRL IN THE BACKGROUND
Elizabeth had stepped out from behind the privacy screen in a white linen dress she’d looted from a chest somewhere, and the camera, now at a slightly different angle, had caught her perfectly. Her pink cat tail was doing the thing it did when she was caught off guard, which was move in a way that had no business being as expressive as it was.
Her ears pinned back the moment she saw the floating eye.
"LIAM IS THAT LIVE."
"Yes," Liam said, and grabbed the camera to recentre it, which resulted in a brief chaotic pan that captured Elizabeth’s expression of pure academic-grade horror before settling on both of them.
"She’s the party leader," Liam told the chat. "I handle the calories."
[SimpPrime]: FORGET THE ELBOW
[StoneArrow]: SHE IS STUNNING
[BobaLady]: WHY ARE THEY IN A HOUSE AND IS THAT A BED.
[Faaah]: IS THIS A FORCED PROXIMITY STREAM
[Peak]: SHOW THE GIRL AGAIN
"Turn it off," Elizabeth said, in the voice she used when she was three seconds from doing something drastic.
Liam turned it off, they had to eat anyway.
The room hit four degrees sometime around midnight.
Elizabeth had taken the floor on principle, which Liam had noted and categorised as her problem. He was running saffron drop-rate calculations in his head and getting close to a number he liked when the sound of her teeth chattering became loud enough to constitute an interruption. He got up, picked her up, she was lighter than most of his prep equipment, put her on the far side of the bed, and got back in his own side. She didn’t wake up. He stared at the ceiling and went back to the saffron problem.
The maths on saffron kept him occupied until about three in the morning, at which point he moved on to wondering whether the volcanic residue in his stomach could be filtered through a grain-based recipe to produce something with actual flavour, and then he was asleep.
He was up before dawn. Elizabeth was still out, one hand curled under her chin, her cat tail tucked around her feet, her hair a complete structural disaster. Liam looked at her for approximately one second, noted that her HP and stamina bars were both full, and went to the kitchen.
By the time she appeared in the doorway, there was chicken soup on the counter and he was already in his armour. "We need a guild," Liam said, before she could say anything about the bed.
Elizabeth sat down, pulled the bowl toward her, and took one sip. Whatever she’d been about to say didn’t come out. She took another sip instead "why a guild," she said, eventually.
"Territory. The best grinding zones are locked behind guild flags if we want consistent access to high-tier ingredients, we need a flag." He was checking his inventory, running a quiet count on gold. "Also I need people to carry things."
"You want to start a guild so you have porters."
"And fighters the carrying is secondary." He closed his inventory. "Come on."
The stream was back on by the time they hit Merchant’s Row, mostly because 600 people had left comments overnight and Liam had decided this was a distribution channel worth maintaining. The camera was still slightly mis-aimed, this time at a forty-degree angle that caught Elizabeth’s face every time she tried to walk behind him to stay out of frame, which she kept trying to do, and which kept failing.
[SimpKing99]: THE TAIL LOOK AT THE TAIL IT’S SO FLUFFY.
[Guild_Recruiter_67]: forget the girl look at his centre of gravity. that’s a high-level player.
[BobaLady]: ARE THEY A COUPLE
[Draco]: THEY’RE DEFINITELY A COUPLE
"We are not a couple," Elizabeth said, to the chat, which she had made the mistake of reading. "We are rivals who survived a server event together and this is a professional arrangement."
"We’re a specialised unit," Liam said, to the camera, for reasons of accuracy. "She handles crowd control. I handle logistics and seasoning."
[ShieldBasher]: LOGISTICS. BRO YOU’RE IN A SINGLET CARRYING TOAD MEAT.
Five players in mismatched leather stepped out of a side alley and blocked the road with the energy of people who had made a decision they hadn’t fully thought through. The leader had a rusted sword and the specific grievance of someone who’d spent the night in the dirt.
"Chef-guy," he said. "You think you’re something special? Private house, cat-girl, cooking show, while the rest of us are sleeping in the dirt?"
Liam looked at his boots. Good leather. Decent thickness. Potentially useful as a smoker-box seal if cleaned properly.
"You’re blocking the light," Liam said. "The viewers can’t see the cobblestones."
The leader lunged.
Liam stepped inside the swing without breaking stride, caught the wrist, applied pressure to a specific point, and the man folded with a sound like a question being answered incorrectly. The other four came in. Elizabeth’s whip cracked twice, two of them went down, and Liam put the remaining two on the ground with the economical focus of someone clearing counter space.
Then his hands were already moving.
[Item Acquired: 45 Gold Pieces]
[Item Acquired: Worn Leather Boots]
[Item Acquired: Half-Eaten Apple]
"Liam," Elizabeth said, watching him unbuckle a bracer off a man who was still making noise. "They’re alive."
"Temporarily inconvenienced," Liam said. "The bracer is good leather."
[Item Acquired: Iron Bracer x2]
"This is unethical!"
"This is resource management." He checked the apple, decided against it, put it back. "Also I need the gold saffron is expensive."
The chat had tripled.
[Draco]: HE PUT THE APPLE BACK. HE HAS STANDARDS.
[BobaLady]: THE APPLE I’M CRYING.
[FootLover]: bro looted a live man and gave back the apple. legend.
Liam stood up, checked his gold total, and decided it was enough for saffron with some left over for a proper spice rack. He looked at Elizabeth, who was staring at him with the expression she got when she was trying to decide if what she’d just witnessed was illegal, and at the five players on the ground, who were doing the maths on whether getting up was a good idea yet.
"We still need a guild," Liam said.
"I know," Elizabeth said.
"I’m going to need a name that sounds serious."
Elizabeth looked at the groaning pile of looted players, at the floating camera eye that had captured all of it, at the chat counter still climbing in the corner of her vision, and then at Liam, who was writing something in his notebook that she was fairly certain was a spice rack inventory and not a guild charter.
"How about," she said, "we survive the next ten minutes first."
[BobaLady]: I SHIP IT.
[Draco]: SAME.
[Guild_Recruiter_67]: I WOULD DIE FOR THIS MAN.