Chapter 14: The Price of Absolute Hunger
The camera was still running, because 600 people had apparently decided that watching Liam walk through a market was content worth consuming, and Liam had decided that 600 people were a resource worth maintaining.
"Turn it off," Elizabeth said, for the third time since they’d left the townhouse, her pink tail doing the fluffed-out thing it did when she was two steps past annoyed. "The local chat is calling us a power couple. We walked out of a house together, and now we are apparently a power couple."
"Information is currency," Liam said, not looking back at her. "Let them watch."
[ShieldBasher]: LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THIS GUY HE’S REALLY A CHEF??
[SimpKing99]: TAIL WIGGLE AT 0:45, BLESSED STREAM.
[Guild_Recruiter_67]: Forget the class. Look at his centre of gravity. heavyweight.
They hit the Iron Hearth Guildhall at the far end of Merchant’s Row, a stone building that smelled like exhaustion and institutional cooking, the kind that comes out of a pot nobody is paying attention to. The guards at the door were elite tiger-kin women in polished armour who had the look of people who hadn’t slept properly since the logout button disappeared.
"No recruits," the nearest one said, then paused, her nose twitching toward Liam’s pack. Rosemary. Enchanted salt. The faint volcanic warmth still radiates off the Golem-shard in his inventory.
"I’m not here for recruitment," Liam said. "I have Rabbit Toad meat, a Golem core, and I heard your guild is hitting a wall on the hundred-man raid. I want in as a chef, and I’m taking a raid slot too. I’m not sitting in a kitchen while the XP is happening somewhere else."
The guard looked at him for a long moment, looked at Elizabeth behind him, and stepped aside.
The guildhall was massive and full of beautiful, exhausted women who looked like they hadn’t had a real meal in two days, which was because they hadn’t. The auto-cook system produced grey paste at five per cent hunger restoration. It tasted like wet paper and the memory of better times. Every surface in the hall had a bowl of it sitting somewhere, mostly untouched.
In the centre of all of it sat Berry.
She was a tiger-kin woman built like a natural disaster, orange hair, a gilded chestplate that was having a genuinely difficult time with its job, and a golden cape over her shoulders that said she had won something at some point and wanted people to keep knowing about it. She looked predatory and powerful and completely miserable, staring at a bowl of grey paste with the expression of someone being personally insulted.
She looked up when Liam walked in. Her eyes did the thing everyone’s eyes did, which was take a moment to process the full situation before arriving at an opinion.
"Five minutes," Berry said, her tail flicking once. "I don’t need a life skiller who thinks he can hold a sword. I need a miracle and my girls are running on fumes, and we can’t clear a raid boss on empty stomachs."
"Your girls are failing because they’re eating trash," Liam said, stepping up to the table without breaking stride. He pulled the Grape Soda and a sealed container of chicken soup from his inventory and set them down in front of her. "I’ll fix the food and in exchange, I want a permanent guild slot and a front-line position in the raids. I’m a Vanguard. I’m not washing pots while the fight is happening."
Berry’s eyes dropped to the container. The smell hit the hall the way it always did, like a physical thing, like someone had opened a door into a kitchen that actually knew what it was doing. Three women at the nearest table stopped talking mid-sentence.
"You brought a friend," Berry said, her gaze sliding past Liam to Elizabeth, who had come to stand at his shoulder with her chin up and her tail very deliberately still. "Is the cat yours?"
"She’s a Warrior," Liam said. "A good one we come together or not at all."
Elizabeth did not react to being described as a package deal because she was a professional and also because Liam had already moved on and wasn’t looking at her.
Berry picked up the container of chicken soup, opened it, and took one sip. The hall was quiet enough that everyone heard her put it down.
"A chef who wants to fight," Berry said, and her fangs showed when she smiled, which was not a comfortable smile but was a real one. "I don’t care if you’re an extra body soaking up hits as long as the meals are real if you can keep my girls fed and hold the front line, and you’re in." She looked at the soup again. "Just keep him away from the decorative props," she added, to no one in particular. "He looks like he’d try to sauté them."
[System: Guild Invitation Received — Iron Hearth]
[Note: Joining a guild in a death game is legally binding... probably.]
Liam accepted it before she’d finished the sentence.
[Guild Joined: Iron Hearth]
[Role Assigned: Combat Chef, Front Line]
[Elizabeth has joined: Iron Hearth]
[Role Assigned: Warrior, Flank Support]
Berry leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the calculating patience of someone who had been running a hundred person operation on grey paste and willpower and was now revising her projections. "The raid window opens in forty-eight hours you’ve got until then to get my girls back on their feet." She tapped the bowl of grey paste with one claw. "If this is still what we’re eating when the gate opens, you’re on dish duty for eternity."
"Understood," Liam said, already turning toward the guildhall kitchen, already running ingredient counts in his head, already three steps into a problem that had nothing to do with raids or guild politics or the hundred pairs of eyes currently watching the new guy with the silver hair and the volcanic warmth coming off his shoulders move through their hall like he’d already decided it was his kitchen.
Elizabeth stayed where she was for a moment, watching him go, then looked back at Berry, who was watching him too, with the expression of someone who had just made a very interesting acquisition and was still deciding what to do with it.
"He has always liked that?" Berry asked.
"Yes," Elizabeth said.
Berry picked up the soup again. "Good," she said, and took another sip.
[BobaLady]: DID HE JUST JOIN A GUILD OF WOMEN
[Draco]: HE DIDN’T EVEN HESITATE
[Guild_Recruiter_67]: FORTY EIGHT HOURS TO FEED A HUNDRED PEOPLE. THIS MAN IS INSANE.
[SimpKing99]: I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO BE FED BY THIS MAN.