Chapter 21: Black Iron Heavy Skillet
Liam woke up before the sun had fully crested the stone walls of Aeros’ inner district. Most players in the Online Game spent their mornings frantically checking their HP bars, screaming about the lack of a respawn button, or huddling in corners.
The townhouse smelled like lavender and leftover ham and the very specific silence of a morning that hadn’t decided what kind of day it was going to be yet, and Liam was already in the kitchen wondering if the previous NPC owners had left a whisk.
They had not left a whisk but he made do.
Ham hit the pan with a sizzle that filled the ground floor and drifted up through the ceiling boards, wild honey went over the toasted waffles in a slow drizzle, orange juice poured into two glasses. He worked with the quiet efficiency of a man who had done this ten thousand times before this game existed and would do it ten thousand more times after, and the scent that came off the pan was the kind that bypassed the brain entirely and went straight to the stomach.
"Food’s up," he called, his voice carrying towards the bed.
A muffled sound came from the bedroom that was not a word.
Then Elizabeth appeared in the kitchen doorway with her hair in a state of a messed up birds nest and her face already at a colour that suggested she had been awake for some time and none of it had gone well for her. She sat down, looked at the plate he slid across to her, and then looked at him with the expression of someone who had been rehearsing a sentence.
Inside the room, Elizabeth was currently having a mental collapse. Embarrassment and panic churned in her chest her heart hammered as she realised she was staring directly at Liam’s broad, bare back as he stretched. Mortified, she had promptly retreated under the covers like a turtle. ’I slept in his bed, her brain screamed. I didn’t just sleep in it; I passed out. I didn’t even set a watch! What if I snored? What if my tail touched him? Oh my god, he probably thinks I’m a total slob. Or worse, he thinks I’m easy! No, he’s Liam, he probably thinks I’m just a high-maintenance pet.’
She crawled out of the blankets, her hair a mess of pink tangles, her face the colour of a ripe tomato. She stumbled into the kitchen, smelling the honey and ham.
"About last night," she started, "the bed, I didn’t mean to..."
"It’s a king-sized frame," Liam said, biting into a waffle, "the mattress has a twelve percent recovery bonus on stamina regeneration we’d be idiots to sleep on the floor and drink your juice, we need to hit the smithy before the Iron Hearth clogs the queue."
Elizabeth stared at him he was completely serious. He had looked at a bed they shared and seen a stat booster, and the mixture of relief and frustration that crossed her face. She stabbed a piece of ham.
He was a very, very dense brick an incredibly handsome, completely impenetrable brick.
The inner district of Aeros was a different world from the muddy outer rim, cobblestones swept clean, NPCs in fine silks, shop fronts designed by someone who thought commerce should look aspirational. As Liam and Elizabeth moved through it, the crowd did what it had started doing whenever Liam was in a populated area, which was go quiet in a spreading ring outward from him like seeing a rare stone for the first time.
"They’re staring," Elizabeth said, her ears back.
"Let them," Liam said. "If they’re busy talking, they’re not undercutting us on prices."
The Iron Ladle and Blade was run by a smith named Bronn who looked up when they walked in, clocked the Vulcan Gauntlets and the silver hair and the Level 24 aura pressing against the walls of his shop, and bowed with the immediate sincerity of a man who had heard what happened in the Goblin Ridge ravine and had drawn his own conclusions.
"Master of the Hearth," Bronn said. "How can the Forge serve the Kitchen today?"
"New shield, new blade for me, something fast for her," Liam said, already moving through the racks while running through the shopping list in his head. He pulled a Heavy Iron Tower Shield off the wall, checked the weight distribution, added a Wolf-Fang Longsword, and turned around to find Elizabeth standing in front of a glass case with her tail doing a single sharp flick and her hands not quite moving toward her coin purse.
Inside the case, a slender curved blade shimmered with green light.
[Gale-Sliver Rapier — Rare. Attack +58, Speed +15. Cost: 15 Gold.]
"I shouldn’t," Elizabeth said, to herself, her voice barely above a whisper.
Liam slid fifteen gold across the counter without looking up from checking the sword’s balance. "Wrap it up."
"Liam, I have fifty gold, I can pay for it myself," Elizabeth said, the words coming out fast and slightly strangled.
"Keep your gold," Liam said, sheathing the longsword. "If you’re slow because of a cheap blade, I’m the one pulling your weight aand Besides." He paused, looked at her with the flat unreadable expression "You were the best fighter out there yesterday, and i need you at full capacity, a cook is only as good as his ingredients."
Bronn the blacksmith developed a flush across the back of his thick neck that the system had probably not been designed to render.
Elizabeth clutched the rapier scabbard to her chest and looked at a point somewhere above Liam’s left shoulder and said nothing, which was the loudest nothing she had produced since the appearance sync.
Then Liam saw the shelf behind the counter and his expression did something it had not done for any of the swords or shields or armour pieces, which was genuinely light up.
"Is that a Black-Iron Heavy Skillet?"
"Folded iron, non-stick mana coating," Bronn confirmed.
"Give me that too." Five gold hit the counter. Liam picked up the pan with both hands and held it the way people hold things they have been looking for without knowing it. He added two more gold as a tip. "For not scamming me we’ll be regulars."
[Reputation with Iron Ladle and Blade: +15%.]
They stepped back into the morning street with a new sword, a new shield, a rapier for Elizabeth, and a Black-Iron Heavy Skillet that Liam was already mentally running recipes through, and the crowd that parted around them did it the way crowds part around something they have collectively decided they want no argument with.
Liam was thinking about the forest.
[Warning: Breakthrough Point at Level 25. Requirement scaling increases by 400% at this threshold. A Rare or Elite hunt is required to trigger advancement.]
He looked at the notification. Looked at his stat points, 120 of them sitting unspent, waiting. A four hundred percent scaling increase meant the gap between Level 24 and Level 25 was not a step but a wall, and walls were either walked around or walked through, and Liam had never once walked around anything in his life.
"What are you planning?" she asked.
Liam looked at the treeline in the distance, at the forest he’d walked into on Day 1 with a cooking pot under his arm and no idea what he was about to break, and his red eyes did the thing they did when his hunger bar was climbing and something interesting was about to happen to whatever was in front of him.
"Level 4 rabbits," he said, "hit differently when you overkill them by twenty levels. I want to see what spawns."