Chapter 25: Press X to Doubt My Life Choices
Rogue blurred into motion, his daggers flashing as he crit stabbed the first fox, muttering "Ggez."
The second fox leapt for Ellie, aiming for her throat. She didn’t flinch. Her [Gale-Sliver Rapier] hummed, a pink and gold blur of steel that pierced the fox’s heart mid-air. She landed with a graceful spin, her skirt fluttering just enough to catch Rogue’s eye, making him trip over a root.
The third fox made the fatal mistake of lunging at the mountain of black metal.
Liam caught it mid-air by the throat with his left hand, the Vulcan Gauntlet hissing with faint orange heat at the seams, and held it there with the focused consideration of a man checking produce at a market stall. The fox kicked once. Twice. Gave up.
"Elizabeth, the small pan," he said.
"We’re in the middle of a clear." She had her sword half-raised, pink hair stuck to the side of her neck with sweat, and that particular crease between her brows that meant she was trying to decide if he was serious.
He was always serious about the pan.
"The meat is freshest when the code is still cooling," Liam said, and sat down in the dirt, pulled out his portable hearth and began skinning the fox.
"You’ve got blood on your neck," she said.
"Fox blood. It washes off."
"That’s not the reassuring statement you think it is."
He glanced up at her, and the red of his gaze caught the firelight from the hearth, and Elizabeth’s breath hitched so slightly that only someone sitting this close would have noticed. He noticed. He didn’t understand it. But he noticed, and the noticing made his chest do a single, inconvenient thud.
Rogue crouched nearby, watching with the expression of a man having a religious experience. "He hasn’t changed at all," he whispered, mostly to himself.
"Four days in a death game and he’s still the same person who tried to grill a slime because it looked like gelatin."
"If you don’t adapt, you starve and if you starve, you die. I’m just cutting out the middleman and It did look like gelatin," Liam said, tossing Hearth-Chestnuts into the dry pan. "Eat these. Scent mask. Predators won’t track us, and there’s a minor HP regen attached."
The aroma hit them like a physical force. The chestnuts began to pop, releasing a rich, buttery, roasted scent that smelled like a high-end winter festival.
"Eat these," Liam said, tossing a handful to each of them. "They make you smell like roasted chestnuts for a week. It’s a scent mask. Predators won’t track us, and it provides a minor HP regen buff."
Everyone ate them without further discussion because the alternative was arguing with Liam, which nobody had won yet.
Then he pulled out a dark shimmering essence from the Shadow-Stalker and mixed it with ground beans and boiling water, and the result was a liquid so black it seemed to have its own gravity, swirling slowly in the cups he handed around like it was deciding something.
"Drink," Liam ordered, handing a cup to Mirra. "You look like you’re about to keel over from a midlife crisis."
Mirra took one sip, and her eyes went wide in the way eyes go wide when something has exceeded every expectation without warning. "This is better than the twelve-dollar artisan roast back in the city," she said. "I feel like my soul just got a firmware update."
Rogue chugged his and immediately started vibrating. "BRO. SHADOWS. I HAVE POCKETS FULL OF SHADOWS. I’M THE SHADOW, THE POCKET MONARCH AHHHHHHHH."
"You’re addicted to caffeine," Liam said, finishing his own cup, and standing up, the massive platinum plates shifting with a sound like grinding stone while he moved with the unhurried fluidity of something that had stopped being limited by its own weight. "Thirty minutes of peak caffeine. Truffle-Hogs before sundown. Move."
"Sir, yes, sir," Rogue said, already blurring toward the treeline.
"Liam," Ellie said softly, stepping closer. Her golden gaze shimmered. "How do you move so fast in all that metal? The ground cracks, but you move like a ghost."
Liam stood up, the massive basalt plates of his armour shifting with a sound like grinding stone, yet his movements were eerily fluid. "Perk,"
Mirra fell into step behind them, finishing her cup. "For a game," she said, "the catering is five stars."
The forest insects stopped.
Not gradually, the way insects stop when something large moves through undergrowth, but all at once, a pressurized silence that dropped over the southern sector like a lid, and violet mist began coiling around their boots, carrying the specific combination of jasmine and something underneath jasmine that had no business being near jasmine.
Liam’s hand was on his sword hilt before the mist had cleared his ankles.
"Liam... be wary," the Goddess whispered, her voice tinged with a rare sharp edge. "The Umbral Matriarch has stirred. She does not fight with claws or fire. She weaves the threads of the heart until they strangle the mind. What you see is a lie, but the death it brings is very real." A shimmering notification flickered in the center of Liam’s vision, pulsing with a deep, bruised purple light.
[EVENT: The Nine-Tailed Mirage.]
[BOSS: Kitsune Matriarch — Level 30, Rare Spawn.]
[Condition: Mist of a Thousand Yearnings has been inhaled.]
"Defensive circle," Liam said, turning, and the forest was gone.
He was standing in a kitchen. Modern, bright, smelling of fresh laundry and bread baking somewhere nearby, the kind of warm domestic smell that belonged to a home he had never actually lived in. His mother was at the kitchen island, smiling with a warmth she had never once aimed at him in nineteen years of real life. His father was at the table with a newspaper and an expression of genuine, uncomplicated pride.
"You’ve worked so hard, son," his father said. "We’re so proud. You don’t need to fight anymore. Just stay. We love you."
For a split second, the iron-clad walls around Liam’s heart cracked. The "God of the Kitchen" felt like a tired kid who just wanted a hug. He stepped toward them, his hand reaching out...
The iron around Liam’s chest did something it had not done since he was small enough that it was the only armour he had. It cracked, just slightly, just enough to let the warmth of the kitchen touch something underneath it, and he took one step toward them with his hand reaching out and his red eyes doing something unguarded that they almost never did.
Then Hestia’s voice hit him like a bucket of cold water directly to the brain.
"Liam. The Hearth is cold."
He stopped. Looked at his hands. No callouses from the sword. No burn scars from the forge. Soft hands, the hands of someone who had never worked a kitchen at two in the morning or held a shield against something that wanted to kill him.
"My parents don’t say I love you," Liam said, his voice coming back up from somewhere quiet to its normal register, low and flat and certain. "And they definitely don’t smile like that."
He didn’t reach for the sword. He pulled the Hearth up from his chest, the first fire, the thing Hestia had been feeding since Day 1, and let it come, and the white-hot pillar that came out of him shattered the suburban kitchen like glass and reassembled the forest around him in pieces, violet mist burning off the grass, the silence replaced by the sound of his party and the dark trees and something very large and very cornered somewhere ahead of them in the oldest part of Tana.
He looked at the notification still blinking in his vision.
Level 30 Rare Spawn, he thought, and the hunger bar ticked up, and his red eyes did the thing. Nine tails. I wonder if they all taste different.
[Tool Tip: Weightless Forge]
Type: Passive Skill / Armour Modifier
Effect: Reduces ’Effective Weight’ of all equipped metal armour by 90% for the user. The Result: The user retains the massive Defense and Physical Momentum of heavy plate but possesses the speed of an Assassin.
Note: To everyone else, you’re a 500lb tank moving like a ninja. To anyone you step on, you still weigh 500lbs.