Chapter 28: Hieght Booster
Rogue held up a small vial of bubbling blue liquid with the expression of a man who had found religion. "Height booster. One inch for an hour."
Liam reached back without turning around, took it from his hand, and crushed it under his heel. The glass shattered, and the blue liquid hissed into the dirt.
"Hey!" Rogue yelled.
"You’re already at eye level with my waist armour," Liam said. "An inch isn’t going to save your dignity." He pulled a glowing violet orb from the loot pile and tossed it backward over his shoulder. "Mirra. Catch. Matriarch’s Eye. It’ll stop your spells from missing when you’re running low."
Mirra caught it, felt the mana surge through her fingers, and looked at it with the sharp expression of someone running a price calculation. "Liam, this is an evolution material. Do you know what this sells for in the main Areo city?"
"It’s not for selling," Liam said. "It’s for the party. If you’re slow, I have to carry you, and I don’t like carrying people."
Mirra looked at the orb. Looked at him. Put it in her inventory without further argument, which was the highest form of agreement she was capable of.
Liam drove a butcher’s hook into the golden tail. The sound of steel meeting Tier-4 meat rang through the clearing like a bell. He set up the portable hearth with the efficiency of a man who had done this in worse conditions than a forest clearing after a boss fight. The Hearth skill caught the embers with a deep orange glow that always made the air feel thicker and more deliberate. The smell that came off the golden tail as it hit the heat was something that had no right to exist in a death game, rich and heavy and intoxicating, the kind of smell that made people stop mid-sentence.
Rogue stopped mid-sentence.
"Is that," he said, leaning toward the fire with his eyes doing something involuntary, "is that actually good? Like, actually good? Not game good, real good?"
"It’s Tier-4 legendary meat processed through a Level 2 Absorption skill and cooked over a divine hearth," Liam said, slicing through the golden fat with surgical precision, the juices catching the firelight like liquid mana. "It’s the best thing anyone on this server has eaten. Probably the best thing anyone on this server will eat for a significant period of time."
"And we’re just eating it in the woods," Mirra said.
"Where else would we eat it?" Liam said, confused.
He pulled the Shadow-Stalker Reduction from his belt, a small blackened jar he’d been simmering on the side since the fight ended, and poured it over the roast. The flames flared violet where they hit, the clearing going briefly and dramatically purple in a way that Rogue immediately pointed his stream camera at.
"You," Liam said to Rogue, not looking up from the meat, "are the scout. Your job is to watch, report, and stay invisible. If you can’t stay hidden, we all die." He carved a portion and set it aside. "Eat the reduction with your share. You’ll be able to walk through a crowded room without a single person knowing you’re there."
Rogue looked at the dark liquid on his portion with the reverence of someone receiving a gift they hadn’t expected to deserve. "Bro," he said, quietly.
"Don’t make it weird," Liam said.
He carved Mirra’s portion next, the Violet Eye already integrated into her build, her mana pool deep and steady in her status bar in a way it hadn’t been an hour ago. Then he carved Elizabeth’s, a thick steaming slab of white and gold meat with the juices still running, and held it out.
Elizabeth took it with both hands and bit into it, and the sound she made was not one she had planned to make in front of other people. Her golden eyes went wide, and her tail went completely rigid, and she sat very still for a moment with the expression of someone whose brain had temporarily gone somewhere else.
"Oh," she said.
[Legendary Kitsune Tail consumed — Nine-Tailed Spirit Meat, Tier 4.]
[Permanent Buff Applied: Spirit Sense. The user can detect illusions, hidden entities, and incoming ambushes within 30 metres. Cannot be removed.]
Rogue’s buff loaded a second later, and he disappeared. Not into shadows, not with a skill animation, just ceased to be visible between one moment and the next, and his voice came from the empty air beside the fire. "I’M INVISIBLE. I’M ACTUALLY INVISIBLE, I’M LIKE THIS INVISIBLE DRAGON! I COULD ROB A BANK."
"You could scout a dungeon," Liam said.
"I could rob a BANK, Liam."
Liam ate his own portion last, standing, the way he always ate when there was something else to think about. The meat was everything the flavor profile had promised, toasted honey and wild game and the older stranger thing underneath it that the slow cook had brought up properly, complex and warm and settling into his chest next to the Hearth as it had always belonged there.
[Nine-Tailed Spirit Meat consumed.]
[Permanent Buff Applied: Predator’s Clarity. Detection range doubled. All illusion and misdirection effects reduced by 80%.]
[Hearth Level: Approaching Tier 3.]
He looked at that last line for a moment. Approaching Tier 3. The Level 3 Hearth settlement upgrade, the one the Smoked Ogre Marrow Toast recipe was waiting on, the one that would let him process boss-tier ingredients at their full potential.
He was close. Whatever was next was going to need him to be closer.
The fire burned low, and the bioluminescent mushrooms came up around the clearing’s edge, and the forest made the sounds forests make when the dangerous things in them have been significantly reduced in number, and the party sat in the orange dark and didn’t talk much because sometimes a meal is enough and everything else can wait.
[Tana’s Hidden Feast — Tier Unknown. Condition: ???]
He looked at it for a long moment, then looked at the treeline, and then closed the log.
Not tonight,
he thought. But soon. They camped that night in the forest, Elizabeth lay on her bedroll, her pink tail curled tightly around her ankles, staring at the embers of the hearth. Six days. It had been exactly six days since the world ended and the "Game" began.
Back then, Liam was a two-foot-tall fluffball who charged people for the privilege of smelling his stew. Now? Ellie shifted her gaze. Liam was fast asleep or at least as asleep as a Vanguard Chef could be leaning against a mossy oak. He didn’t use a tent. He just sat there, his massive obsidian-clad legs stretched out, his silver hair catching the moonlight.
In the "Real World," Ellie had seen handsome guys, but Liam was on a level that felt like a glitch in the simulation. His jawline could probably parry a boss strike. His shoulders were so broad she was pretty sure she could use one as a twin-sized mattress. Is this real? she wondered, her face heating up to a shade of pink that matched her hair. I’m sleeping in the woods with him. Just us. And Mirra and Rogue, but they’re basically background noise. It might as well be a date. Survival, maybe even a game honeymoon.
[TOOL TIP: THE "DIGNITY-CRUSHING" DINNER PARTY]
Status: Party Buffed / Rogue Legally Missing / Liam Still Tall.
The "L" in Liam stands for Logic (Part 2): Liam crushed Rogue’s Height Booster because "an inch isn’t going to save your dignity" when you’re already at eye level with his waist armour. Savage, but accurate.
Gourmet Healthcare: Liam served up Tier-4 Legendary Kitsune Tail cooked over a divine hearth, providing Elizabeth with Spirit Sense and Rogue with a stealth buff so potent he immediately started planning a bank heist.