Chapter Fourteen: Flawless
Floor ten pinged a quest notification the second I stepped off the platform, gold text scrolling clean across my vision.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ SYSTEM NOTICE
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════╣
QUEST AVAILABLE: THE KING TROLL. RECOMMENDED PARTY SIZE: FOUR. REWARD: RARE ITEM DROP.
Wren's voice crackled in my ear a second later, already half laughing. "Recommended party size four. You reading the same notification I am?"
"Recommended," I said, popping my blowpop to the other side of my mouth. "Not required."
"Chat's already going insane. Someone just typed she's actually going to solo this, isn't she."
"Tell them they're not wrong."
The King Troll's chamber opened up wide and echoing, stone walls scarred from a hundred prior fights that hadn't gone anyone's way cleanly, and the thing itself rose up from a throne built out of the bones of whatever hadn't survived meeting it first. Twelve feet of muscle and old scarring, a crown of jagged iron welded straight into its skull like someone had decided divine right applied even to monsters.
It roared. I laughed. Roughly the same energy, honestly, just aimed in different directions.
I went in low first, cards fanning out from one hand to open a dozen thin cuts across its shins before it even finished its opening swing, and used the half second that bought me to close distance instead of retreating from it. The hammer came up next, full weight behind the swing, catching it across one knee hard enough that the whole chamber shook with the impact.
It staggered. Swung back. I ducked under an arm the size of a tree trunk and came up inside its guard with the bat instead, three fast strikes to the ribs before it managed to backhand me clear across the chamber.
I hit the wall hard enough to see stars for half a second. Rolled through the landing anyway, already laughing again, already reaching for the next weapon my hand found waiting there.
"You good?" Wren's voice, tighter now, genuine worry threading through it.
"Never better," I said, and meant it, blood in my mouth and a grin stretching wider because of it, not despite it.
The fight ran long, longer than I expected, the troll smarter than its size suggested, learning my patterns just fast enough to make me work for every opening. But I'd learned my own patterns too, by then, learned which weapon answered which kind of opening better than instinct alone could tell me, and by the time it finally went down, crown cracking loose off its skull and rolling across bloodstained stone, I hadn't taken a single hit in the last three full minutes of the fight.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════════╗ SYSTEM NOTICE
╠══════════════════════════════════════════════╣
QUEST COMPLETE: FLAWLESS.
BONUS REWARD UNLOCKED.
The chest that materialized where the troll had fallen popped open on its own, revealing a pair of thick metal cuffs, dull iron etched with something that glowed faint orange even in low light. I slid them onto my wrists without hesitation, because at this point hesitation had stopped being part of how I did anything.
Heat bloomed instantly, curling up from the metal into my knuckles, and when I threw an experimental punch at the empty air, fire trailed the motion clean and bright, gone the second the swing finished. I grabbed the hammer next, swung it once through open space, and watched the whole head catch alight, flame licking along the metal like it had been waiting its whole existence for permission.
"Okay," I said, staring at my own burning fists like a kid on Christmas morning. "That's just unfair now."
RARE ITEM ACQUIRED: EMBERBOUND CUFFS. BONUS QUEST COMPLETE: MAKE SOMEONE LAUGH.
I blinked at the second notification, genuinely confused for a second, before the reward populated underneath it. A small, spring loaded party horn, tucked neatly into my inventory between a dagger and a half eaten bag of gummy worms I didn't remember picking up.
I laughed so hard at that one I had to sit down on the troll's ruined throne to catch my breath, flaming hammer resting across my knees, chat scrolling faster than I could read it through the tears in my eyes.
I closed the run out the way I'd started closing most of them lately, standing in the wreckage of something enormous, blowpop back between my teeth, looking directly into the nearest drone lens.
"That's floor ten," I said. "Flawless. Recommended party size four, in case anyone was wondering." I paused, considering, then reached into my jacket and pulled out a fat red marker that definitely hadn't been part of my gear loadout an hour ago.
I leaned in close to the lens and signed it, big looping letters straight across the glass, and finished it off with a kiss print left in bright red lipstick right beside my name.
"For the viewers," I said, stepping back with a wink, and walked off screen leaving the marker behind, floating gently in the space I'd been standing.
The clip broke every previous record the stream had set within the hour. By morning, half of chat had rebranded itself, unprompted, as her waifus in the replies, and the other half was still arguing in increasingly elaborate threads about what kind of threat level a girl who signed camera lenses with lipstick actually posed to society.
Guild recruiters kept posting the same four words in every channel they had access to, no closer to an answer than they'd been three weeks ago.
FIND ME THIS GIRL.
I read it curled up on my new apartment's couch that night, Reyna asleep on the other cushion with purple stains still faintly visible on one hand, Wren still awake beside me scrolling through engagement numbers with the particular glow of someone watching something they built finally take off.
They could keep looking.
I had a hammer that caught fire now, and a party horn I still hadn't found a use for, and honestly, that felt like plenty to be getting on with.
--Grayson POV--
Across the city, in an apartment considerably nicer than the one I used to share with him, Grayson watched the whole thing from a leather couch, drink sweating in one hand, his girlfriend curled against his other side with her attention only half on the screen.
"Babe, what's wrong?" she asked, catching something in his expression he hadn't meant to let show.
"Nothing," he said, too fast, taking a longer sip than the moment called for.
He wasn't thinking about the fire cuffs, or the flawless run, or the party horn joke that had chat losing its collective mind. He was thinking about a lie he'd told on camera, still sitting out there uncorrected, still earning him invitations to guild functions he didn't fully feel he'd earned. He was thinking, in the same breath, about noodles going cold across a table two years ago, and a version of tonight where it might have been his own couch, his own hand reaching for hers instead of a stranger's, watching all of this unfold from the inside instead of from a screen.
He didn't say any of that.
"Just tired," he said instead, and set the drink down harder than he meant to, and didn't look at the screen again for the rest of the stream, though he didn't turn it off either.