With the Safe House established, and Otto on my side despite his sultry mood, I took some time to allocate my Stat Points.

Attributable Stat Points: (0)(-7)

Strength (6) (+0)

Defence (10) (+0)

Vitality (5) (+4)

Affinity (0) (+0)

Restoration (0) (+0)

Endurance (7) (+3)

Agility (11) (+0)

The three Skill Tokens were hard to place, but I managed to upgrade [Tsunami Strike] so that it did a bit more damage and shortened its cooldown. I used a second Token on a new skill:

[Shield Wall I] (Ability)

Repel enemies in a two-meter radius around your shield. 10-minute cooldown.

It didn’t do any damage, but it would be handy if I could increase the radius a bit before facing down an army.

Not that I planned on taking them all on at once. {The Glass Cannon} was good, but I doubted it was that good. Otherwise, the weapons store owner could’ve just put on one of those armour sets they had and became the superhero of Bill’s Yard.

Hang on. What happened to the weapons store?

I didn’t have time to find out. Exploring the destruction of Bill’s Yard and chatting to Otto and Barney hadn’t left me much time before I needed to head to Garters.

I had to disconnect.

--Disconnecting, please wait—

Regaining consciousness after a few hours in the Pod was always strange. It was like my brain had fallen asleep just enough that I was groggy, but I wasn’t under for long enough to feel like I’d earned my sleep fatigue.

The house was loud when I came back, and I massaged my temples for a while after taking off the nodes. I’d lost little patches of hair where the nodes sat, which Mom thought was hilarious.

I put on some clothes that didn’t smell like a week-long B&B grind, then combed my hair. I did it so infrequently that I was no good at it, and my attempt at styling fell flat on its face. In the end, I just roughed it up like usual.

Dale found me when I was tying up my shoes.

“Found yourself a bit of fame, huh? What’s the deal, anything I can help with? That reporter just had to put your name in the article, what a nut.”

“Yeah, not handy at all. Think it’s fine for me to go outside?”

“Errrr, Em would probably say not to, but you’re not a bird in a cage so just don’t talk to anyone you don’t know, yeah? Best not to give them anything.”

I’d try my best. B&B reporters could get very intense when it came to front-page stories, though I was probably safe as a mere ‘second-pager’. An afterthought, really.

Still, I went out the backdoor and through a gate that took me out the other side of the property. A couple blocks further south, I looped back in the direction that would take me to Garters. The last thing I needed when I met Annette and Duri was an audience. Roping them into my issues wouldn’t be beneficial to anyone.

It was a bit of a hike, but it gave me a chance to clear my head. By the time I pushed open the door and saw them at a corner booth, I’d come up with a few ideas for The Safe House.

“The Wonder Kid!” Duri yelled.

Annette whacked him, cautious of my recent experience with the real Wonder Kid and my…perspective of his guild.

“Have you guys ordered? I could demolish just about anything right now — that was a big walk.”

“You walked?” Annette queried. “What about the reporters? You’ll get mobbed out there, ya donkey.”

“Took the back door and went down Barrut Road. I’m not big news anyway.”

A steaming plate of scallion pancakes came out from the kitchen. Annette basically beat us away with a stick so she could get to them first.

“You kind of are,” she said, reaching for the plate. “You’ve got your name in the biggest news publication in the world, and you’ll probably be in it again once the Government does something. I’m surprised Joey isn’t hitting you up, trying to recruit you for his future raid team.”

That got my attention. I paused my scoffing, looking up at Annette and Duri with a question on my face.

“You know about that?” I asked.

“About what?” Duri replied.

“Joey sent me a message.”

The pancakes were forgotten for a moment while they processed.

“No way!” Duri exclaimed. “And he invited you to a raid team?”

“Well, not exactly. That was definitely the vibe of our chat, but he didn’t explicitly invite me to anything. To be honest, it felt like I was talking to his dad, with Joey as the intermediary. He must’ve spotted the article and decided I was someone worth keeping in contact with.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Annette was still digesting the news. It probably hit her hardest, since she’d been the closest with Joey, out of the three of us. That’s not to say that Duri and I weren’t close — the four of us were basically siblings in everything but our DNA.

“Did he mention us?”

“Umm, briefly, yeah. He probably didn’t mean it like this, but he said you guys ‘weren’t up to his level’…Don’t shoot the messenger.”

Duri sat back in the booth, slouching down with a fearsome look. A second dish came out, and he pushed it away, making me regret my honesty.

“Dick,” he said. “What a—”

“Calm it down, big fella.” I placed a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. He tried to bat me away, so I doubled down, shuffling over and poking him. “Baby Duri can’t handle a couple mean words? Huh? Little baby Duri?”

He fought back, telling me to piss off, but he was smiling.

Annette was quiet. It was obviously a lot to think about, but she’d always been a planner, wily in her ways of organising, constructing and general life-ing.

“You good, A?” I asked. “You’ve barely touched your…brown, beef dish? Tofu?”

Duri frowned at me for disparaging his family restaurant. I took a bite and gave him a thumbs up to assure him it was still delicious, despite the presentation.

“I’m alright, I suppose. Just feel like he’s kind of right, you know? I thought the Elthen Fields would be this oasis of quests, EXP and legendary equipment, but it’s just how it sounds — endless fields. Obviously there’s more to it, cos Joey and all that are doing raids and dungeons and whatnot, but the rest of us don’t have the same degree of inside knowledge.”

“Or our parents have good enough ethics not to disclose it to us,” Duri chipped in.

“I’m sure you guys are doing fine,” I tried. “You’re comparing yourselves to the most kitted-out graduates in the world. Try this on for size — until a couple days ago, I was still grinding out monsters that gave me 3 EXP per kill. How’s that?”

“I didn’t even know you could get less than 50 EXP from a monster,” Duri said. “The Yard sounds like a grind.”

“It can be,” I agreed.

We took a break from B&B while the restaurant filled up with people flowing in from their jobs or Pods. The kitchen got loud. Steam and savoury smells poured out into the dining area, coating us in homely warmth. We ordered more and more, with dessert promised, but I was almost asleep in the booth once the mains were taken away. Duri assured us it would all be free — a graduation gift from his parents.

We looped around multiple topics, but things always had a way of coming back to B&B.

“So how’d you end up beating a boss that you weren’t supposed to battle for five and a bit months?” asked Annette.

I cleared my throat, cautious of my answer. “Well, I met a girl named Claire—”

“OOooOoooo,” Duri jibed.

“Yes Duri, I am capable of speaking to women. Anyway, Claire was the one who found it. One of the towns bordering Bill’s Yard had been razed by Asterian soldiers — I think foreshadowing the Event — and she just messaged me yesterday saying she stumbled across it.”

“What was she doing in a destroyed town? Couldn’t be many quests going on there.”

“Just exploring, I suppose. I did the same thing.”

Annette pursed her lips and looked down her nose at me, like a suspicious detective. I continued with my story.

“Anyway, we climbed down this claustrophobic as shit cave system, fought some jelly-headed acid monsters, then almost died about sixty times to a [Dark Naga] and its Servants. You would’ve hated it Annette, soooo many snakes.”

“What level?”

“The Naga was Level 80, but that was the highest we saw.”

“Eighty?! You’re a liar, Ollie. Dream on!” Duri cried.

“It’s the truth! I have this spear, {The Glass Cannon}, and it shredded the thing. Two hits along with an ability both times.”

Desserts came out, something called ‘songpyeon’ for me, and ‘hodu-gwaja’ for Annette. Duri refused, claiming he was watching his weight. I found that hard to believe, considering the number of entrees and mains he’d packed away.

“Well that just seems frickin’ absurd,” Annette said, breaking off a portion of hodu-gwaja and waving it under Duri’s nose.

“It is. I think I scammed the system somehow by getting the spear. It wasn’t your everyday kind of sale, that’s for sure.”

“And what’re your thoughts regarding the Asterians? Gunna fight back and secure a few more articles?”

I smiled at the concept. I’d never been one for drama, but if I did it right, the invasion could play into my hands rather well.

Except for the fact that, despite them all being 1s and 0s, I cared for the place. Otto’s Pub, Marge and Pilaf’s stalls, even the burnt down barn.

“That’s kind of why I’m here. I need your help with that.”

“Can’t get from the Fields to the Yard, buddy boy,” Duri pointed out.

“I know, I know. It’s more of a mental thing. I don’t like the thought of killing the Asterian soldiers. Some of them are players and I just know that, if I succeed, I’d have to physically hurt a lot of people. Like, a lot.”

Duri snorted, but when he opened his mouth to reply, nothing came out. We’d had similar upbringings, and I was happy to see that it wasn’t a simple answer for my friends, either.

Annette spoke first. “Well, I think the easiest part to address is your issue with hurting the real Asterians. I get that them being a bunch of pixels isn’t the issue, but that’s what they are. A bunch of angry pixels that have destroyed the town you live in and killed or hurt the people you talk to every day. If you have any self-interest, you’ll know that you’re going to need the quests those NPCs give you later on. The Asterians are holding you back.”

I thought about the 400,000 EXP I’d earn from the Liberate the Yard quest, should I complete it. Quests might not be an issue after that.

“And hurting the players? Stabbing another human with {The Glass Cannon}? After everything we’ve been taught?”

“I dunno. Does it make a difference if I mention that the Olympics are primarily a display of humans stabbing humans?”

“Not really.”

Duri grabbed his fork and shuffled along the booth to my side. I thought he was going to give me a sympathy hug, which was very out of his character.

Instead, he stabbed me in the arm.

“YOW! What the hell?”

I recoiled in shock, looking down and seeing a dribble of blood run down my right bicep. There were four angry red dots from the fork prongs, one of them piercing my skin.

“Did it hurt?” he asked.

“Yes! You stabbed me, man!”

“Does it still hurt?”

Annette, as dumbfounded as I was, handed me a wad of serviettes.

“I mean, I’m bleeding, but no.”

“Well, there you go. You’ll cause them a second of pain, then back to normal. Maybe a slight shock.”

“Was that really the best way of making your point?”

“I think so.”

It wasn’t quite the well-reasoned, logical response that I’d hoped for, but it got the message across. If players came looking for a fight, they were accepting that they could lose. Looking at me, they probably wouldn’t expect it, but proving them wrong would only cost them a quick jab, like being stabbed with a fork by your friend.

Trust me, I know.

“What about my issue with beating up people in general? You got any instant painful cure for that?”

“I think you gotta work that one out yourself, bro. All I can say is that the system is what it is, and it works.”

On the outside, I agreed, nodding my head. But on the inside, two words bounced around my brain, creating turmoil and doubt wherever they went. Just two words.

So far.