I don’t know why, but I knew he was talking to me. His voice said ‘boy’, but to me it may as well have been ‘Oliver Matanor, born 5th September, resident of 17 Myrtle Springs Road.’

By speaking, The Gladiator had narrowed down the search for his identity by roughly half the world’s population. It was undoubtedly a male’s voice.

The crowd exploded, and The Gladiator disconnected. It was lucky I wasn’t attached to being front-page news, because with that massive revelation, the spot had been taken for at least a week.

I thought I saw Dale in the crowd, but the perspective changed too quickly to be sure. I would’ve paid good money to see him and Esko in their Duos uniform, matching colours and hairstyles like two schoolgirls.

Back when they had hair, of course.

For all I knew, Dale could’ve been The Gladiator. The voices didn’t match, but anyone could talk a little differently if they didn’t want to be discovered by millions of armchair-detectives and superfans.

Not sure he would’ve called me out like that if it was him, bit strange…

I heard him coming down the stairs, suspiciously good timing after The Gladiator had just disconnected.

“What a crunch!” he called. “You guys see me? 3rd row from the front, near the challenger’s side.”

He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat down in his spot.

“Whew! Only thing that would make the Olympics better is if I could get drunk in the grandstands. No hangover, bunch of cool flavours, fund some cool stuff — someone should work on that.”

Mom sat next to him and stole a sip, screwing up her face.

“Yeesh, that one sucks. And what happened to your new rule? Thought you weren’t gunna start until six o’clock.”

He paused with the neck of the bottle right near his mouth, then jumped up and poured the remnants down the drain.

“Crap! Okay, reset the counter.”

“It didn’t make it past zero.”

“Ah.”

Apparently, Dale was trying to wean himself off his bad habit.

“Oi, kiddo, you gunna do some training round here today? I get that Esko beat you up pretty well enough over the weekend, but I’d be happy to give it a shot.”

“Sorry, I’m gunna hop back into B&B for a bit, just to check things out. Got a lot of messages to sort through.”

I left them to watch the closing ceremony. There was some hope for The Gladiator to attend this time around, but the world was disappointed. Only the 2nd and 3rd place players would stand atop the podium.

The Pod was still warm, which felt extremely uncomfortable as I lay down. I arranged the nodes on my head and conked out.

--Immersing, please don’t disconnect--

I said a quick hello to my mute gardener, then continued into the world. Last time I was here, the town was a mess, but now it had undergone a serious change.

It was now a liberated mess.

The streets were full of crappy, burnt wood and smashed belongings organised in piles for the carts running up and down the streets. An empty cart was occupied by two people who hopped out at each pile, filled their arms with as much as they could carry, heaved it all into the back, then went on their way. The houses and buildings nearest the plaza were almost completely clear of debris, and Bill’s Barn even had fresh planks nailed to new, sturdy pillars.

Everything was running along perfectly without me.

Phew.

I opened my Message Requests and filtered the hay from the chaff. The older messages were full of obscenities and people wishing me a short walk off a tall cliff. However, that sentiment changed immediately as of the morning after the fight.

The best example was the following messages sent to me by a Level 3 [Mage] who’d sided with the Asterians:

[Gunna burn down city to find you out freak.]

[Go dye.]

[Terrorist peace of shit]

[Sorry for above, got lots of EXP from new quests. Thanks]

Not exactly the kind of person I wanted to track down as my next hunting partner, but I was happy to be back in the good books. The rest of the year would’ve been tough, otherwise.

For once, I knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. I started with Otto’s Pub, dropping in to find that the broken tables had been thrown out and new ones brought in, their surfaces painted with lacquer and already stained with ale.

There were three people behind the bar, all of them working overtime and falling over each other to pour enough liquid for the demanding drinkers. They had three times Otto’s manpower, but they’d need about a dozen more to match his pace, even while his stubs regrew.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“Where’s Otto?” I asked the room. With my newly buffed Friendship, people were happy to reply.

“Basement!” someone chirped.

“Brewing something. He said it’s a potion, but by the smell of it, I think he meant poison,” said another.

I ventured out, noting that The Safe House door was wide open. It wasn’t exactly needed anymore — it had done its job quite nicely, although the invisibility potion was a monumental failure.

“Otto? Watcha cookin’?”

“Get BACKKK!”

He came out of the lab, hunched over a pot of smoking blue liquid before straightening up and rushing through to the main room.

“OUTTA THE WAY, COMING THROUGH!”

The madman banged through the new front door hard enough to nearly rip the hinges off, then tossed the contents of the pot out onto the road.

“Take cover! Any second! Brace yourselves!”

We waited as he raced back in and curled into a ball on the floor, holding his legs with his six remaining tentacles. Nothing happened.

“Otto mate, nothing’s wrong. Was it a dud?”

“Get down Ollie! She’s gunna blow!”

I looked out at the blue solution as it soaked into the dirt. It was entirely unreactive.

He must’ve just cooked it too long and the smoke bui—

FWOOSH!

A sound like a stampede of bulls with their horns tied together erupted outside, the earth burgeoning outwards until it popped like a zit, spraying the pub and its occupants with clods of dirt. Otto yelled through the entire process like a soldier enduring a barrage of enemy shells.

When the cacophony let up and the dust settled, I ventured outside. A fifteen-foot crater fell away into the earth, the sides crumbling into a steep slope. If that concoction had gone off inside, there would’ve been pieces of me spread from the fields in the south to the Cambree Mines up north.

“Otto. What the hell have you been cooking?”

He got to his feet, using the wall as support. He looked horrified at the crater, but there was a tinge of pride, too.

“Mate…that wasn’t even the end-product. That was just step two.”

He plodded outside and placed a sucker on the ground.

“Salty,” he murmured. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

“Was just here to check up on the pub and ask where Bill is. He not around?”

“Nope, sorry. Probably at his barn, but if not—” he shrugged his shoulders and made a sound like aa-on-oh.

“Cool, you need a hand with that?” I gestured at the crater.

“Nah, nah, nah, she be right. Tell you what; if you could get me some better ingredients, the next version might not be so…volatile. Whad’ya say?”

My first opportunity to see why these players are thanking me.

“Sure, that’d be fun.”

Just like the first time we met, we shook hands and tentacles, and my empty quest-log was back in business.

Quest Accepted!

‘Perrywort or Perish, Dallytongue or Die’

Reward(s)

+2500 EXP

+5 Friendship (Otto)

+3000 Krad

Three thousand krad.

I had to remind myself that the EXP was pretty decent too, but I’d been largely desensitised to it. The money on the other hand — that felt good. The rewards were astronomically higher than what the NPCs had offered before the event.

“Holy cow, Otto, what are you having me collect? Are these ingredients made of solid gold?”

“Nope, they’re even cooler than that. They’re flowers — the two with the highest water requirements in any region I’ve ever heard of. They say each petal represents one hundred buckets of water, and over each flower’s lifetime, it can run a river dry. As you’d imagine, we don’t grow them here.”

I surveyed the cracked ground and lack of greenery. We barely grew anything here. It took me back to the first day, when I’d stumbled across the lady working in the field. Now that I had some Strength under my belt, I felt like going back and helping her till the soil.

“Am I going to have to transport them back alive?”

“Hell no! Transport ain’t the issue, it’s getting them in the first place. You know the Kingdom of Asteroth, right?”

I laughed at his sarcasm, then remembered it was probably just part of his quest dialogue. It was hard to tell, sometimes.

“I do, yes. What about it?”

“Well for starters, it’s far away. The second issue is access. Perrywort is held under lock and key in the Royal Botanist’s, so you’ll have to work out how to get past that conundrum. Dallytongue is much the same, but rather than a key, it grows in a pretty rank place called ‘Piliton’s Palace’, also inside Asterian land. Big underground cave system kind of thing — monsters and whatnot, really not my type of gig.”

This was sounding more involved than the Liberate the Yard quest. Even just for starters, I had to travel to a place that wasn’t even on the map. Plus, I’d seen enough of the blue and white soldiers for a few lifetimes.

If I have to fight even more of them…

“Well thanks, Otto. I’ll do my best.”

I left before someone could hand me a shovel and ask for a strapping young lad like myself to help smooth out the crater. By the looks of it, they’d have to scrape five inches of dirt off the rest of the street to fill it, unless they wanted to go around with a brush and shovel and collect the original dirt off every roof in the region.

Before I set off on my deathly important journey for two thirsty flowers, I decided to drop by the weapons store. Raoth and Purg were back, which brought me more joy than I’d expected. They weren’t exactly friendly faces the first time, but at least they were familiar.

With the +50 Friendship, I’m pretty sure Raoth even nodded at me as I entered.

Tren was at the counter. He argued with Paul, whose chest hair — sorry, man tufts — were bushier than ever.

The things I could do with a pair of tweezers and fifteen minutes.

“Tren! How are you?”

He jumped at his name, apparently deep in discussion.

“Oh, Oliver, that is, um, excellent timing. I was just telling Paul about how you recovered {Ayari’s Bliss}—

“And how you STOLE {The Glass Cannon} from under my nose! I’d be within my rights to set Raoth and Purg on you if you hadn’t done the town a favour!”

This is what fifty Friendship gets me?

“I’m sorry, Paul. But as you can see, I took it no further than the spear. This javelin and shield are the same ones I bought from you the first time — I always tell people I got them right here and that they won’t find such expert craftmanship anywhere else.”

He enjoyed hearing my white lie as much as I enjoyed telling it. It almost looked like he reined in his puffed-out chest a little — Tren and I were dangerously close to having our eyes poked out.

“That’s right. Now what are you here for? Are you ready to pay back your debt?”

“I’m afraid not, but I think you’ll like my proposition. I’m travelling to Asteroth on another errand — what would you say to me recovering one of those armour sets that got stolen?”

His eyes flashed, and Tren’s mouth formed into an O. I couldn’t begin to imagine how many {Redwood Spears} or {Wooden Shields} they’d have to sell to make up for losing the armour sets.

“It’s a tempting idea, of course. I could pay you…two thousand krad? And once you get one, you can wear it between Asteroth and here. Sound good?”

He held out a hand. I could see permanent blisters on his nearly rectangular fingers.

“Sure, but there’s something else I want alongside it.”

He spread his arms wide and gestured to the store — it was slowly returning to its former glory.

“What more do you want? I’ll throw in something from here if I must. A new shield?”

I couldn’t help grinning, and his face fell as he saw where this was going.

“I want to keep a piece. Forever.”