One caramel milkshake turned into a full-fledged banquet.

Annette buried herself in a bowl of hash browns and aioli, Duri got busy with a rack of ribs, and I faced down my fears by ordering the same burger as yesterday. I was surprisingly hungry despite a pretty quiet day, exercise-wise. The highest my heart rate got was probably when I’d been conked out in the Pod, dead to the world.

We didn’t talk much about the challenge. At the end of the day, sixty-four kills just didn’t cut it. I had no idea how the winner managed eighty-six with that dragon bearing down up them, but there was nothing to be gained by guessing.

Despite the overall failure, I couldn’t help feeling a little chuffed to have beaten the rest of the gang. I didn’t gloat, and I admit it was an ugly emotion, but it gave me confidence that I could keep up with the Elthen Fields peloton despite my predicament.

After a while, we all squeezed out of the booth and rolled ourselves home. Annette and I lived in the same suburb, so we said goodbye to Duri outside the diner.

On the walk home, I looked hopefully at a shopping trolley ditched on the footpath. Its back-left wheel was wonky, and rain in the weeks gone by had rusted most of the basket area. Nonetheless, it looked capable of carrying a one-thirty-pound lad and the artery-clogging burger in his belly.

“Fancy pushing me?” I asked.

“Only if you go down The Drop.”

“Phwaw, fat chance.”

‘The Drop’ was a stupidly steep hill sitting between Annette’s house and mine. It was an absolute pain to ride a bike up but glorious to speed down, albeit extremely frightening. We’d both had our fair share of spills there, almost all as a result of speed wobbles and terrible brake-discipline. To go down in a shopping trolley would be a one-way ticket to the ER.

“What if I go with you on roller-skates?” she asked.

“Okayyy, I don’t hate it. Do you even know how to use them?”

“I’m a fast learner.”

We laughed, and passed the trolley. Perhaps another day.

Annette’s voice changed, and I could tell the topic wouldn’t be as light-hearted as a jaunt in a shopping cart.

“What are you gunna do if you can’t get the Pod fixed? It’s pretty much only one week away now.”

I’d been avoiding this topic myself — aside from that theory about the alternating shifts — but I wouldn’t get past Annette with such a half-hearted plan. Plus, it assumed the Pod could be fixed in the first place.

“I mean, I don’t have anything set in stone. Mom kind of suggested that even though the Fields isn’t an option, we aren’t fighting for scraps, you know? I could shop around for a second-hand one, or maybe something new if it’s from the budget range.”

“So not a Todd & Podd.”

“No.”

She nodded, and we crossed the road. We passed Mrs Balterby’s house, where her cats used to hiss at us. That was back when money was an ‘adult’ concept and B&B was a distant blip on the horizon.

One of the things that I applauded in the New World system was that, for a good majority of your childhood, you were allowed to act like a child. You could be ignorant of B&B until the second you stepped into a Pod around the age of seventeen, and you wouldn’t be penalised. The final year before ‘graduating’ could be stressful, but at the end of the day, you couldn’t stop time. It just happened.

“Remember the cats?” asked Annette.

“Was literally just thinking about them. Do you still reckon Balterby ate them?”

“Nah, not anymore. Too much fur on ‘em. She’d be coughing up more crap than they did.”

At the next block, we fist-bumped goodbye and I continued a few more streets to home. I kicked up a few weeds from the path and made a mental note to fill up the birdbath. Mom loved it when the parrakeets came by and selected our house to wash at. She described it like a butterfly choosing to land on your nose.

The front door was locked, so I ventured around the back to grab the spare key. It was nestled under a pot plant, and removing it disrupted the home of several spiders and a whole heap of roly-poly bugs. Duri once ruined the fun by informing me that they’re actually called Armadillidiidae, which I thought was just bonkers.

I wandered inside, not used to the silent house. It was uncommon for both Mom and Dale to be gone at the same time, but not a big deal. I went to my room and closed the door.

Now that the challenge was done and dusted, I felt aimless. School was finished, B&B was still a week and a bit away, and the only certain thing was uncertainty. I pulled out my phone and looked at the News app, just in case Duri was actually onto something.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He wasn’t. The first five or so articles were all old, dull, and written by either a weak AI or a severely intoxicated journalist. I scrolled further, just to give it a chance, when I came across something interesting.

Glendan break-in tied to Olympic upset

Last night, during the biennial Blade & Battle Olympics, an alleged break-in resulted in a last-minute quarter-final upset that left fans confused, and guilds outraged.

Fan-favourite Darith “Boomer” Hule was moments from conquering his younger opponent when the veteran [Warrior] suddenly took a turn for the worse. A series of awkward movements and failed skill-casts allowed his foe to claim a sudden victory before Hule abruptly disconnected.

At the time, some claimed that Hule had simply ‘lost his touch’, however Peacekeeper reports have now confirmed that a violent break-in at Hule’s Glendan-East home was responsible for the disconnection and loss.

Peacekeepers apprehended a suspect early this morning, however they encourage members of the public to contact them if they hold any additional information.

Written by Jill Pearl (0384 712 890)

My first thought was that it was awfully brave of Jill to put her phone number on the article. Then I realised how close we lived to Glendan-East, and how similar the event was to our break-in.

I’d completely lost track of the Olympics once Mom lost her event. I used to be a die-hard, but it was hard to get hyped for the other events when they all reminded me of that final leap. Now there was something afoot, and I had to know more.

I raced downstairs and turned on the TV. I didn’t need to switch channels, because all the main ones were showing the Olympics.

The quarterfinals of the Duels had finished days ago, and I’d arrived just in time to watch a gaudily dressed [Assassin] materialise behind her opponent and take him down. The crowd was packed in like smoked oysters, and fireworks and other special effects lit up the arena as she celebrated. I assumed this was the semi-final, and the winner had qualified for the Grand Final, which she would inevitably lose to The Gladiator.

No one beats The Gladiator.

I left the TV running in the background, then flicked through more of Jill Pearl’s articles. She wrote primarily about the pets of B&B, focusing on the cutest and most accessorised, but occasionally I’d find a more serious article. She’d written about a strange disappearance in the last Olympics, a debacle between two guilds that left them both disqualified from competing this year, and then it was back to the ‘Top 10 Cuddly Creatures of Crastapor’.

Crastapor was the largest merchant city in Blade & Battle. Millions of people flooded through every day, and billions of krad were spent. It was one of those things that we weren’t technically supposed to know, but it was hard to keep such a well-known metropolis a secret.

I read the two meatier articles, but there wasn’t anything of relevance. The disappearance was interesting, but Jill had covered it in four brief sentences, which didn’t leave me much to go on.

Left without a clear path, I pulled up the results of all the Olympic events so far this year. It took thousands of races, battles and showings to narrow each category down to a winner, which left me with a staggering amount of data. My Yurt couldn’t process it into anything meaningful, so I rummaged through my bag and found my laptop. I barely ever used it outside of school, and it had been beaten up over the years.

Thankfully, it switched on. The fans sounded like an airplane taking off, and the battery could’ve fried an egg, but it worked.

All the data got moved into a spreadsheet and I sorted it to find any events where there was a significant upset in the rankings. I was limited by my meagre knowledge of the B&B legends, but when I found a [Mage] ranked 8042nd who utterly destroyed their rank 378 opponent, I noted it down as curious.

I love an underdog as much as anyone else, but a couple hours of investigation revealed a suspicious trail. Almost a third of the drastic upsets involved members of the same guild coming out on top.

‘Blast Off’, it was called.

Jori Hayacker’s guild.

There was something else I’d missed, too. Mom’s event wasn’t an upset, it was almost an upset. The common denominator wasn’t that a low-ranked player beat an astronomically higher-ranked player, it was that the one coming out on top was often a member of Blast Off.

I pulled together a list of all the events the guild had won. It was long, as I’d expected, but if I could scrounge up recordings of all these, and they showed a pattern…

At that moment, I’d have killed to have access to the B&B records. Unfortunately, until I was an official B&B player, I’d have to settle for the live viewings on TV.

No frame-by-frame analysis just yet.

I pulled out a blank calendar to mark down the times of Blast Off’s events in the coming days. I didn’t think I’d spend my last week of freedom watching the B&B Olympics, but there I was.

Stones crunched in the driveway as a car pulled in. My younger self would’ve leapt off the couch and hurried to my room, afraid to be caught watching TV instead of going to school. I’d been prolific at faking sick days in my high school years, which gave me a keen ability to hear things like cars entering the driveway, shoes on pavement and the front door easing open.

Gifted with all these wonderful skills, but useful things like cooking and cleaning and wielding a longsword have evaded me thus far.

I heard Mom approaching the door and I met her there, curious why they’d headed out. I didn’t like that the last time I’d seen them they’d both been drinking, yet only hours later, they were behind the wheel.

The door opened, and Mom yelped, shooing me back and waving her arms.

“Back! Back! In the house, you can’t see yet! Git boy, git!”

Confusion wasn’t the word. Bewilderment, maybe. I stepped back, laughing at her manic movements and reversion to ‘Git boy, git!’ as though I was a misbehaving dog.

“What can’t I see? Is Dale out there? Did he get a haircut or something? A shower, maybe?”

“Yes.”

“Yes to what?”

“Dale’s out there. No to the other things, but just don’t look, okay? Go to the couch and shut your eyes.”

I did as I was told, settling back down in front of the TV. There were no Blast Off players in the current event.

A trolley clanged its way up the path, and all that came to mind was a new beer fridge. The wire door opened, and I saw the corner of a box before I remembered that I was supposed to close my eyes. I couldn’t help smiling, because Dad used to pull this kind of trick. He’d tell me to put my hands out, and he’d place a fake cockroach or toad in them.

Good times.

“Alright, open up!” Dale said.

They stood in front of me, blocking the Olympics. Dale steadied a trolley, on which sat a tall cardboard box. He was red in the face, so I could assume it was heavy.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Have a closer look. Dale, spin the label around.”

He heaved the box ninety degrees, and I read the bolded writing on the side.

‘Todd & Podd: AT-2000 Cocoon Pod’.