[Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t come find you, leave our party, then kill you.]

Claire did not take my reappearance as well as I thought.

[Um, good point. Next time, I will simply just not have a medical emergency and spend days sedated in a hospital.]

[Good. Now check your map and come to Brasstown.]

I considered how to break the news in a way that wouldn’t make her follow through with her initial threat.

[About that. This wasn’t the kind of medical emergency that I can just brushed off. Doctor says I can’t play for more than an hour at a time.]

Radio silence for a few minutes.

[Fuck. Can you just play for an hour, disconnect and do some star jumps, then come back? That wouldn’t be so bad.]

[Don’t think so. Pretty sure it’s an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon type of thing. How’s Penny?]

Her next reply came a bit faster.

[Good. Very good. After you disappeared, we continued north-west until we got to Brasstown. I paid fifty krad to a tavernkeeper for a bunk upstairs. He gave it back the next morning after Penny completely renovated their vegetable garden and made it not suck. Tavernkeeper and his wife are super nice. Potential new parents.]

That was both good and bad news. It was good that Penny was safe and things were looking up for her, but the fact that she needed ‘new parents’ had some nasty implications.

Claire must’ve finally got it out of her. Not a fun conversation, I bet.

[Great. Thank you. I have to get off immediately. Doctor’s (Mom’s) orders. You all good?]

[Ya. Tip-top. Check your krad balance.]

I smiled. I’d had a suspicion that my time out of action would result in a pleasant surprise upon my return.

Krad

1,060

Holy crap. A positive number. That means they did it without killing anyone.

[YESSSSSS. WE ARE THE FREAKING BEST!!! Gotta go, but we are doing very irresponsible things with this money when we get the chance. I’m gonna fly to wherever your eye procedure is and make sure that my dopey face is the first thing you see.]

[NO. You are not flying here. And my sister has already claimed that honour. Then Mom and Dad. Then the cat. You can go after the cat.]

[I’ll take it. See ya!]

--Disconnecting, please wait--

“Moooom!” I yelled. “Your son is no longer a failure!”

I told her the good news, celebrated with a few pieces of chocolate, then basically collapsed into bed.

Despite my headache, I’d never had a better night’s sleep.

**************

Whether I liked it or not, I was now in holiday mode. It had come a bit quicker than I imagined, and the Great King Gonar quest gnawed at me like an unscratchable itch. If only my body had spontaneously combusted just a couple days later, I might’ve been able to kick up my feet and forget that B&B existed for a little while.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. My last two days had created even more questions and provided no answers whatsoever.

I tried to come up with a list. Asking Dale about the ‘oddities’ that Esko mentioned was a good, simple start, considering I had another oddity to ply him with.

The names of those monsters. It had to be a glitch, or something I wasn’t supposed to see.

There was no way the ravine was meant to appear there. It didn’t feel right, and even the map hadn’t included or anticipated it. I obviously didn’t have the chance to examine it too much, but I wished that I could go back and see how far west the ravine led.

And how wide it got.

It tapered off relatively quickly — only a couple hundred feet before we could jump over — but if it widened just as fast in the other direction, even over the course of just a few miles…

It could tear apart a country. The one to the west, that Gonar fought against. Marintyl?

Dale would be interested. I’d tell him about the orb, and how its pulses were what hurt my head the most. If I had to guess, I’d say that was what caused my seizure. Or at least, the other factors put me in the worst position my brain could be in, and the orb was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Anyway. Another item on the list was finding out who the hell The Gladiator was once and for all, and discovering why the gardener in my…vision?...was suddenly thirty years younger than his normal self, and suddenly repeating The Gladiator’s invitation.

Some would call it a bold task, considering that many had tried and failed over the years, but I had a secret resource that none of them had.

Once again, Dale.

Everything seemed to centre around him. For a guy who spent a large portion of his existence on the couch with a beer in hand — alcohol-free before six pm — he certainly had his fingers in a lot of pies.

And finally, at the bottom of the pile, like the half-eaten candy wrapper stuck under my permanent pile of laundry, two tasks remained.

Investigating Jori Hayacker’s guild, Blast Off!, and finding out Mom and Dale’s rankings.

Oh god. Also, guild stuff. This is about as far from a holiday as it could possibly be.

I decided to start off with some simple wins. With my headache still giving me some issues, I wanted to avoid too much concentration. I’d make a damn good snack, then have a look through the B&B Leaderboards. It was a pretty easy task, but amongst my constant obligations, completing it had eluded me.

First came the corn chips. Then the salsa. A handful of cheese. Repeat. Top with jalapenos. While my nachos were in the oven, I considered cooking up some beef mince to go on top.

Can’t be bothered.

Instead, I whipped up a small bowl of super-quick-super-basic guacamole (PUT RECIPE IN AITHOR NOTES), and slapped it on my cooked nachos with a dollop of sour cream.

Hell. Yeah.

This was holidaying. If I’d known this would be my first act, I would’ve fought shadow monsters and gone to the hospital a lot sooner.

I loaded up the B&B Leaderboards. There were a dizzying number of filters, ranging from the age of the players — ascending and descending — to their hair colour, or even the number of ‘one-legged dragon gauntlet’ events they’d participated in.

My goal was just to see how good Mom truly was in the Agility field, and to see Dale’s all-time peak Duels ranking. I started by selecting the Agility stat, then on second thought gave it a secondary importance to ‘Agility Events Placed’.

Up came a list, and right at the top was my good friend Jori. He’d definitely earned his stripes, but I was sure it wasn’t all done legally. The lists wouldn’t show his exact Agility stat — which would still be bolstered by equipment and skills anyway — but switching the importance of the filters still had him on top.

Super quick, and super talented. Could he be any more punchable.

I thought about how the world might view me, based on my recent time in the news cycle. I realised that, for those who didn’t know me, they might apply a similar description to me.

Super lucky, and somewhat talented.

But he deserves to be punched. I don’t think I do.

A chuckle escaped me at my hypocrisy. I’d spent so much time debating over violence and how world-ending it was, yet here I was, basically throwing away the morals that I’d held on so tightly to in the past.

Damn. These nachos are amazing.

The quick-search feature helped me find Mom a bit faster than scrolling through and getting side-tracked by whichever other player I felt like criticising. When I found her name, I felt vindicated.

Rank 184. She’s good. Really good.

Of course, Agility wasn’t everything. Not all players bothered to involve themselves in PvP events, so her Rank wasn’t truly representative across the entirety of the B&B power scale. But Top Ten Thousand felt entirely believable. Likely, even.

Hell yeah. Take that, Dad.

I considered searching him up, then pushed back the urge. On the off chance that he was secretly a very capable player when he wasn’t busy recruiting players for his guild and walking out on his family, I didn’t want to know it. I wholeheartedly believed that he could barely swing a sword, but even if he was a bottom of the barrel player, it wouldn’t make me feel any better.

Next up was Dale. I sorted the chart for ‘Olympic Duels Win/Loss Ratio’, then added a second parameter that would make players with more total Duels under their belt more important. There was no point scrolling through pages of pages of players who’d won a single Duel then dropped out of the tournament, thus acquiring a 100% win rate.

He wasn’t on the first page, which wasn’t surprising. As a player became less active, their stats would ‘decay’. It meant that up and coming, modern players would be the most prominent. I didn’t want to sort through a bunch of washed-up players from three decades ago.

Or maybe I do. This is Dale we’re talking about.

I had to give up on finding him in the first pages. I secretly hoped to find him right at the top despite not being an active player, testament to his utter domination of everyone else in his prime.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t a god.

A quick search placed him at Rank 2,399. I wasn’t disappointed, but it was an underwhelming result.

Until I checked his historical stats.

By selecting a player’s profile, it was possible to find all kinds of charts, graphs, statistics, even pictures of the player in action. I swept through pages of mostly blank content until I finally landed where I wanted to.

Rank History.

A large chunk of the graph was a straight, flat line, so I had to zoom in and force it to pick a timeframe from before I was born, to about the time I was six.

Another straight line. But unlike its predecessor, this line didn’t lie tamely on the bottom of the graph. It sat right at the top, an infallible beam bestowing Dale as the Rank 1 player.

Again. And again. And again.

It never wavered. He dominated the rest of the field for almost eight years, repeatedly defending his Rank 1 place in Solo Duels. His Duo Duels win streak was impressive as well, however it abruptly dropped, probably straight after the incident with Joey’s Dad.

But he can’t be The Gladiator. There aren’t any records after the eight years. He completely disappeared.

It couldn’t have been a loss that took him down — once he attained the Rank 1 title, there was not a single loss to be found.

I looked at the other side of the graph, the one that depicted his rise to the top. Like all players, his climb up the leaderboards was a series of ups and downs. Even Dale couldn’t possibly have spawned into B&B and then immediately crushed the competition.

They didn’t have much time before he came for them, though.

From only a slightly zoomed out perspective, the line depicting his growth was nearly vertical.

I cleared my searches and turned off my Yurt, facing down my nachos instead.

It was exciting to finally put a small section of my curiosity to rest, but it wasn’t the satisfying final reveal that I anticipated. It was part of the reason why I’d left my investigation until more than a month after gaining access to the records.

I didn’t want to be proved wrong. It was fun to think that the random chilled out dude on the couch was secretly the most prominent B&B player of all time.

Shouldn’t forget that until eleven or twelve years ago, he literally was.

And then The Gladiator came. It had to have been the exact year after Dale stopped participating, or else I could’ve put this all to rest a long time ago. Seeing them fighting each other would be some pretty damning evidence to support them not being the same person.

Logically, this led to the question that countless other people had asked, all the way from B&B historians to a kid sitting in front of the TV, watching his or her first Olympics.

Who the hell is The Gladiator?