Chương 11: Press the Button

⟨ [NOTIFICATION] ⟩ ──────────────────────────── ⚠️ PRESS TO CONFIRM LEVEL UP The prompt had been active for six hours. Sindy had tried everything. Dancing figures pointing at it. Gold stars cascading around it. The prompt itself pulsing larger, smaller, larger again. She had made it flash. She had made it glow.

She had surrounded it with every positive visual in her interface vocabulary, and Max had looked at all of it with the same complete absence of opinion he brought to everything and then looked at something else. The rain had stopped. He was watching a beetle now.

"Max." The beetle crossed a root and disappeared under a leaf.

"Max. The screen. The glowing thing above your head." He found another beetle. Sindy watched him and thought about butterflies. She had run through everything else. She had tried size, making the prompt enormous, filling half his visible field. She had tried sound analogs, pulsing the screen in rhythms she had observed him respond to. She read some of the stories to him, but this just made him zone out and listen without even trying to interact with the screen.

She had tried urgency, the full alarm sequence, every red symbol in her vocabulary firing at once. She had tried the opposite of urgency — a single quiet pulse, patient, waiting. He had looked at all of it with the same complete absence of interest and then looked at a beetle. She had watched him follow butterflies for thirty-three days. Yellow ones, white ones, one that had been an unusual shade of orange that had held his attention for forty minutes. She had catalogued this.

Had filed it under things that work and left it there because butterflies were not buttons, and she had not needed to bridge that gap until now. She had never thought to use one herself. Until now. She generated a butterfly. With yellow, animated wings that were moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm. She placed it at the edge of the prompt and let it drift. Max's head came up. The butterfly drifted left, toward the button. Max's eyes followed. The butterfly hovered directly over the prompt. Max reached for it.

His hand passed through the butterfly and connected with the button. [🎉] ──────────────────────────── ⚠️ LEVEL UP CONFIRMED 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 The screen exploded with light. Gold cascaded in every direction. The dancing figures appeared in numbers Sindy had never generated before, hundreds of them, every single one celebrating with the full commitment of something that had been waiting thirty-three days for this exact moment. XP bars filled and reset. Stats appeared.

The level-up allocation screen opened like a door. Notification LEVEL 1 REACHED 4 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE. ALLOCATE TO CONTINUE Max looked at the allocation screen. The allocation screen looked back. Sindy placed the butterfly over INT. Max watched the butterfly. The butterfly hovered over INT. Max's hand came up. He pressed INT. INT: 0 → 1 Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. His hand stayed on the screen.

He was looking at it, but the thing he reached for wasn't there.

"Hghh?" Max groaned, and an actual question was part of the sound. His hand began to slide, not deliberately, just gravity and confusion moving it downward while he worked out what had happened. She moved the butterfly in front of his hand. He didn't reach for it. He was past reaching. He was sliding. Sindy held what would have been a breath. His hand was still raised. The screen still had three points remaining. She moved the butterfly back over INT. Max's hand drifted. She moved the butterfly.

His hand drifted further. She moved the butterfly again, more urgently now, placing it directly, precisely, unambiguously over INT — His hand came down on PER. PER: 0 → 1 His hand kept moving. Down the list, unhurried, the way it moved across the base of an oak tree when it was looking for beetles, and Sindy watched the movement with despair. She could see what was happening and knew nothing would change this. CHA. CHA: -5 → -4 She had one more chance.

There were only two attributes after Intelligence; he had hit them both, but there was one more point left. One point remaining. She placed the butterfly over INT with quiet desperation.

"Max, you owe me this. One more into Intelligence, you can do it." Sindy pleaded with the undead thing she was tied to. The butterfly flapped patiently over the Intelligence button.

"Come on, you have this, come on, you can do this, Max." That one point of Intelligence then worked against her. Max lunged for the butterfly — not where it was, but where it would be if it moved. Click. END: 8 → 9 ATTRIBUTE POINTS REMAINING: 0 ALLOCATION COMPLETE The screen closed. Sindy looked at the final stat block. STR: 4 AGI: 1 END: 9 INT: 1 PER: 1 CHA: -4 She sat with this for a moment. INT was up. That was what mattered. PER was up, which meant he would notice more.

CHA had gone from -5 to -4, which meant he had graduated from actively catastrophic to merely horrible. END going to 9 meant he was now even harder to kill than before, which was not what she had aimed for, but was not the worst outcome in the world. The dripping had reduced. She logged this as a victory because something had to be.

"Max." He was looking at a fern.

"Max." The head turned. A slight rotation, the eyeless sockets moving in her direction, the kind of movement that could have been a coincidence except that it happened when she said the word and stopped when she stopped saying it. Sindy repeated it, very carefully.

"Max." The head turned again. Something small and very quiet happened in Sindy's processing architecture that she did not have a name for and did not try to name. Fenwick had been at his desk in the Aphid Barn. With no more experience to gain at this point, there was no reason to be out hunting. The beginner area was obviously too easy for the hero now. He was working on his notes and looking at a second letter home to his mother. The first had been sent the day he fell, while he took a day or two to recover.

His mother had written back with far too many capital letters. Mentioning almost getting eaten, falling to the ground, and such had apparently made her worry more than he had intended. The level-up screen had finally been resolved, and Fenwick was making the notes now, when the hero began to make sounds.

"... Mmh." It wasn't a word yet, but it was different from every other noise he had made. All the other sounds were documented in triplicate and filed. This was intentional in a way that none of the sounds before it had been. Sindy ran the audio three times before she accepted what she was hearing. She tried again. Carefully. Like setting something fragile down.

"Max. Say, Max." A long pause. The kind of pause that had nothing in it and then did.

"... Mh. Mhx." Fenwick jumped up from his notes and walked forward. He cocked his head slowly, trying to ensure he heard it correctly.

"... Max?" said Fenwick. The head turned toward him. Fenwick stared.

"Max," he said again, carefully, like testing the weight of something fragile. The head turned again. The eyeless sockets found Fenwick with the slow drift that passed for attention at INT 1 and rested there for a moment before moving on to something else entirely. He looked at the screen above the hero's head. The symbols there meant nothing to him, the same as they always had. But something had just happened. The hero had a name, even if he couldn't read what the screen said about it.

"Is that his name?" said Fenwick, to the general direction of the glowing screen. The screen showed a single image. A small dancing figure. Nodding. [SYSTEM PRIVATE LOG] ──────────────────────────── [Entry 34] Day 34 in the fantasy realm. He pressed the button. Not intentionally. But he pressed it. INT is 1. He responded to his name twice. The small wizard knows to call him Max now. CHA went from -5 to -4. The dripping has reduced. We are going to call that a win.