Chương 2: The Wrong Road Forward

The boar hit the broken fence rail, bounced left, and gave Meno half a second. He used all of it. Short cut to the shoulder. Step with the recoil. Short cut again before the beast could square up. He kept the root between them, forcing the boar to turn wide, and his sword rose and fell in a rhythm so plain it made his jaw ache. [Compound Swing | Chain: 10 | Damage: +100%] The tenth hit bit deep. Meno did not chase the feeling. Chasing got him killed.

He let the boar lunge, slid behind the cracked rail, and cut its flank as it stumbled over the wood. [Compound Swing | Chain: 20 | Damage: +200%] The boar died on the twenty-third swing. Twenty-three. A caster nearby killed one in four spells and complained about mana downtime. Meno stood over the corpse with his sword tip in the mud, breathing through his nose while chat laughed itself thin. The field had changed around him. The launch flood had become streams. Parties moved farther down the road.

The good players had outleveled the ridge. The whales and guild stacks had vanished toward dungeons, escort quests, and whatever early routes their analysts had smelled out. Meno stayed with the pigs. He stopped dying to them after the first hour. That should have felt like progress. It did, for about five minutes, until the kill timer made the truth measurable. A clean boar still took too many hits. A messy boar took forever.

Every fight began with pathetic starter damage, and Compound Swing only became real after he had already spent the time other classes used to finish the mob. Mastery made him safer. It did not make the first nine hits stop being bad. [Level Up | Level 2] He stared at the notice while a boar twitched dead at his feet. No new skill. No stat choice. No class art. Just Level 2, a little more health, a little more basic damage, and the same sword asking for twenty polite contacts before it behaved like a weapon.

"Okay," he said to the stream.

"Standardized level curve. Early levels are fast. We keep pace now." keep pace with who bro the pace left He muted chat for one fight, missed a shoulder read, and lost the chain at eight. [Chain Broken: Tempo Break] He unmuted chat because hiding it had cost him focus anyway. The sun slid higher. The meadow thinned again. The first wave of casuals disappeared back toward the city to sell loot, repair gear, brag, or complain. A handful of late starters arrived and passed him after twenty minutes.

Two warm-voiced newbies asked if he knew where the herb lady was. He pointed with his sword without looking.

"Thanks!" one said.

"Good luck with, uh… your thing."

"My thing is called damage ramp."

"Oh. Nice. That sounds strong." Her friend whispered, "Why is he still on boars then?" Meno pretended he had pushed chat volume down and could hear nothing. [Level Up | Level 3] Still nothing. His hand opened and closed around the sword grip. The level-up restored enough health to save him a bandage he did not own. That was the reward. That was the whole party. He checked the leaderboard. [Launch Leaderboard | Global Level Rank] [Rank 1: BrineSaint — Level 7] [Your Rank: Unlisted — Level 3] The gap had shape now.

It was not a bad start. It was a wall being built while he counted tusks in mud. He farmed until the grass darkened under repeated spawns and corpse fades. The AI director adjusted the field after the crowd moved on. Boars rooted closer to fences that had been broken by player traffic. A farmer NPC shouted at anyone dragging mobs through his turnip rows. Crows gathered where too many starter beasts died and scattered whenever players approached, black wings flashing over the hill. Meno used all of it. Fence bounce.

Root trip. Mud slide. Turnip row funnel. He turned the ridge into a cheap training room one mistake at a time. [Compound Swing | Chain: 30 | Damage: +300%] The thirtieth hit killed a higher-health boar he had pulled from the far side of the ridge. His sword arm hummed with fatigue feedback. His real wrist, somewhere under the rig strap in his apartment, sent a dull warning up his forearm.

"Thirty," he said. Nobody in chat answered for six seconds. Viewer count: 13. Then 12. Then 11. still lvl 3? actual loser The next level took longer. Meno knew it would. Everyone knew leveling curves climbed. The insult was how slowly his class converted cleaner play into XP. He was not dying. He was executing. He was reading boars like patch notes. The kill count rose, and the leaderboard vanished farther ahead anyway. [Level Up | Level 4] He waited for the second line. A technique. A mastery hint. A class unlock.

Some ugly little crumb that proved Swing Master had a floor under the floor. Nothing came. He opened his panel and closed it before the class name finished hurting him. [Launch Leaderboard | Global Level Rank] [Rank 1: BrineSaint — Level 10] [Your Rank: Unlisted — Level 4] Six levels. Only six, if a person lied with subtraction. Level 4 to 10 was not the same distance as Level 1 to 7. Every level would take more XP, more uptime, better mobs, cleaner kills. BrineSaint was already inside systems Meno had not reached.

Dungeons maybe. Chain quests. First-clear bonuses. Coordinated event tagging. A whole server's momentum pulling away from a man still negotiating with starter livestock. His stomach folded in on itself. Viewer count: 9. Eight of the names were the old viewbots that never typed, never clipped, never subbed, never left unless the platform purged them. One real viewer remained, silent in the list. Probably his mother. That thought found a soft place and put a knife there. A message slid into his private overlay.

Mom: I watched some. It's still early. Everything will be fine. Please don't take it so hard. Meno looked at the words until the field blurred. She had tried to make it smaller for him. Anger would have let him push back. Comfort meant she had seen enough to pity him and had chosen gentle hands because she still remembered when those worked. He imagined Lysa reading the family chat later, careful and exhausted, saying he needed a plan outside games. Again. Correct again.

His sister who sent money to their mother while Meno spent launch day proving full random could ruin a life in high fidelity. A boar spawned thirty steps away. Meno did not move. He knew the correct play. Go back. Pick up quests. Stack XP sources. Deliver medicine, gather flowers, escort farmers, listen to NPCs with fake-local grief and real AI reactions. Let the standardized systems pay him. Let the world director hand out dynamic objectives to every player smart enough to stop pretending raw grinding was noble.

Quests were for newbies, roleplayers, and people with party patience. Rank one players routed them when efficient, sure, but Meno's head refused it. Running flowers after getting laughed off boars felt like kneeling. He pictured himself carrying herbs while chat typed MOM WAS RIGHT, and heat crawled up his neck. Everyone else could give up on him. He had not earned the right to join them. Meno sheathed the starter sword and walked back toward the city. The road had become louder than the field.

Players rushed in both directions, carrying sacks, weapons, rumors, and bad information. A speedrunner argued with a lorehunter near a milestone.

"The mill event is bait," the speedrunner snapped.

"NPC chain costs seven minutes and pathlocks you." The lorehunter had ink on his starter sleeves and the wild-eyed look of someone who had found three clues and slept zero hours.

"The widow mentions an old oath. Oath means faction trigger. Faction trigger means later dungeon unlocks. You deal with your goblins; I am more interested in consequences." Meno moved around them. He could barely stand the word dungeon. He did not open the leaderboard again. His hand twitched toward it twice. Both times he curled his fingers until the urge passed. Westmarket's outer bazaar had gone feral. Auction barkers yelled over NPC merchants.

Crafters sat behind blankets covered with bones, hides, cracked crystals, and weeds sorted by color. A market baron type in a clean coat bought boar tusks by the pile with a smile that remembered every price it had ever beaten. Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Boar parts?" the man asked Meno.

"I'll do twelve copper for the lot."

"They vendor higher."

"They vendored higher two hours ago. Supply is a flood, friend. Take twelve before every desperate blade in this city learns to count." Meno walked past him to an NPC stall where a woman with rolled sleeves sorted hides into bins. Her hands moved fast, her eyes faster.

"Bristleback tusks, hides, chipped hooves," Meno said. She weighed the bundle.

"Fifteen copper. Tusks are down. Hides are still useful if they are cut clean. Yours are hacked."

"They were moving."

"Most things do when stabbed." He sold the lot. Currency climbed, then fell almost immediately at the weapon rack next door. The sword merchant was a broad man with a gray beard and a scar across one knuckle. He watched Meno compare blades and clicked his tongue.

"You want better damage, buy an axe."

"I need swing recovery."

"You need coin."

"I have coin."

"You have apology money." Meno put every copper he had on the counter. The merchant counted it without hurry, then picked a plain iron sword from the lower rack. It had a straighter edge, better balance, and a grip that did not feel like wet rope. [Common II Plain Iron Sword | Damage: Low+ | Durability: 42/42] Meno took it. It was still trash. It was also better trash. The merchant nodded toward a padded vest.

"Armor next."

"If I get hit, I lose anyway."

"If you get killed, you lose more."

"If I'm building around getting hit, the build is dead." The merchant looked at him for one long second.

"You lot say the strangest things with confidence." Meno left before the man could be right for free. He repaired nothing because the starter sword was going into storage or sale later, and the new sword had taken all his money. Armor was dead value. Defense helped bad hits hurt less. His class failed before the damage number mattered. Contact broke tempo. Stagger broke chain. Panic broke chain. Death broke everything. The only defensive stat that mattered was never letting the enemy touch the run.

Which meant boars were the wrong target. The thought settled as he crossed out of Westmarket and took the smaller road toward the farms. Low-level mobs were safe now. Safe meant slow. Slow had already killed the push. If he could not reduce the number of required early stack hits, he had to make each kill worth more XP. Higher threat. Higher reward. A target with big health, slow patterns, maybe exploitable recovery windows. Something lethal to normal Level 5 idiots.

Something stupid enough to catch him up if he could force it to become repeatable. The continent was full of starting cities. It had to be. No server would put the whole launch population through one gate unless the AI director wanted a riot simulator. BrineSaint had probably spawned in another kingdom, another economy, already inside a clean chain of XP sources Meno could not see. Fine. Meno needed to leave the pack he was losing to. First, he needed insurance.

Death drops had taken inventory before equipment so far. Ration. Coins. Tusk. The game was cruel, but it had rules under the teeth. If his bag was full of garbage, maybe the sword stayed on his hip when the bad plan started killing him. He went back to the boars. The new sword cut better. Not enough to fix the class. Enough to make the early hits feel less like filing paperwork. He killed faster, chained cleaner, and watched the viewer count stay at 9 like it had been nailed there. Chat said nothing.

The silence made every breath louder. Every swing had room to sound stupid. He found himself talking anyway, because a streamer with no voice was just a man failing alone.

"Common II sword reduced average kill time. Still bad. Chain dependency still bad. Level 5, then we move." No reply. He killed until the ridge looked empty, crossed to the far wallows, and killed there too. A party of late casuals invited him when they saw the chain damage ramp on a longer boar.

"Hey, sword guy," one said, bright and confused.

"You hit really hard after a while. Wanna group?"

"No."

"We have snacks."

"In-game snacks?"

"Morale snacks." They laughed and moved on. Warm people were dangerous. They made bad choices feel rude instead of optimal. [Level Up | Level 5] Meno exhaled through his teeth. Again, no skill.

"Beautiful," he said.

"Perfect. Five levels of nothing." Nobody typed. He did not return to Westmarket. The city meant crowds, recruiters, leaderboards, his mother's message sitting in the overlay like an unpaid bill. A smaller town sat beyond the starter farms, marked by smoke from kitchen chimneys and the churned road of players passing through. He headed there with a bag full of boar parts and a plan that deserved to be mocked by at least one real viewer. The town was called Rillpost.

Its palisade had fresh-cut stakes and two NPC guards who looked at the player traffic like men watching weather ruin crops. Inside, a few stalls served players too low or too impatient to go back to Westmarket. Prices were worse. Lines were shorter. Meno sold his boar materials to a tired grocer who had more tusks than fruit.

"Another bundle," she said, weighing them.

"At this point I could build my children a tusk fence."

"Vendor value."

"Barely." She paid him anyway. Then he found the worst stall in town. A junk dealer sat under a patched awning surrounded by cracked bowls, bent spoons, chipped wooden saints, broken belt buckles, dull nails, split buttons, and other gray-name trash with no use except turning back into less money later. The man had one lazy eye.

"I need your cheapest inventory filler," Meno said. The junk dealer blinked.

"You need what?"

"Junk. Light. Stackable if possible. Lowest unit price."

"You making a scarecrow?"

"Yes." The man leaned back.

"That is the first honest stupid thing I've heard all day."

"Can you sell it or do I need a smarter trash guy?"

"I can sell trash to anyone dumb enough to ask for it." He pulled a crate forward.

"Cracked clay tokens. Broken loom pegs. Splintered prayer beads. Worth near nothing, which is still more than their practical use."

"I'll take as many as this buys." The dealer counted Meno's coins, then thumbed through them again with open disbelief.

"This is my lucky day." Meno packed his inventory with gray junk until the slots looked embarrassing. [Inventory Updated | Cracked Clay Token x18] [Inventory Updated | Broken Loom Peg x14] [Inventory Updated | Splintered Prayer Bead x11] Meno headed out the opposite gate. The road bent away from Westmarket and climbed through thin forest. Birds shrieked from branches whenever players ran under them. Some were ambient. Some were not.

He learned the difference when a needle-beaked pest dropped from a pine and tried to take his ear. [Hostile: Needlecry Finch | Type: Pest Beast | Threat: Low | Trait: Dive-and-Flee] He ducked, ran, and refused the fight. The forest opened into farmlands cut by stone walls, irrigation ditches, and trampled grain. Players filled the area in clusters. Level 4s and 5s, maybe 6s by the gear.

They fought scarecrow-shaped vine things, fat field rats, shrieking birds, and animated clumps of thorn that rolled like angry baskets. The system gave threat, not exact levels, because of course it did. Exact numbers would have made planning feel too fair. [Hostile: Furrow Rat | Type: Field Beast | Threat: Low | Trait: Burrow-and-Bite] [Hostile: Threshvine Clump | Type: Plant Beast | Threat: Moderate | Trait: Snare-Roll] Moderate was still beneath what he needed. A healer on a low wall pointed at him as he passed.

"Road quest is back there."

"Good."

"You're going the wrong way for it."

"That's the plan." She squinted.

"That sentence has killed a lot of DPS." A tank beside her, shield dented, called, "Let him cook. Sometimes soup needs one idiot." Meno lifted a hand without slowing. Past the farms, the land dropped toward a river running fast between pale banks. Beyond it, mountains rose in stacked gray ridges, dark pines clinging to the lower slopes. Smoke marked camps in the valley beyond. The air felt cooler near the water, and the safe clutter of players thinned until his footsteps sounded alone.

He checked his inventory once. Junk, junk, junk. Sword equipped. Common clothes. A few copper left. Good enough to die with. The river had no bridge in sight. Upstream meant time. Downstream bent toward a cluster of players fighting river pests, which meant more time and maybe a route back to town. Meno chose the narrowest crossing and stepped onto slick stones. Halfway across, the water bulged.

[Hostile: Hookjaw Pike | Type: River Beast | Threat: High | Trait: Ambush-Bite] The fish came out of the current like a thrown blade, all teeth and wet muscle. Meno jumped back. His boot slipped. The pike snapped shut where his ankle had been, teeth clacking against stone. Another shape rolled beneath the surface.

"Of course the river has hands," he hissed. He sprinted the last stones, water slamming his shins, sword held high because dropping the new blade in a river would be too perfectly on-brand. A pike clipped his calf. Pain flashed. He hit the far bank on one knee and scrambled up mud while the fish thrashed behind him, unable or unwilling to beach itself. His health sat at half. He laughed once, breathless and mean.

"Still faster than quests." The mountain valley began with scrub grass and broken rock. Then the first orc horn sounded. Meno dropped flat behind a boulder. Below, an orc camp sprawled around three smoking firepits. Hide tents. Bone racks. Crude banners painted dark red. The orcs moved in groups of three and four, broad-shouldered and heavy-armed, with patrol paths that overlapped in ways designed to punish greedy pulls. A shaman stood near the largest fire, staff capped with a skull that leaked green sparks.

He inspected the nearest patrol. [Hostile: Redscar Orc Raider | Type: Humanoid Warrior | Threat: Lethal | Trait: Pack-Aggressive] Another tag flickered as the shaman turned. [Hostile: Redscar Bone Shaman | Type: Humanoid Caster | Threat: Lethal | Trait: Hex-Projectile]"Absolutely not," Meno whispered. One lethal monster might be content. Three lethal monsters and a caster was a loading screen with scenery. He edged around the camp, keeping rocks between himself and the firepits.

His health ticked up slowly through natural recovery, too slowly to matter if anything found him. Twice, patrols forced him to crawl through thorn scrub. Once, an orc stopped mid-path and sniffed the air. Meno froze with one hand pressed into gravel. The orc's head turned toward him. A boar would have charged. A starter beast would have committed and let him abuse terrain. The orc stared at the boulder, then gestured to another raider. They spread. The AI director was not giving him dumb targets anymore.

Meno slid backward on his elbows and dropped behind a ledge as a green bolt cracked against the rock above him. Stone chips sprayed his cheek. He ran. A horn blared. Footsteps pounded behind him. Another spell hissed past his shoulder and burst against a pine, splashing green fire over the bark. He cut left between two boulders, jumped a dry wash, and nearly ate dirt when the slope gave under his boot. Aggro held longer than it should have. Lethal zones had teeth.

He kept maximum distance, broke line of sight three times, and still heard the orcs crashing after him until the valley widened into harsh orange earth. The chase fell away. Meno bent over with both hands on his knees. His stream overlay still showed 9 viewers. Still silent.

"Great content," he said between breaths.

"Man runs from employment, mother, and orcs. In that order." The badlands stretched ahead under a hard sky. Orange dirt. Black mountains. Ribs of dark stone pushed from the ground like old bones. Heat shimmered above cracked flats. Large beasts moved in the distance, each one far too big for his health bar. He kept to ridges and gullies. Every inspection came back ugly.

[Hostile: Ashhide Gorer | Type: Badlands Beast | Threat: Lethal | Trait: Gore-and-Trample] [Hostile: Glassback Scorpion | Type: Badlands Beast | Threat: Lethal | Trait: Armor-and-Venom] [Hostile: Cindermaw Jackal | Type: Badlands Beast | Threat: Lethal | Trait: Pack-Harry] He gave everything distance. Some still chased. The jackals tracked him over a ridge until he threw himself down a shale slope and tore open both palms.

A scorpion turned faster than its size promised, claws clicking, and he hid under an overhang while it stabbed the ground above him with its tail. The plan had entered the part where even Meno could see its shape from outside his own skull. He was underleveled, undergeared, alone, and carrying a bag of broken prayer beads so death would steal trash before his sword. This was not genius. It was desperation with inventory management. He kept moving anyway.

The canyon entrance appeared between two black stone walls, narrow enough that the larger beasts avoided it. Shade pooled inside. The ground turned from cracked dirt to packed dust scattered with fist-sized rocks. Wind pushed through the gap and carried a slow grinding sound from deeper within. Meno stopped. Something moved around the bend. At first it looked like a pile of stone deciding where to fall. Then it unfolded. Two thick arms. A body of packed earth and embedded rock.

A head with a single dull amber glow buried where a face should have been. It dragged one heavy foot, then another, each step shaking dust from the canyon wall. He inspected it. [Hostile: Dustbound Earth Elemental | Type: Elemental | Threat:??? | Trait: Tremor-Slam] Question marks. Meno's heartbeat changed. Lethal meant the game could still categorize him against it. Question marks meant the gap had left the chart. It was stupid. It was probably impossible.

It was also alone, slow, and made of a body that looked like it would accept repeated weapon contact without dancing away like a boar. This was it.

"Okay," he whispered. His mouth had gone dry.

"Pattern check. We don't need kill. We need data." Still no chat. He drew the Common II sword and stepped into the canyon. The elemental turned toward him with a delay that felt exploitable. Its shoulders ground together. Dust spilled from its chest. Meno circled left, testing aggro radius. The amber glow brightened. [Compound Swing | Chain: 1 | Damage: +10%] The sword struck stone and jolted his arm to the elbow. The health bar moved so little he thought he had missed. He had not. The chain held. Valid resistance.

Big body. Slow turn. His chest tightened around a laugh.

"Valid," he said. He landed the second hit, then third. Zero damage. The elemental lifted one arm with terrible patience. Meno backed up, ready to punish the downswing. The arm did not come down. The ground did. A circular shockwave burst from the elemental's feet, dust and stone kicking outward in a ring. Meno jumped too late. The canyon floor slammed through his legs, spine, teeth, skull. His health vanished in one line.

[Death | Penalty: Dropped Item, XP Loss, Rank Slip] [Respawn: Emberhollow Cave Shrine] [Dropped: Cracked Clay Token x1] He woke on damp stone under a ceiling of hanging roots and mineral veins. A small shrine glowed blue in the back of a cave. The air tasted of dust and cold water. Somewhere outside, wind moved through badland rock. For once, the respawn was closer. Meno lay still long enough for the death pain to drain from his nerves. Then he laughed, quiet and cracked, because the sword was still equipped.

One clay token gone. Forty-two pieces of junk left to learn a fight that killed him in one AoE. He sat up, checked the blade, checked the bag, and pushed himself to his feet.

"Again," he said to the dead chat. The cave mouth waited ahead, opening toward orange light and the canyon that had just flattened him.