Chương 25: To Slop or Not to Slop

Maddy stood there for about three seconds with the pink panel floating in front of her face and the [Sparkle] still hanging at the end of the line like the system had absolutely no idea what it had just confirmed, and then Maddy turned to the side and went to her hands and knees and threw up on the road. She threw up dry fish.

The dry fish from yesterday and the bread from yesterday and bile and she made a sound between the heaves that was not a sound he had heard her make before and her hair was in her face and the talisman was hanging off her neck and pulsing a confused color, something it had not been before, and Ben stood there and did not know what to do with his hands.

He put his hand on her back, lightly, just to let them know he was there, and she did not push him off, and she threw up again, and the wax knife was still in his other hand because he had not figured out where to put the wax knife yet. The woman in red was still crying behind them. She was saying Mike less now. She had switched to a low keening sound that did not have words in it.

Up the road, one of the guards was kneeling next to the lead wagon and was doing something to his arm with a strip of cloth, and the other guard was walking down the line of bodies checking them, kicking them lightly with his boot. Lefant.

Lefant was still hitched to their wagon, was still there, was unbothered, was looking back at them with his wrong-side elephant eye, and Lefant was a row of code, Lefant was a row of code, Lefant was a row of code, his brain was looping on that because if Lefant was a row of code then so was Mike, so was the woman in red, so was— The system said the people are real. The system said. The system said the people are real. You heard it dude. Maddy's screen said it. They're real. He did not know what to do with that.

He stood with his hand on Maddy's back and he watched the woman in red hold Mike's hand and he listened to the keening sound and he thought, in a panicked compartment of his brain, this is not real. This is AI slop. This is the system trying to make us feel something to advance the plot. The throat is code. The blood is code. Mike's name being Mike is code. The keening is code.

The system is using every cheap fucking trick because the system is a clanker and the system cannot do anything other than cheap fucking tricks, and the system has just told us the people are real because the system wants us to feel bad about it because the system is going to use the feeling-bad-about-it to advance the next plot beat. It's slop. It's slop. It's slop. The thieves were bad people. Even if the thieves were real, they were bad people. They were trying to kill us. They were going to kill us.

They wanted the amulet. They knew about the amulet somehow. They were going to slit our throats and they were going to take the amulet and they were going to do whatever bad people did with magical amulets in worlds with magical amulets. So even if they were real. Even if they were real it wouldn't. It wouldn't be— The lit major was still screaming.

The lit major was screaming about the cliché and about the cheap of it but the lit major was also doing the math the lit major did when the lit major was confronted with something that was actually working, which was: the move was a cliché and the move had worked and Ben was feeling something and feeling something was data and data was real even if the source of the data was slop. Maddy was still on her hands and knees. She was done throwing up. She was just there.

"Maddy."

"Don't."

"Maddy."

"Don't Ben." He took his hand off her back. She stayed on her hands and knees for another minute and then she sat back on her heels. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and there was vomit and there was thief blood and there was sweat on her wrist when she pulled it back and she looked at her wrist for a second. Her face did a thing he could not read and she wiped her wrist on her shorts.

"Ben."

"Yeah."

"I…want a shower."

"Yeah."

"I want a fucking shower."

"Yeah."

The caravan split.

Mike was dead and Mike had been from the Mossgrove end of the world and Mike had a brother in Mossgrove and Mike's body needed to go back to Mossgrove and the woman in red was Mike's wife, right, she was, somehow, his wife, Ben had not known they were a couple, had not picked up on it, had not been paying attention enough since AI bullshit did AI bullshit, and the woman in red was going back with the body, and three of the merchants were going back to escort her, and the rest of the caravan was going to push on to Silvermarch because Silvermarch was closer now than Mossgrove was and there was cargo that needed to be delivered.

They wrapped Mike in his cloak. They wrapped him slowly. They wrapped him with a care that the system, Ben thought, with the lit major still active in his head, could not have written from scratch, the care of a man's wife folding the edges of his cloak around his hands. The woman in red did not cry while she wrapped him. She had been crying. She was not crying now. She was doing the work of wrapping her husband. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

One of the merchants put a small wooden token in Mike's pocket. Ben did not know what the wooden token was. He did not ask. The two guards loaded the bodies of the thieves into a pile off the side of the road. Fucking yeeted them into a sad little pile of bodies and limbs. The reasoning the guards offered, when one of the merchants asked, was that the forest would take care of it, by which the guard meant scavengers, by which the guard meant Ben did not want to think about what the guard meant. The pile was a pile.

There were ten bodies in it, or eleven, or twelve, Ben had lost count. The cape pieces stuck out in patches of brown and black. The woman in red took Mike's wagon and turned it around. The three merchants who were going back arranged themselves around her.

One of them was an older woman with grey hair who had been driving one of the middle wagons and who Ben had not really registered before now, and she was holding the woman in red's arm and walking beside her wagon and saying something into her ear in a quiet steady voice that the woman in red was nodding to at intervals. They started back down the road. The wagon went away from them. The lanterns on the wagon went away from them.

The shape of the wagon got smaller and the shape of the woman in red got smaller and then the road bent and the wagon was gone. The rest of the caravan started up again. Lefant pulled. The wagon creaked. The yellow sun was now fully up and the blue sun was coming up behind it and the woods were lighter and the canopy was thinner and the bird sounds had come back, which the lit major in his head registered as another cheap move, the system using the birds come back after the battle trope.

Because the system was unable to stop itself. Right? He climbed back into the wagon. Maddy climbed in after him. She sat against the back wall with her knees up and her arms around her knees and Bolt across her lap. She stared at the canvas opposite her and she did not say anything. Her hands were shaking still. Less. Still. He sat next to her with a foot of space between them.

"Maddy."

"Don't."

"Okay." He didn't. He sat next to her and the wagon creaked and the road did the road thing and Lefant pulled and the talisman pulsed on Maddy's clavicle in a color it had not been before and Ben stared at the canvas and tried to think about anything else. The system pinged softly. [Ben! You leveled up twice!] [Don't forget to allocate your points!] He muted the panel. Fuck you. He let his head fall back against the wagon wall. Just... fuck you. The wagon creaked. A long time passed.

The Lefant merchant came by maybe an hour later. He came by with a wooden cup of water for each of them. The cup was warm and the water had a faint mineral taste and Ben was holding the cup before he realized he had been handed it. The merchant was standing at the back of the wagon with his desert coat and his hat and his face. His fucking NPC face.

"My lady," he said.

"Drink. Slowly." Maddy did not look at him. She took the cup. She drank. The merchant looked at Ben.

"And you, friend."

"Thanks."

"I am sorry. For the lady. For Mike. For all of it." Ben drank his water. The merchant stood there for a second. He stood in a quiet that Ben could not categorize, that did not match any of the NPC pause patterns Ben had clocked from the system, and the merchant looked, for a second, at his own hands, and then back up.

"The road can be cruel," he said.

"I have lost companions on this road. I lost my wife to the road. I did not bring her water afterward because I was not there. I am bringing you water now." Ben looked at the merchant. The merchant's face was the merchant's face. The merchant's coat was the merchant's coat.

The merchant's hands had small scars on the knuckles and the scars were detailed enough that the system had either spent a lot of compute on the merchant's knuckles or had not spent compute on them at all, because real knuckles had small scars and the system, when given a knuckle to render, might either model it or default to it.

"…thanks dude," Ben said. The merchant nodded. He left. Maddy was looking after him.

"Ben."

"Yeah."

"That was a…thing."

"Yeah."

"That was…well, he said he lost his wife."

"He did."

"He told us he lost his wife. And he brought us water and he…told us he lost his wife."

"Maddy."

"What if it's real, Ben."

"It's not."

"What if it's real."

"It's not real, Maddy. It's slop. It's slop on slop. It's a system that has read every wagon-attack scene in every fantasy book ever written and is feeding us the average. It's giving us a grieving merchant because the grieving merchant is the move. Mike is the move. The wife is the move. The water is the move. It's all the move. It's all the moves."

"Ben."

"It's not real."

"…"

"It's not real."

"…okay."

"It's not real."

"Okay." She was quiet for a minute. Then she opened her panel.

"What skill did you get," she said. Her voice was flat. She was making conversation. She was making the conversation he had been about to make. She had taken the move out of his hand before he could play it.

"…Wax Arc. Ranged slash. Two meters. Four mana."

"Cool."

"You?" She tapped her panel. She read.

"Volt Toss," she said.

"Throw Bolt in knife mode, it locks on the nearest enemy, electrifies them for three seconds, returns to my hand. Cooldown twelve seconds, mana cost six."

"…that's a boomerang."

"It's a boomerang."

"It's actually called Volt Toss?"

"The system named it. It's a fucking cringe ass name. I tried to rename it Pikachu Frisbee in my head but the system said it was not a valid renaming."

"…"

"Yeah."

"That's actually a really good skill."

"Yeah."

"That's like, a lock-on ranged attack with an automatic return."

"Yeah."

"With three seconds of stun damage."

"Yeah."

"That's actually broken."

"It's actually fine."

"Maddy. It's broken. That's better than my Wax Arc. By a lot."

"…yeah okay."

"…"

"…" She put the panel away.

"Allocations," she said.

"I leveled once. Five points."

"Yeah?"

"I'll put them all in CHA."

"All five?"

"All five."

"That's just HP."

"I know."

"You're already at 150."

"I'll be at 175." He look at her. Her eyes stared down at her hands, then at Bolt, then at the ground. He that stare.

"…you're scared."

"I'm fucking scared."

"…"

"I don't want to die, Ben."

"…yeah."

"I really don't want to die."

"Yeah."

"Because what if it's real."

"Maddy."

"What if it's real and I die."

"Maddy stop."

"I don't want to."

"Stop."

"Okay." She allocated. Her panel chimed. [HP 175/175!] and she didn't even look at the chime. The talisman pulsed against her collarbone and she put her hand over the talisman without looking and held it there for a second and then took her hand away. He allocated his ten.

He allocated them evenly across STR, DEX, WIS, CHA—two each—because his brain had clocked that he was getting demolished on physical stats against Maddy and his brain had also clocked that more CHA was more HP and more HP was the difference between dying and not dying, and he was not going to put points in INT because INT was already 23 and INT was fucking worthless right now, and he was not going to put points in LCK because LCK was still question marks and putting points in question marks was a sucker move.

Then he reread his own math, realized he sucked ass, and added the extra two from the leftover and dumped them in CHA too because fuck it, more HP. His panel updated. [Level 9] [HP: 140/140] [MP: 24/24] [STR: 18 | DEX: 22 | INT: 23 | WIS: 12 | CHA: 19 | LCK:???] [Skills: Wax Arc] [Titles: Newly Arrived!] He stared at it.

He stared at his own stat block on his own panel and the stat block was the stat block of a person who had just killed five other people in a forest on a road with a knife made out of a wax pen, and the stat block did not know that, the stat block was just a stat block, the stat block was rendered in soft blue with sparkle effects and was telling him he had grown. He muted the panel again. He let his head fall back against the wagon wall again. Lefant pulled. The wagon creaked.

Maddy did not say anything for a while. Then she said, very quietly, "this is slop, right."

"It's AI slop."

"Really good AI slop."

"It's still slop."

"…okay."

"It's not real."

"I…know it's not real. It's just that—""It's not real, Maddy."

"…"

"…"

"…okay Ben." The wagon creaked. Up the road, the bird sounds kept doing the bird sounds, and the yellow sun and the blue sun did their math, and somewhere a wagon ahead of them squeaked on a bad wheel, and the road did the road thing. He looked at the canvas. The lit major was very quiet.