Chương 26: Mike Made Shit Pizza So He Had to Die

She was sitting on the edge of the wagon. Legs dangling. Bolt in spear mode. Spear mode felt better than knife mode after yesterday. Knife mode said I have a knife and spear mode said I have a spear and right now she wanted the version that said I have a spear even though the wagon was moving at four miles an hour and there was nothing to spear. The road did the road thing again. Very original. Very dirt and pink grass. She was thinking about Mike. Not the NPC Mike. The other Mike. Mike of Mike's Pizza. Well.

She didn't know if they guy from Mike's Pizza was called Mike. Maybe he was. Maybe he was a dude named Tristan, that just happened to understand that people wouldn't give a shit about a place called Tristan's Pizza, so he had called it Mike's Pizza instead. Whatever. Mike's Pizza was on Route 9 in Hartsdale. Mike's Pizza had been Mike's Pizza her whole life, since she was four, since before she could read the sign on the front. They went there. Her and her mom. Big green vinyl booth in the corner.

Large pepperoni, small side of garlic knots. They went there after her high school graduation. They went there the day Maddy got the MIT acceptance and her mom cried for the third time in Maddy's life that Maddy could remember and then they got the extra large with bacon because it was a celebration even though they couldn't really afford the extra large with bacon. The financial aid package came two weeks later. It barely covered a semester. She did not tell her mom. She opened an OnlyFans the week after.

She was at MIT. MIT was fine. MIT was where you went when you got into MIT and figured out how to pay for the rest yourself. Mike's Pizza was the place she went with her mom. Now there was another Mike. The other Mike was dead. The other Mike had been an NPC. The other Mike had handed her dry fish. But his name was Mike, and the system had named him Mike out of the cliché bin, and now she was on a road in a fantasy world being pulled by a camel-elephant-dragonfly and she was about to cry over a pizza place.

Fuck you, NPC Mike. You died and now I'm thinking about Mike's Pizza. Fuck you, real Mike, for naming your pizza place after yourself with such a basic ass name. Fuck you both. You died and gave pizza to nobody. And fuck you Tristan. She didn't actually care about NPC Mike. That was the thing. She had met him for thirty seconds. He had given her dry fish. He had probably been generated by a sub-process running at low priority.

The brain was just doing the brain thing where it ran a pizza memory loop because the brain was a pussy and was trying not to think about hands-and-knees-throwing-up-yesterday-bread. She put her deodorant on. For the third time today. She had three sticks now because she had bought one more in Mossgrove the morning they left, the deodorant prepper instinct having graduated from impulse-buy to a small operation, and she was going through them at a rate that suggested she'd need more in Silvermarch.

"Why the fuck are you putting deodorant on for the third time," Ben said. He was lying behind her in the wagon, head on a shitty rolled-up tunic he bought from John, wax knife on his chest like a security blanket. They tried to sleep after the ambush. He had not slept much. Neither had she.

"I smell. Bad. So I put deodorant. And I don't have water spells so I can't actually shower."

"You don't smell that bad."

"You're lying."

"I'm lying."

"Hey system." [Yes Maddy?]"Modify Bolt to be a shower head." Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. A pause. [I cannot help with that, Maddy! Bonded weapons cannot be modified into utility items!]"What if I make the shower head do damage." [I cannot help with that, Maddy!]"What if it shoots Thunderbolts." [I cannot help —]"FINE." [Have a nice day, Maddy!] She put the deodorant back in her pocket. The wagon creaked. Lefant pulled.

A bird did a bird noise in the trees and the bird noise was almost convincing. She put a third layer on her left armpit. Ben commented on it.

"That's literally just doubling up on a spot you already deodoranted."

"And?"

"It's not gonna do more if you stack it."

"Stat points stack. Energized stacks. Maybe deodorant stacks."

"Deodorant doesn't stack."

"You don't know that."

"…technically you're right but—""Five-stack lavender. Sephora-tier."

"Maddy."

"Goddess tier." He laughed. Small laugh. Exhale through the nose. But it counted. She had been working on getting him to laugh since they woke up from the no-sleep-zone. She hadn't told him she was working on it. He hadn't noticed. The system, the worst thing in this world, had at least left her this, the ability to make Ben laugh once with something stupid. She turned in the wagon. Back against the wood frame. Legs tucked under. Facing him now.

"Hey dude."

"What."

"Did you ever do, like, martial arts or some bullshit." He thought about it. Slow. Eyes up to the canvas, fingers tapping the handle of the wax knife.

"No. Not really. Well—""Well what."

"I used to swim when I was little." She stared at him.

"How the fuck is that relevant."

"…"

"How is swimming relevant to slicing dudes in half with a wax pen." He looked at the canvas. There was a slash through it where a knife had ripped the fabric yesterday, a long jagged tear about a foot long, and she had been pretending the slash wasn't there for eight hours because pretending was easier than thinking about how close the knife had been to her hair. He was looking at the slash now. She kept her eyes on his face.

"Right," he said.

"Not really. I don't know. Probably some stupid shit the system gave me. I mean shit—did you ever handle a fucking spear?"

"No."

"I know you've handled your share of dildos but—" Her eyes went wide. She kept her mouth in a flat line. She bit the inside of her cheek hard. She was not going to laugh. She was going to refuse. The bit was going to die at the start.

"Shut up," she said. Mouth flat.

"Just saying."

"SHUT UP." She was smiling. She could feel her own face going against her will, corners going up before her brain could get to the controls, and Ben was looking at her now. He'd landed the joke. He knew he'd landed it, it was all over him. She'd already given him the win.

"I don't know either," she said.

"Like. How I'm doing it. With Bolt. It just feels right. Like. Bin. Bam. Pow."

"…"

"Pow."

"Onomatopoeia."

"What."

"Onomatopoeia."

"Whatever, lit major."

"You're a warrior who fights using onomatopoeia."

"Yeah?"

"Very warrior-adjacent."

"Shut up dude." She leaned back against the frame. Her shoulder hit something soft and she realized it was the side of Ben's shin. He had stretched his leg out somewhere in the conversation. She did not move her shoulder. He did not move his shin.

She kept her shoulder there and looked out the end of the wagon at the weird pony thing dragging the wagon behind them, and the trees thinning out ahead and the road getting wider, and she let her shoulder stay against the warm denim of his non-jean pants, and Ben did not say anything about it, and she did not say anything about it, and Lefant's dragonfly wings twitched in the morning light.

"Ben."

"Yeah."

"Even if they're real. They were like—bad people or some shit. So we're like soldiers. Soldiers kill bad people." He was quiet for a second.

"Well. Soldiers kill pretty much whatever they're told to kill. And most of them have batshit insane trauma about it afterward."

"…"

"Or whatever."

"Dude. You're really not helping."

"Right. Sorry."

"You're supposed to be agreeing."

"Right. We're soldiers and they were bad people."

"That sounded sarcastic."

"It's not."

"It sounds sarcastic."

"Well it's not." She looked at the canvas.

"They were thieves," she said.

"They ambushed a caravan. And they cut a guy's throat. They wanted the amulet, which we didn't even know they wanted, which means they planned this, which means they were doing this for, like, a job. Mike-the-NPC wasn't the first throat they cut."

"Probably."

"So we did the world a service."

"We did the AI slop world a service."

"By killing the throat-cutters."

"Yeah." He pulled himself up to sitting, his shin sliding away from her shoulder, and her shoulder noticed the warmth being gone, and her shoulder filed that, and she did not say anything about it.

"It's like the…goblins," she said.

"A little bit."

"Yeah."

"We didn't feel bad about the goblins. Well. I didn't."

"No."

"We literally laughed about the goblins."

"We did."

"The goblins were also alive. The system didn't tell us the goblins weren't real."

"The system also didn't go full RED about the goblins."

"…right."

"It told me to focus. Here I mean."

"Yeah."

"It told me the event was real."

"…" She thought about that.

"Okay so the system thinks goblins aren't on the same tier as humans."

"Maybe."

"That makes sense. Goblins are pests. Humans are citizens. The system is doing some kind of citizen-hood math behind the scenes."

"Probably."

"Or the system is full of shit and panicked because we were getting cooked."

"Also probably."

"…I'm choosing citizen-hood math because it makes me feel less bad."

"Yeah okay."

"Fuck the thieves. They were bad citizens. We shitted on them."

"We fucked their shit up."

"No shit left."

"Yeah." She tipped her head back against the frame and looked at the slash in the canvas.

"RIP Mike," she said.

"You made really good pizza." A beat.

"Pizza?" Ben said.

"Yeah. Pizza."

"…NPC Mike made pizza?"

"No. Different Mike."

"…"

"Mike's Pizza. Where I used to live before MIT."

"…oh."

"It was bad pizza. But it was Mike's."

"…yeah."

"I went there with my mom."

"…yeah." She wiped her face with the back of her wrist because her wrist was right there. Her wrist still had a little dried blood on it from yesterday, a brown smudge near her thumb that she had missed in the wash, well, the idea of a wash with a dry cloth, and now saw and did not react to. She would deal with the wrist later. Her face was dry. She had wiped a face that did not need wiping. She put her face back.

"Pizza," Ben said.

"Yeah. Pizza."

"…I kinda want pizza."

"Yeah. I want pizza too."