Chương 3: Orbs of Cum and Code Lines of Despair and Sadness

The cart creaked. The horse-wolf-pony thing made a sound like a kazoo dying. Ben sat in the back of the cart on a pile of straw that was definitely full of bugs, his phone in his lap, the screen still floating six inches from his face, the suns moving across the sky at speeds that did not match each other because of course they didn't. He looked at the back of the old man's head. The old man was humming.

"Yo," Ben said.

"Dude." The old man turned. Ready to be Helpful and Informative.

"Yes, traveler?"

"What's your name dude."

"Gerald." Ben stared at him.

"... Gerald."

"Yes, traveler. Gerald."

"Let me guess. Gerald the something. Gerald Thorne. Gerald Ironwood. Gerald the Wise. Marcus Cornball. Bartholomew Stormfeather. Aldric the Patient Giver Of Rides." Gerald laughed. The wind chime laugh again.

"Just Gerald, traveler."

"What's your family name dude."

"Oh! Us mere habitants do not have family names, naturally. You are very curious indeed, traveler, to not know this!" Ben stared. His brain ran the sentence through itself a few times and could not find a single human being who had ever said it.

"Fuck you."

"Again with that. Very funny indeed." Okay so the question on the table was whether Gerald was a real human dude who had been born into this slop world and was just out here living his life as a kindly farmer, or whether Gerald was a row of code lines that had been generated by the same system that put a sparkle emoji in his peripheral vision. Important question. Possibly the only question.

"Gerald."

"Yes traveler?"

"Do you beat your dick." Gerald's expression did not change. Nor did it register confusion. Or offense since Ben had just asked him about his beating habits. It just kept being Gerald, kind and weathered and waiting.

"Pardon?"

"Do you. Like. Goon. Jack off. Masturbate. Touch your fuckin willy. Do you do that." Gerald tilted his head.

"I am... unfamiliar with these terms, traveler. Are they perhaps from your homeland of Tung Tung Tung?" Ben waved his hand in front of Gerald's face. Gerald flinched. Actually flinched. A small flinch. The kind of flinch a person does when a stranger waves a hand in their face for no fucking reason. Eyes tracked the hand. Brow furrowed slightly. A small lean backward.

"Are... are you alright, traveler?" okay. Okay. That was a human reaction. That was at least a midrange human reaction. That was a person being weirded out by another person doing something weird. That wasn't a script. Or it was a script that was just really good at flinching. He didn't know. He pulled his wax pen out.

"You want a hit?" Gerald looked at the pen. He looked at Ben. He looked back at the pen.

"What is that, traveler?"

"It's a wax pen. It's like. It's a thing that makes you feel funny. Gonna fuck your code lines real good."

"Like ale?"

"Sure. Sure dude. Like…ale. Yeah."

"I do not partake before sundown."

"Of course you fucking don't." He put the pen back. Gerald watched him put the pen back and then turned forward and clucked at the horse-wolf-pony thing and the cart kept creaking and Ben sat in the bug straw watching the back of Gerald's head, and Gerald, after a few seconds, started talking.

"It is not often I see a traveler in these parts," he said, in the voice of a man easing into a small speech.

"These plains lie at the edge of the Velmoran lowlands, where the wheat once grew tall before the Pale Years. Now we make do, as people do. Mossgrove sits two mountain-lengths to the south, just past the Old Bridge where the river forgot its name—""I don't give a fucking fuck dude." The cart creaked. Gerald was quiet for a moment. Then, more quietly:"... sorry. I did not mean to bore you, traveler." Ben blinked. Oh. Oh fuck. Gerald's shoulders had gone a little smaller.

He was looking forward at the horse-wolf-pony thing's ass. There was a small thing happening in his posture. It wasn't in a script. Too small for a script. Too sad. Unless it was. Unless this whole thing was so good at being slop that even the sad bits were slop. Ben hated this.

"No no no it's fine. It's fine dude. Sorry. I'm—it's been a weird day. Keep going. Like. Tell me about the bridge and the river forgetting its name or whatever." Gerald perked up. Actually perked up. He sat up a little straighter on his bench and his voice came back warm and his hands moved on the reins like he had been waiting all day for someone to ask, and Ben sat in the back of the cart and listened, because what else was he gonna do, throw himself off the cart and walk back to a Cybertruck.

Gerald lived two mountain-lengths from Mossgrove, which, Ben gathered, was a unit of distance roughly equivalent to whatever the system felt like it equaled at any given moment, because mountain-length was such a fucking AI-generated unit of measurement, like the system had refused to use kilometers because kilometers sounded earthly and not Fantasy enough so it had reached into its little training data and pulled out a vibe and called it a length. Mountain-length. Fuck off. Gerald had a wife named Mira.

Of course she was named Mira. He had a daughter named Lila. Of course she was named Lila. Mira and Lila. Fucking. Of course. They lived in a farmhouse with a thatched roof at the bottom of a hill where a stream ran down past a stand of birches. Lila was eight. Lila had recently lost her first tooth. Gerald had carved her a small wooden horse to celebrate.

He had brought eggs to Mossgrove today because Mira's chickens—or whatever shitpiss in this world counted as chicken—had been laying double, which Mira said was a sign of a good season ahead, and Mira's signs were usually right. It was cute. It was so fucking cute.

It was so cute Ben kind of wanted to throw up because if Gerald was a real human dude with a real wife and a real daughter and a real horse-wolf-pony thing, then everything he was about to do was going to involve real people, and if Gerald was a row of code lines then this world had specifically generated a kindly farmer with a wife and an eight-year-old daughter and a tooth story to make Ben feel a certain way, which was even worse, which was psychological warfare, which was— This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Why would Gerald be a real person if a fucking quest had appeared the moment Ben met him. The quest. He kept forgetting about the quest. The quest was still floating in the corner of his vision in its little box. Travel to the village of Mossgrove. Of course Gerald was going to Mossgrove. The cart was going to Mossgrove. Gerald was the quest. Gerald was the delivery mechanism. Fuck you Gerald. Fuck you Gerald you ai slop motherfucker with your wife and your daughter and your eggs— Something wet exploded behind him.

Ben turned. The horse-wolf-pony thing's head was no longer attached to the horse-wolf-pony thing's body. Interesting. The head was on the road. Eyes still open. A little surprised looking. Blue blood, because of course it was blue, jetting out of the neck stump in a stupid little fountain that looked like a videogame death. The body kept walking for a second. Then it didn't.

The cart lurched and tilted and Ben grabbed the side and Gerald made a sound like a man whose entire afternoon had just been physically removed from him, and Ben turned to see what had popped the horse-wolf-pony thing's shit smooth off, and there it was, sitting on the road, eight feet behind the cart, glistening. A slime. A… slime. It was green. It was the size of a refrigerator. It pulsed. It had two little black dots that were maybe eyes, located in a fold near what might have been the top, if a slime had a top.

It looked like a fucking tutorial enemy. [URGENT QUEST] [Defeat the Common Slime!] [Protect Gerald the Farmer!] [Reward: Unique Weapon, XP, Class Selection.]"FUCK YOU DUDE." Ben was screaming at his peripheral vision. The screen sparkled. The slime made a sound like a man stepping in pudding and shot a glob of green something at the cart and Ben felt the air go hot beside his ear and a tree thirty feet behind them just stopped existing. There was a hiss. There was steam.

The tree was now a wet stump with smoke coming off it. okay. okay okay okay okay okay. He grabbed Gerald by the vest and ran. Gerald made a sound like a shitty kettle.

The old man's legs were doing their best but his best was sixty-something years old and worked on a farm and had bad knees, and Ben was twenty and ran on caffeine and panic, and the gap between them widened with every step, Ben pulling Gerald forward by the vest and Gerald saying Pony, Pony, oh Pony, over and over because the horse-wolf-pony thing was named fucking Pony. Gerald named the horse-wolf-pony thing Pony.

"YOU NAMED HIM PONY?" Ben yelled, while running.

"He is a pony!"

"HE IS NOT A PONY."

"What else would he be?" Another green glob screamed past them. It hit a different tree. The tree did the steam thing. The smell was somewhere between sulfur and a public bathroom. Cum orbs. They were green cum orbs. Ben was going to die because a slime was shooting cum at him. Gerald stumbled. Gerald fell.

Gerald hit the dirt hard, knees first, and Ben slammed to a stop and turned around and Gerald was on his hands and knees with his straw hat lying ten feet away upside down and his face had gone a color it had not been before.

"Get up dude get up GET THE FUCK UP—""My knee, I—traveler, run, please—""DUDE—""Tell Mira—" Gerald's voice cracked.

"Tell Mira and Lila I love them. Please. Tell them—""DUDE NO."

"The farm is past the second hill, the one with the—""SHUT UP."

"—the stand of birches, you cannot miss it—" It was so cliché Ben could have punched him. It was so cliché it had loops on it. It was the most predictable thing a kindly NPC farmer with a wife named Mira and a daughter named Lila could possibly say in this exact moment, beat for beat, syllable for syllable, like Gerald had downloaded the line off a free assets website, and yet, somehow, against everything Ben believed about fiction and AI and dignity and his own taste, something in his chest did a small mean thing.

A small twist. A small wet little squeeze. In case. Just in case Gerald was real. Just in case there was a Mira and a Lila and a stand of birches and an eight-year-old kid with a wooden horse waiting for her dad to come home. He hated that it worked on him. He hated it. He hated it so much. The slime was coming.

It was thirty feet away and closing and it was faster than something that size should have been, gliding across the dirt in a slick jizz-happy way, pulsing, eyes tracking Gerald, who was the closer target, who was on his knees, who was about to get his head removed by a glob of green sex.

"SYSTEM." The screen pulsed gently.

"SYSTEM. SYSTEM YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT. HELP ME. WHAT DO I DO. HELP ME YOU PIECE OF SHIT FUCKING CHATBOT CLANKER." [Hello, Ben!] [The common slime's weak point is located around the eyes.] [Try hitting it hard there.]"TRY HITTING IT HARD THERE???" [Try hitting it hard there. Sparkle]"THAT'S NOT HELP THAT'S A SUGGESTION. THAT'S A FUCKING SUGGESTION. YOU'RE A WIKI ARTICLE." [We believe in you, Ben. Sparkle] He was going to kill this thing. The system. The chatbot.

He was going to find its server room and piss in it. okay weapon. weapon weapon weapon. trees. trees have branches. He spun and grabbed at the nearest tree and ripped a branch off, which would have looked badass except it took him three tries and on the third try he scraped his palm and yelled FUCK and the branch came loose with a sound like a wet fart, and he turned with it in both hands like a baseball bat, except baseball bats were heavy on purpose and this branch was both too heavy and too light somehow.

The slime was almost on Gerald. Ben ran at it. He swung. The branch made contact with the slime's side with a sound like punching a pudding. There was no resistance and also there was infinite resistance. The branch sank in two inches and then the slime just kind of... ate the impact and threw it back, and the branch flew out of Ben's hands and hit a tree and stuck there, vibrating. okay so the branch idea was bad. The slime turned. It looked at him.

The two black dots in the fold near the top of its body were looking at him. It made the pudding noise. It shot a cum orb at his face.

Ben dropped sideways onto the dirt and the orb went over his head and exploded against a rock and he felt a fine hot mist hit his shoulder and the shoulder of his Uniqlo tee started SMOKING and the smoke smelled like meat and chemicals and his entire shoulder lit up with pain in a way that pain had never lit him up before, a real pain, a grown-up pain, a pain that made his eyes water and his throat close. This thing was going to kill him.

This thing was actually going to kill him and eat him and have green slime sex with him. This was real. okay. okay okay okay. He needed to run. He wanted to. Every cell in his body wanted to. His legs wanted to. His brain wanted to. There was a voice in his head that sounded a lot like Cayenne, weirdly, who had never been in this kind of situation but who would have had something to say about it, that was screaming FUCK HIS SHIT UP PUSSY. So he didn't run. He stood up. His shoulder was on fire.

His shoulder was crying. He didn't have a weapon. But he had a wax pen. He had a wax pen in his front pocket and a wallet and a student card and a note about god watching and that was it, those were his weapons. He had fucking NOTHING. The slime turned away from him. The slime turned back toward Gerald. Gerald was still on his knees in the dirt with his hands up and his face doing that small old man thing where he was trying not to cry in front of a stranger. Try hitting it hard there.

He pulled the wax pen out of his pocket. He didn't think about it for very long. He ran at the slime from behind while it was lining up its shot on Gerald and he slammed the wax pen, two-handed, with everything he had, into the fold of jelly where the two black dots were. It went in. It went in like a… wax pen into a giant green sack of jizz.

The pen sank to the hilt and Ben's hands sank with it up to the wrists in cold green slime that smelled like the inside of a septic tank and the slime made a sound that wasn't a sound, more like a slurp in reverse, and then it just— —deflated. It deflated like a bouncy castle losing power.

It collapsed in on itself and the green went grey and the grey went translucent and then there was nothing on the road except a smear of jelly and Ben's wax pen, which had fallen to the dirt, and Gerald, who was making a sound that wasn't quite crying and wasn't quite anything else. Ding. A small clean little ding. Like a microwave. [Quest Complete!] [Common Slime defeated.] [Gerald the Farmer protected.] [LEVEL UP!] [LEVEL UP!] The screen exploded with confetti. Actual little blue confetti particles.

They drifted out of the screen and into the air and faded before they hit the ground. A new panel slid in. [Character Sheet—BEN] [Level: 3] [Class: Unselected] [HP: 84/100] [MP: 18/18] [STR: 8 | DEX: 12 | INT: 14 | WIS: 9 | CHA: 11 | LCK:???] [Skills: None] [Titles: Newly Arrived] Ben stared at it. Ben Robinson, the screen did not say. It just said Ben. His last name wasn't on it. His last name had been chopped off like Pony's head. There was a small black space where Robinson should have been.

His heartbeat was very loud. His shoulder hurt. His hands were green up to the wrists. He was kneeling in the dirt next to the deflated leftovers of a refrigerator-sized slime that had popped a horse-wolf-pony thing's head off with what was essentially fantasy semen, and the system was telling him he was level three, and his last name was not on the chart, and his stats were exactly the stats of a guy who had only ever moved his thumb for a living. INT 14. INT FOURTEEN. He didn't even read the rest.

His brain skidded off the numbers like a car off black ice. Some part of him filed LCK??? away as a thing to be angry about later, because luck was a question mark, of course it was, because the system was a fucking marketing intern and question marks made things feel Mysterious. A second panel slid in. [UNIQUE WEAPON OBTAINED] [Wax Knife] [Rarity: Unique] [A blade forged from the bond between user and substance.] [Damage:???] Ben looked at the dirt. His wax pen was glowing.

It glowed for about three seconds and then it stretched, the plastic body of the pen elongating like a cheap dildo, the bottom thickening into a handle, the top drawing out into a blade, the whole thing settling into a shape that was about ten inches long and curved very slightly and looked exactly like a kitchen knife if a kitchen knife had been carved out of solid earwax. It was yellow. It was yellow and slightly translucent and it had a wax pen's mouthpiece sticking out of the handle as a kind of pommel.

It was the stupidest weapon Ben had ever seen. He picked it up. It was warm. He looked at the screen. The screen sparkled.

"What the fuck is this piece of shit." [Congratulations, Ben!]"What the fuck did you do to my pen." [Your wellness is our priority.]"WHAT DID YOU DO TO MY PEN." Behind him, Gerald was crying. Ben turned. Gerald had crawled back to Pony. Old man on his knees in the dirt next to a headless horse-wolf-pony thing, one hand on its flank, the other on its mane, head bent down. He was crying for the horse-wolf-pony thing. He was crying for Pony.

Ben stood there with his wax knife in his hand and his shoulder smoking and his heart rate banging against his ribs and the screen sparkling in his peripheral vision and the two suns moving across the sky at different speeds, and he looked at Gerald, and Gerald looked up.

"…Thank you, traveler." Gerald's voice was small.

"Thank you. You saved me. You saved me, traveler, thank you, thank you. I have nothing to give you. I have eggs. Some eggs. I will give you eggs. I—I—thank you." Ben opened his mouth. Nothing came out. He closed it. He looked down at his wax knife. He looked at the smear of green jelly that used to be a refrigerator.

He looked at Gerald and at Pony and at the cart that was sitting tilted on the road with one wheel coming off the axle, and the screen that was still saying Your wellness is our priority, and the pink grass moving in a wind that did not feel like any wind Ben had ever felt, and somewhere on this planet was a kid with obsidian fucking hair gathering himself in a courtyard. This was stupid. This was so stupid. This was the stupidest thing that had ever happened to him. His shoulder really, really hurt.