Chapter 50: Two Deaths for an Answer
Chapter 50: Two Deaths for an Answer
The Moss-Crowned Slime King killed Glitch in ninety-three seconds.
Jin considered that rude.
Also informative.
Breakfast was long over. The real Glitch lay curled on the folded blanket in the corner, belly full, bandaged leg propped and supported, fast asleep and going nowhere—which was exactly where Jin wanted him. Whatever happened before the encounter window closed, it would happen to a body made of light.
He propped the phone against his knee. To anyone who walked in, a cheap puzzle game glowed on the screen, colorful and harmless.
To Jin, the boss chamber loaded.
[Moss-Crowned Slime King]
[Area Boss: Mossy Hollow]
[First-Clear Reward Available]
[Encounter Window Remaining: Approximately 05:30:00]
Five and a half hours. Plenty—provided he treated each respawn as part of the cost.
He deployed the avatar.
The boss came into view slowly, and Jin’s first thought was that someone had built a hill and made it angry.
The Slime King filled the far end of the chamber—an enormous heap of translucent green studded with slabs of gray stone and crowned by a thick shelf of moss. Somewhere deep inside it, a blue light pulsed, slow and steady, like something breathing beneath ice.
Glitch trotted in with the easy confidence of a lizard who had spent the night dismantling ordinary slimes by the dozen.
He attacked it as he had attacked all the others—a fast lunge, jaws tearing a chunk of green from its flank, claws raking loose a slab of stone.
It worked. Slime sprayed. Stone dropped.
Then the King simply grew the wound shut. The torn flank flowed together in less than a second, its missing mass replaced from the endless bulk of its body. Even the slab Glitch had knocked free dissolved and reformed along its crown.
Jin’s eyes narrowed.
Okay. The outside isn’t real. They could carve that green hill apart all day and it would keep rebuilding itself. The body wasn’t the target.
The blue light was.
He watched it pulse deep inside the slime and understood, with a sinking sort of professional respect, that the boss knew it too. The instant Glitch turned toward the core and drove inward, the light slid. It flowed away through the slime, unhurried, keeping the full thickness of its body between itself and Glitch’s teeth.
They couldn’t chase it. It lived inside a wall that healed while moving the goalposts on purpose.
And while Glitch chased anyway, the King attacked.
It spat a compressed ball of slime like a cannon shot, and Glitch barely rolled clear. It raised a portion of its mass and slammed it down, jolting the entire chamber floor. Then it stretched an arm of its body outward, long and heavy as a whip. Glitch ducked the first lash, then twisted beneath another from the opposite side.
Glitch was good. He avoided most of it. But he remained fixed on the core, hunting the blue light, and stopped watching the body—
The King folded open along one side.
There it was: an opening. A clear path to the core, sitting exposed within the slime.
Too easy, Jin thought, half a beat too late. That’s too—
Glitch dove for it.
The opening closed around him. The King collapsed inward in one fluid motion, folding its entire mass over the avatar. The blue light flared as the whole thing crushed down.
[Digital Avatar Defeated]
[Death Penalty: None]
[Estimated Recovery Time: 01:58:43]
Ninety-three seconds.
In the corner, the real Glitch sighed in his sleep and tucked his snout deeper beneath his tail, entirely at peace.
Jin looked at him.
"Your other body lasted ninety-three seconds," he told the sleeping lizard. "I’m not putting that on the family record."
Glitch did not respond. Glitch was dreaming.
Jin opened the recording and watched his avatar die again, slower this time, hunting for what he had missed.
He found several things.
The outer body regenerated—confirmed. Attacking it was a waste. The core was the only real target, and it moved to remain unreachable whenever Glitch approached under normal conditions.
Whenever Glitch approached normally.
He replayed the final four seconds. Then again. Then a third time, frame by frame, because something changed immediately before the King’s crushing slam.
To raise that much mass, the King had to gather itself—dragging the bulk of its body upward before bringing it down. During that gathering, for slightly less than a second, two things happened.
The core stopped. It settled beneath the stone crown and went still because the body around it was occupied with lifting.
And the membrane covering it became thin, stretched taut as the surrounding mass pulled away to feed the attack.
A stationary core. A thin wall. A one-second window that appeared only when the boss committed to its most dangerous move.
The opening wasn’t hidden. It was paid for. To get the shot, they had to bait out the exact attack that had crushed Glitch.
"Huh." The corner of Jin’s mouth moved. "You have to walk into the scary thing on purpose. Rude and elegant."
The respawn clock ticked in the corner.
[01:41:12]
He set down the phone and forced himself to stop staring at it. The headache was already beginning—that familiar hot coin behind his eyes that he had learned not to feed. Watching a live fight and dissecting the recording afterward was real work. Glitch might be safe, but Jin’s skull didn’t care that the lizard was fine.
He drank a full cup of water, ate a nutrient bar he didn’t particularly want, and lay back with a damp cloth over his eyes for most of the timer. He didn’t sleep. He simply rested the part of himself that using the Engine actually cost.
The real Glitch slept beside him, and neither of them was in danger.
That was the whole miracle of it.
When the avatar reassembled at the spawn point, Jin sent him back in.
He didn’t micromanage. He had learned that lesson in the arena: give a partner the objective, then get out of his way.
Stay alive.
Make it use the slam.
Wait for the core.
Glitch understood. Jin felt the response rise through their bond, focused and cold. None of the reckless confidence from the first run remained. This was a lizard who had died once and was thinking about it.
He didn’t touch the outer body. Not once. He circled low and patient, studying the King’s tells, evading the slime shots and whip-arms without committing. He was baiting it, drawing the boss toward the one attack he needed, and Jin watched him do it with quiet pride.
The King reared for the slam.
The core settled beneath its crown. The membrane thinned.
Now.
Glitch struck. His jaws drove into the thin point over the core with everything he had.
It cracked.
A fracture spread across the blue light. The King shuddered, and the entire chamber seemed to flinch.
Then the boss changed.
It abandoned its shape completely. The immense green hill collapsed and spread, flooding outward across the chamber floor in a widening sheet of sticky mire. Wherever the mire touched, Glitch’s feet dragged and his movement slowed to a crawl. Stone fragments and slime tendrils lashed from the spreading slick in every direction.
A second phase. Breaking the core had triggered it.
Jin’s stomach dropped.
Disengage. Get to the exit. Move.
Glitch turned toward the chamber mouth and couldn’t reach it. The mire had already spread between him and the exit, thick and grasping. Every step toward safety became a step through glue while tendrils raked his sides. He fought toward the clear ground beyond the wave—
But the wave was faster.
It closed over him. The tendrils dragged him down.
[Digital Avatar Defeated]
[Death Penalty: None]
[Estimated Recovery Time: 01:58:43]
[Core Damage Preserved Until Encounter Window Closes]
Jin released a slow breath.
It didn’t feel like failure. It felt like a receipt. Glitch had cracked the core, and that crack would remain. He had also dragged the boss’s second phase into the open, where Jin could finally study it.
Two deaths. Two pieces of the puzzle, bought and paid for.
He checked the encounter window.
[Encounter Window Remaining: Approximately 03:24:00]
Two hours until Glitch returned. Roughly an hour and twenty-five minutes afterward to end the fight.
Enough for one more serious attempt.
One shot.