Chapter 43: Fifteen Minutes Too Early
Chapter 43: Fifteen Minutes Too Early
The third morning without Liora began quietly enough to feel suspicious.
I woke before dawn and lay still for two minutes, listening. From the upstairs window, I checked both approaches before going down. The can on the track hung undisturbed. The twigs remained where I had scattered them. No new trail cut through the wet grass on the slope.
Nothing waited inside the cellar. Nothing watched from the treeline. The house had not burned down during the night.
By midday, I had almost accepted the peace.
The ember caught beneath three splinters, and I had a fire in under three minutes. While the water boiled, I did footwork across the boards, knife draws, forty smooth rifle mounts, and balance recovery off the back step. I finished sweating and out of breath, which was normal, and without falling over once, which was not.
Fresh meat went into the pan. Dried strips softened in hot water with a pinch of salt from the apartment.
I sat on the back step with the bowl balanced on one knee and let myself notice something.
Nobody had told me to do any of it.
Nobody had said check the lines before lighting the fire, boil before drinking, drills before food. I had woken alone, fed myself, maintained my equipment, and made a plan for the afternoon without a cat-eared woman standing over me and explaining that I was holding the pot incorrectly.
Six days ago, I had not known how to make a fire.
Now I had survived three full days after Liora’s departure. I had hunted, withdrawn when a hunt turned bad, stored food, and kept a secure shelter functioning.
The pride was small and private and probably premature.
It was still mine.
I planned to hunt again that afternoon. Something below Level 5 near the outbuildings, then home before dark. Level 10 was close enough to tempt me, but I had refused the stronger target so many times that the refusal had become a rule.
Before leaving, I checked the countdown.
[Blind Call Recovery Remaining: approximately 00:15:00]
Fifteen minutes.
I laughed. Three days, near enough to the hour, since Liora had disappeared from my arms. In another quarter of an hour, I would have a roll of the dimensional dice waiting. This time I might even use it somewhere sensible instead of behind a laundry with a number written on my wrist.
Fifteen minutes. Finish eating. Let the charge recover. Then hunt.
The ground moved.
Not a tremor. A single thump travelled up through the step and into my spine. Water shivered inside the pot.
My first reaction was not impressive. I was on my feet and pressed against the doorframe with my heart battering my ribs before I formed one useful thought. For several seconds, I was simply an animal responding to something larger.
Then the training rose beneath the fear.
Breathe. Low and slow. Do not hold it.
Now look. Do not run until you know where.
I listened.
The shaking had a rhythm. A long pause, then a heavy compression through the earth, then another pause. It was not a collapse or the ground doing something on its own.
Something was walking.
The impacts grew stronger. Whatever made them had a direction, and that direction led toward the house.
I ran upstairs.
The slope gave me a clear view over nearly a kilometre of ruined district before haze swallowed the buildings. For three days, the view had contained roofless houses, broken roads, and nothing large enough to notice at that distance.
Now something walked between them.
It was as tall as a five-storey building. I had nothing to compare it with except the buildings around it, and it stood above most of them. Its shoulders removed a section of sky. Grey-brown hide covered a frame too thick to look real. In one hand, it carried a tree the size of a shipping container, roots still tangled around one end.
An actual club.
Its name floated above it in deep red.
I remembered that colour. Red was the part of the old interface designed to make sensible players leave.
[Ash Ogre — Level 15 Field Boss]
I stared through the window.
Fifteen.
It is five storeys tall, and it is only Level 15.
Six levels separated us. The creature could have stepped on the house without noticing the change beneath its foot, while I had spent three days becoming proud of killing badgers.
It walked through a row of houses without slowing. Not around them—through them. The club swept lazily across the road and removed four building fronts in one motion. Brick crossed hundreds of metres.
Something small scrambled from the wreckage. One of the grey creatures I had hunted so cautiously made it six metres before an enormous foot came down.
The ogre crouched, picked up what remained, and ate it.
It does not care. It is not hunting or defending territory. It is walking, and everything in front of it stops existing.
Its path followed the stream toward my hill.
Everything I owned was inside the house. Meat hung in the cellar. Two pots, a pan, a blanket, spare boots, the rifle supplies, and a working chimney. Three days of effort had turned the place into something dangerously close to a home.
Liora’s voice arrived with perfect clarity.
You take what is ready. You leave the rest. You do not die for things.
The pack waited beside the back door because she had made me keep it there. I put it on, slung the rifle, and left without entering the cellar or touching one other object.
Two hundred metres uphill, inside the treeline, I stopped long enough to confirm the ogre’s route.
For forty seconds, I thought I had escaped.
It was tracking northwest along the far bank. If it maintained that line, it would pass the house by several hundred metres and carry its destruction elsewhere. I crouched beneath the bracken, did the geometry twice, and let myself believe it.
Then its head turned.
There was no reason for it. I was motionless, behind cover, with the wind moving across the slope. Maybe it caught the fire’s smoke. Maybe it sensed heat, motion, or something I did not know existed.
Its gaze stopped on the treeline.
I felt the moment its attention found me like a hand settling between my shoulder blades.
The ogre dropped one shoulder, changed direction, and began to climb.
[Blind Call Recovery Remaining: approximately 00:14:40]