Chapter 148: The Long Miles (Patreon)

3/6---

The Azure Watch let him through, and the wall let go of his shoulders.

[Zone Discovered: Eastern Extension - The Mosaic Path]

Fine, the system had opinions about what counted as a zone. Kage walked out onto the grassland with fifty feet of painted history at his back and the road unspooling east under the moon.

Night had thinned things out. The fields still held their share of parties, bodies moving through the dark in loose formations, spellfire strobing over silvered grass. Speech bubbles went up and popped like lesser constellations.

"Pull next—"

"I'm PULLING, I said I'm pulling—"

"Loot goes to whoever dies last, gentlemen."

Enough players to keep the spawn timers rolling. Sparse enough that the road stayed walkable without him becoming scenery in somebody's clip. A wagon went by heading west, loaded with podded grain, and the driver watched Kage's ink-dark silhouette pass without comment.

You're invisible tonight, Kage thought. Savor it.

He opened the friend pane between two fields, stepping around a deep cart rut.

[Friends: 7]

[Lily - Online]

[Zara - Online]

[Jax - Online]

[Valdrias - Online]

[Finn - Online]

[Zherdev - Online]

[Ren - Offline]

[Pending: Vami.]

[Pending: Julie.]

Hm. The two endorsements in his inbox, both sitting in pending limbo.

He wrote two lines while walking.

[Kage → Lily] Tomorrow works. If you can get everyone in one place, do it. The guild thing. Better everyone says their piece once.

The answer came back in under a minute.

[Lily → Kage] YES. finally. also you know you can message them yourself right? they dont bite :)

[Lily → Kage] but heads up! vami and jules had some appointment today and havent been on since the raid.

[Kage → Lily] Ye. Wondered what those two were up to.

[Kage → Lily] I'm offline 09:00 to 14:00 tomorrow. Personal matter. So either before that, or 14:00 to 16:00. After that I crash.

[Lily → Kage] "after that I crash" is pretty ominous for going to sleep lol

[Lily → Kage] i'll poke everyone. tentatively 14:00, ill tell you if it changes

[Kage → Lily] Noted. Thanks.

He closed the pane. One obligation, successfully outsourced to the best social engine he'd met in either world. Lily would have a room, a time, and eight people by tomorrow afternoon, and she would do it with enthusiasm he had genuinely stopped being able to model.

Good. That's handled.

The road climbed a low rise. To his left, a five-man party was taking a Painted Tusker apart with the kind of coordination that comes from a shared job, and to his right a duo was getting bisected by the same species of pig for the same reason. The boars here wore spirals of dried color on their flanks, old dye-work from the herd's owner stamped in ink-based brands. Korros's livestock had fancier branding than most cities' nobility.

He turned back to the night's actual agenda while his feet ate gravel.

Mirethiel's commission. Premium chromatic dyes, she said. Pigments that bound into enchantment matrices rather than sitting on the surface, colors that breathed with the wearer's state. His best-case hope for the reward, laid out plainly: a dye process that survived gear swaps.

The current situation had a hole in it. Every time he upgraded a piece of equipment, the careful charcoal-and-wine cohesion of his outfit broke, and the small, very real etiquette bonus the system granted a unified wardrobe bled out. Every new piece meant another trip to the Chromatic Thread or another Dyer.

A self-adjusting palette ends that whole expenditure line. If the reward was anything like what Mirethiel had advertised, tonight paid for itself in future savings. Rare-grade quest rewards also tended to come with a tail. Experience, reputation, some odd little property nobody else had the frame for.

And the night window worked for him twice over. His name was a liability now. Densely farmed zones were exactly where someone eventually recognized the beret-and-charcoal silhouette from a forum thread. Midnight emptied the spots, emptied the eyes, and emptied the risk.

The quest itself actively punished crowds. The bloom sites died to any violence within twenty meters, so every grinding party camped on top of a grove was burning the spawn table to ash. Fewer players meant more viable sites. Thirty five minutes before midnight on a weeknight was about as few as it got.

He walked.

[Zone Discovered: Sable Commons]

[Zone Discovered: Nightjar Flats]

The map filled in behind him, a slowly growing splatter of conquered darkness. The lands east of Korros carried names like a generous codex, Sable, Nightjar, painters' words that the design team had clearly enjoyed stacking. He gave each new zone a perfunctory glance, captured it, and moved on.

Grind spots went by. A trio was rotating a spawn of something long-eared and aggressive while their healer sat on a log lecturing the tank about posture. Another group, all in guild capes, was running a line of small rolling rocks with eyes all over them through a kill corridor. Kage passed them all without slowing.

[Zone Discovered: Palebell Rise]

[Achievement Earned: Wayfarer (Tier I) - Enter twenty unique zones on foot.]

[+2 Fame]

He dismissed it. Twenty zones. Fantastic.

He walked.

Minutes went by. The treeline of the Verdant Reach, which a map-sized zone away should have already been squatting on the horizon, stayed stubbornly absent. He crested a slope and found more grass. He descended it and found grass again.

Hm. 11:23 PM. Then 11:25 PM.

Should've bought a map. He sighed once, without heat. In Korros, the Vista Guild, apparently, sold stylized painted overlays, and he'd walked straight past their storefront twice today. The forums would have solved it too. Someone had to have charted the entire Korros Grasslands by day two or three, posted with timestamped screenshots and route markers. Not probably. Certainly. Didn't matter now. He was out here, he'd walked it, and that was that.

He checked the time. [11:28 PM].

Almost half an hour of travel for a harvest errand. Deeply inefficient.

He gave the road one more minute. The minute, it turned out, was enough as Verdant Reach appeared on his minimap and in front of him.

The road peaked another low rise, and the treeline finally arrived, rolling out to swallow the horizon east. A proper forest. Dense, rugged, the kind of timber that hadn't given up the fight against weather in centuries. Ancient redwoods massed in a dark front, with giant ferns filling the gaps and fallen trunks grown into mossy gullies. The whole thing read green-on-black in the moonlight, heavy, coarse, earth-smelling.

And the forest had a visitor's queue.

Players camped along the entire border in organized little clusters. Fifty at rough count, more deeper into the tree line, gathered with the discipline money bought or the discipline guilds enforced. Not the ragged sprawl of random grinders. Lines. A couple of players in ranked formation up near the road, watching arrivals.

Rich. A reception committee.

Kage slowed, took the spectacle in, and checked the time again out of habit.

[23:30]

The forest changed its mind about what species it was.

It started as a bleed of light in the bark. The oldest redwoods along the border turned semi-translucent, the way a hand does under a lamp, and through the softened grain came the liquid gleam of starlight, sap streaming upward in slow rivers. A breath later, the canopy let go of itself. Leaves, mosses, fat pollen pods lifted off the branches and drifted, bioluminescent jellyfish swimming an underwater sky. A pastel mist rolled out along the forest floor, lavender and pale emerald and silver, thick enough to erase the ground, and the border parties went knee-deep in cloud.

Above everything, ghost architecture claimed the canopy. Glass archways. Spiral staircases that circled trunks without ever touching them. Suspended gazebos hanging on nothing at all. The phantom bones of an elven city, phasing into visibility for as long as the twilight held.

The night crowd at the border erupted, voices colliding in speech-bubble foam.

"THERE. Wells first. Rotation five, move, move—"

"Translite's live, get pullers up—"

"Beautiful once again, I swear—"

Kage stood at the start of the road and let the zone have its one show. His eyes climbed the floating stairworks and hung there. Even in a game that offered him a private, art-rendering reality, this qualified as spectacle. Conceded, gladly.

He started toward the forest at an easy pace.

One of the men on the border line, a big frame in white-and-forest livery, turned at his footsteps. Close behind him, other heads turned too. Crests flashed into view as they shifted. The same crest, all of them. A stylized pale tree burned into cloth and enamel and shoulder guard, from the scouts up front to the deep-line grinders behind.

The big man's speech bubble went up.

"Oi."

Kage's step never broke. The guy started forward to close the gap, and the rest of the line shifted with him, a small herd-motion of the well organized.

All one guild, Kage noted, as he saw the guild identifier.

[Greenlanders]