Chapter 77: Inbox
King crossed the room and crouched in front of Eli.
Up close, the damage was worse than the initial read.
The tears on Eli ran deeper than surface level, his skin beneath shredded in patterns that indicated multiple separate strikes rather than a single engagement gone wrong.
Eli’s breathing was steady but strained, the kind of controlled inhale and exhale used in moments of excruciating pain.
"What exactly happened?" King asked.
Eli held his gaze. He tried to organize his words, then started again. "We were doing well. The quest was going clean, Maya was safe, I had good sight lines." He paused, something shifting in his expression.
"Then they came in. Several of them, all at once. Player invasion."
"Who?"
"Hunter’s Association."
King kept his face still, only his eye brows twitched.
"They knew where we were," Eli continued. "Came in coordinated, not randomly. They weren’t after the quest objective." He stopped again, a roughness building at the back of his throat.
"They were after us specifically. I tried to push through it, keep Maya covered, but I was already running low from the quest and I..."
The cough started without warning.
Eli bent forward as it took over, his whole torso contracting with each convulsion, and blood came with it, a thin stream tracking from the corner of his mouth and dropping onto the stone floor between his boots.
The sound of it filled the room. Vi looked up from Maya for a half second, then returned her focus to the child.
King reached into his inventory without standing. He pulled out his last health potion, a basic vial, not ideal for damage at this level, but it was all he had left, he pressed it into Eli’s hand.
"Easy now," King said. "Just drink this, and rest up."
Eli took the vial and looked at it for a moment, then pressed it to his lips and swallowed the contents in one long pull. He lowered the empty vial and exhaled in a slow, full release of breath that carried the tension of the last several hours out with it.
The potion’s effect began working mildly, but visibly, the color returning to his face in gradual degrees.
King stood.
He walked to the far side of the room, away from Eli, Vi and Maya, and stopped at the window.
The estate’s grounds were still outside, the world beyond the glass carrying on with its usual indifference. King looked through it without really seeing what was there.
The Hunter’s Association.
Hunt Starbuster had put a bounty on him during the Second Woe, and King had absorbed that as a direct challenge between players, after their first indirect encounter, King didn’t expect any less.
But Hunt had remained silent afterward, and he had filed Hunt away as a problem to address when the moment was right.
He had not anticipated this.
Going after Eli and Maya. Not because they were threats, not because they held anything Hunt needed, but because they were connected to King and Hunt had decided that connection was leverage.
This was not a challenge anymore. It was a message delivered through people who had nothing to do with whatever dispute Hunt had constructed around a stolen scroll.
King had always positioned Cain as the primary threat in his mental ranking of dangerous players, watched Cain’s patterns across the rankings and concluded that the man’s directness made him predictable in the ways that mattered.
But Hunt operated differently.
King thought about what Pantheon had said. That quiet, offhand statement that had lodged itself in his memory without fully registering at the time.
Pantheon, the most strategically reserved player in the game, had expressed more concern about Hunt Starbuster than about Cain.
King had noted it and moved past it.
Standing at this window, looking at nothing, he understood it now.
Cain fought. Hunt constructed situations.
And a man who was willing to go after a seven-year-old child to communicate urgency to someone he hadn’t even directly engaged yet was not operating by the same set of limits King had assumed.
"I didn’t think he’d take it this far," King said quietly. "Over a scroll."
The words landed in the room without response. Neither Vi nor Eli offered one.
They didn’t need to.
A soft chime broke the silence.
King looked at his interface. A message request notification, glowing with the standard incoming prompt. He checked the sender ID.
The All-Good.
King paused. He pulled up his fan list and confirmed it. The All-Good had been there, apparently for some time, her fan value registered and sitting in the list without him ever having noticed the moment she added herself.
Another one of the All-Gods had been watching.
He accepted the request.
Several messages arrived in immediate succession, each one following the last without pause.
[The All-Good: This is the All-Good.]
[The All-Good: I have been the main patron of the child in your care. The one called Maya.]
[The All-Good: You caught my attention. I have watched what you do for her, the consistency of it. And I can see you are worried right now.]
[The All-Good: But the child will not die today. I want you to know that.]
King read through the messages.
The relief that moved through him was real, if narrow. Maya had a divine patron, not a passive fan, but an active patron, the main one, which explained the depth of what the child could do, the abilities that had surfaced in moments that didn’t match her apparent fragility.
The All-Good had been behind it, sustaining something in Maya that none of them had fully accounted for.
Knowing that shifted the weight of his concern without eliminating it. Maya would survive today. What happened tomorrow, and the day after, depended on factors that a divine patron couldn’t cover entirely.
The world was getting more dangerous at a rate that assurances about individual days couldn’t keep up with.
King typed a simple reply.
[King: Thank you.]
He closed the conversation. He was not in the space for extended exchanges, and the All-Good’s message had given him what it intended to give. Anything further could wait.
He was still holding the interface when a new notification pulsed.
Another message request. The sender ID read: The Hunter’s Association.
King stared at it for a moment.
He opened it.
The message was formal in structure, constructed to communicate organization and intentionality rather than hostility, though the hostility was present underneath every sentence regardless.
[Hunter’s Association]
Subject: Clarification Regarding Recent Events and Invitation
Dear [King],
I am writing to clarify the events involving your companions. Please understand that the recent action was not an act of random anger.
Instead, it was a clear demonstration. It was done to show you how important this matter is. We chose this path to make sure you saw our invitation, to ensure it was treated with total urgency and not ignored.
We expect your prompt response, and hope you do not give us a reason to act again.
Sincerely.
The Hunter’s Association requested a meeting. The phrasing was neutral, almost courteous. The substance beneath the courtesy was not.
At the base of the message, a map link displayed the location of the Association’s headquarters, a marker sitting in a specific zone.
They wanted him to come to them.
King closed the message and stood with it for a moment, turning the information over. Hunt had calculated this carefully.
The attack on Eli and Maya was not random escalation, it was an opening move in a negotiation, the kind that established leverage before the conversation began.
Come to us. We’ve already shown you what we can reach.
He turned away from the window and faced the room.
"I’m going."
Vi looked up from Maya immediately. "King,"
"I’ll be prepared." He replied.
"That’s exactly what they want," Vi said. Her voice was steady but the tension underneath it was audible. "They set this up. They hurt Eli and Maya to get you walking through their door."
"I know that," King said.
"Then why are you going?"
"Because not going doesn’t change what they’re willing to do. It just means the next demonstration is worse."
King looked at her directly. "I’ll go, find out what Hunt actually wants, and I handle it from there. Staying here doesn’t protect anyone."
Vi held his gaze for a long moment. She wanted to argue it further, he could see that clearly, but she didn’t, because the logic didn’t have a clean counter and she knew it.
King looked across to Eli.
Eli met his eyes from where he rested against the wall, the potion barely doing any more work through him. He gave King a single nod.
King turned back toward his inventory and began preparing.
