Chương 100: Four Slices Not Two

Meno washed his face until the dried blood was gone. The water ran cold over his nose, and he stayed at the mirror a few seconds longer than he needed to. Health concerns should have mattered more. They did matter, somewhere behind the much louder fact that the AI had taken a hammer to his class and called the damage an evolution. None of the options were truly his character. Infernal felt like a completely different class, built around waiting, stacking, and detonating.

Eternal felt closer to Aurelia's hammer class, where you learned the fight so perfectly it played out like a movie and punished every deviation with death. Swing Master could not animation cancel without deleting Chain, and Eternal turned that into you die. Imperial was fine. It had good PvP tools, good status control, and a strong rank-one flavor, but against anything challenging, the correct play was probably to stand next to the monster, evade everything, and wait until enough Chain had built to erase it.

Attacks barely mattered. Old Swing Master had felt like dancing on a knife's edge every second, while Imperial felt like waiting for permission to swing a crown. Meno left his apartment. It was Wednesday morning, and for the first time in a while, he had no urge to rush home and log back in. The stream could survive on Chadculator's math sermon for a bit. Meno took the long way along the coast toward his favorite pizza place. The air near the water helped. A little.

He kept circling the same bad idea: refuse to pick. Stay level sixty. Keep the old class. Let XP stop until the AI got annoyed enough to deal with him directly. If Solar wanted to nerf him, it could do it openly. Maybe he could wait for Karmabeast to hit sixty, run the Titan Trial, and see if some other path opened. A guy rushed up beside him.

"Yo, PBG! Which one are you gonna pick? Eternal, right?" Meno looked over. A high schooler in uniform had rushed up beside him, bag bouncing on one shoulder, too excited for this hour. Chat had spawned into the real world.

"I don't know," Meno said.

"Maybe I'll delete my character."

"What? Don't do that, man. That would be lame."

"So which one do you think I should pick?"

"Obviously Imperial," the student said instantly.

"Who doesn't want to be the emperor?"

"Should I order a crown and wear it on stream too?" The student frowned.

"Nah, that would be cringe."

"So do you have any reason to pick it other than it sounds cool? Should I pick the option with the highest roleplay value?"

"Yeah, I mean…" The kid shifted his bag.

"I don't know. Maybe. It's probably good for sponsorships and stuff."

"Do you watch streams based on who sponsors them?"

"No way, man." The student stepped back, his excitement finally cracking.

"Sorry, I guess. Didn't want to bother you. Just got a bit excited. That's all. Bye." The student left fast, and Meno watched him go with a shake of his head. He had never wanted to be famous. He had wanted rank one and money. Now he was technically both, so why was he walking along the coast in a bad mood, hungry, and with dried blood recently washed from his nose? The class evolution should not matter this much. He could probably make any option work. The problem was principle.

A real nerf would have been simple: reduce Chain Madness from ten attacks per second to eight, weaken Panic Pump, or change Break Surplus so it didn't rest the combo. It would not hand him three other classes that only vaguely resembled the one he had built. What if he just stayed level sixty and made Naraltan work anyway? If he deleted content above his level while everyone else passed him on farming dungeon trash, people would know the ladder was cooked. Rank mattered, but perceived dominance mattered too.

Nobody would call another player rank one in spirit if Meno was fighting level one hundred-plus smart champions while stuck at sixty by choice. It was petty, and Meno was not above petty. He did not know if it was viable, but the idea felt more exciting than all three evolution options combined. Two more people recognized him before he reached the pizza place, and he ignored both. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

"PrayerBeadGod!" one shouted. Meno kept walking.

"PBG, pick Infernal!" Meno kept walking harder than necessary. At the pizza place, he bought four slices of supreme and a bottle of water. Whatever supreme meant, it seemed to have everything. Pepperoni had been temporarily ruined by Morlando, private jets, and trillionaire surveillance. The four slices felt like a huge upgrade from his usual two. He was rich now, at least on paper. Five still felt irresponsible. He sat inside.

The shop was almost full, mostly people grabbing breakfast before work, but nobody bothered him. Maybe they were half-asleep, or maybe pizza at breakfast filtered for people with better priorities. Meno ate fast, then slowed down on the last slice because rich people probably savored things. He finished and still wanted blueberry juice, but the pizza place only had water and soda. The mall downtown had a juice bar. He wanted to buy his mother something anyway, so that made it as good a time as any.

Also, walking delayed the moment he had to go home and watch Chadculator explain that his old class was dead by math. Meno went downtown.

"ExploitGod!" someone shouted. Ignored.

"PBG!" Ignored.

"Meno! What happened to your wife?" That one he ignored with extra force. The mall was already filling up when he arrived. Meno bought a large blueberry juice from the juice bar and rode the elevator to the highest floor, where the expensive stores sat under lighting designed to make normal people feel underdressed. He knew exactly what he wanted, or at least the category. Something nice for his mother first. He entered a jewelry store. An old man in a shirt and vest stood behind the counter.

As Meno sipped from the blueberry juice, the man gave him a look that suggested the drink had reduced his buyer rating by several tiers.

"How may I help you, sir?" the clerk asked.

"Do you have silver kitchen stuff?" The clerk's mouth tightened.

"We do not sell 'stuff,' I am afraid." Meno looked around.

"You clearly sell a bunch of stuff."

"No, sir. We sell jewelry. You can find stuff on a lower floor, I assure you."

"Spoons, forks, knives, things like that. You know what those are, right?"

"Yes," the clerk said.

"I know what those are."

"Good." They stared at each other while Meno took a slow sip of blueberry juice. He already had aggro, and running from a low-level monster would be embarrassing, so the correct move was to wait for the first attack and counter. The clerk adjusted his collar, caught somewhere between calling security and doing his job.

"A full silver set is twenty-five thousand credits," the clerk said.

"Orders only. Payment up front." Meno nodded.

"How about twenty-three thousand?"

"Sir," the clerk said, outraged.

"This is not a vegetable market. We do not haggle." Meno took another sip.

"Twenty-four?"

"I am not authorized to give discounts." Counter failed. The low-level monster was actually a support player, happy to stand near the fight as long as someone else took the real hits. Meno had to regain momentum, and support players needed to be baited into spending cooldowns before they hid behind the tank.

"Can I pay twenty-six?" Meno asked. The clerk blinked.

"What?"

"Twenty-six thousand."

"I suppose, if you wish to pay more, that is possible. It is a custom order." Meno pointed with the juice bottle.

"See? You can haggle with the price after all. Why were you lying to me?" The clerk's face reddened as Meno took a loud sip.

"You," the clerk said.

"Get out, or I will call security." There it was. Cooldowns popped.

"For what?" Meno asked.

"Go ahead." The clerk picked up the phone angrily, then paused as he looked at Meno, the blueberry juice, the store entrance, the cameras, and possibly the cost of being wrong. Instead of calling security, he slammed the phone back down and disappeared into the back. Meno waited calmly. A minute later, the clerk returned with an older, well-dressed woman, who looked at Meno once, then at the juice, then at the clerk.

Her expression adjusted in a way Meno recognized from skilled players entering a messy fight and instantly reading who had caused the wipe.

"I was told you wish to order a set of silver flatware?" she asked.

"Yes," Meno said.

"A very nice one for my mother."

"I cannot discount a custom order," she said.

"But if you also buy something else, I could deduct a thousand credits from that item." Meno got serious immediately. This woman was high-rank DPS, and there was no room for sloppy play. First, he had to identify the bait. Once he knew the angle, he could dodge and strike from somewhere she did not expect.

"What do you recommend?"

"Do you have anyone in mind?"

"Yes," Meno said.

"My sister." The woman walked out from behind the counter, moved to a display case of necklaces, and removed one. To Meno, it was a thin gold necklace with a dark-blue stone surrounded by tiny diamonds. Pretty, probably. He had no real idea. Jewelry looked like equipment with no tooltips.

"This is an eighteen-karat gold pendant," she said, "featuring a natural oval sapphire with a diamond halo. Five thousand credits." Meno took a long sip of blueberry juice. There it was. The kitchen utensils cost twenty-five thousand credits, and those were just forks and spoons. This necklace had a shiny stone and diamonds, yet only cost five thousand. That made no sense. Something had to be wrong with it. Bad mods. Low durability. Hidden curse. Meno looked into another case and pointed.

"What about that one?" He pointed to a white-gold necklace with a large green stone and diamonds glittering around it. The woman gave him a strange look before putting the sapphire necklace back and removing the other one from behind the glass.

"This is an eighteen-karat white-gold pendant featuring a three-carat natural emerald framed by nearly two carats of diamonds," she said.

"Twenty-five thousand credits." Meno made a small fist pump, and the woman noticed. He knew it. They had not shown him the good item first. Five times the price made no sense if both looked high-tier, which meant the first one had definitely been a dud. The emerald one probably had much better beauty scaling.

"I'll take this one for twenty-four," Meno said.

"Then the custom set for twenty-five." The woman nodded with perfect professionalism, and the old clerk looked constipated. She took the necklace to the counter and placed it into a fancy box. Meno gave his mother's address for the silver flatware delivery, confirmed the order details, and paid for the whole thing like it was nothing. That part felt fake. Forty-nine thousand credits vanished, and his stomach barely twisted. It twisted a little, but not enough to stop him.

He had spent worse amounts emotionally by dying to a dragon, and this was for his mother and sister. Nobody could patch that out from under him. Meno took the box, waved at the clerk with the empty blueberry juice bottle, and left satisfied. It was true what people said. Sometimes you had to spend money to save money. He had saved a thousand credits, which was huge. Outside the store, Meno looked at the small box in his hand. It was time to visit his sister.

He wanted to talk to Jonas anyway about whether giving the legendary shield to Oxy was thoughtful or desperate. Probably both. Jonas was usually home all day, doing mind magic from his home office, and Meno trusted him on social mechanics more than he trusted any tooltip Solar had ever written.