Weeks had passed, bygone and mud trodden. Kevin chuckled, downing the dregs of his pint that evening. The Laughing Minotaur’s hearth-fire sprawled a glow across the common room, clinging to the edges of faces and mugs alike. The place smelled of roasted onions, tallow candles, and pine-smoke—comfort stacked on comfort, pressed in like layers of a quilt.
Across from him, Borik scratched at a strip of leather as if it owed him answers. Tharn leaned back with his arms folded, the great smith’s hands idle for once. Renna had curled herself into a corner seat with a small ledger open on her knee, notes dotted with ink and smudges of something greenish. Garric, the innkeeper, was behind the bar polishing the same mug for the third time, listening as always.
“Hard to think I’d have lasted this long without this place,” Kevin said. His voice had that warm edge ale gave him. “Still feels… unreal. Like the Minotaur’s too good to be true.”
Tharn snorted. “That’s because it is. Good stone, aye, timber, aye—but walls don’t sit here by chance. This inn’s hidden, lad. Not just tucked in a corner of the city. Magic keeps it where it shouldn’t be.”
Kevin frowned, tilting his head. “Hidden? From who?”
“From everyone who doesn’t need it,” Garric said, setting down the mug and stepping forward. “The Minotaur doesn’t show itself to just any drunk with coin. You have to be in the Games proper, signed by the System. Door looks like an archway to nowhere else, maybe a busted alley if you squint. But if the mark’s on you…” He tapped his broad chest with a thumb. “It opens. Always does.”
Borik looked up from his leatherwork. “And don’t ask where it truly stands. Might be under the city, might be halfway in another realm. All I know is, I walk through the arch, and I’m home.”
Kevin leaned forward on his elbows. “So, what—this place is… pocketed?” He searched for the right word. “Like… folded into the map?”
Renna smiled faintly, closing her ledger. “Closer to being folded out of it. Think of the Minotaur as perched between pages of a book. The city writes itself on one side, the dungeons on the other. This inn is the pressed flower in between—thin, fragile, but… a marker. That’s why it feels safe.”
Kevin let the image roll around in his head. A pressed flower between chapters. “And here I thought it was just cozy lighting.”
The dwarves chuckled. Tharn reached across the table and clapped Kevin’s shoulder hard enough to jostle his pint. “You’ve the head for odd truths now. Grind long enough, you stop questioning the rules and start learning the exceptions.”
“Besides,” Borik added, “the Minotaur isn’t only walls and wards. It remembers. You ever wonder why the stew’s the same no matter when you ask for it? Because the hearth knows what kept you standing. Garric pretends it’s him, but it’s the inn itself looking after fools like us.”
“Oi,” Garric barked, mock-offended. “I stir the pot, thank you very much.”
Laughter rippled easy across the table. Kevin felt it sink in—warmth without edges, shared between them. For once, no System prompts, no rats to crush, no clock gnawing at his nerves. Just friends, mugs, and the quiet miracle of an inn that should not exist, yet did.
“Alright,” Kevin said, shaking his head, grinning. “A pub between pages. Fine. Long as it keeps serving.”
“It’ll keep,” Renna replied, raising her glass in a quiet toast. “Until you’ve outgrown it. That’s the other trick. The Minotaur lets you rest, but not forever. Sooner or later, you’ll walk out and the arch won’t be there.”
Kevin’s grin faltered a touch, though he hid it behind his mug. Rest for now. Tomorrow would come, but tonight the Minotaur held.
Kevin lay back against the straw-stuffed mattress, the hum of the hearth fire still muffled through the walls, the laughter of Borik and Tharn fading into snores two doors down. Sleep didn’t come easy, not when the System hovered so temptingly at the edge of his vision. He exhaled and pulled it forward—familiar panes and glowing script fanning open like stained glass.
“Alright then,” he muttered, half to himself. “Let’s see what the grand Rat Slayer’s amounted to.”
The sheet unfolded.
Character Sheet: Kevin—level 9—Rat Slayer
Race: Human
Experience: 82%
Attributes:
Strength: 4 (+1) Wolf Fang Amulet = 5
Dexterity: 0 (+2) Ratleather Armour Set Bonus = 2
Intellect: 4
Wisdom: 0
Charisma: 0
Constitution: 18 (+2) Ratleather Tower Shields = 20
Vitals
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Health: 400 HP (boosted by extra Constitution milestone)
Armour: 85—11.44% mitigation vs Level 9 foes
Dodge: 0
Magic Absorption: 0
Skills
Herblore: Rank 6
Alchemy: Rank 4
Woodcutting: Rank 5
Leatherworking: Rank 2
Armour Smithing: Rank 2
Combat Proficiencies
Leather Armour: Rank 5
Shields: Rank 8
Kevin scrolled with a twitch of thought. His pack slotted open next.
Inventory
Equipped Gear:
Ratleather Armour (full set) +2 Dex bonus
2× Ratleather Tower Shields +2 Constitution
Wolf Fang Amulet +1 Strength, +3% Damage Reduction
Tools
Bone-handled knife (serviceable, blunt tip)
Mortar & Pestle (Renna’s “loan”)
Small Hatchet (woodcutting, cracked handle)
Stitching awl (Borik’s spare)
Coin Purse
142 Copper
6 Silver
Kevin flicked the panes shut one by one, sighing into the dark. “Not bad,” he thought, though he’d never say it aloud. Nine levels, a body like a brick wall, and enough herbs and pelts to stink up the room if he left them untended.
The inn creaked. Somewhere, Garric hummed under his breath as he wiped another mug that didn’t need it. Kevin smirked into the dark. “Alright, Minotaur,” he whispered. “Hold me between the pages a while longer.”
Kevin was about to will the interface closed for good when something caught at the corner of his vision. A tab he swore he hadn’t seen before. It pulsed faintly—no smug cube, no crackling announcement, just there, waiting.
“…Map?” He muttered.
The word alone tugged it open.
At first it was nothing more than a sketch—the clearing, the inn nestled within, and a hazy green stretch that he recognised as the forest where he’d spent most of the last bloody month grinding vermin into progress. But then his hand twitched in the air, and the image shifted. It moved.
Kevin sat up in bed, half a laugh caught in his throat. “You’ve been here the whole time?” He slapped the heel of his palm against his forehead. Fuck’s sake, I really am a dumbass. He pinched, dragged, and the world unfurled beneath his fingertips like a painted scroll.
To the north rose jagged white teeth of icy mountains, a frozen wall stretching into horizonless distance. To the southwest sprawled a great, blistering desert, dunes caught mid-surge as though painted in ochre waves. To the southeast, blue swallowed everything: an endless ocean, broken only by a few specks of island like crumbs on silk.
And right in the middle—so cleanly centred it made his stomach twist—lay the clearing. His clearing. A neat circle of green, carved like someone had taken scissors to the world’s fabric. Deliberate. Staged.
He zoomed, the map blurring, then resolving into smaller rings. Sub-zones. Each neatly tagged with a shimmer of script:
Forest of Gnash (Level 1 to level 3)
Deep Thickets (Level 4 to level 6)
Wolf Den Ridge (Level 7 to level 9)
Southern Glade (Level 8 to level 10)
He swallowed. Everything around him, the entire month of sweat and ratblood, was… the tutorial zone. “Fuck me…” He trailed softly, disappointedly. He had felt power and competency for the first time ever - now crushed - his heart sank.
Kevin pinched out further. The rings radiated outward like ripples in a pond, each halo larger, darker, marked with harsher numbers. His eyes skipped, darting across gates that climbed and climbed.
Level 20 to level 25. Level 40 to level 55. Past the desert’s edge: Level 90 to level 120. Beyond the frozen mountains: Level 130 to level 150.
And there—just barely at the edge of where the map would let him pan—one last ring. Numbers stark, almost obscene.
Level 165 to level 200.
And then nothing. The map refused to scroll further, as though the rest of the world had been deliberately redacted.
Kevin lay back, staring at the ceiling, the echo of that number seared behind his eyes. He whispered into the dark: “One hundred and ninety-eight…”
Sleep took him again, this time in jagged pieces. One moment he was staring at the ceiling, listening to the creak of beams and Garric’s quiet humming, the next he was elsewhere—under the trellis outside the inn. The lattice above was draped in climbing vine, moonlight silvering its edges. The Laughing Minotaur behind him glowed warm, every window spilling light and laughter. But Kevin wasn’t drawn to the inn. His eyes pulled forward, to the figure waiting just beyond the arch.
It was enormous. A giant shape built of smoke and sinew, its form struggling to hold itself together. Purple wisps coiled off it like steam from an open wound, each puff throbbing in time with a pulse that wasn’t sound so much as pressure inside his skull.
Kevin couldn’t breathe. His body screamed to step back into the doorway, to run for Garric, for Tharn, for anyone—but he was fixed to the ground, transfixed by the sheer wrongness of it.
The giant leaned, faceless but intent, its bulk blotting the horizon. From somewhere inside the haze, a word rumbled—less spoken than hammered straight into the marrow of Kevin’s bones.
“Soon.”
Kevin’s vision wrenched white. He gasped awake in the cot, sweat chilling his neck, fingers clawed into the mattress as if he’d been bracing against a blow. The room was quiet, the hearth-fire a dim ember.
