All Chapters of EARTH ONLINE: Chapter 41
- Chapter 50
89 chapters
Chapter 41 — Worm's Tears
The twenty-minute limit was the Spire's constraint on the player — and, in its way, the Spire's protection. Anyone but the very weakest could survive twenty minutes and choose to exit. That was an S-instance: don't get greedy, and you don't die. In difficulty it wasn't remotely in Mario's Monopoly's class.Cole sat in the dark and waited half an hour for the worm to sleep. At last it popped its snore-bubble and woke, hissing: "So hungry… I want my mama, boo-hoo…"Still no tears. Still fake-crying.Cole stood; the worm reared its upper half at once. He couldn't see it, but he was fairly sure it could see him. He felt his way along the wall toward the tunnel, and at the mouth turned and beckoned. "Come on."No response.He had no idea whether this would work; he only knew they had to get out, before the red-haired man came back with whatever colleague he'd promised — and the ringmaster, Cole did not think, would let him walk away easy.He went into the tunnel, slow, stopping now and the
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 42 — Three Hours / The Pink River
After S3 he had two days. He staked out the mall again to try for another S-instance — but before he could tail the woman called Tara into one, he tripped a single-player instance of his own by accident. Easier than the worm's S3, but it ate an enormous amount of time, and when he came out it was the morning of the tenth day.At five that afternoon, the Spire would pull him into his assault game.Cole checked his pack twice, shouldered it, and went into a hardware store. The place was a mess; players had clearly come through hunting weapons after the game began. In the wreckage he found a sharp little knife, took it to the back room, drew the giant match, and began to grind the blade against the match.The wooden shaft of the match scraped along the edge — and not a splinter came off the match. Instead the blade ground sharper, until it threw a cold metallic light.He sharpened two knives and four small throwing darts the same way. The knives he strapped to his right leg, the darts he
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 43 — The Burning Forest
At the western edge of the city, at the end of a highway, two black dots appeared. They grew, and grew, and finally tore past a tollbooth and threw themselves into the city with the last of their strength.Two ruined men. One had lost his left arm, raw flesh still hanging in a flap from the bloody stump. The other was drenched in his own blood, every step a struggle, on the edge of falling.A middle-aged woman saw them and fled. A girl of fourteen or fifteen came around a corner, too frightened to run before one of them caught her arm. He clung to it, shaking, almost weeping. "Is — is there a Stowaway organization here? In this city? Is there?"The girl was near tears. "Wh-what are you talking about? Who are you? My friend's a Registered Player, he has an ability, don't you try anything — if you touch me he'll — he'll avenge me!"The one-armed man rasped: "Stowaways. In this city. Are there — them?""Of course there are Stowaways."The despair flooded their blood-soaked eyes, and they
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 44 — I'm Little Red Riding Hood / Granny Wolf
Cole's face shifted, and before he'd parsed the words he heard shouting."My God — fire! The Monster Forest is on fire!""How did it catch? I'll get Grandpa Elephant — quick, put it out!"A dense pounding of feet, closing fast — twenty of them at least. By the time he heard them they were a hundred meters off; no running clear now. In a pinch Cole scrambled up a great tree and climbed into the leaves to hide his body.Five seconds later his heart skipped a beat. He'd finally seen the things that were talking.Not people. Animals — monsters. The leader was a man's body under a gorilla's head, in a black tank top, corded with muscle, carrying a room-sized water vat toward the blaze. Behind him: a pig-headed man, a monkey-headed man, a great snake coiling a hose as it crawled. Some had only animal heads; some were animal all over.Cole held his breath and clung to the tree, his heart slamming, the only thing left to do to make himself small and pray they missed him.Then a dog-headed one
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 45 — Whack-a-Mole
Slightly curled black hair fell down both sides of the face. A middle-aged man, eyes shut, mouth open, hung on the wall as if asleep — but for the bloodless gray of his skin, the dead blue of a corpse.Cole looked once, and looked away.Granny Wolf finished the arm and tossed the bones into the fireplace; the flames crackled, and the reek of burning bone wandered the little room. "Don't think I'll be making you supper," she said, wiping the blood from her mouth. "Seven copper coins is already the most you'll get. Starting tomorrow you go and catch that gold mole, and if I come home in seven days and don't see its corpse—"Cole looked up, cold, at the towering wolf.She split her teeth into a smile both gentle and savage, a half-eaten finger still wedged in the gap. "Then you'll be my supper."The whole house shuddered with each step as she went to the bedroom and slammed the door, and before long there was snoring like thunder.Only then did Cole begin to move about. He checked every
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 46 — The Black Mole / This Is a Single-Player Game
He had a way, though.Cole drew the red gem and put on Mario's hat. The reek hit him; he held his breath, fixed his eyes grimly on Granny Wolf's fireplace, counted to three, and with a great shout drove his own head into the wall.The first sound was his skull hitting stone. The second was a denture clattering to the floor."That wall's a little too hard," Cole muttered, rubbing his head, and took the hat off.He picked up the denture — yellowed, old, a smear of chocolate still in its teeth. He'd handled an excrement-shaped potato; a denture didn't frighten him. He dropped it in the jar.> 【 A cobbler's seventy-year-old dirty denture. 】The line slid down pale yellow this time, and when the jar was wholly yellow a golden thing sprang out onto his leg. A sweet potato, arm-thick and arm-long, no different from Earth's but for a fainter scent. Cole hadn't eaten in a day; looking at it, he had no appetite at all.Mario's hat, on use, grew a treasure by headbutt — a ten-percent chance at b
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 47 — The Invisible Player
Cole carried the powder-laced dirt out into the open and, with a focus he had rarely brought to anything, began to pick the white powder grain by grain from the soil. It took a full hour. Then he went to the fifth hole and dug up the powder from both his own plates — yesterday's, half-merged with the dirt at the left edge, and today's, smashed deeper in.Three heaps of dirt. Three sets of white powder. He compared the two from the fifth hole: glazed ceramic, shattered. Then he turned to the powder from the third.He compared all three."…Identical."The powder from the third hole was not yesterday's, and not placed before six today. He'd checked all nine holes yesterday, and again before six today, and found them unchanged but for his own plate's residue at the fifth. He fought the black mole maybe five minutes, rested three outside, walked half a minute from the fifth hole to the third — and before six he'd finished checking the third hole with five or six minutes to spare. Fifteen m
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 48 — That Person Is Me
Cole put the egg away and went to the window and looked down at the nine black holes. Beside the sofa, the little pink clock ticked, and its hand swung to twelve.The third day."This is a single-player game," he said, very calm, looking at the third hole, and gave his last conclusion. "That person — is me."There were not two players in this valley. There were not many players. There was one. Him. A single-player assault that ran more than once — and every run, another Cole, walking the same mountain, baiting a hole, unable to see or be seen, all of them folded into the same seven days. The invisible hand at the third hole was his own, from another turn of the game.He thought it through the night, and the next morning, before six, he tried the egg again.He knocked three times. And a low, startled voice answered at once: "Cole?"Cole had never seen Adrian Vance. But they'd spoken a handful of times, and not once — not even when Cole told him, two days back, that he was about to run
Last Updated : 2026-07-06
Chapter 49 — Someone I've Had a Crush On / My Name Is Sugar
Cole watched the second hand crawl toward six. Two minutes left.He had it now, the whole shape of it. He was running the assault again and again, each turn a different Cole, none able to see the others, all of them folded into one valley. To clear it, every Cole had to bait the same hole, and stand at it, at six o'clock — and then the gold mole came at eighty percent instead of zero.But the Coles could not see each other, could not speak. They could only converge if every one of them, alone, independently, made the same choice.And there was exactly one thing every iteration of himself would choose identically, with no communication at all. A fixed, personal constant. The same in every Cole, because every Cole was him."Ask that me," Cole said, "this: Cole — if you had only your last day, which is your lucky number?"Adrian, on the rooftop's edge, glanced at a distant clock tower. A minute to six. "I find I'm curious," he said. "What is your lucky number?""Why?""I have someone," C
Last Updated : 2026-07-07
Chapter 50 — Because I Trust Myself
Adrian seemed to have been waiting. He answered at once: "Mm, I'm here, Sugar—" The sound cut off; a pause. "I don't mean to call you Sugar. I meant to say your name — Sugar—" And cut off again.Cole said nothing.Adrian said nothing.He had not, in the end, gone on to the city; he sat now in a hotel, meaning to leave tomorrow. Yesterday Cole had told him he might call today, and Adrian had decided to settle this before anything else. He'd waited from midnight — thirteen hours — and had actually heard Cole's voice again. And the moment he tried to say the man's name, what came out, for reasons he couldn't explain, was Sugar.Cole understood. The man was caught in I'm Still Your Daddy — believed Cole was called Sugar, and for three days could not say his true name. Understanding it was one thing; being called Sugar over and over by that low voice was another, and it sat strangely close, far too intimate.Cole coughed. "I know what you're thinking — why you're sure I'm called Sugar.""…
Last Updated : 2026-07-07