Mocked at Level 1, I Became the Spear God

Chapter 4: The Price of a Gold Coin

The meeting room smelled of cheap coffee and forty nervous people trying not to look nervous. Nate walked in late, cup in hand, and found a seat near the back like he always did. Suite 3001 had booked out the whole room, and it was big enough to hold sixty, which meant there were plenty of empty folding chairs to avoid sitting in.

Cassie's brother was already on the stage.

Nate hadn't met him yet. The guy wore a tailored suit that clearly cost more than Nate's rent, thin glasses, and the kind of jaw that looked like it had been drawn with a ruler. He stood at the front with his hands folded, waiting for the room to shut up, and the room shut up fast.

"Good morning," he said. His voice was cool, educated, just aloof enough to let everybody know he considered this a waste of his morning. "I'm Grant Reid. I run this house now. Whatever you were doing before you walked in here, whatever your old title was, forget it. You work for Red Dragon now. You do it well, I take care of you. You don't, you know where the door is."

He paused, letting that land.

"First, the metrics." Grant held up a finger. "Within seven days of launch, every single one of you hands in one gold coin. Miss that, and you're gone."

The room went quiet, then erupted.

One gold coin. A single goblin dropped maybe ten copper. A long day of grinding bought you a handful of silver. Seven days to scrape together a whole gold meant nobody got to slack, not for an hour.

"Silence." Grant didn't raise his voice. He didn't have to. "Second. At day seven, the ten players with the lowest levels are fired. No warnings, no second chances."

A couple of the farmers near Nate exchanged looks. That was a club upside the head on the first day.

"Now, the upside." A thin smile. "First person here to hit level ten gets five hundred dollars. Anyone who cracks the city's top thousand gets a thousand. Top one hundred gets five thousand."

That actually pulled a few hopeful murmurs. For all the guy's coldness, the numbers were real.

A hand went up in the middle row. Somebody brave, or stupid. "What about the top ten, Mr. Reid?"

Grant laughed at him. Actually laughed. "You can stop dreaming about the top ten. The big studios run their best players in stacked teams—they bring in bodies to weaken the mobs and their carries finish them. You're solo. You have no shot. Save your energy for the five hundred." He turned to the girl beside him, the one with the tight top and the clipboard. "Brittany, pull their classes and levels off them one by one. Send me the numbers every evening."

"Sure thing, Mr. Reid," she said, and started working the aisles.

Grant strode out before she'd even reached the front row.

* * *

Nate clocked out at eight, sore and half-baked on whatever the game was doing to his neck, and walked out into a city that didn't care. His head kept replaying Wade's hands on that spear—the pivot at the hip, the three points lining up, the spear surging forward like a surfacing fish. You couldn't unlearn that once your body had felt it.

He had to hand it to The Vigil. It wasn't a game, exactly. It was more like somebody had kidnapped real life and handed you a controller.

The company metrics he barely thought about. He'd been a gamer before it paid bills. He knew how these launches went: on day one everybody was stacked on top of each other, and after a week the early rush thinned out. You didn't win day one by panicking. You won by being ready when the field opened up.

Back in his cramped rental, he couldn't sleep. He lay there staring at the ceiling, and every time he closed his eyes he saw the training dummy's forehead plate, saw the line of his own thrust. Then, stupidly, the dummy's face started to change. It got teeth. It smiled. It looked suspiciously like Cassie.

He sat up, scrubbed his hands over his face, and cursed. He'd spent too many hours swinging a stick. This was how people ended up in those support groups.

He booted his laptop to kill the time. The Vigil's first official announcement was pinned to the top of the forums.

*Dear players. Congratulations. Twelve million characters registered on launch day. The game is running clean.*

*To keep you playing, we're offering a level-rush bonus.*

*One: the first player on the entire server to reach level ten receives three hundred gold, one Bronze-quality piece of gear, and a special supply pack.*

*Two: the second player to reach level ten gets two hundred gold and one Bronze piece.*

*Three: the third player gets one hundred gold and one Bronze piece.*

*Four: the first player in each individual starter village to reach level ten gets one Bronze piece of gear.*

The comments were already a zoo.

Nate leaned in. The exchange rates were public now: one gold coin was a hundred silver, ten thousand copper, and on the unofficial trading platforms a single gold was already going for about three hundred bucks. Three hundred gold wasn't a bonus. It was nine dollars times a hundred, nearly thirty thousand real. Thirty thousand, for being fast.

On top of that, a Bronze item. The Vigil was stingy—normal mobs dropped gear one time in a hundred, and even then it was white garbage. On day one, a guy in plain white shoes had a little crowd around him like he'd invented fire. A Bronze piece didn't exist anywhere on the market yet. When it showed up, it'd go for insane money.

*Moneybags: holy hell. They're actually giving that away?*

*Stillwaters: lol Moneybags, you? You retire already, leave the village kids alone.*

*GetOverHere: oh my god a real one. hi Stillwaters!*

*NoBoat: carry me, please, somebody, I'm begging.*

*YearsFlow: that Bronze isn't gear, that's my down payment on a car.*

Nate read it all with a dry mouth. Three hundred gold was a fortune. But grabbing it? Twelve million players online, and the serious ones were all level four or five already—teams feeding their carries, guilds locking down whole maps, every advantage money could buy. Solo players didn't beat that on raw willpower.

His math was simple. Wade had told him the jump from Basic Spearplay Lv3 to Lv4 needed ten thousand proficiency points. Even grinding nonstop, that was around three days of his life. Three days behind the front-runners.

And yet he'd still spend them on the yard.

Reason one: you didn't get a family-trained spear master teaching you body mechanics every launch. That didn't come around twice. Reason two: the math. In three days, the teams would hit about level six, and that was where the hired help stopped keeping up—low-level mobs gave the carries no XP, and the grinders couldn't survive the high-level zones. After that, it came down to individual skill again. When that day came, Wren's Basic Spearplay would be Lv4 raw, Lv5 with the talent, half again his damage against a field full of people still swinging stiff. He'd out-steal kills, out-trade, outlast. Catching up to the front ten was a long shot, sure. But being the first level-ten in this village? That Bronze item was realistic.

And the company's five-hundred? That was already spent in his head.

Server-wide dream, village-level goal, five hundred bucks as the floor. He had a plan. It was the first plan he'd had in two years that didn't end with him staring at an empty bank account.

He skimmed a few more threads, found nothing worth stealing, shut the laptop off, and lay back down.

Somewhere behind his eyelids, the dummy was still smiling.