# Chapter 5
# Chapter 5: The Broken Meta
Michael died for the ninth time in under an hour, and it was the best he'd felt all week.
*"Third Age"* had never given him this much trouble before. He'd beaten it twice on Normal, once on Hard, and here he was on the couch in his own house — a week after a park, a wrench, and a man named Culvert had rearranged his understanding of reality — dumping every level-up point his in-game Ranger had into raw Strength and getting his skull caved in by a cave troll for the fourth time in a row.
He didn't care. It was familiar. It was normal. It was the one hour of the day where the biggest threat to his life was a poorly-timed dodge roll.
"You're doing it again," William said, from the beanbag on the floor, controller resting on his knees like he'd already surrendered.
"Doing what."
"The thing. The *Michael* thing." William gestured at the screen with his whole hand, like he was presenting evidence in a trial. "You have thirty skill points. THIRTY. You could put ten into Evasion and never get hit by that troll's overhead swing again. You could put five into Vitality and just — survive the hits you do take. Instead you've put twenty-eight points into Strength and two into 'Intimidating Shout,' which, and I checked, does *nothing.*"
"It makes the troll flinch."
"It makes the troll flinch for *half a second,* Mike, and then it hits you for sixty percent of your health bar, which you don't have because you didn't put anything into Vitality!"
On screen, the troll swung. Michael's Ranger — who currently had the defensive profile of a wet paper towel and the offensive profile of a freight train — took the hit, staggered, and did not die, because the number under his HP bar had somehow survived at eleven percent.
"Eleven percent," William said, flat. "That is not surviving. That is the game feeling sorry for you."
"Or," Michael said, already lining up his next swing, "eleven percent is exactly enough."
He landed the hit. The troll's health bar — a long, ugly red thing that had been taunting him for three attempts — dropped to zero in a single strike, and the screen exploded into a victory fanfare that felt, honestly, a little smug.
**LEGENDARY WEAPON UNLOCKED: TROLLBANE**
Silence in the living room.
William set his controller down on the carpet with the exaggerated care of a man defusing a bomb.
"No," he said.
"What?"
"*No.* This is not — Mike, this is a *twenty-hour boss.* People post videos of themselves crying about this boss. I watched a fourteen-minute video essay about this boss's attack patterns to prepare for this fight, and you just walked in with a build a twelve-year-old would get bullied for online and *one-shot the enrage phase.*"
"I got lucky."
"You are not lucky! Your character sheet is a war crime! You have a Strength stat that shouldn't exist at this point in the game, zero defensive investment, and a legendary weapon drop that has a twelve percent proc chance, and you got it in *nine tries!*" William was on his feet now, pacing the same six feet of carpet he always paced when the universe personally offended him. "This is not how this is supposed to work! I followed a *guide!* I looked up the *optimal build!* I have a *spreadsheet,* Mike, I made a *spreadsheet* for this game, and you just—"
He gestured at the screen, at Trollbane gleaming in its little inventory box, at the whole unfair architecture of Michael's continued existence.
"Why does this ALWAYS work for you?!"
"I don't know, Will—"
"I hate you!" William dropped back onto the beanbag like his skeleton had personally quit on him. "I hate you so much right now. I have a *spreadsheet.*"
"You could just put points into Strength too."
"That's not the POINT, Mike, the point is that the *game has rules* and you are supposed to *lose* if you *ignore* them, that is the entire *social contract* of game design, and you keep — " William dragged both hands down his face. "You keep getting away with it. In every game. Every single one. This isn't new, this is just the most recent, most *personally insulting* example."
Michael grinned and didn't say anything, because there wasn't really anything to say. He'd known this about himself since he was nine years old and had beaten his first JRPG with a fighter built entirely around one stat and sheer stubbornness. William had known it just as long, and had spent just as long being furious about it, and somewhere in there the fury had become its own kind of ritual — a thing they did instead of talking about the things that were actually hard to talk about.
Michael set the controller down.
"Okay," he said. "Real talk."
William's residual outrage drained out of him at once, like a tide going out. He sat up.
"Real talk," he agreed.
They hadn't gone with Culvert that night. He'd walked them as far as the edge of the park, told them the wrench needed to "settle" before it would show them anything useful, and given Michael a card with nothing on it but the branching-circle symbol and an address that turned out, when William looked it up, to belong to a shuttered auto parts store on the edge of town.
*Come back when you can lift the wrench one-handed without shaking,* he'd said. *Not before.*
It had been the single most infuriating piece of homework Michael had ever received, mostly because it made sense.
So they'd waited. And while they waited, Michael did the only thing he knew how to do with a problem that didn't have an obvious next step: he ground it down with repetition until it broke.
**[STRENGTH: 11]**
That had been the number the night of the park. A week later, it wasn't.
Michael ran in the mornings, before his father was even awake, looping the quiet streets of Ripon until his lungs burned and the System rewarded him with numbers he hadn't spent a single point to earn.
**[AGILITY: 6 → 8]** **[CONSTITUTION: 7 → 9]**
He'd expected to have to fight for every stat. Instead the running gave him some of them for free, like the System was less interested in what he chose and more interested in what he actually did with his body — which, William pointed out with no small amount of bitterness, was exactly the kind of unearned generosity that had ruined the troll fight.
The afternoons belonged to William's basement and the dusty weight bench that had once mocked him with its complete indifference. It didn't mock him anymore.
**[DAILY QUEST: STRENGTH GRIND]** **[OBJECTIVE: COMPLETE 50 BENCH PRESSES AND 50 BICEP CURLS]** **[REWARD: 5 EXP]**
Five EXP a day. It wasn't much. But it was five EXP a day that hadn't existed the week before, and Michael had never in his life been the kind of person who could resist a number that was allowed to go up.
By the end of the week he'd signed up at the boxing gym on Fig Street, mostly because William had found an old anime poster of a scrawny kid turning into a heavyweight through sheer bloody-minded repetition and had declared it, with total sincerity, "a viable strategy document."
The System had agreed.
**[CONDITION MET: USER HAS ENROLLED IN A PHYSICAL COMBAT DISCIPLINE]** **[SKILL UNLOCKED: BOXING (F)]**
Coach Reyes ran the gym like a man who had given up being surprised by anything decades ago, which made him, as far as Michael was concerned, the ideal trainer for a fifteen-year-old boy who occasionally flinched at notifications only he could see. Michael hit the heavy bag until his knuckles ached and the System handed him a jab quest with the enthusiasm of an app trying to get him to open it every day.
"Five hundred jabs," William read off Michael's floating screen, sitting on the gym bench with a stopwatch he'd bought specifically for this purpose. "*Maintaining proper form.* You know what that means? It means the System is grading your technique. It has opinions about your technique, Mike."
"It's not wrong to have opinions."
"It's a *magic time-travel status screen,* it should not have *opinions about your jab.*"
By Friday, Michael was sitting on William's couch with a body that ached in ways it hadn't a week ago and a stat sheet that had quietly rearranged itself into something almost respectable.
**[STRENGTH: 14]** **[AGILITY: 9]** **[CONSTITUTION: 10]**
**[SKILLS:]** **[IMPROVISED WEAPON MASTERY (E)]** **[FIST FIGHTER (F) — Passive]** **[BOXING (F) — 24% Proficiency]**
"It's working," Michael said, flexing a hand that didn't quite feel like his own anymore.
"It's working *too well,*" William said, not looking up from the strategy guide he'd been pretending to read for the last twenty minutes. "You've gained more in a week than most people gain in a year of actual training, and you didn't even need the System to hand you half of it. You're not just leveling up, Mike. You're — " He stopped, searching for the word. "You're becoming the kind of person the System *has* to reward. That's different. That's not a cheat code. That's just you."
Michael didn't have a good answer for that, so he didn't try to find one.
He thought instead about the card in his pocket — blank except for a symbol and an address — and the wrench sitting wrapped in a gym towel at the bottom of his closet, warm even when nothing was touching it.
*Come back when you can lift it one-handed without shaking.*
He held out his hand. It was steady.
"Will," he said. "I think it's time we go find out what an auto parts store has to do with saving my dad."