All right everyone, as the master of Skilz, savior of this world, slayer of dragons (a dragon), you'd expect I'd retire to the quiet life, allow my in-game moms to spoil me with food, ride GYOAT around town, and just enjoy the world I saved.

  That's some adult thinking right there. I, on the other hand, had important things to do. There was a world to explore.

  So I ran through the forest, leaping tree to tree, occasionally yelling, "Parkour!" because it felt like I got more skill XP when I yelled it. Currently, I was in the northern forest, scouting the way north at least a little before Grimmblade and SisterQuery started their journey to start Sourdough.

  Mobs were easy to dodge mostly, because they rarely looked up and forest Parkour! was more fun when trying to stay in the treetops.

  Could I make it more of a challenge? Yes, I could eat a [Musical cake], I could lower my stealth, I could wear bells over metallic armor and slow all my stats.

  Why don’t I? Aren’t I skill grinding?

  Yes, I am, but I have one very good reason not to do that yet, and it’s about to get unlocked.

  Congratulations! You have explored 1% of the world map!

  Skill unlocked: Explorer lv. 1

  And with that, I now had the coveted mini-map. It showed lines of ten feet in diameter of everywhere I’d walked and explored. Not much, but...

  I jumped from tree to tree.

  Congratulations! Parkour! has reached lv. 23!

  This was the way, two skills grind at once. I kept exploring. There was a corrupted dire sheep, which looked pretty cool, but I wasn’t here for blood, I was here for...

  Message from HelzBom: Time to log out when you can, we’re having kabobs for dinner, so prepare for sticks.

  Well, that would do it. I eyed the evil sheep and considered. My inventory was empty, and I had gone as far as I could in a single day...

  I decided to do it.

  I leapt down, took a bite of the awful-tasting bean brittle, and yelled, “Yo! Your wool is ugly and you smell funny!”

  The corrupted sheep turned and roared. I resisted the urge to dodge as it charged me, roaring, a corrupted aura emanating from the foul sheep as it crashed into me. It really did smell pretty bad.

  You have died from Dire sheep! 10% lv. XP lost!

  No items were dropped, it’s like you planned for this or something.

  This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  The monster was gone, and I respawned at Starter. My moms were, all four of them, sipping steaming tea outside of Noob Noms. My mom Deadsilence quipped, “You ready, kid? We have some skewers to make at home.”

  “Do we have veggie chicken?” I asked, debating what I wanted my kabobs to be.

  “Plain, or breaded if you feel a little more goblin at home and want that burnt taste,” she offered.

  HelzBom shook her head. “I’ll turn off the smoke alarm.”

  I hugged Noobkitty and ExpertBunny; the two of them hugged back.

  “I need something that can kill me but doesn’t make me lose items,” I asked since they were a crafter and the admin.

  “That would kind of break the game,” suggested ExpertBunny.

  “Why do you want something like that?” Noobkitty asked.

  “So that I can start working on my gathering skill,” I replied.

  Noobkitty nodded, ExpertBunny considered, they’d think on it.

  “Your junk-food peddlers can help you later; veggie chicken won’t burn itself,” said my mom Deadsilence.

  “Burnt chicken takes priority,” Noobkitty agreed.

  ---

  So I logged out. In the Prime world, I took the sensors and activators off my body; my legs ached. A day of jumping tree to tree definitely took it out of you.

  I looked to my moms, they were removing their own equipment and adjusting their muscles. I hadn’t asked what they did in Coro?en today, but my mom Bella, whose username was HelzBom, was rubbing her hand and wrist. Game playing with muscle activators like we used, while designed not to cause damage like carpal tunnel, did still leave you a little sore at times, and these old ladies in their forties took a few extra minutes to adjust.

  My second mom, Vin, was prepared faster; her soreness seemed to be in her legs like mine, rogues.

  We’d all sleep well tonight, after some burnt chicken kabobs.

  “First one to the kitchen picks the sauce!”

  I leapt from my chair, but it seemed Vin was prepared and had a lunging start. It was an important race: I wanted BBQ and extra spicy; she’d want curry and sweet and sour. The fate of our taste buds was at stake.

  I had youth, a lower center of gravity, and the willingness to knock over chairs on my side. She had the stride length and years of practice in hers. It was close, but she unfortunately won, it would be curry flavor.

  She smugly went to the fridge to grab the bottle and removed curry and the extra spicy sauce. She often did things like that; my moms were big softies after all. My mom Bella made it to the kitchen and started the process of pulling out veggies. She also picked a large bottle of orange sauce, evidently, that’s what she was craving today. Orange sauce did sound good, maybe mixed with the hot sauce... and the curry... okay, I recognized I was still in a “goblin mood,” which was good because kebabs were the perfect food for that.

  Mine had breaded veggie chicken because Mom Bella is a vegetarian, and it wasn’t one of the “splurge” days where my mom Vin and I would gorge ourselves on the flesh of animals. Softened potatoes, mushrooms, tomatoes, a few other things like jalape?os, most of it was just a pretext for cooking atop a fire.

  We ended up with what we always do, a mound of grilled sticks piled high, some marinated, some not, some pretty... some not.

  We had couscous, but I mainly just wanted skewers, which my moms didn’t complain about. I had a feeling two things were at play here: one was that I was eating veggies without a fuss, and two, they may have put nutritional powder in the sauce cups, which I was fine with. You could eat pure sugar mixed with nutritional powder and live a long life. It’d be awful because you'd miss out on things like kabobs (kabobs were really good), but in theory you could live on junk.

  “So what did you do today?” asked Mom Vin.

  “I went north, finally unlocked Explorer,” I said.

  “How did you explore?”

  “Um, I went a long way forward, then I zigzagged some,” I said. I summoned a screen from my wearable and passed the map to my mom.

  She looked at it and tisked. “Inefficient.”

  She passed her map to me, and I saw she was doing a spiral pattern starting from Starter.

  “But I want to see how far I can get in a day, I’m not going for percent gain,” I complained.

  Bella put down her orange-soaked skewer and pushed a map towards me that had been drawn on. “It’d take a month, but this would get you the majority of Starter and its surrounding areas.”

  The map showed color-coded lines and wedges that would indeed get me over 20% full world explored in a month. After that, I’d have to set my respawn location away from Starter, and who’d want to do that yet? It’d mean I couldn’t get daily snacks from Noobkitty.

  By then, hopefully, Sourdough would be started and have its respawn location set.

  “We are considering exploring the desert soon. It’s rare for there not to be a dungeon in a desert, we just have to find it,” offered Bella.

  I considered and smiled. “Fine, I’ll lend you my skills when you head into the desert.”

  Vin rubbed my head. “Good, we’d definitely fail without your greatness, kid.”