For the past half-hour, Sláine had been staring at a potted plant and making absolutely zero progress.

Actually, she didn’t know if it was half an hour. It might have been five minutes she’d spent crouched there, her arms crossed over her knees and her attention focused on the blue, cup-like blossoms of a hydrangea. She’d figured the natural attunement with flowers the Root had given her would help the process along, but she had no idea what Red meant about a tingling feeling or grabbing onto an imaginary sensation. It was all too abstract to her, and she kept sitting there, eyes focused on the petals and hoping for something to happen that just never did.

She wasn’t sure what she’d expected, really. Maybe that things would just click into place, like fighting had. Like war.

It wasn’t that she’d always hated academia. Numbers hadn’t always bored her, nor had elaborate concepts and high-minded ideas that took numerous sentences joined with commas and semicolons to get the point across. She remembered her older brother teasing her about her odd nature collection and about how she’d loved going into the wilderness to find more samples. A budding botany habit had just been a single manifestation of her desire to catalog and collect things, and there’d been a time in her life when she’d truly liked depth, thoroughness, and making records filled with exacting detail.

Math. History. Science. she’d been… good at school, before she realized how shallow everything was.

Sláine was only been interested in humanity’s Protocol system because of its singular ability to push a person beyond their limits. To ‘level up’ their power. She didn’t care about the particular numbers - things like skill trees and classes, all these ways to put powers in boxes, were ultimately pointless. It didn’t matter if she was a rank five or a rank five-hundred; she just wanted to be the most powerful person in the room. Powerful people had control. Powerful people… didn’t have to suffer, because they could transform the world in whatever way they wished.

Ten years ago, this might have been exciting. But now? Sláine looked down at the flowers on her arms, studying the way the small, soft blossoms crested from her skin to seal old injuries, and could only think that it all felt like a chore.

Suddenly, she paused, shifting her gaze between the plotted plant and the floral scars, and a thought occurred to her.

Wouldn’t it be easier to practice with inspecting her own body - the statistics that everyone here had fussed about - rather than some random object she’d found in the hall?

She thought back to what Red had told her earlier and put her hand over the markings on her shoulder. Proximity based contact seemed to be important here, which she found interesting given that she apparently just had to look at things for [ Inspection ].

The skin beneath her fingertips felt… warm. Not like the normal warmth of a body; this was something different. Without looking, she could trace the lines and letters inscribed there, and as she closed her eyes she tried to feel that thing the others had described. That spark.

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It was sort of like trying to find something she’d lost in a pit full of mud. Sláine knew the shape of the thing she was grasping for, but had no clue about where it was or if she’d even be able to reach it at all. She analyzed everything she currently felt, from the way her leather garments clung to her frame to the warmth pulsing lightly against her fingers, but it still felt undirected and desperate.

After a minute of frustration, Sláine leaned her head back and sighed. Great. It kind of ticked her off that they’d both talked about it like it was so easy. Was it because she had no affinity for magic? That’d all make sense, because her people didn’t -

Suddenly her thoughts cut off, and there it was, right in the back of her head where Red had said it’d be. Panicked and afraid she’d lose it - it was already starting to fade! - Sláine clumsily grasped for the sensation. Maybe it was just something she needed to feel to get, or maybe her desperate thought of, no, don’t go, I need to know something allowed her to hold onto it… but behind her closed eyes, she saw little pricks of light.

Were they rearranging themselves into words, or was Sláine just learning to see the words in the glow? Either way, she began to understand.

It was like seeing but not seeing. It was like hearing but not hearing. It was both a feeling, a thought, a voice and a line of text all at once, and it reminded her distinctly of her initiation.

The first thing she saw, right at the top, was a sequence of numbers that also seemed to simultaneously spell her name - [Slainé E. Catháin]. Beneath that were a few other parameters, listed out neatly with a bizarre sort of precision.

[ LEVEL 1 ]

[ BERSERKER ]

[ HP 1034/1034 ]

[ MP 40/43 ]

[ AP 250/250 ]

[ STATUS: NONE ]

There was far, far more than she could interpret, but she still felt a surge of victory. This was it. This had to be it. [ HP ] - that must be tied to her durability since it was the highest, and the fact that her [ MP ] wasn’t completely filled suggested this did have to do with magic and she had been right, interacting with Protocols was based in magic, but what on earth was -

[ Great job! System Use has reached Level 2! ♥ ]

…Huh? Was that - what was that?

That's... what happened when someone leveled?

Wait, was this the reward for managing to check her own stats, or was it a byproduct of flinging herself repeatedly at the task in a desperate attempt to understand? …Leveling made things easier, so would that feeling she was reaching for come more readily now? And hey, what was up with the way she’d just been… spoken to just then? It hadn’t come with any kind of tone - just a series of kind-of words existing somewhere between ‘heard’ and ‘imagined’, but what was with the way it was phrased…?

With a sharp start, Sláine realized that someone was touching her shoulder.

Her reaction was more based on instinct than anything else, a hard-coded response from years of training. She hooked her arm back, sending a sharp jab of her elbow at the knee of whoever was behind her. It was only at the end of her motion that it occurred to Sláine that it was probably one of her fellow guildmates, but it was too late to stop. To her surprise, her attack met only air, and she swung her body around to get a look.

The first thing she noticed was that it was Red. The second thing she noticed the distance between the two of them - much farther than she could have gotten in a split second, and the third was the odd wisps of shadow curling up around her feet. Once she’d seen her hesitation, Red relaxed, adjusting her mask before speaking in a cheerful voice.

“Hey, cottontail. How about we go beat something else up, yeah?”

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