Life as an Adventurer meant that you were always one bad day away from utter ruin, assuming you even survived. There was an obvious flipside to that though, sometimes you were just a good day away from a sudden reversal of fortunes.
The powers that be were very grateful to receive Lacintus alive. And, for a rare—but very welcome—change of pace, gratitude directly correlated to cold, hard coin. Which was great, because Ranthia had basically turned every coin they had left into food and inhaled it while the men got paid. She was thrilled to be able to have seconds too; expending large quantities of mana for a prolonged period of time required a lot of nutrients.
Then, of course, there were other things that delayed their journey back home a bit, but it was worth it. In the end, Tatius was fully reequipped, and his new armor was far more durable and resilient than his old gear had been.
He mostly nerded out over his new bow though, during their return trip. Ranthia learned more than she had ever wanted to about the materials that bows could be made from. It was kind of cute to see the man so energized and excited about a topic though, since Tatius tended to be so reserved normally.
Ranthia had waived the opportunity to buy her own armor. It would have put them back into lean finances, it would have delayed them considerably to get something customized for a woman’s build, and Ranthia wasn’t entirely sure how much further her body would develop.
Plus, she just didn’t like the armorer, even if the man did solid work for Tatius.
It was the same old thing with the armorer. The worst part about being a woman and an Adventurer was that everyone made the exact. same. jokes. Often repeatedly, because nothing made poor attempts at humor more endearing than endless repetition.
Was ringing the gong with a jump kick even remotely necessary? No. No, it was not.
Tatius was yelling as much at her while he sprinted to catch up, just in case she was somehow unaware.
But she was impatient!
The gate opened a short time later, before the ongoing echoes of her unconventional gonging had ceased.
“Adventurers, returning successfully from a job abroad!” Ranthia announced loudly.
“Yes, I remember you three; it’s been less than a season since you all left. I was already opening the gate.” The guard grumbled.
“And it’s great to see you again too, guardface #3.” Ranthia replied sweetly, even as she tried to dodge around the man to get inside the city.
“My name’s Primus, and you called me guardface #2 last time!” The guard moodily retorted.
“Didn’t ask~” Ranthia quipped, already sprinting into town.
“You still need to do something magical!” The guard called after her.
Ranthia leapt into the air and twirled—which allowed her cloak to billow out impressively—before she landed and continued her sprint toward a certain apothecary.
She had a girlfriend to kiss. …Among other things.
She’d let the men debate whether her impressive bit of style counted as magical.
Adventurer Names were an ancient tradition, or so everyone liked to claim. No one got to choose their own name, of course. Their peers granted them their moniker. And no one was allowed to call themselves by their own moniker, they would be taunted mercilessly if they did. It was even taboo for someone in the same party to use it, unless the person in question truly hated it. The moniker was something for others to use for—or against—the owner.
If you were lucky, you got named after an impressive move that was relatively unique, or some great feat. Most people got names they hated, because people—in aggregate—were jerks.
Pupius got Whirling Edge. He claimed it was silly, but Ranthia never missed the subtle little grin he got when someone used it.
Tatius got Prickly Turtle. Because he had Snapping Turtle, then got prickly and cranky over it and thus it became worse. When he was having a bad day, sometimes Pupius and Ranthia made a game of trying to work the component words into as many sentences as they could manage. It always cheered him right up.
That, of course, was sarcasm. But true friends were able to savage one another when necessary.
Ranthia hadn’t quite gotten a name yet. Periodically people recommended Screamer for her. Which was unfair because that was her girlfriend, not her. Direct your noise complaints elsewhere! But the big reason why the name hadn’t stuck was Ranthia, unlike Tatius, understood how to change Adventurers’ minds.
She only had to send someone to a [Healer] once.
And so every time there just strangely wasn’t enough consensus to leave her stuck with Screamer.
Ranthia gritted her teeth and concluded her [Channel], finally shifting back to a mirror image that she had thrown out near Tatius. In theory, she should have been a perfect counter for this beast of a dinosaur. In practice, its thick armored hide seemed to turn aside even her [Blades of Darkness] enhanced strikes with minimal harm.
The dino was a simple herbivore, just another ankylosaur, but the blighter was absurdly territorial. It had become a bit of a local menace for that area—one that the Rangers would have likely been asked to handle the next time a team came through—and then it attacked a full merchant convoy. The officials for the town were prepared to recommend that the town just bunker down and close the roads off until the Rangers arrived, but some son of some wealthy merchant was killed in the attack. Between that and the loss of goods—knowing merchants there was no telling which was the dinosaur’s greater sin—the merchants decided to put up a sizable bounty. The local Adventurer teams failed to take it down, so they sent a call out to other branches of the Adventurer’s Guild and Sardonia’s Guildmaster decided to throw the best team he had on-hand at the problem and see what happened.
The trio were more than a little flattered to be called the “best team,” even with the qualifier. Pupius and Ranthia were raring to go and all but dragged Tatius out of town, eager to become lauded heroes once again.
Unfortunately, both Ranthia and Pupius seemed to be able to do little more than piss the raging creature off, which was admittedly still a minor accomplishment with how furious the beast already was. Tatius was armed with his brand-new weapon, a gigantic war hammer that had a vicious spike instead of a flat head. That weapon, at least, promised to do real damage to the dino… if Tatius managed to ever get a good hit in. The dinosaur seemed to be aware of which one of them actually posed a threat and kept its distance from him, even when Ranthia and Pupius tried to draw its attention.
Something that big and that resilient had no business being so damned quick.
“This!” Pupius roared, as he activated [Dervish] yet again, but the dino simply spun along with the blades, yet again, which meant they did little more than draw a thin, harmless line across the beast’s hide. Again.
“Is not!” Pupius grunted as he fled the dino’s attempt to crush him beneath its club-like tail in response.
“Going well!” Pupius finished, once he had enough breathing room away from the angry dinosaur.
“It’s obnoxious enough that I keep double-checking that it hasn’t spontaneously gained a class.” Ranthia muttered, as she triggered [Identify] yet again. …And got no response, once again. For an instant Ranthia could have sworn that the skill’s presence seemed to fuzz in her status for a moment, then suddenly it resumed working. And, once again, showed the dinosaur had no class, just the comparatively monstrous level of 437.
“Maybe if we keep whittling it down, I can manage to get a real hit in.” Tatius was always the optimist.
…Wait, no, that wasn’t right. Ranthia was pretty sure the man was usually the one saying they should stick to safer jobs and give up on the more dangerous ones before someone got seriously hurt. They had been fighting for long enough that it almost hurt to think of anything outside of the immediate battle and the huge amount of datapoints that she had to track. So Ranthia refocused and tossed aside her concerns about Tatius’ weird mood. She had more mana potions to choke down after all as she tried to hurry her mana back to useful levels.
Once her mana was ready—though her stomach was feeling very sour over the mana potions—Ranthia started to [Channel] once again. While she did that, one by one, five more images were created using [Scattered Reflections]. Three moved to attack, two of which used [Mirrored Move] to activate false [Blades of Darkness]. At that point Ranthia’s head felt ready to split, but she tried to focus through the pain, she just needed to hang in there a bit longer (no matter how clumsily her images were moving). The dinosaur was clever enough that it recognized skill uses and responded to them, though the how was always in question. The instant that [Boosted Reflexes] and [Knives & War] agreed how the dino was reacting, Ranthia released the [Channel], triggered [Reflections of Reality], and shifted to a mirror image near the dino’s head. As swiftly as she could, she lashed out with [Blades of Darkness] for the beast’s left eyeball, but it ducked its head just enough that she instead scored an all-too-shallow bloody gash across its headplate.
Ranthia hurriedly retreated while the dinosaur crashed through all of the images that she had placed near the beast and was only narrowly able to run away—in large part thanks to Pupius’ efforts—when the accursed creature tried to run her down. Pupius was still swearing over her attack failing, even as she fled. They knew that if they could just eliminate even just one of the beast’s eyes the fight would have become so much easier.
Ranthia just released her frustration; her aching mind had no space for anything else. Instead, she drank yet another mana potion while she watched for her next opening. Pupius had already closed in yet again and once again Tatius was, quite uselessly, trying to close in on the beast.
Drinking so many mana potions was a bad idea. Two or even three were usually fine, but, at some point, everyone started getting far less out of a potion than they should. The body was slower to absorb it, and the effects were diminished. That got worse and worse the more you tried to cram in.
Plus, every potion was, at least to some degree, a poison as well.
At least every time she was able to shift to a new body it relieved the pressure on her bladder. That was the other downside to drinking so many potions.
The battle raged on. Pupius savagely attacked and accomplished precious little other than drawing a little more blood. Ranthia tried to find opportunities to engage and, all too often, ended up forced to fight longer than she wanted to.
Once again, she was reminded of the pain of having half of her lower body trampled by something that weighed more than a fully loaded wagon. Another shift—one that she nearly lost her grip on the [Channel] for—saved her life, and another mana potion was consumed.
She wasn’t even sure if she was getting any benefit out of them anymore. It was getting to be almost impossible to focus on the numbers through the agony of her mind.
Once she had enough mana for another shift—just how long had the fight been dragging on?—Ranthia focused on her [Channel], unable to even bother with another image anymore, while she waited for her next opportunity and Pupius fought on with clash-and-retreat tactics.
And then Pupius was clipped in the side by the beast’s tail. He had, ever so slightly, lost his footing on a bit of blood on the grass, which slowed him down just a little too much. The man hit the ground and rolled.
Tatius shouted. Ranthia probably screamed.
The dinosaur went straight for Pupius. He looked so small in that moment, face-down in the grass, with a gigantic, armored fiend of a beast bearing down on him.
She needed [Reflections of Reality] to be instant, but it was never instant. Ranthia threw an image directly into the dinosaur’s path, midway between it and Pupius, concluded her [Channel], and shifted to it without even thinking. All her tortured mind could focus on was how many heartbeats it had taken. She lunged straight for the beast’s right eye with both knives, completely confident that it was going to turn left to evade. She just had to land her strike with one of them…!
[Knives & War] led her astray, the beast instead turned right. Her knives missed its head entirely.
And, instead, her [Blades of Darkness] enhanced knives both slid perfectly into a soft spot near where the right front leg met the torso. It sure didn’t look like a soft spot, nor had [Critical Strike] ever noticed a vulnerability there, but her knives bit in deep.
Then Ranthia’s knives ended up ripped straight out of her hands as the monstrous dinosaur howled in pain and stumbled away. The beast shoulder-checked Ranthia as it went, but she wasn’t badly hurt when she hit the ground. Bruised ribs at worst. …Okay, maybe one of them was broken, but she wasn’t in desperate need to shift yet.
Not that she had enough mana to shift again either way.
The hobbled beast stumbled and struggled to keep its balance. It looked between Ranthia and Pupius, as if trying to decide which of them it wanted to reduce to red paste first. Pupius was slowly finding his feet, and, to Ranthia, the dinosaur seemed to select him.
And then, at long last, Tatius closed in and brought his weapon down into the dinosaur’s head with a vicious crack. The dinosaur tried to jerk away, but Tatius followed it doggedly and continued to repeatedly hammer away at its skull, while a bloodied Pupius—wielding only a single sword—hacked at its uninjured legs, in an effort to slow it further.
The sounds of Tatius’ spiked hammer were as beautiful as they were brutal. Crack! Crack! Crack! CRUNCH!
[*ding!* Your group has slain an [Ankylosaurus] (Mountain, level 437)!]
Ranthia just rolled onto her back once the party kill notification came through, exhausted and lightheaded. There was the thought that her ribs hurt, followed by increasingly detached thoughts. Were they even her ribs? What even defined ‘her’ while she was shifted? Would she even be able to recognize her own body when she returned to it?
Slowly the feverish thoughts faded away and Ranthia’s eyes reopened once she fought her way back to the then and there.
Momentarily, Ranthia panicked that she’d fainted or been knocked out during the battle. She was halfway to her feet—hyperventilating—before she finally recalled that they had killed the foe. Gods and goddesses, total exhaustion was awful.
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With no small amount of effort, Ranthia finally oriented herself and found where her true body was hidden. One [Channel] later—when had her mana regenerated, had she really been down that long?!—she shifted back to it and, confident that she was herself again, dismissed the remaining… image. Singular.
That had been closer than she had known.
A short distance away, Tatius rotated a chunk of dino meat, impaled on a branch, over the fire. A few paces further away from the fire, Pupius remained face-down, now butt naked, in the cool evening grass. Occasionally the newly clothing-challenged man groaned, muffled by the ground, about how sore and tired he was.
“Little Mage.” Tatius greeted fondly when she joined him.
Ranthia eyed the roasting meat with disdain. To her, it seemed a terrible waste to not use such fine meat for a hearty stew. But she knew better than to give voice to that thought, Tatius would lecture her in a heartbeat if she complained about a hot meal.
And she had nothing left in the tank to argue with anyway.
Pupius asked a question into the ground. When no one answered, he repeated it. Then, at length, and with visible effort, he lifted his head enough to ask his question without it being garbled into nonsense.
“Did. You. Level?” And back into the grass his face went.
After a moment, [Identify] worked again—the skill really seemed to be getting worse—and she realized with a start that both of them had gained multiple levels each. Eagerly, she checked her own gains from the fight.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Sudden End] has leveled up from 87 to level 91! Per level: +5 Strength, +11 Dexterity, +4 Vitality, +7 Speed from your class, +1 free stat for being human, +1 Mana from your element.]
[*ding!* [Dark Affinity], [Knives & War], and [Blades of Darkness] have leveled from 87 to level 91!]
[*ding!* [Critical Strike] has leveled from 60 to level 63!]
[*ding!* [Strengthen Blade] has leveled from 38 to level 73!]
…Whoof, she had abused her poor knives.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Shards of Reflection] has leveled up from 156 to level 164! Per level: +1 Free Stats, +3 Dexterity, +4 Vitality, +2 Speed, +7 Mana, +9 Mana Regeneration, +7 Magic Power, +7 Magic Control from your class, +1 free stat for being human, +1 Mana Regeneration and +1 Magic Power from your element.]
…What?
[*ding!* [Mirror Spirit] and [Scattered Reflections] have leveled from 156 to level 164!]
[*ding!* [Reflective Motility] has leveled from 86 to level 99!]
[*ding!* [Persistent Imagery] has leveled from 45 to level 57!]
[*ding!* [Mirrored Moves] has leveled from 29 to level 42!]
[*ding!* [Reflections of Reality] has leveled from 11 to level 26!]
[*ding!* Would you like to merge [Channel] into [Reflections of Reality]?]
[*ding!* For reaching level 160, you have unlocked the Class Skill [Distorted Likeness]! Would you like to replace a skill?]
[Distorted Likeness]: A subtle change to a mirror can entirely change the image that it reflects. Now you will be able to create and modify the images reflected by [Scattered Reflections]. More dramatic modifications possible with increased level.
[*ding!* [Identify] has leveled from 156 to leve—]
[*ding!* [Identify] has leveled from 156 to level 164!]
[*ding!* [Ranthia’s Covenant with Xaoc] has leveled from 39 to level 40!]
[*ding!* [Dodging] and [Boosted Reflexes] have leveled from 156 to level 164!]
“What in Xaoc’s name?!” Ranthia screeched, not entirely sure about which wild or bizarre thing she was screeching about.
[Reflections of Reality] felt all but impossible to level, yet it had gained 15 levels from a single battle. [Distorted Likeness] sounded ridiculously awesome if she could manage to figure out which skill to drop for it. [Identify] was really starting to freak her out with its weird issues. And, overall, just… so many levels!
[Sudden End] ‘only’ getting 4 levels felt unfair, but even she had to admit the class had just been wholly outmatched by the dinosaur. Her best blows did all of nothing and [Critical Strike] had completely misread her foe. Sure, her last blow had finally turned the tide, but it was a total accident.
Thinking still felt hard, but Ranthia almost immediately decided to merge [Channel] in, it wasn’t like she needed the skill for anything else—oh Xaoc she must have been tired if she was even thinking such dangerous phrases. Still, she accepted the merger. [Reflections of Reality] kept the same name, but at the very end of its description “Can be channeled.” was added. Which, honestly, was about all she could ask for.
Both Tatius and a now upright Pupius—put on some damned clothes!— were staring at her impatiently after her outburst.
“Sorry, just… a lot to process. Four levels in [Sudden End] and most of its skills, except [Strengthen Blade] which shot up like I was smashing my knives into a bony shell like an idiot or something.” Ranthia started.
The men chuckled good naturedly at her joke.
“Eight levels in [Shards of Reflection], if you can believe it. With 15 new tasty levels in my beloved little skill that refuses to ever level. Plus, it absorbed [Channel].”
That got appropriately impressed sounds from both men.
“But that said, my [Identify] skill seems to be getting worse. I know you two brush me off when I mention this, but something is seriously wrong with it. It stopped working entirely more than once during that fight and I got the level up notice for it twice except the first notice for it… I don’t know how to describe it; it was like the notification broke and the System had to try again. Plus, it didn’t group the notification—either of them—like it was supposed to. And… wait, how long were we fighting anyway?” Ranthia became side-tracked after she tried to estimate how many times she had used [Identify] during the fight.
“It wasn’t even lunch time when we started fighting. The freaking sun had set before the stupid thing finally died.” Pupius whimpered.
“…By all the gods and goddesses that watch over us, no freaking wonder my stubborn skill leveled.” Ranthia muttered. The news seemed to add further weight to the burdens of her headache and exhaustion.
“Yeah, we really should head back to town.” Tatius suggested.
“Everyone probably thinks we died.” Pupius added.
None of them made a move to get up, so Tatius returned his attention to the roasting meat. Pupius just bonelessly collapsed back into the grass.
Silence descended, so Ranthia tried to make the mush that was left of her mind concentrate on her new class skill. It didn’t seem like it would be essential for combat, but she still wanted it. It just sounded really fun, especially coupled with [Reflections of Reality]. Would she have made the same decision if she was in a better mental state? Irrelevant.
The obvious options for replacement were [Echoes Reflected], [Persistent Imagery], and [A Looking Glass]. When she first classed up, she had kind of expected [Persistent Imagery] to be temporary, but she had gained a real appreciation for just how fragile her mirror images were. [Persistent Imagery] also was the only thing that protected her true body while she was shifted elsewhere, so it was staying. [Echoes Reflected] was the skill that let her defeat the Mirage classer, though it wasn’t generally useful. Meanwhile, [A Looking Glass] had seemed invaluable when she first took the skill, but she rarely used it and she just knew that the skill’s useful life was rapidly coming to an end as [Reflections of Reality] slowly leveled. Why settle for a peek when she could just shift (yes, mana gated her, but that’d improve eventually too)? [Mirrored Moves] wasn’t even up for consideration, the skill sounded pointless since it couldn’t actually inflict damage, but the ability to fake out thinking targets was invaluable.
Ranthia agonized over the choice for several long moments before her mind caught up with the fact that she had already made her decision.
“Losing a skill, be right back.” Ranthia informed Tatius and Pupius.
She stood, uneasy, and shuffled a polite distance away, then selected to purge [A Looking Glass] and take [Distorted Likeness]. The wave of nausea forced her off of her unsteady feet immediately. On her hands and knees, she dry-heaved and suffered noisily for a small eternity—longer than it should have taken, but she was already in rough shape before it started—before she finally crawled back; unable to trust her feet to carry her.
Tatius patted her arm affectionately and served her a large cut of well-roasted and surprisingly tasty dino. The men drank wine while they ate, but Ranthia was completely content to just drink water with her food. She didn’t trust her stomach at all at that point.
She still wished that the dino had gone into a stew but promised herself that she’d make some tomorrow if the meat hadn’t gone too far off by then.
The next day the three returned directly to Sardonia, victorious, with the dinosaur’s mangled head and the carefully shorn off backplate in tow. The bony back had been Tatius’ demand; he wanted to see if the town’s crafters could turn it into a tower shield.
They were nearly to the Adventurer's Guild when Ranthia's girlfriend erupted from the small crowd that had gathered to welcome them back, immediately leaping into Ranthia's arms. The normally reserved young woman seemed to not mind the smell or the crowd, at least for the moment, while she cried and kissed Ranthia. Between frantic kisses she whined that she thought Ranthia had died. Ranthia just focused on kissing her girl until they were both reassured.
That night, Ranthia slipped out of bed after she carefully disentangled herself from her lover’s arms. They were sure to catch hell from the young woman’s grandfather the next day over her staying the night, but neither of them had cared.
Ranthia’s head felt much better, finally, and she had become restless with her impatience to experiment with [Distorted Likeness]. A certain naughty part of her mind had even imagined several ways she could use the skill to surprise her girlfriend, which helped to drive her into experimenting immediately instead of being reasonable and waiting for morning. Plus, she’d started channeling mana into [Reflections of Reality] a while ago—it wasn’t like she was using it for anything else.
Ranthia figured that she should just need to focus on what she wanted her mirror image to look like when she activated [Scattered Reflections]. Skills were usually intuitive, but sometimes there was a bit of a learning curve. Gleefully, she envisioned a version of herself with some oh-so-slight, specific exaggerations. Then she activated [Scattered Reflections].
…Something went wrong. Metaphorically, it was like her mental image popped like a bubble when the skill tried to grab it, and thus nothing appeared since [Scattered Reflections] failed to activate.
Ranthia tried again and the same thing happened. And again.
She took a deep breath; she was concerned but there was no reason to fret. Clearly the skill just worked a bit differently than she had expected. She had just been through this with [Reflections of Reality], after all. It wasn’t a mana problem this time though (thankfully, she would have been so mad if she’d needed [Channel] back already). Maybe she had, somehow, misunderstood [Distorted Likeness]’s activation requirements; not that such a thing had ever happened with any of her skills ever before. Perhaps she needed to generate a mirror image first and then modify it. The thought calmed her, since it seemed a reasonable thing to try.
Just as she always did, she activated [Scattered Reflections] to stick a mirror image just in front of her.
…And nothing happened, the skill seemed to reach for something that just wasn’t there and failed to activate.
Ice filled her veins as a cold panic bloomed at the center of her being.
She tried again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again.
“Nononono… this isn’t happening, this can’t be real...” She whispered.
[Distorted Likeness] had permanently altered [Scattered Reflections], it needed an image of what to create now. Desperately she pictured herself, but nothing happened. She dragged her water bucket near the window, so the moonlight caught it and tried to stare at her dim, unfocused reflection in it. Still nothing.
She had been wrong, this wasn’t at all like the problem with [Reflections of Reality], this was so much worse!
At the edge of a blind panic, she dug through her gear—heedless of the risk of waking her girlfriend—for her little polished metal mirror while she tried to think of everything she knew about her body, every single detail. She spent ages going through every single tiny feeling of when her muscles moved, every ache or pain she had felt, every little imperfection on her skin that hadn’t been wholly erased by [Sexy]. Every shade of her skin, every piece of her anatomy. Her attractively styled short dark brown hair, a shade deep enough that it seemed black in faint light. Her brown eyes, a few shades lighter than her hair (though in her mounting panic she forgot the mirrored sheen that her eyes had gained when she first achieved [Reflection of Chaos] and gained an advanced element). When she could think of nothing else, nor find any other details with her too-small mirror, Ranthia shoved everything that she had assembled at [Scattered Reflections], unable to spare even a single thought to pray to Xaoc. It'd been hard enough to hold her concentration on the channel during the entire process.
An image appeared where she wanted, but it was wrong. It was weirdly flat and muddied. It was worse than the images that she had created with [Image of Self] with her old class. Gods, the image’s face looked more like it was drawn on, rather than part of its body.
She still, impulsively, activated [Reflections of Reality] and slipped into the image.
Ranthia existed within a total void. No sound reached her false ears. Her caricatures of eyes let in no light. Her painted skin had no touch. She wasn’t even sure if she was able to move.
At last, she panicked.
But she couldn’t even scream.
There was no darkness, there was no light, there was no warmth, there was no coldness. All that she knew was a void, so bereft of existence that nothingness was all that it encompassed. It was a place that felt wholly incompatible with her continued existence. It denied her, it ignored her terror, and it eroded all that she was.
It was oblivion beyond death.
It was true void.
An ageless span of existence continued as what was left of Ranthia desperately tried to channel her mana to activate [Reflections of Reality] blindly. She had no idea if she even still had the System, let alone the skill. She even tried to pray to Xaoc for guidance—no, for rescue, blasphemy be damned—but she had no idea if her words could even reach beyond such an impassable void. The nothingness that she had consigned herself to.
And then, quite suddenly the universe exploded into existence around her. Sound, sight, and sensation overwhelmed her as she found herself back in her true body. Ranthia collapsed against her tiny table and crashed to the floor as she screamed.
There was only one whit of coherent thought within her. With a heart full of hatred, Ranthia erased the horrible, twisted prison that she had entrapped herself within and it vanished an instant before her girlfriend shot upright in bed. Ranthia was still screaming. Her mind was still overwhelmed by the endless sensations caused by mere existence as part of the world. And to her very soul she was still terrified of the true nothingness she had, however briefly, become.
Even the sight of her naked lover did nothing to still her terror. The other young woman held her and tried to soothe her and assure her that everything was alright.
“No, it’s not! I’ve destroyed it!” Ranthia snapped angrily, once she rediscovered how to use her voice for something other than screaming.
“We’re both fine, Ranthy-love,” and in that moment Ranthia hated that cutesy pet name with every fiber of her being, “it’s all okay. We’re together and that’s what matters.”
“My class—my goal that I devoted my entire worthless fucking life to—is ruined! I can’t use any of it anymore and I can’t even hope to fix the problem for another 92 fucking levels! You don’t know a damned thing! Just… go! GET OUT!” Ranthia shrieked while she shoved the girl away.
She completely ignored the hurt and confusion on the young woman’s lovely, vapid face.
Instead, she curled up on the floor and cursed herself. She had stupidly taken a cursed skill. Maybe she deserved to have remained lost within that void until it wore her away into nothing.
[Name: Ranthia]
[Species: Human]
[Age: 15]
[Mana: 5466/11330]
[Mana Regen Rate: 6149]
[Stats:]
[Free Stats: 24]
[Strength: 299]
[Dexterity: 1278]
[Vitality: 772]
[Speed: 736]
[Mana: 1133]
[Mana Regeneration: 1238]
[Magic Power: 1095]
[Magic Control: 828]
[Class 1: [Shards of Reflection – Mirror (164)]]
[Mirror Spirit: 164]
[Scattered Reflections: 164]
[Echoes Reflected: 39]
[Reflective Motility: 99]
[Persistent Imagery: 57]
[Mirrored Moves: 42]
[Distorted Likeness: 1]
[Reflections of Reality: 26]
[Class 2: [Sudden End – Dark (91)]]
[Dark Affinity: 91]
[Knives & War: 91]
[Blades of Darkness: 91]
[Critical Strike: 63]
[Shadowed Steps: 85]
[Strengthen Blade: 73]
-
-
[Class 3: Locked]
[General Skills:]
[Identify: 164]
[Ranthia’s Covenant with Xaoc: 40]
[Soups & Stews: 66]
[Dodging: 164]
[Boosted Reflexes: 164]
[Fast Learner: 74]
-
[Sexy: 78]