Ranthia kept her eyes shut once she concluded her class up, and eagerly checked her System notifications. Reality could wait, she needed to see the capabilities of her new class!
[*ding!* Congratulations! You have upgraded your first class – [Magissistant – Light]!]
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Magissistant] has reached level 9! +2 Mana, +2 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control from your class, +1 free stat point for being human, +1 Mana Regeneration from your Element.]
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Magissistant] has reached level 10! +2 Mana, +2 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control from your class, +1 free stat point for being human, +1 Mana Regeneration from your Element.]
…And nope, Ranthia immediately decided that she wasn’t doing that. It was a simple enough matter to tweak her System interface to combine like notifications.
[*ding!* Congratulations! [Magissistant] has leveled from level 8 to level 16! Per level: +2 Mana, +2 Mana Regeneration, +1 Magic Power, +1 Magic Control from your class, +1 free stat point for being human, +1 Mana Regeneration from your element.]
So much better.
[*ding!* You have unlocked the Class Skill [Light Affinity]!]
[Light Affinity]: You have an affinity for Light. Put it to use.
[*ding!* You have unlocked the Class Skill [Light Manipulation]!]
[Light Manipulation]: Seize light and reshape it. Increased control and efficiency per level.
[*ding!* You have unlocked the Class Skill [Light Resistance]!]
[Light Resistance]: Resist Light-aspected attacks and, just maybe, you will manage to not permanently blind yourself.
[*ding!* [Identify] has leveled from 8 to level 16!]
[*ding!* For reaching level 16 you have unlocked a new Class Skill! [Meditate] evolved into [Spell Reworking]!]
[Spell Reworking]: With focus, effort, and repetition anyone can modify or create a skill for their magic. But why wait? Enter a state of deep focus and hurry your progress along! -300 Mana Regen Rate while using this skill.
…And that was it. Ranthia felt oddly disappointed. She had single-handedly defeated two opponents far beyond her level, one ‘merely’ thrice her level and one that was like five times her level (okay, yes, neither had been a truly impressive showing on her part, but she won)! She had even met her god face-to-face and only [Identify] seemed to care (yes, the blasphemy still bothered her, but she was in a greedy mood and such concerns were—briefly—set aside)!
[*ding!* [Combat], [Knives], and [Boosted Reflexes] have reached level 9!]
Had the system just simultaneously pitied and sassed her? Was there some sort of odd delay? Ranthia puzzled over it briefly before she shrugged it off. She got what she wanted—sort of—and she really didn’t want to push her luck. No one quite knew just how intelligent and aware the System was, after all. Instead, Ranthia quietly thanked the System before she focused on the changes to her stats and her new skills.
[Name: Ranthia]
[Species: Human]
[Age: 8]
[Mana: 260/260]
[Mana Regen Rate: 303]
[Stats:]
[Free Stats: 8]
[Strength: 5]
[Dexterity: 13]
[Vitality: 5]
[Speed: 6]
[Mana: 26]
[Mana Regeneration: 34]
[Magic Power: 13]
[Magic Control: 13]
[Class 1: [Magissistant – Light (16)]]
[Light Affinity: 1]
[Light Manipulation: 1]
[Light Resistance: 1]
[Spell Reworking: 8]
-
-
-
-
[Class 2: Locked]
[Class 3: Locked]
[General Skills:]
[Identify: 16]
[Combat: 9]
[Knives: 9]
[Dodging: 7]
[Boosted Reflexes: 9]
[Fast Learner: 7]
-
[Cute: 5]
[Light Affinity], [Light Resistance], and [Light Manipulation] were obvious. The cornerstones of any [Mage] class, though usually there would have been a [Light Conjuration] to complete the set. An affinity for the element so you can use it efficiently. Resistance so that you’re less affected by your own spells for that element, plus those used against you by others. Manipulation for modifying the ambient element or your own spells, and—if you outpowered your opponent sufficiently—against hostile spells of that element.
Those were straightforward enough, but [Spell Reworking] was interesting.
Honestly, once she put more thought into the skill, Ranthia was elated. One of her goals that she, ideally, wanted to complete before her level 32 class up was to establish a custom magic skill. Ordinarily that required strong effort with a [Conjuration] skill or a similar skill that you didn’t mind breaking, but without a teacher who happened to have something along the lines of what she wanted, it promised to be a bit of an arduous task. [Spell Reworking] would give her a shortcut, which almost made up for the absence of [Light Conjuration].
…The only problem was that she basically wouldn’t regenerate mana while she used it.
Meh, she’d take it. In the end, it brought her another step closer to her goals! …Probably!
Ranthia allowed herself to smile happily before she opened her eyes… to immediately behold the less-than-lovely sight of the dead, glassy eyes of the teenage boy that laid next to her. It was the first dead body that she had ever encountered—at least as far as she remembered—but the sight really bothered her remarkably little. She felt no need to scream or freak out, like one might expect from a child that found a dead body. Not that she was a child, no matter how she appeared.
It wasn’t like Ranthia was filled with warm fuzzy feelings to discover that she was nearly cuddled up next to a corpse, but she wasn’t freaked out either. Instead, she examined the poor boy’s body quickly. She wasn’t quite sure why, but based on his pallor she intuitively suspected that he had died shortly after she had started her class up; the sun had moved so she had been under for longer than she had thought. The discoloration introduced by the snake’s venom had spread and worsened during the time that she was unconscious to the world, and dark lines covered much of his body while the flesh around where he had been bitten, on his ankle, was almost pitch black. A foul aroma wafted from the ankle, which only promised to get worse as the body cooled and stopped defending itself.
While Ranthia wasn’t freaked out, the loss of the kid—that was nearly twice her body’s age—still squashed her excitement and enthusiasm more than a little. She sighed and whispered a quick prayer to Xaoc on the nameless teen’s behalf—she really needed to work on her apparent inability to learn anyone’s name—so that her god might offer the kid some comfort before he was returned to the cycle. It was the least that she could do to acknowledge the poor soul.
The proper thing to do would be to find the kid’s—again, ignore the fact that he was roughly twice her age—betrothed and gently break the news to her. The girl deserved to know before anyone else, after all.
…Except Ranthia really wasn’t up to dealing with someone else’s emotional breakdown. She just wasn’t really equipped for it, she told herself.
Instead, she carefully slipped out of the wagon on the side opposite from the young woman. Dexterity was no longer Ranthia’s best stat, but it wasn’t like it had decreased. She was just as agile as she had been, even if she was a proper [Mage] now. Not that 13 dexterity was even remotely impressive. Still, despite a bit of inadvertent noise, no one seemed to notice that she got up. Not that their group, aside from Ranthia herself, ever paid close attention to anything while they traveled.
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Once she was out of the wagon, Ranthia proceeded to shamelessly outsource the undesirable task. Ranthia considered the ‘adults’ in the vicinity and made her choice.
“The k-, er, the teenager didn’t make it.” She reported quietly to the woodsman after she got his attention. She even managed to tug on his tunic without cringing about being forced to do such a childish thing to get the man’s attention.
“Tch, the lad’s just asleep.” The man snorted in response. It was, grudgingly admittedly, somewhat reasonable to be unimpressed by the claim of someone’s death when it came from a child. If you ignored the tiny fact that they just came from a town that had been devastated by plagues, who would expect a child to recognize death?
Still, despite his words, the man fell back as the caravan slowly (always slowly) ambled forward and leaned over the wagon to check. And then yet another complete stop happened, thanks in large part to the fact that the man clearly lacked any semblance of tact.
“Ah fuck, he’s dead!!!” The woodsman shouted, all too loudly.
Ranthia buried her face in her hands. She was surrounded by idiots.
People had crowded around, as if their ability to gaze at the corpse of the recently alive teen might have somehow changed anything. Some argued, some grieved, his widow—not that that was quite the right word for someone who loses a betrothed, but it was the best word that Ranthia possessed—wept openly.
All in all, Ranthia decided that it represented a wonderful opportunity to slip away a bit and practice her newfound magic. She slowly backed away…
“Oh, by the way little one, sorry I didn’t believe you. It’s just you’re, y’know…” The woodsman called out, which drew almost every gaze onto her.
Gods and goddesses, WHY?! She had been so close to getting off the road and out of sight!
“Ehe… That’s… reasonable?” Ranthia replied awkwardly once she turned back to face him and tried to ignore just how many gazes were fixed on her.
“…Huh, wow, I’ve never seen a freshly unlocked kid get a [Mage] tag already.” The woodsman whistled.
Ranthia cursed aloud while others, presumably, confirmed for themselves. Though there were a wide variety of reactions, Ranthia’s attention was wholly captured by the look of pure, raw fury on her mother’s face.
Ranthia hissed some especially colorful curses when the woman started to stomp toward her.
The illusion of privacy was especially thin when Ranthia could see the gawkers. Some of the group focused on the actual dead boy and what to do, but all too many eyes remained fixed on Ranthia’s mother while the woman stormed toward her daughter. The wicked fools outright seemed excited about what was going to happen.
May the gods see fit to ruin this life and the next of anyone who enjoyed witnessing a family’s argument.
“What were you thinking, you stupid child?!” Ranthia’s mother shrieked when she arrived, one arm raised.
[Combat] and [Boosted Reflexes] triggered, since the woman’s fingers were curled when she began her strike. She wanted to hurt her daughter.
[*ding!* [Dodging] has reached level 8!]
Ranthia dodged backwards from the blow and fixed her mother with a glare.
“I was thinking that I actually want to survive this reckless trip! I told you! I TOLD YOU this was what would happen!” Ranthia shouted back.
The childish shrill notes in her voice only stoked her anger further.
Her mother’s eyes widened when Ranthia dodged her first strike, but she simply reversed her arm and backhanded the child across her cheek.
Ranthia refused to dodge that time, she took the blow—which promised a bruise to match the one on her other cheek—while she glared at the woman. Her fingers twitched while she considered and discarded the urge to draw her knife.
She was an adult, body be damned; she intended to resolve this with words.
“You’re only a few years away from being affianced, you stupid child! No one wants a housewife that pretends to play at being some classer!” Ranthia’s mother snarled.
“Only a few..?!—I’m eight for Xaoc’s sake!” Ranthia lost her composure immediately.
“If we had more money to our name you’d probably already be betrothed, I had hoped I could train you to be a proper housewife and help hone your looks so you could get a good match before you get too old, but you’re ruining everything!”
Ranthia inhaled and exhaled while she tried to push her revulsion for the idea aside. What in the name of all that was holy was wrong with these people?! Young women had more to live for than to become property to some man!
But Ranthia needed to make her mother understand.
“Look, whatever your plans are, they don’t matter right now. None of it matters if I’m dead before my ninth birthday! We’re too small and too vulnerable like this, look what happened when we barely got beyond the outskirts of the farmlands! That snake is one of the least dangerous things out here, and it still was a disaster. You’re lucky I was able to defend myself, especially since you seem determined to prevent me from doing so!” Ranthia responded, not quite as calmly as she meant to.
“Accidents happen all the time, that doesn’t excuse any of… this! What is wrong with you?! My sweet little Amaranthia would never have run around with a knife like some sort of lunatic! Where did you even get that?!”
“Accidents? Accidents?! That kid would still be alive if this had been a larger group with a proper escort that knew the area! We’re all in danger! Fifteen people was far too few, especially when the highest leveled person isn’t even past his third class up!”
“What would a child know about anything?! You don’t even know what you’re talking about!”
Ranthia fixed her mother with a remarkably—for her stature—cold glare.
“The city had walls for a reason. Predatory beasts, dinosaurs, and other monsters roam the wilds. Or do you doubt that I know about class ups? Level 8—which I just escaped from—is the first. The next is level 32. At level 64 you unlock your second class. Level 128 is the next class up. Then 256. Level 512 in either class grants you your third class. The next class up isn’t until level 768. After that—” Ranthia began the list in a cold tone, a finger extended with every tier she listed.
“SHUT UP! Why… Why did you become so weird? I… I can’t deal with this anymore!” Her mother suddenly screamed.
Ranthia was left somewhat stupefied. The woman looked stricken, and tears started to escape before she turned around and rushed away toward the back of the convoy.
Because I’m not your Ranthia…
The explanation that she could never give the woman. Ranthia just ground her teeth in frustration—and guilt—before she hurried to the front of the convoy. At some point during the argument the group had gotten underway again, though their membership was more scattered than ever.
At least, now that she had been exposed, Ranthia was able to practice openly while they travelled. She consoled herself with focus on her magic and her own plans for her future, though she kept a vigilant eye out as well. Gods knew she wasn’t up in front because she trusted the woodsman’s vigilance.
Magic was incredibly intuitive. With ease, Ranthia captured a small amount of the ambient light and shaped it with [Light Manipulation]. She could condense it—though she didn’t condense it too far, lest she blinded anyone—and form simple shapes with the intangible glow. Once she got the hang of it—and a couple of levels in [Light Manipulation]—Ranthia activated [Spell Reworking] and attempted to shape the light into a human-ish form, a process that she continued for as long as her mana held up. Then, while she waited for her mana to recover, Ranthia considered how things had gone, pondered techniques and experiments that might help her once her mana recovered, and planned her next steps. Once her mana was—finally—fully restored (and there was always a terrible temptation to go ‘close enough’ and eschew efficiency), she started the cycle anew.
Four repetitions later, she was jarred out of her [Spell Reworking] focus when she plowed into the woodsman’s… nope, she refused to finish the thought about where her face had been. Abashed, Ranthia realized the sun had nearly set for the evening and the group had moved off to the side of the road to camp for the night.
For all of her talk of vigilance and distrust, she had completely zoned out.
Ranthia intended to help out with the establishment of the camp, at least as much as an 8-year-old with limited reach and poor strength could, but everyone waved her off. She elected to not try and interact with her mother, so instead Ranthia sat down out of the way and waited for her mana to regenerate.
It would be far more difficult to practice once the sun had gone down.
The funeral pyre for the dead boy went off without a hitch, which was kind of surprising since none of the group had experience with building one (the city had collected and handled the plague victims in bulk in an effort to combat the plagues). The farewell was somber and mostly quiet. His widow—Ranthia really needed a better word for that—wasn’t up for speaking and no one else pretended they knew the boy well enough to speak for him. Ranthia silently said a second prayer for the boy, just to add something to the moment.
He deserved better.
Dinner was another communal potluck of the least long-lived foods the group brought along, including the last of their bruised mangos. Ranthia ate with disinterest, her mind focused on her own magic and the next stages of her plans for the development of her skills.
That night, the group slept. They knew they should have a watch set, every night they discussed it, but they just never bothered. And Ranthia had learned her lesson about trying to stay awake throughout the night with her limited vitality.
Deep into the night, Ranthia was woken up at her bladder’s insistence. She grumbled quietly to herself while she drowsily ambled behind the trees nearby and had just squatted down when her groggy sleep-addled mind was jolted alert by the sound of something that crashed through the jungle, entirely too close to the camp. Something that sounded large.
Ranthia cursed an imaginative little swear under her breath—one that would have earned her a blow from her mother, no doubt, had the woman heard it—as she rushed her bladder’s voiding and—as soon as she was done—slipped toward the sound. Her light weight and budding dexterity helped to make her quieter in the jungle than she would otherwise be. She was far from a savant of stealth, she had no skills for it and her dexterity was still low, but her scrawny build and short hair helped.
Ranthia balled a fist and tried to condense as much of the moonlight—thank the goddesses of the moons that it was the night of the full moons—into her hand as she could.
All too soon—the thing was barely a stone’s throw from the camp—she neared the creature that crashed through the underbrush. It was obviously larger than she was, but the visibility beneath the canopy was far too poor to make out details. Ranthia ran through her options before she landed on her decision. It was dangerous, but…
Ranthia further condensed the moonlight and amplified it with [Light Manipulation], backed by every drop of mana and power she could put into it, and thrust her hands at the monster while she—hopefully—pushed the light into its face.
A shriek followed immediately, while Ranthia tried to blink the spots out of her vision that were inflicted by the dimmer-than-she-had-hoped flash of light.
The shriek concluded with a noisy crash.
And Ranthia found herself standing over the dazed and partially blinded teenage girl, the one that had just lost her betrothed such a short time ago.
“…Whoops?”
Once the teen had recovered, the two found themselves seated next to each other on a fallen tree. Ranthia felt a little guilty, though she mostly blamed the older girl for crashing through the woods at night like a weird, hungry dinosaur. The teen looked sullen though, so Ranthia decided she needed to apologize properly.
“Look, I’m sorry… uh,” by Xaoc, why was she so bad at names, “I didn’t expect anyone to be in the woods. I thought it was some sort of monster.”
Not that her own plan had been sensical. Blind the monster with a flash of light and then…? She had been drowsy, but it was still stupid.
“…I was going to just disappear into the jungle. I thought I could just walk out into the darkness and die and be with him again.” The teenager confessed.
Ranthia’s mind froze. She knew very little about herself, all things considered. But she knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she was the wrong person to deal with this situation! None of her bizarre, eclectic knowledge she was left with was useful here. In a bit of a panic, Ranthia ran through numerous bits of her weird collection of contextless knowledge, each more useless than the last (what even was a goose?). …And then her mind got distracted by something that was, in hindsight, absurdly obvious.
“…It’s not weird, it’s chaotic!” Ranthia suddenly gasped aloud.
She earned an odd look from the teen for her non-sequitur.
“Er, sorry. I mean uh-,” Ranthia fished through her mind for a moment before she decided to fall back on off-the-cuff dogma, “Xaoc lets us be chaotic and take chaotic actions, but He—and most other gods for that matter—frown upon the waste of life. I’m sure… your beloved… would rather you live as well.”
Gods, the words sounded awkward and stupid even to her own ear. She really was incredibly unsuited to this. Even a regular 8-year-old that actually had proper damned memories would have likely been able to do better, at least then she would have remembered what it was like to be comforted! Ranthia had never experienced that!
The teenager instead started to cry and threw herself against the younger, smaller girl and wrapped her up in a hug.
“It’s not wrong to live on without him? I don’t know if I can, but…” The teenager pleaded.
“Uhm, of course not! I can tell you for a fact that Xaoc would want you to live. You can…” Ranthia’s mind scrambled for a conclusion. There were many good things that she could have said here: ‘live for him too,’ ‘carry his memory in a way no one else can,’ ‘find a new path forward,’ and more! And yet…
“…find someone else?” Ranthia finished, awkwardly, and physically cringed when she realized just how terrible of a thing that was to say to someone that had just lost her betrothed.
The teen’s mind obviously worked no better than Ranthia’s own, since, impossibly, she seemed to find the girl’s words persuasive. The young woman visibly—and figuratively, not literally—chewed on the words, her face in hopeful thought.
Ranthia smiled, despite her own embarrassment about how bad of a job she was doing, and decided to give the teenager an extra push.
“Why in a few more years you—” Ranthia stopped herself cold.
She was about to offer—to a teenager—that she look Ranthia up in a few more years. That was beyond horrible for far too many reasons! In many ways, the least of those reasons was the fact that Ranthia was 8 damned years old.
…No, the least of the reasons was the intrusive thought that the teenager wasn’t even her type! Ranthia really just wanted to get up, walk away, and scream at herself over that. Ranthia almost entirely vanished into her own mind to stew over the realization of just how terrible and shallow she could be.
The teenager, thankfully, was wholly unaware of where Ranthia had been about to take that statement and the internal battle the young girl fought over those words. The teenager, somehow, took the words as a prompt, for her to finish herself.
“…I could be a beautician in the capital.” The teenager smiled a strange smile at the thought.
And that was how Ranthia—almost entirely inadvertently—saved a life through the power of her words. It promised to forever be a bittersweet memory of a life saved for the worst of reasons and with the worst methods; even in the moment Ranthia felt equal parts cringing disgust with herself and warm fuzzy feelings for helping to save the teen’s life by giving her a new goal to work towards. Entirely by accident.