I looked up from my first spell to multiple notifications and the staring faces of everyone in the room. I ignored the faces to start with and looked at my notifications.
Congratulations! You have learned the spell Water Ball! It has been added to your spellbook.
Congratulations! Due to handling a higher tier type of mana, Basic Mana Manipulation is ready to evolve to Lesser Mana Manipulation! Visit the shop to purchase it for 10 Chits.
Huh. So, no EXP for skill-ups. Irritating, but still manageable. I almost dismissed the notifications, but then I thought about what the first one said. Spells are separate from skills? That makes a major difference. That means I can perform magic, even though my stupid class set all of my skills for me. I smile inside because, if I’m honest, magic was something I was actually looking forward to in this apocalypse.
I looked up and immediately my inner smile shrank back and disappeared. Every single kid in the orphanage dorm was staring at the ball of water in my hand, so I do the only reasonable thing.
I throw it at them.
They dart away, shrieking, and the ball of water bursts on them and soaks their clothes. That should dissuade them from bothering me too much. As soon as I thought that, a small six or seven-year-old kid appeared next to me and tugged on my shirt.
“How’d you do that?” he asked. Before I answered, or even had a chance to, he tugged again and asked the same question. I sighed and answered.
“I used mana manipulation.” Of course, this sparks an onslaught of questions from the kid.
“What’s mana manipulation?” Okay, so maybe not an onslaught, but it was still irritating, all right?
“Mana manipulation is manipulating the mana around us to make magic happen. For example, I gathered water mana, which conjured water vapor, only to condense it with some type of mana I’m unfamiliar with.” I prepared myself for the next question, but it wasn’t what I’d expected.
“Can you teach me?”
“Uhh… I don’t think so. Humans can't normally sense mana, so you'd have to buy it from the Shop before you'd be able to."
"What's the Shop?" By this point, I noticed that every single kid in the room is staring intently at me, desperately yearning to know my answer.
"It's a part of the System that allows us to purchase skills and items." The kid opens his mouth to ask another question, but before he can, I answer it. "The System is the thing that sends out the notifications about the monsters and stuff. If you say 'Status' and wish to learn about yourself, the System will show you information that you can't find anywhere else."
The kid says "Status" and his eyes unfocus as he looks over his stats. I silently use Master Identify to see what he is seeing.
Mack Rodan
Class: None
Level: 1
HP: 200
Stamina: 90
Mana: 80
Strength: 9
Endurance: 11
Intelligence: 8
Willpower: 6
Control: 6
Perception: 7
His physical stats are pretty high. I actually think they might be higher than my original stats were. I guess the System scaled his stats up to equal fully grown adults to prevent him from having a disadvantage? I wonder if he actually has higher endurance than average people. Most of his stats aren't so good though, so if no one protects him...
Oh. Crap.
Goddamnit! I wanted to break off on my own! I didn't want to protect a fucking orphanage from monsters! I couldn't just leave them, though. My sense of right and wrong wouldn't allow it. I wondered if the system sold cheap lobotomies. I quickly identified a couple of others, but they all had similar stats to Mack. None of them have really terrible physical stats, but everything else is terrible. It didn't seem like I had any other choice though. Fuck!
Mack finished looking through his status and turned back to me, ready to ask another question, but Mrs. Olfson called us for dinner. It was quite early to be eating for someone my age, but, since we were such a small orphanage and such a small town, everyone lived in the same dorm and ate the same food at the same time. We sat down at the long table and began to pass the food around. Coincidentally (not really), I sat next to Mrs. Olfson. I had a few questions for her.
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"Did you see the floating text describing the initialization of the System, Mrs. Olfson?"
She smiled kindly at me. "Of course I did, dear," she said.
"What are you going to do about them?" I asked. "Monsters are going to be spawning everywhere, and you have an orphanage full of children less than ten years old. How are you going to protect them?"
Her smile disappeared in the blink of an eye, and she started looking at me more coldly."What do you mean, monsters? The Lord would not send monsters to our world, especially not during the rapture." Wow. Quite a bit to unpack there.
She seemed to think that the apocalypse was God rapturing us. I guess she thought 'monsters' was meant metaphorically instead of actually meaning monsters. This simply reinforced my need to stay and help the rest of the orphanage. They have no skills and classes, and no Chits to buy either from the System. I was beginning to regret having wasted so much money on my daggers when I could have used kitchen knives with just as much ease. Damn.
Anyway, back to my conversation, I couldn't deal with her level of crazy. So I immediately replied, "Oh, yes. My bad." Then I went back to my dinner. After a suspicious glance, she went back to eating her food.
While I ate, I thought about my plans. I wasn't going to back to school. I had other things to do, such as preparing to defend twenty people. That meant that I needed to level up faster and possibly bring people to level up with me. No, I couldn't do that. They wouldn't have any weapons and, even if they did, I doubt they could stomach being near a zombie or a skeleton, let alone killing one. I also needed to develop more spells. The more I have, the better prepared for anything I am. I needed single-target, powerful attack spells as well as area-of-effect (AOE) spells that affected a large number of targets with lower damage than normal.
I stuck one hand under the table and summoned the cube of the Training Facility to my hand. I squeezed it to activate it while eating.
Would you like to enter the Training Facility or modify the programming?
Modify, I thought. The menu appeared in front of me and I began to surreptitiously change the waves until they looked like so.
First Wave: 1 zombie
Second Wave: 5 zombies
Third Wave: 25 zombies
Fourth Wave: 1 skeleton
That was all I was confident in facing without breaks in between. The reason I was okay with most of the massive numbers of zombies is that they're really slow. I don't need to worry about being bogged down with 20 zombies at a time. Besides, apparently one of my skills teleports me. That reminded me that, despite how much I hated my class, I still needed to master the Blink skill to maximize my chances of survival. All right, I said to myself, after dinner, you know what to do.
We finished dinner and cleaned everything up. Luckily, I wasn't on dish duty, so I could start my practice right after dinner. I swear though, the whole time, Mrs. Olfson was eyeing me like she was wondering whether or not to kill me. She looked terrifying, and I personally hoped she had decided on not murdering me.
Before Mack could approach me once more, I ran outside to practice my new skill. I might have decided to protect them, but that didn't mean that I needed to constantly answer all of their questions. I went for a little run before anyone could stop me and marveled at the effects of my new strength and endurance. A single step would drive me inches higher into the air than I could jump, and by the time I arrived at my destination, I wasn't tired at all.
My destination was a park. It was basically empty because most people were either panicking and preparing for the coming apocalypse, or pretending nothing was happening. The important part was that they were doing it at home.
I looked at a destination across from me, just to the left of a large tree. I decided that, instead of thinking this skill, I would activate it by saying it out loud, so I didn't accidentally teleport myself somewhere. I glared at the spot as if it represented all of my problems in this new world. In a way, it did. This was where I would use the hated skill that had the same name as my hated class. I was perfectly fine with my life going the way it was! Well, not perfectly fine, but fine enough.
Enough thinking. I glared at the spot and thought about going there, but not through moving, but by simply ceasing to exist here and existing there. "Blink!" I called, and I appeared at my destination.
I spun around and fell to the floor. Who knew? It turned out that when the skill said disorientation, it meant that I was going to puke and want to die. I threw up and saw the wonderful dinner I had just eaten for the second time.
After about ten minutes, I was able to stand up again. It still took another five minutes for me to rid myself of the rest of the effects. In other words, I felt like I had just been spun around a million times at breakneck speed. Not fun. I still stood up, though, because I knew that I was going to have to use all the skills and spells in my arsenal to survive the monsters as well as keeping the orphanage safe. I focused on another spot much farther away from the pile of upchuck next to me. I closed my eyes this time, in anticipation of my impending dizziness, and shouted, "Blink!"
This time, when I blinked, I was barely disoriented. I had still teleported, and I was still a bit dizzy, but I could tell the tree on my left apart from the tree on my right, unlike last time. Is it that simple? The disorientation of going from one place to another must have been too much for my brain. Simply closing my eyes, or, rather, blinking, when teleporting allays most of the discomfort!
Congratulations! Your skill Basic Blink is ready to be upgraded to Lesser Blink! Visit the shop to upgrade it for 10 Chits.
Well, that was easy.