A quick [Inspect] of his attacker revealed little.

Name Jorn Banhoff Race Human Age 37 Class Messenger

Brin skipped the list of Skills–chances were they were fake anyway, and he didn’t have time for reading. This guy’s age looked accurate to what [Inspect] said, and since levels usually came with time, Brin was in serious trouble.

He had a split second to make a decision. Flee or fight? There was no real decision; the chances that he’d actually get away were next to nothing.

Death sense flared, and he dodged a flying knife. He activated his armband, turning invisible, and then quickly switched direction to avoid another knife. The invisibility would only last for five seconds; he’d only get one shot at this.

He used the one thing he’d learned with [Call Sound through Glass], and completely deadened the sound in a sphere around himself.

“” He sent three spears of glass towards his assailant from the front, while at the same time dashing forward to close the distance. Rather than attack from head on, he wrapped around behind. Jorn stepped to the side to avoid the spears, which put him in the perfect position.

With a second to spare, Brin stabbed at Jorn’s back.

A lot of things happened at once. Jorn laughed and spun around, dodging perfectly out of Brin’s way despite the invisibility. He whipped another throwing knife around, aimed at Brin’s center.

At the same time, a black barrier sprung up between the two of them, knocking their weapons away and slamming them away from each other.

Jorn landed softly and blinked to his feet with supernatural speed, but chains of black wrapped around his arms just as quickly and pulled him back down to the ground again.

Brin stood shakily, holding out his knife, but the semi-translucent barrier of shadow between them stood firm. That was hard light. Hogg was here.

Just like that, it was over.

Level up! 31 -> 32 +5 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +2 Vitality, +2 Magic, +3 Mental Control, +1 Will, +2 free attributes.

Now? After all this time, and only now he got a level? The System didn’t even think he’d participated in this fight enough to get the “you have defeated an enemy” notification, but it had still been enough for a level. He must’ve been right on the edge.

Right on cue, Hogg stepped out of the shadows and made his way over to the downed man, freeing him of the shadowed shackles.

“This was a set up,” said Jorn, dawning in comprehension.

Hogg shrugged by way of non-apology.

“Why?”

“He wanted to help me try out my death sense,” said Brin. He looked at Hogg. “Right?”

“That’s right,” said Hogg.

Honestly, he wasn’t that upset, but he knew he probably should be. Paying someone to attempt to assassinate your son was psychopathic behavior, but he was too happy to finally have another level to care. Also, he’d gotten what he wanted, which was a better look at his Skill. If this would save his life some day, it was worth it.

He needed to make some show of being upset, though, because not caring when your adoptive father paid someone to kill you was also worrying behavior. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know if that would ruin the Skill. This was the third thing I tried, by the way. I tried attacking you from the shadows myself, but you didn’t get any warning, probably because I knew I was going to cancel the spell at the last second. Then I had a [Hunter] shoot at you from a long distance, knowing that I was going to block the shot–”

“Who?”

“Kevim.”

“Figures.”

“Then I tried this. He really meant to kill you and he had no idea I was going to stop all his knives at the last second. And it worked! That’s all it takes to set off your Skill,” said Hogg.

“Huh,” said Brin. “That’s a useful detail to know, actually. I would’ve thought that the attack would need to have a certainty of landing before the Skill went off.”

“Apparently not. Nice dodge, by the way,” said Hogg. “Although you really shouldn’t have tried to close the distance. Not to channel Lumina here, but you should’ve stayed where you were and used the five seconds to summon your strongest ranged attack. It probably would’ve hit.”

Jorn watched them talk back and forth with an increasingly wide smile. “If we’re giving notes, it was impatient of you to go for the killing blow on first strike. What’s to say I don't have a similar Skill to yours? And is that an artifact which made you invisible? I wonder where someone might go to acquire something like that…”

Hogg glared at Jorn. “Shut up, you.”

Jorn spread his hands in apology, the self-satisfied smirk never leaving his face. “Then I take it you’re satisfied with this outcome?”

Hogg nodded. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to make your way from here. I can’t have someone like you in my town. You understand.” He flipped a golden coin at Jorn, who caught it.

Jorn smiled. “No matter. Pleasure doing business with you.” He made a mock salute and sprinted away; to say his departure was abrupt would’ve been an understatement. Clearly he wanted to get as much distance as possible before Hogg changed his mind.

Brin waited for ten seconds before asking, “You’re really going to let him go? He seems like a dangerous type of person. [Assassin]?”

“Just a [Rogue],” Hogg answered. “He can still hear you, by the way. And yes, I'm letting him go. He did the job I paid him to do. It’d be hypocritical to punish him for it.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

That did give Brin some conflicting emotions. This guy hadn’t killed him, but he’d clearly been willing to. Who was going to save the next kid that this guy got paid to assassinate? Then again, how often did something like that even come up?

“He’s got a [Messenger] Class,” Brin said to distract himself. “Good fake Class for a [Rogue]. While he delivers messages to all these important people, that puts him right inside their house where he can listen to all their secrets and stuff.”

“He chose some movement Skills to make it more convincing. He didn’t have any obvious murderer Achievements that I could tell. This was going to be his first one.”

Brin didn’t answer for a minute, chewing it over.

“So, are you mad?” asked Hogg.

“I don’t know what I am!” Brin snapped. He sighed and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t like the way you went about it. You had a good reason and it worked out, but I still don't like it. I thought keeping secrets for my own good ended on System Day.”

Hogg nodded easily. “Ok. Deal. Anything else?”

That was the problem with Hogg. He did completely ludicrous things, but whenever Brin criticized him, he owned up to it completely and changed his behavior. It made it hard to stay mad.

“Well, if that’s settled, why don’t you help me out with Self Invisibility. I got it working, but it takes so much focus that I can’t do anything else while it’s active.”

Hogg looked relieved at the change of conversation. “Well, that’s mostly because it’s made for someone with a Lightmind. For you, you’ll want to pare it down and take just what you need. What’s the smallest amount of magic you need to still accomplish your goal? If you’re in a crowded, well-lit room, then sure, nothing but total invisibility will do. But what about out here in the forest at night?”

Brin thought about it. “Rather than wrapping it around my skin, maybe just a one-way wall?”

“Think even smaller. Think about how the last one out here who’s still hiding is doing it,” said Hogg.

Brin stood up straight and looked around, ready for another [Assassin]. It took him a minute to realize who Hogg must’ve been talking about. “Marksi?”

Marksi stepped out of just the spot Brin had been looking. Dark greens slid off his scales, replaced by his regular rainbow patterns. He preened, looking smug.

“Camouflage. I could camouflage myself like Marksi,” said Brin.

“It’s something you could learn to do now, even without any other Skills. It’ll take some practice…”

It was already getting late, but the idea of trying to sleep right now felt completely repulsive. Anything to put off the inevitable three to six hours of being tortured by nightmares. “Let’s start now!”

The first step was easier than Brin expected. He used a few words of the Language to completely change his color. “” made him appear as if he’d been dunked in a bucket of forest green paint, clothes and all. The only problem was that the green also covered his eyes, and it took more concentration to pull it back from that one spot than it had to create the spell in the first place.

He summoned a hand mirror out of glass to admire himself. He had to admit, the effect was quite striking, but it made him stand out more, not less.

He tried black next, and already felt a lot more stealthy.

“Black stands out even more than the green did,” said Hogg. “You just feel more stealthy because you equate black with darkness, but take another look. Do you really blend in?”

“Well, no, I don’t,” said Brin. “But that’s only because I have darkvision. To most people, this would be hard to see.”

“Then why don’t we assume our opponents aren’t blind? You’re mostly going to use this for hunting, I assume, and monsters and animals have very keen senses.”

The next step was harder. Brin had to cover himself in splotches of all different shades of green and brown. He had some experience with camouflage in his past life, so he sort of knew what he was looking for.

He eventually made a breakthrough when he made the pattern first, and then wrapped it around him second. “.”

The effect, once he’d figured out how to get it off his eyes again, was stunning. While holding still, Brin seemed to sink right into the landscape. It helped that he was able to use the exact color of the grass and mud he was hiding against.

After that, Marksi demonstrated his excellence again. He didn’t just pick the approximate colors of the forest and put them on his scales. He actually painted a perfect picture of the ground near him on his scales. He even went so far as to subtly adjust the picture to match the perspective of the person watching him. The only way Hogg and Brin could see the mistakes in Marksi’s camouflage was when they stood apart and looked at him from different angles.

Brin didn’t think he could even approach something like that, but Hogg told him to try, so he tried.

First, he tried covering himself in a blank, neutral color, and then colored the details onto himself just like he would a painting. He could sort of get his light magic to do that, but he wasn’t a great artist. He’d been a doodler all through school just to pass the time, but he’d never tried to make anything that looked realistic, and this was showing now.

Maybe he should take [Painting] or [Drawing] as a general Skill? Those would probably help both his glass and illusions. For now, though, he needed a different approach.

“Can I use light to take a picture and hang it in the air?” asked Brin.

“Yes,” said Hogg. “I don’t have that one written out yet, though. Do you want it?”

“Yes please,” said Brin. “What about a spell to show off an image that I’m thinking of?”

“That’s kind of how all illusion magic works? Sort of,” said Hogg. “You’d have to have a perfect, crystal clear imagination…. Which you do.”

“I do,” said Brin, thinking of [Memories in Glass]. He got a good look at a patch of ground he wanted to imitate, then reviewed the memory of it from the glass ring he always had on his finger to record his life.

“” said Brin. He pushed his mana in, and it did nothing. This wasn’t something he’d get on his first try, but he thought it held some possibility. If he could do this, he wouldn’t even need a Lightmind; the sky was the limit on what he’d be able to create.

Sadly, after two more hours of trying, he didn’t get any further. The best camouflage he had was the random blotches, which admittedly worked pretty well. It was after midnight when he finally admitted defeat and they began the long trek towards home.

“Sorry again,” said Hogg, as they made their way through the forest.

“It’s fine,” said Brin.

“Sometimes, I wonder how much even normal Classes mess with our personality. As an [Illusionist], I was sneaky and manipulative. I never revealed any of my secrets to anyone, to an obsessive degree. Lately, I don’t feel that much of a drive to keep everything hidden, but then again, some habits die hard.”

“[Scarred One] was a huge shift. I felt like a different person, immediately. [Glasser] and [Illusionist] just felt like becoming myself again. I think it’s more likely that your personality changes to fit what you do. If all your Class lets you do is hit stuff, then you’ll start to think of yourself as a person who hits stuff. If all it lets you do is hide, then you’ll be a person who hides.”

“Fair enough. But if [Illusionist] does mess with your personality, then it pushes you to hide things from the people close to you for no reason,” said Hogg.

“I don’t hide things for no reason,” said Brin. “I have great reasons.”

“Just something to keep in mind.”

When they got back to the house, Hogg said, “The caravan is going to stay in Hammon’s Bog until after Rodrige and Madely’s wedding. I think it makes the most sense to travel with them.”

“So we leave in two weeks? Sounds good,” said Brin. He could barely think, to be honest. His exhaustion had caught up with him on the way back.

He’d give sleep one chance. If it didn’t work, he’d take Calisto’s anti-sleep potion and spend the night working on illusions. Should he do that anyway? Well, he could at least try to sleep a little.

He fell into his bed, and suddenly everything went bright.

He squinted, feeling for [Know What’s Real], but it didn’t go off. There was no illusion–this light was real. And really bright. Had Hogg bought a new super-bright lamp and hung it in his room?

He sat up and his mouth felt dry. His brain was moving slowly. Had he been attacked by something? Again, no sign of danger. Just really bright light coming from his window. He pulled away the blinds and saw the sun.

“What?”

He stumbled out of his room, feeling like his brain was in a fog.

“Good morning! Or afternoon,” said Hogg.

Brin’s mind was moving too slowly to process that right away. What? His mind was moving slowly, but in a comfortable way, somehow. This was the way he felt after being sleep-deprived for a long time and then finally sleeping in. He hadn’t felt this way a single time in this world.

“I slept…”

“You slept for fourteen hours,” said Hogg.

He’d slept. He’d slept most the day away, with no dreams or nightmares at all.

“Something changed,” said Brin, shaking his head.

It was right there, on the tip of his awareness. A dream, or a memory of a dream? He tried to grasp it, but it slipped away.

The End of Part 1