Chapter 7
Tom had mostly figured out seven of his eight skills, only three of which he could perform without the aid of a Core. Claim brought animals or dungeon elements under his Control. Level had caused the Core to spend its banked experience all at once and jump from level four to forty-eight in an instant. Expand and reduce were opposites of each other and affected Territory, Maximum Mana, and Mana Regeneration, although he’d yet to figure out the nuances of that relationship. That left Summon and Customize, and while he had a feeling that Customize had a lot of nuance and options to it, he wasn’t too worried about figuring them all out right now. That left only Summon as a Skill he hadn’t tried yet.
So he tried it.
The Core Stone in his hands lit up bright yellow, and then projected a circle on the ground filled with geometric shapes and complex symbols, some of them like the ones Tom had seen during his class upgrade. Others were different, more primal somehow, and not at all familiar to his eyes. They seemed to twist reality.
The circle rotated rapidly, the symbols moving about on its surface. Above the circle, a rip in space suddenly appeared, strange and confusing and terrifying to look at. Tom knew that beyond that rip lie other worlds, some of them like his own, others alien and filled with creatures that were beyond his comprehension. He should have been filled with terror at the mere contemplation of such existences, but he was instead excited by the fact that he Controlled this power.
From the blackness beyond the rip, a person emerged. A girl, sixteen or seventeen years old. Unconscious. Red haired, much lighter in color than Tom’s mother. And nude.
Both boys abruptly looked away, their faces burning red, even as the rip in space healed itself and the magic circle faded away, leaving behind only the girl as evidence.
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Jessica had not been expecting to wake up, but she did. And she wished that she could promptly go back to being asleep. Or dead, since she was pretty sure that when she’d last closed her eyes she was dying. She was cold and naked on stone, with cloth over her. Was she in the morgue? That wasn’t what she was expecting. Why could she still feel her body if she was dead? Why could she --
She could move. So she did. She sat up, and was surprised to find that the lingering weakness she had suffered from off and on since she was eight years old was gone. Aside from being a bit chilly, she felt better than she had since before The Diagnosis.
“You’re awake! Good! How are you feeling?” a voice asked her. It belonged to a man, or a boy, just a bit older than her she supposed. She looked over at him in the dim light. He was buff!
“I feel good,” she said. “Suspiciously good, in fact. Is this the afterlife?”
“I hope not. I’ve got a lot of sinning left to do,” the man chuckled. “Although I suppose I can’t blame you for thinking that, seeing how you got here.”
“How I got here?”
“My friend opened a rip in the universe and you came out,” the man explained. “He’s promised not to play with that Skill anymore. For now, at least. Until we talked to you and figured out if we, I don’t know, accidentally kidnapped you or something?”
Jessica frowned at him. The words made no sense, but they also made a perfect sort of sense.
“Oh my god, I’ve been Isekai’d,” she muttered. She flexed her hand a few times, and decided to look on the bright side. She was pretty certain that she was in a new body. Presumably one not riddled with leukemia. She was also pretty certain that they weren’t speaking English, although she had no trouble understanding the man’s words or responding intelligibly.
“I don’t know that that means,” the man admitted. “My name is Sevin, by the way. My friend who summoned you is named Tom. He’s in the other room, meditating or something. I’m not certain coming to this Dungeon was the best idea for him, he’s been acting strangely ever since we got inside. Although maybe it started a bit before that.”
“I’m Jessica,” Jessica said. “Jessica Small. You said we’re in a Dungeon?”
“A small, weak one, yeah,” Sevin answered. “Or at least it used to be small and weak. Tom is playing around with his abilities, and apparently it lets him dig tunnels and move walls with a wave of his hand or even just a thought. I’m not really sure how it works. Do you want my shirt?”
“I wouldn’t mind it, it’s a bit chilly in here,” Jessica said. She didn’t have too much modesty, but she’d still prefer not to be naked except for a sheet.
No, it wasn’t a sheet, she realized. They’d covered her with a cloak.
“So, I guess there is magic in this world? What about technology. Do you have --” she searched for the word for electricity, but the closest she could come was ‘lightning’ or ‘spark.’ “Huh. I guess whatever lexicon was downloaded into my brain doesn’t have that word, which means I doubt that you people have it. You still get around on horse drawn carriages and stuff like that?”
“There’s definitely magic in the world, although only about one in a hundred people develop the gift enough to use it to any degree. My friend I guess is one of them, although I don’t think he’s a typical mage. We only just awoke our Classes in the last couple days,” Sevin explained. “I take it your world doesn’t have magic?”
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
“Only the Disney kind,” she answered. “Wait, does everyone in this world get classes or just the lucky few?”
“Everyone,” Sevin confirmed. He pulled his shirt off to hand it to her, then turned his back to allow her to put it on. “Although most of us have common classes. My friend unlocked Controller the other day, like I said, and I just unlocked Warrior. I’m still getting used to the new feeling, and I almost can’t recognize myself in the mirror.”
“How do you check your class?”
“You just pull up your status.”
“Yeah, but how do you do that?” she asked. “My world doesn’t have a system built into it.”
“Oh,” Sevin said. “Um, I don’t know how to explain it. I’ve been able to interact with my personal interface since I was a very small child, so it’s mostly second nature by now. But perhaps you don’t have one yet? When children are four years old, they’re presented to a Core Stone, which gives them the Child class and the basic system interface. You came through the rift, but I never thought about that. Maybe, well, maybe Tom’s stone will work the same as the Village Core Stone?”
“Alright, let’s find out,” Jessica agreed, and she stood up. The shirt he had given her was long enough that it reached to her thighs; her new body wasn’t all that tall, but just to be sure she wrapped the cloak around her as well, making sure that she was covered. It felt strange to be walking around in a stone Dungeon without pants, but she was alive when she wasn’t expecting to be. That made up for a lot of the shortcomings of the situation.
She paused when she followed Sevin into another room, but seeing that the creatures lining the walls didn’t attack him, she nervously darted to follow behind.
“Damnit, he was just here,” Sevin said, looking around the room for where Tom had vanished. He spotted a door leading deeper into the mountain, one that hadn’t been there before, and he quickly went through the empty arch.
Jessica followed him, and froze, as she suddenly found herself outside, with the sun shining down on her in all of its warmth. Except it didn’t feel real. She wasn’t quite certain how, but she knew when she looked up that the ceiling was only a few meters above her. She was not looking at the real sun, nor real open sky. And there were no plants around basking in the sunlight, just perfectly level packed earth.
“Sevin,” a boy’s voice called out. “I figured out how to make the Dungeon create a new floor!”
She looked at the source of the voice, and it was a very ordinary looking kid, thirteen or fourteen years old by her guess.
“Dammit Tom, I told you it was time to stop messing around with that thing,” the man scolded. Except, now that she saw him in the light a bit better, she realized that she might have overestimated his age a bit. He wasn’t much older than she was. Maybe younger.
“You said not to do any more Summonings or Spawnings, and I haven’t. There’s no harm in creating floors. Well, there hasn’t been so far, but like I said I’m still figuring things out.”
“Which is exactly why you shouldn’t be doing this while you are by yourself! We need to go back to the village and wait for Lukan to get that missive about your class before you make any more major moves, okay?”
“I’m figuring things out faster on my own,” Tom argued. “I don’t need help or guidance from some dusty old men with books.”
“Tom,” Sevin said, and his voice was both exasperated and concerned. “Something is wrong. You’re not acting like yourself. Maybe let’s put the Core back where you found it and go back to the village for now.”
“If we do that, the adults will never let us come here again,” Tom argued. “We had to sneak out last night just for me to Claim this dungeon in the first place. This dungeon belongs to me. I’m not leaving.”
“Oh boy,” Jessica muttered. “These kids need an adult.”
The argument devolved from there, with Tom growing more and more unreasonable the more he was pressed to leave. He wouldn’t even contemplate the idea of allowing Jessica to touch the stone to unlock her Status. Jessica slowly came to terms with the fact that she’d been summoned to another world by a kid who was slowly losing his grip on reality.
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“We’ve sent out word to look for them, Norman, but there’s very little else we can do,” Harvold pointed out. “The valley is a big place, and there’s plenty of space for two young men to explore while exploring their new Classes.”
“You don’t sound worried,” Norman objected.
“I’m not,” Harvold said. “What do you think will happen? Some high level creature wander into the valley and attack them? The way that Sevin moves now I’m confident he can handle any beast native to the valley. Why, I’ll bet he could clear out the dungeon by himself if we asked him to. We might just let him do that, next time it’s due for a purge, just to put some levels on him. Most likely, I think, is they’re out looking for new ways to use your son’s new abilities.”
“Tom wouldn’t have left in the middle of the night without telling us,” Norman protested. “Something is wrong.”
“What’s wrong is that he’s an adult now. Even if he was still a Child, he’s old enough that I’m not going to upend the Valley because he went out seeking an adventure and neglected to clear it with his parents,” Harvold said.
The argument took place on the village green, not very far from the Core Stone where the boys had evolved their classes just recently. Harvold truly wasn’t worried about the missing duo; he figured that a night or two out in the rough was exactly what they needed to settle down after the excitement of gaining access to actual classes. He really had sent out a few messengers to the likely spots he could see a pair of young men going to vent their excess energy, but no matter how Norman bothered him he wouldn’t bother with more than that. The Weaver was far too overprotective of his son, by Harvold’s estimation. But he needed calming, and half of the time as leader of the Militia, Harvold’s job was simply to calm the villagers down and reassure them that everything would be just fine.
The pair, and the rest of the village, was caught offguard when the Core Stone flashed brighter than the sun. Harvold cursed, wondering what the devil was happening, when a system message flashed before his eyes.
Incoming Teleportation.
Please stand clear.