“No way.” Both Eito and Lily jumped out of their seats but Eito was the first to get his incredulity in. “It was at twelve before, Arthur. Ten levels is too much.”

“Lily destealthed Corbin. The system adjusted the reward for how hard that is to do. It sounds like it’s pretty hard to use her Majicka Lamp skill like that.” Arthur looked back at the screen. “It’s confusing, though. It says 22 absolute. She’s at 15 effective.”

Eito threw up his hands. “No idea what that means. Honestly no idea at all. See if the system will give you any information.”

Arthur bought up the Majicka Lamp skill, finding it to be mostly the same as the first time he had seen it. There was no more information on the situation and no other way to get any.

“No luck. You’d think there would be more messages attached to this,” Arthur said.

“You never know with the system,” Itela said. “Some illnesses, you get books worth of information. With others, you get ‘This Demon’s ankles are afflicted by a weakness*.’* And then you hit the books.”

“I wish Spiky was here,” Arthur said. “He’d probably know. Or he’d know how to find out.”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea.” Eito said. “Not using Spiky, of course, but finding a librarian. Someone who specializes in this sort of problem.”

“Does that even exist?”

“Oh, Arthur.” Eito smiled. “This is the capital. Everything exists here.”

—

Arthur expected the library to be enormous. Even back in the city, some of the libraries were huge to the point of filling him with a weird, high-quantities-of-books type of awe. The capital was so much bigger in every way than any place he had ever been before that he expected their destination to track with that. The reality of the building Eito took them to was somewhat different.

“You look disappointed,” Ella said, laughing. “What were you expecting here?”

“I don’t know.” Arthur was staring at a building about three times as big as his house, large in some respects but very much smaller than the infinite field of literature he had beheld in his mind’s eye a few minutes ago. “Something more magnificent, I guess. Shouldn’t capital libraries be… I don’t know. Enormous?”

“Some of them are,” Eito said. “Bigger than you are imagining even. But there are different ways for things to be big. The kind of library you are thinking of is general. They carry every book a normal demon could want, and then the more specific books they want after they read those.”

“And this?”

“This is several steps of specificity beyond that.” Eito sighed. “This is a trainer haven. There are books in here that deep dive into aspects of classes so obscure that even I’ve never heard of them. There have been demons who spent their entire lives documenting how certain skills work and whose books have never been so much as cracked.”

“That seems like a waste.” Arthur looked at Eito apologetically. “Sorry.”

“It is a waste, until you run into a situation like ours. Then they are the most important books in the world.” The tree-demon moved towards the doors of the building. “You’ll see. Follow me.”

The inside of the building was clean and brightly lit, defying Arthur’s expectation of a musty, dark environment filled with ancient tomes. The books themselves were also much more uniform than he expected, with some large majority of them sporting identical, stripped-down leather covers.

“Why are they all the same? I thought these were esoteric works, by underappreciated geniuses,” Arthur asked.

“They are, and the originals tend to reflect that. These are copies, Arthur. They’ve been edited and reprinted by the librarians,” Eito said. “And here comes Remmy. Let me talk. Trust me, it will be faster.”

Remmy was a raven demon, one with the most unkempt feathers Arthur had ever seen. As he drew closer, Arthur could see the librarian’s clothes hardly fit, and were much more worn than he’d seen on anybody since Lily had first wandered up to his stand in her street-orphan garb. Arthur kept his mouth shut. There were usually reasons for things, even if he didn’t understand them off the bump.

“Eito!” Remmy yelled, much louder than seemed normal in a library. “Good to see you! It feels like it’s been years.”

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

“It has been years. Which is my fault. Sorry.” Eito hugged the raven lightly then stepped back. “I do have a way to make it up to you. An interesting problem.”

“Oh, and what’s that? This offworlder?” Remmy looked at Arthur closely. “An… Earthling? Or something like it?”

“How do you know about Earthlings?” Arthur was shocked. This was a first, something he hadn’t run into in his entire time on the Demon World.

“Well, we do keep records, sir.” The raven’s back stiffened. “I wouldn’t be much of a librarian if I didn’t read them.”

“Oh, lighten up, Remmy,” Eito said. “You know full well you are the only person who actually reads those things that thoroughly. Arthur’s not the first Earthling on record?”

“No. There’s been at least one I’ve seen mentioned, from the era of the war. He dropped in, became very proficient with maces in a very short time, and was said to have created very widespread havoc in a local skirmish,” Remmy said.

“And what happened to him?” Arthur said. “I'm guessing he didn’t reach The Bear levels of fame.”

“The working theory is he simply died in a battle. There weren’t many records past a certain point. Sorry.”

“Ah.” Arthur was once again glad he had aimed for a nice planet, rather than one where he’d get to cut a lot of things in half. “Thanks. Good to know.”

“At any rate, if not him, then who?” Remmy said. “I’m all ears.”

“It’s a third type juvenile class, with active, personified system interaction during the uptake trance,” Eito said quickly. “Now experiencing some sort of restriction on her system skills. The specific language being used is absolute and effective, regarding a skill.”

“Oh.” Remmy leaned against a bookshelf and took a hard look at Lily. “Interesting. Does it hurt?”

“No. I just can’t use my class.” Lily frowned. “At all.”

“At all?” Remmy walked forward to Lily and stooped a bit closer to her. “Let’s see about…” Then, before anyone could react, he reached out and shoved her, hard.

Before Arthur could make it to the raven, Ella and Itela were already almost on top of the librarian, moving forward with a combined mom-and-aunt fury that stopped Arthur in his tracks. Remmy scrambled backwards, waving his arms in a wild defensive pattern as the onslaught of rage advanced towards him.

Eito got between them just in time to keep the feathers on his friend safe.

“It’s an experiment!” Eito yelled, spreading his arms wide and trying to act as a demon-shield buffer between Remmy and the coming storm. “There’s a reason, I promise. If there’s not, I’ll let you hit him. I swear.”

“He’s right!” Remmy yelled. “Little owl, that didn’t hurt, correct?”

“No, I guess not.” Lily rubbed her shoulder where he had made contact. “I was just surprised.”

“Good, good! That means she has access to her stats. She would have fallen over if she hadn’t. I put a fair amount of my strength into that.” Remmy looked warily at the women. “More information is better! We know something we didn’t before.”

“That’s good, Remmy,” Eito said. “Just know that everyone here is very fond of Lily. It might be best if you don’t surprise us like that again.”

“As if I would. That was terrifying.” Remmy brushed his messy clothes back into some semblance of smoothness and took a deep breath. “I think I have some books that might help with this. I’m not intimately familiar with them, believe it or not, so I’ll need some help reading through them.”

“Good enough,” Eito said. “What room?”

“Oh, I think the big one. And this won’t be a quick process. It might be best to start considering the practicalities of the rest of the day.”

“Do you mean food?” Arthur asked.

“I do.”

Ella sighed. “That’s me. I’m not going to cook today, but I’ll find some solution. I’ll see you all in an hour or so.”

—

Four hours later, the reading room was completely covered in books. The large central table that dominated the space and all the chairs were loaded up with various tomes. There were dozens of them, an intimidating stack of scholarly writings that would have been completely unmanageable if it wasn’t for a few factors.

The first was manpower. Eito and Remmy were monsters, able to skim this kind of material much faster than anyone else in the room, sorting out what was potentially useful and what was useless at lightning speed. Their stacks of reviewed books was more than twice as big as anyone else’s, and that gap was only growing.

The second was the fact that many of the books were surprisingly short. Arthur had run into a couple that were more cover than book, a few pages of relevant information jotted down by some scholar, edited into a complete train of thought, and then stored for whoever eventually needed it. He got into a sort of rhythm of looking at the shorter ones first, determining whether they addressed the specific problems they were having with a short read-through, and getting rid of them if they didn’t.

That irrelevance was the third reason they had a hope of finishing that day. All of the books were related to problems either having to do with system-enforced class restrictions, young class holders, or some other edge case that at least seemed like it might matter.

Still, most of them didn’t. Arthur sighed and closed a short write-up of a young woman who voluntarily abandoned her class to give herself more time to play, then tossed it into a pile with his other rejects.

“No luck?” Lily said. “Me either. I feel like I’m going cross-eyed looking at all these.”

“We’ll run into something eventually.” Arthur patted her head. “I promise.”

“Something, or a combination of things. Just because someone hasn’t had the exact same problem doesn’t mean they haven’t had similar problems at all.” Eito tossed Arthur another book. “Trust me, this is how it always is. And there’s almost always at least something that’s useful.”

Arthur nodded, reached for the book, and then fumbled for some of the baked meat-bearing breads Ella had found to keep them sustained through this particular trial. Remmy, surprisingly, did not seem to mind if people ate while they read his precious books, and had looked confused that anyone would even ask.

It was another hour before Arthur found his first lead, buried on the tenth page of an unbelievably boring book about communicating with system screens in a more refined way. The author was determined to write in such a dull, plodding way that the reader’s eyes would actively burn out of their head trying to read it, and Arthur was close to giving up on it when he hit the section that would actually end up mattering.