Day 2, 8:15 PM
“How? Why?” Shock is clear in Edna’s voice. I can relate, I never expected I would change a class just like that.
I check my skills, and there are no new additions, meaning that the weapon master class has no innate skills.
“Edna, what’s your favored weapon?” I ask after reading the level up condition.
“Why?” She’s suspicious. Can’t say I blame her. I’d also be suspicious if a stranger asked me about my favorite weapon.
“I need to defeat a combatant with their favorite weapon to level up. You would have to give it your all, but I’m certain I can take you with whatever you’re used to.”
She deadpans at me, her gaze stabbing like twin daggers.
“My favorite weapon is magic. I haven’t used anything else since learning my first offensive spells. And even before I learned them, I didn’t need to fight anyone with a common weapon. My status was special, and nobody would dare attack me.”
I take note of her boasts, some of her arrogance and pride still present, even after the world and society in general kicked her like a dog, but the only important takeaway is that I can’t use her to level up.
I guess I could squash a slug unarmed, but I’m pretty sure BSD doesn’t see a harmless slug as a combatant, and it would probably nitpick about me using hands or arms to defeat something without them. What if I stomped it? Slugs have feet.
BSD is nitpicky about such details, and I hate how it tells you nothing about why you have failed to meet its arcane conditions. You simply don’t level up.
“Do you know anyone who could pass for a combatant I could spar with?” I ask, stopping myself from sighing.
Edna shakes her head. “I’m not the most social person around, and the few people I do know are hermits, definitely not warriors or anything I would describe as combatants.”
Figures. “Thanks. I’ll tackle that alone later. Now, I have changed my class. All you have to do is change my appearance, and I can go into a dungeon.”
“You plan to delve alone?” Apparently, whatever I say is wrong, or we speak two different languages.
“Yes? Is that a problem?”
“Well, it’s suspicious,” she draws out the words, hesitating about her answer. “People usually delve in teams of three to five. I could make your face and body young, then you can pretend you ran away from home, were lucky enough to cross the wilderness, and came here to try your luck.”
She taps her chin, looking into the distance. “Yes, that could work. You tell them you come from Grayfort, but keep the details vague. Your parents didn’t approve of your ambitions, so you fled home…”
Edna keeps talking, narrating an imaginary life, seemingly lost in her fantasies. Her story devolves into an eerily familiar narrative about the feud between my family and that of the woman I love, with the twist in which I have left home to grow strong enough to end their strife.
“Wait,” I don’t mind her blathering, but it’s going nowhere. “Will the inquisitors really ask about what my uncle has done to my girlfriend’s grandfather?”
“They might.” She crosses her arms, her voice way too defensive for someone who believes what they are saying.
“All right, you make me look young, I fled from home, and I try to make some friends in or near the dungeon to make the inquisitors less inquisitive.”
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“You looking young and having an impressive physique, but nothing outlandish, given your warrior class, will add more weight to your words than just about anything else. The process of reshaping your body will hurt, though.”
I shrug. “I woke up in the body of a person thrown off a cliff, I was burned on a stake twice, and I was eaten by two kinds of wild beasts in the last few weeks. Reshaping of flesh doesn’t sound that bad.”
She smirks, and half an hour later, she proves me wrong. The green glow suffuses my body, sticking to my skin and sinking beyond sight. She sings in a shrill voice which grates at my ears, and following her words, the bones of my face crack, move, and heal into new shapes, including moving my frickin’ eyeballs. Then my flesh shifts to adapt to new features. The former was painful, the latter disturbing. I’m certain muscles weren’t made to do what mine were doing.
There are next to no changes she needs to make to the rest of my body’s skeleton. She makes me a bit taller, and following a series of cracks and pops, straightens my spine, but that’s about all. Next, she works on my muscles, making them lean, hard, and well defined.
“Can you do something about all this hair?” In his old age, Fyoor was as hairy as a monkey, and if I have a choice I would do without curly chest hair I can braid and the annoying strands sticking out of my nose and ears.
With what must have been a thought of Edna’s, the hair falls off just like that, revealing the sickly pale flesh veined with blood vessels. I would like something tanned, more in line with my previous life, but in this world of sickly albinos, a tanned Hercules would stick out like a sore thumb.
I’ve sweated half a bucket by the time she’s done, but the suffering and discomfort were well worth it. My new body glistens like oiled, my physique indecently decent.
“Your body will change over time.” Edna says, eyeing me like a sculptor evaluating their art. “Your muscles will adapt, growing or shrinking, but your skeleton and organs will remain mostly like they are, unless you damage them. I have worked on everything, including intestines, to make you resemble a youth as much as possible.”
Yeah, no wonder she’s an eternal virgin. I’d be too, if I perceived humans as a bloody mess waiting for me to fix it. I wonder if she rejuvenated my testicles, and how she felt about it.
“Thank you.” I give her a shallow bow, the gesture would have been more formal if I wasn’t buck naked, covered in sweat.
“You’re welcome.” She doesn’t give a damn about my thanks or my sexy figure. I would have been offended if I was several centuries younger, but she continues her speech, unaware of my thoughts.
“So your goal is to infiltrate the dungeon, activate your Guide, and then try to cheat some attributes out of it. Remember, the Guide can answer simple questions, and it’s responsive to your thoughts, to an extent. It works better inside the dungeons, but basic functions are available everywhere.”
“Do you know why that is?”
She shrugs. “Because it works better in a dungeon. You don’t question why the ground is hard or why water falls from the sky.”
For some reason, those words come as a disappointment. I don’t consider Edna my friend, but it’s obvious she is taking and accepting a course of action more favorable to myself than it is to her. In fact, she is taking an unnecessary risk. That should be a sign of good will, and if I really was wrong about her wanting to use me as an experimental subject, I will need to return the favor.
I’m a cynical old bastard, I may see the worst in people, but if someone graces me with favor, I will return it in kind.
“I think you should ask yourself why the ground is hard, why water falls from the sky, and why the Guide behaves better inside the dungeon than it does outside. A lot of knowledge and power is hidden in asking such questions, a lot more in answering them.”
She looks at me with a cocked brow.
“That’s a lot of preaching coming from a bare-butted kid.”
I wanted to bite back with a witty remark, but she raised a valid point. “Fyoor’s clothes no longer fit, and they have charred and burned patches. Can you—”
“Just put them on, and I’ll handle the rest.”
I follow her instructions, and she starts singing again. It’s a low, slow chant this time, almost pleasant compared to the violent assault my ears suffered while she reshaped my body.
Green and brown mores appear, washing over my clothes, smelling of mint. The grime dissolves, disappearing into my shirt. The holes and tears mend, the long, waxen sleeves grow an inch longer, then another, becoming slightly too big for me.
The same happens with my waterproof trousers, their leggings growing long enough that I need to cuff them to walk normally. I cuff my sleeves too, and the only thing left are shoes, which suffer a more radical change. The leather or soft carapace from the soles moves up, stretching the shoes, and Edna adds two small chunks of wood, which dissolve and flow towards the bottom of my shoes, becoming the new soles.
“No wonder you don’t need anyone, you can do everything yourself.”
Edna looks at me, bobbing her head once sharply. “Magic can do almost anything. Now, you have new weapons, new body, new clothes, new shoes, the only thing left is a new name.”
A wry thought comes to mind. I won’t use my old name, but there was a title everyone called me back when I was a king.
“What about Griff Rider?”