Chapter 61: Thief of Souls

[Contacts

Amelia Dawn - Level 30 Necromancer

Harvey Miller - Level 9 Thief of Souls]

Amelia being more than a simple healer came as no shock to me, as I’d suspected something was up ever since she added me as a Contact, seemingly on a whim. The Matron said she did it quite often, as a prelude to hiring her newfound Contacts as assistants, but that never quite added up to me. Sure, the Matron may have genuinely believed that, but in a town of just a few thousand people, it hardly seemed worth the hassle, when her prospective recruits lived a few streets down at most. It only made sense if her network tended to be a bit more widespread, as my suspicions - now vindicated - showed. Also, now that I saw both names side to side…

“Am I going to need to grab a Class related to the undead? There’s a bit of a trend here.”

“You might get offered one eventually,” Harvey shrugged noncommittally. “ The Dead Hand have a lot of necromancers, and like any other Class, if you spend a lot of time working around them, the odds of becoming one yourself goes up. It’s not a hard and fast requirement or anything, in fact, the organisation could probably do with a bit more diversity in our hiring. Now, where was I? Right, Thief of Souls. I left Class Day as a common Thief, which is why I can still pretend to be one on my name tag. That’s a common trait with advanced classes, by the way. I grew up in a big city, with a heavy security presence, so I never did any big heists during that time, instead advancing via the time-honoured traditions of pickpocketing, lockpicking and burglary. That’s not to say it was an entirely peaceful existence, as sometimes I got caught, at which point I had to defend myself. I earned my first three levels that way, dealing with unruly victims.”

“Which is why you showed up as a Level 3 Thief at our first meeting,” I surmised. “Your ability to implement a fraudulent name tag is based on historical data.”

“Exactly. That’s one of the most common methods of deception, using the past to conceal the present. Your method is another example, where a less threatening Class is substituted for your actual one. Merchant is a pretty popular choice, since they’re expected to travel around a lot, whilst not being that threatening.”

“Walking around as a Soldier would attract the wrong kind of attention. I value myself too much to be press ganged by some random noble in need of disposable bodies.”

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It wasn’t surprising that Harvey had noticed the discrepancies in my backstory; most Merchants probably couldn’t punch up to defeat a monster four levels higher. That wasn’t a bad thing at all, because that facet of my capabilities barely touched on my actual Class; the best way to keep a secret is to hide it behind other, more disposable secrets, as people rarely kept looking after they found the first layer of the onion.

“You and me both,” Harvey chuckled at that. “In any event, one day I decided to try my luck with an old, run-down house. I’d scouted out the place over a few weeks, and it was hardly ever occupied, with only the occasional visitor, who brought boxes of meat inside and left empty handed. I went in one quiet night, expecting to find someone’s elderly relative who was too infirm to visit the market by themselves. Let me tell you, I really wasn’t prepared to see human limbs all over the floor, spread out in a ritual summoning, with half of a demon already crawling out of a portal. I did the only decent thing I could think of at the time, and stuck a knife into the summoner while he was distracted, kneeling in front of the ritual circle.

Luckily, the entire summoning collapsed with her death, and the demon got itself chopped in half, otherwise I wouldn’t be here today, but that still left the question of what to do with her reagents. I didn’t know it at the time, but summoning demons requires freshly harvested souls belonging to sentient beings, so a barrel of salt pork won’t cut it. The souls of the victims were still part of the formation, waiting to be sacrificed, and now that I’d collapsed the whole thing, they were begging me to let them live. Of course, there was nothing I could do for them as a mere Thief, but apparently, accidentally stumbling upon and stopping a demonic incursion is worth some points with the System, because it offered me a Class Upgrade then and there.”

Harvey snapped his fingers, and a piece of vellum appeared, rendered from the skin of an animal I couldn’t identify, which was probably for the best given the subject matter.

“Thief of Souls still predominantly follows the Thief path of advancement, but adds relevant options from the Necromancer Class as a bonus. When I accepted the upgrade, I immediately received an innate ability, Soul Contract, which allows me to make deals with disembodied souls. They get to stick around in my book, and I can give them a degree of life by shoving them into artificial bodies, while I get a significant degree of control over their actions.”

“I see, so the Archers aren’t truly dead. Or, well, they are, but you’ve still got them stored and can bring them back later?”

“I’ve got a few dozen souls in my book,” Harvey nodded. “They’re no longer registered in the System like we are, so no more growth or levels, but they kept what they had when they died, and it lets them stick around. To be clear, my Class only lets me deal with willing subjects, but that’s hardly a problem; most people are willing to put up with quite a lot, for a second lease on life.”

I had to try really hard not to burst out laughing, given my own experience in that area.