CHAPTER 13 – HUMAN RACIAL TRAIT
Tom ate his food mechanically while pondering the issue of malicious fate use.
Bir was the centre of attention, chatting happily to the entire table about her success, bringing her usual extroverted self around other four-year-olds to the fore. Her pleasure at causing chaos was seeping into how funny she found everything to be.
His eyes, unbidden, turned to Snotty… Ma, he corrected himself forcefully. He had to stop thinking about her with that derogatory term. Her condition was probably some innocent variety of hay fever. It wasn’t her fault, and it wasn’t right to pick on her for it, and if they were truly as safe as the information in the isolation room implied, that was a change he could make. From now on, when engaging with her, he would refer to her by her name.
Ma, the sound that many mums out there would have loved to have heard first in a world different to this one, was sitting by herself. She was on the second table and was still alone. The isolation room had spat them out half an hour after the start of dinner time, and half of their immediate cohort, the other four-year-olds, had already left when they got there. No new four-year-olds had come in since, so she ate alone, her head down, not making eye contact with anyone. Her movements were listless, and she was picking at her food rather than enjoying it.
She was four, and he wanted to move and sit next to her, but forced himself to stay still. Yes, he was probably safe, but he wasn’t going to take undue risks, and moving to join her would as likely backfire instead of help. If he did it, she would probably think it was just to mock her.
It was sad, and he wondered about how things had got to this state. Her hay fever was part of it, but her not-parents were probably to blame. The ring, while given from a place of love, made her a social pariah. It was too powerful to have been handed to someone her age.
If you were four and had the power it gifted, you were going to use it. Little Ta would have exploited it worse than Ma had done. Earlier, she had used her ring to push them aside in order to get ahead of them in the queue. In the grand scheme of things, it had been a pretty minor abuse of power, and according to his memories, it was not the first time. But Tom knew that, if Bir had the ring, she would have abused the functionality a lot more than Ma had.
He sighed sadly.
She had, he admitted, with the benefit of his adult memories, shown remarkable restraint. It had only ever been used to constrain, never to hurt, and while it couldn’t hurt them directly, that didn’t mean no malicious applications were possible. If she had struck when they were running or taking the opportunity to push them off a raised platform, the outcomes would have been more serious.
But she hadn’t. She had never tried to hurt them, and she wasn’t ever verbally cruel. In fact, she was restrained on most occasions, and he couldn’t remember her having ambushed them with water balloons, thrown food at them, or locked them in a room - which were all actions Little Ta had done to her.
And the ring would have made it easy for her to succeed at all of them.
Bir tapped him on the shoulder having noticed where he was staring. “I’m going to win dinner.” She grinned. “And I’m never going to lose bubbles.”
“I’ll beat you,” he answered back half-heartedly while internally wondering at the type of monster that he had unleashed.
She was currently a very happy bubble monster, but Tom could tell that if she had her way, they were all going to suffer various mishaps when they next played anything competitive. Realistically, it wouldn’t end up at all like that, but she would start winning more. Forty points of fate a day being directed proactively to help with everyday life meant she would be getting an awful lot of good fortune. Hopefully, with minimal prompting from him, the other kids would notice her success and grow to counter her. As for Bir - he was sure that, when she saw the older children developing amazing powers, like the girl with the levitating fork, she would realise how to direct her fate to achieve a similar outcome. It was only a small step from what she was already doing.
If he was lucky, this would be the start of his cohort exploding in capability. Given the size of the challenge that humanity was facing, if he could help make the entire generation stronger, that could only help.
After dinner, Bir wanted to play bubbles. Her dreams of greatness were not realised, since she was only using the small amount of fate that had regenerated since the start of dinner. She was also not going against the strangely fateless adults, and the tiny amount she could direct was not enough to challenge the defensive fate of the other children. That didn’t stop it from working, but it did so by only affecting Bir almost exclusively. For example, bubbles changed colour from negative into beneficial just before they reached her. Another time, when she was running instead of stopping, she slipped and ended up tagging someone she hadn’t been targeting. Then she fell over once more, and in a fluke occurrence landed on a floating bubble that let her escape Tom, who was chasing her.
Each of the events was a minor thing, and, if Tom hadn’t been watching for them, he wouldn’t have realised they represented abnormal luck. But while individually they were insignificant, the advantages added up. She was the last tagged in four out of their six competitions, and, when she was the dragon, she hunted everyone down in record time.
Observing her clever and semi-regular use of fate made the entire thing fun for Tom.
The lights flashed warningly, and they retreated to sleep.
When he woke up, the first thing he did was grab the toy knife. He gripped it hard while remembering how painful the cuts had been for the entire morning. Every time he had moved, it had been like being lashed by a multiple-tailed whip.
The memories didn’t stop him. Once more, he started to cut himself systemically.
Like the previous day, he tried to move like normal. It was a continual battle to stop himself from hunching over to relieve the pain from his protesting chest, but he kept his back straight and smiled every time it was required from him.
Finally, he got to the isolation room and used the identification ritual immediately.
As expected, the screen updated to the title description.
Title: Complex Conspiracy Discoverer:
* Reward: Previous Reward is no longer applicable. Reward transfigured into DEUS Chosen – tier 0, which grants a single question once every thirty-two days and will be made available when you gain access to your system room.
* Awarded for: Discovering that the flexibility of the human racial trait was artificially hobbled in the tutorial and teaching others about it is restricted in Existentia.
* Geas of ‘Fate Restriction’ Strengthened: Extra constraints around discussing, or even alluding to, the extended capability of fate has been placed on your soul.
He paused while reading the change to the reward. He had been certain that he would keep the title, but he was unsure about whether the reward would change. Out of all the possible options, keeping a version of DEUS’ Chosen, even if it was greatly weakened, was one of the better outcomes. Under the literal interpretation, it meant he wouldn’t be able to use it until he turned ten. After that point, it would be extremely useful in helping him to fine-tune the build that he hoped would allow him to save humanity.
The previous version of the trait was:
DEUS’s Chosen: Once every eight days, you may ask a question. The answer given will be the truth, but can only be a yes or a no.
Which meant what he was getting from the title now was only as quarter as good as what he had purchased from the contribution shop and used in his second life, and thirty times worse than what had come for free in the tutorial. Back then, the questions had been possible daily, and it had been a crutch he had used to get through his everyday life. It would be a massive drop in flexibility, but even when reduced as significantly as it had been the trait remained powerful.
Being able to ask whether he should continue on his current trajectory or change it up was something that he was looking forward to.
With that first step done, he got to work, meaning to get the most out of the isolation room. He split his time between spear forms and studying. His research was focused on cataloguing the room’s contents rather than on launching into any in-depth analysis.
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Tom was impressed by the breadth of information available. There were lots of books on a variety of builds, as well as on the unexpected synergies between powers that had been identified. Another few shelves covered battle strategies against specific enemies that could be found in the nearby wilderness.
Tom did not read them from cover to cover to confirm they were serious literature. Instead, he put them into his to-be-read pile and moved onto the next book. All too soon, his isolation room time ended, and he went through another evening, slept, and then suffered a pain-filled morning before finally getting back into the isolation room.
This time it was a different one, and, while the toys supplied here constituted a different set, the books were basically the same.
The session was three quarters of the way through, and he was stretching to keep himself limber while his breathing recovered from the exhaustion of the previous ten minutes of frantic training. One by one, he checked the title of each book. These were dedicated to scouting and opponent analysis, and, while these were undoubtedly important skills, they weren’t for him. He hoped to recruit a specialist into his team to fill that role instead of doing it himself.
He grabbed one that was thicker than most, and then saw the title. A spike of excitement went through him, and he snatched it up.
“Racial Traits and Bloodlines Abilities.” He read the title out loud and then immediately opened it to the index.
His finger stabbed down in relief when he spotted what he wanted.
Humans - Page 8
Almost buzzing in excitement, he flipped the pages open. This was it. Finally, he was getting his answers!
Humans.
Possess Three Racial Traits
He read the heading in a state of disbelief. After almost three sessions, he had finally found it. What he had been secretly hoping to uncover the whole time but had been too afraid of the answer, too terrified of disappointment to dedicate the time to search for it.
But he shouldn’t have been. He had been wrong. His fears misplaced.
There were three traits!
They had done it, and finally he could see a description of what his team had achieved in his absence.
1. Directable Fate: Can actively direct fate.
Tom’s eyes skipped over that first trait. It was better than the words suggested; a doozy of an ability, of course, and the key to his future success. However, for him it was boring. It was exactly what they had already before he had died.
2. Community Fate: Fifty percent extra fate is generated and then automatically split in equal parts to provide a revenge pool* to protect the individual, the community and the species. These fate pools decay at ten percent per day.
Additionally, if the entire fate pool is emptied, regenerated free fate can be directed to the community benefit and have the usual stickiness penalty reduced by 75%.
*The revenge pool acts independently, and is dedicated to causing bad luck to any non-human sapient that hurts the members of the pool. The backlash aims to duplicate, with interest, the negative impacts inflicted upon the human victim, from maiming to death. This can extend to killing sapient creatures through the created misfortune many months after the initial transgression.
3. Intrinsic Fate Link: Provides a number of benefits:
1. Fate is 20% more potent.
2. Bloodline fate properties are improved.
3. Receive +1 fate per level.
4. And, fate specific traits, skills and spells are 30% easier or cheaper to acquire.
Tom stared at the two extra traits that had been added since he was last alive.
A huge grin split his face.
He clapped in excitement.
They had done it!
He had suspected they had. But this… this was evidence.
Clare and the others had done it.
They had been successful. He couldn’t tell if they had managed it in the first year, two, four, eight or sixteen years, but they had definitely done it. Humans had stolen another species’ traits during the competition!
It was a massive achievement.
All those years of planning, the sacrifices he had made to see this through – it was all worth it, since they had been able to succeed. Following the plan that he had laid out for them, without DEUS’ Chosen to keep them on track. It was incredible.
And what a success it was! It almost made him feel less guilty about dying due to a stupid mistake.
Tom knew he had skimmed over the exact wording, but the additions had all felt powerful.
He focused on Community Fate to try and understand the precise benefit it brought.
There were two parts to it.
The first was the revenge shield component. The wording was confusing, but nothing that a bit of mathematics in the pseudo-system room couldn’t resolve. What it did was create three pools of fate over time, each of which was one and a half times the size of the person’s personal fate pool. That storage would then act as a direct and collective threat to anyone who hurt any humans.
“A revenge shield,” he repeated those words while his mind was striving to understand the intricacies underneath the broad description. If a sapient attacked, and then either materially hurt him or killed him, some of the fate that had built up in his pool, the local community storage and the species dam, would be unleashed to eliminate them. It wasn’t stated explicitly, but he suspected that if the enemy was killing multiple people, the species pool would release a lot more fate than if someone had only killed one person. The released fate would not act as a protective shield – rather, it was dedicated completely to offensive action.
The part of the description that made the racial trait special was the section that said ‘many months after the initial transgression.’
That addition made all the difference.
If you killed a human, you would create a pool of fate that wanted to kill you. Most of the time, that wouldn’t be enough. But if you kept killing that hostile intent following you would only grow. Eventually, you would get in a seventy thirty fight or a sixty, forty fight where you would expect to win, and then that entire pool built-up over months would be out to get you. Everything that could go wrong, would, and you would die.
The idea was insidious.
A pool of fate that could wait until the killer of humans fought someone near its own strength, and then the world itself would turn against it. The ground would slip under their feet, magic with a low chance of failing would implode, the monster would dodge the right way and, when they themselves have to guess the safe position to dodge into, they would choose wrong. Each error like these had only a small influence on the battle, but when you added them all up, they guaranteed the killer’s death. And given how the trait worked, you were not necessarily talking about small amounts of fate, either. He remembered Bir during their most recent bubble session. She had only been spending a few points of fate, but it had made such an extraordinary difference. She had gone from average to dominating as a result.
That was with less than five points. The Revenge Shield worked on a level many orders of magnitude higher. If someone killed a handful of humans, it was easy to see the combined contributions from all three pools building up to the point where thousands of points were acting against them. They would die fast.
Despite its strength, it was a deterrent, not a shield. Once other species discovered that humans had this trait, they would be very hesitant about attacking. Until then, humans would remain fair game to all those stronger around them.
Tom remembered the ladder and the consequences and benefits of each of the seven spots.
This new trait functioned the best when humans were together. The importance of getting into the top four was only increased by the presence of this racial trait. This revenge pool would not matter if you were up against a single human. Yes, the hostile revenge-fate might, on occasions, be problematic. But if it was someone strong eliminating the weak, then the low levels of revenge fate would not be able to get through the natives’ natural fate reserves. But if you had to fight ten million humans, even if they were pathetic and unlevelled, a small amount of fate multiplied by thousands would make powerhouses that would give even a terror race pause.
One often-quoted rule in Existentia was that quality trumped quantity. One powerful person could defeat a hundred weak ones. However, this racial trait turned that paradigm on its head. It didn’t matter now if you were many times stronger than humans - if you killed enough of them, that revenge fate would build up until there was so much of it that it would kill you. Where once someone might have been able to kill a thousand humans a day without any issues, with revenge fate in play, even eliminating a hundred would become a death sentence.
“You’re the best, Clare. You’re amazing.” The words slipped out. She had done it without DEUS’ Chosen to help her with her strategies. She was completely missing his aid and the benefits of his preparations, and she had managed to pull off a victory anyway.
This! This was exactly what he had wanted.
A real future for humanity in Existentia - and that’s what that trait did.
The secondary component of Community Fate was not as interesting to him, though his strategic mind disagreed. It was happy to remind him that removing the stickiness penalty was a massive upgrade to the flexibility of the primary trait. His team had performed the impossible and beaten the dragon, and a lot of that success had been achieved by stacking fate for months until it was effective despite the loss of efficacy normally caused by using fate away from themselves. What they had unleashed against the dragon would have been four times stronger if this trait had been in existence.
Nevertheless, while it didn’t create any excitement, it certainly explained why all the adults had empty fate pools. The town was clearly taking advantage of that part of the racial trait. With a thought, Tom created a note in his to-do list. He was definitely going to find out what the fate of ten thousand people was being directed towards, because that sounded awesome. Some of it would be directed permanently to security, he was certain of that. Another chunk, he was sure, would be used to protect the reincarnated ones, but Tom wondered if they were using it for more exotic purposes. Say, like occasionally applying it to supercharge crafting, or to help everyone in the orphanage to improve their abilities. It was safe to assume that a lot of strategic minds would be guiding the plan. Unfortunately, he guessed, it would be awhile until he was able to uncover those exact details. Still, it was nice to imagine what such a massive amount of reality-defying potential could be directed at accomplishing.
Asking those types of questions as a four-year-old, or even an eight-year-old, was definitely a no-go, though.
Finally, the Intrinsic Fate Link was also interesting because of the variety of actions that it supported. Curiously, he flipped through the book to get an idea of the racial traits that different native groups had received.
He wanted to understand how powerful Intrinsic Fate Link was, because, unlike Directable Fate and Community Fate, Intrinsic Fate Link had values that he expected he would be able to compare against the racial abilities of other species.
With mounting excitement, he checked what the other species had. This was good, maybe even great.
This gave humanity a real chance.