A problem Zoe had begun to realized in her time walking around Foizo were the looks people gave her. She was one of the highest level people around — one of the highest levels she’d ever seen. Every so often, a royal guard would stop by with resources or information the town needed, and sometimes they’d be higher level than her. Or perhaps somebody drawn to the excitement of Flester’s Might that was higher than her.
But other than that, there was nobody. Most were even under level one hundred, let alone reaching two hundred. Or even approaching three hundred! Zoe was powerful, at least in the context of Foizo. To many of the people who wandered through Foizo and saw her, Zoe might not have even seemed all that beyond some of the others Zoe noticed.
What was the difference between level three hundred and two hundred to somebody who’s identify would show the same coloured question marks? But while people with their fifth class were much more common than people who reached as high as Zoe, they were still a sight to be excited about to most of the population.
And Zoe didn’t like that attention. Being seen as superior, hearing the whispers of people who wanted to curry favour with her, seeing the special treatment she got for being such a high level. It was tedious, at times. Sometimes it was fun. Getting into a restaurant ahead of the line because of her level, having crowds part as she walked into the dungeon town or let her take on the boss first because she wouldn’t take long anyway.
But it all fell apart as soon as she flipped on her Vampyric Empathy. Their cheerful faces belied their underlying emotions. Hints of fear crept through their anxieties. Worries they would offend her, scared of a simple mishap that would shake their world.
And it was hard to blame them. Zoe was beyond what she could have even imagined when she first showed up in this world. At her fingertips was more power than she could even describe. She could be in space in a matter of seconds, visit a forest on the other side of the planet in just a handful of minutes. If she pushed all of her mana into it, she could destroy cities and level forests with her Cosmic Rift.
In a fit of irresponsible rage, the devastation she could leave behind her would be incredible. But Zoe knew that wouldn’t happen. She knew she wouldn’t lose control of her magic, cast her skills around without regard for what would happen. She knew that nobody could annoy her enough to make her want to kill them, or even annoy them. That if the police showed up to talk to her, she probably wouldn’t even resist much.
But the people who saw her didn’t know that. All they saw was somebody who could wield unimaginable power, without any responsibility to the town, without some established rapport with the people. A stranger who they saw in town sometimes, but never knew the motivations of. Never knew why they were here, or what they were doing.
Zoe thought back to her first year in Flester, sitting at the restaurants and watching people wander around. How few blue marks there were to be seen, and how incredible each one was. The slight anxiety she felt when they stared her down, the respect that power demanded from her.
Now that she thought about it, there really weren’t many blue marks around in her time in Flester. She could remember a few of them who she saw in the streets, and even one or two red marks who she’d met. But there were dozens more in Foizo, despite it being so much smaller than Flester once was.
Flester was enormous, and powerful. Filled with powerful magic, guards who defended the town, and hundreds if not thousands of other folk who lived their lives. Why were there so few blue marks, compared to Foizo?
Was it the royal guard, Zoe wondered? Flester was an independent town, did they just tend to have lower levels in them? But it was such a successful town, at a point would being independent even make much of a difference? Sure, she wouldn’t be seeing the royal guards around, but that didn’t mean anything for the rest of the population.
Foizo was a bit of a frontier town, Zoe knew. And that would invite a lot more of the adventurous folk, whereas Flester would be a safer, established city. People were born there, and grew up there, without ever knowing the dangers of the world. Did they just lack motivation?
Zoe peered into a glimpse of her enchanting workshop and Cosmic Stepped into it, plopping down on the chair. Piles of papers covered the desk in front of her, with diagrams of mana structures she’d been studying. None were successful enough to be a beacon for her yet, but she had a few more ideas she wanted to try.
She focused on the system, and pushed it to replace her Enchantment Amplifier with Enchantment Bestowal. A bit of a waste, considering she just replaced her somewhat higher leveled Bestowal with Everlasting Enchantments recently, but such was life. Maybe it was a hint of the pain others had to experience when they looped, Zoe thought.
A ball of frost appeared in front of Zoe, and she gripped it with her hand, forming it into a rudimentary ring. Mana rushed from her body, flooding into the ball as she enchanted it with Gathering to find a vial of ink she kept on her desk, and then cast Everlasting Enchantments and Enchantment Bestowal on it.
Zoe put the ring on, and her hand glowed a very faint light as she brought it closer to the ink well. She pulled the mana back from the ring, dissolved it off of her finger, and summoned another ball of frost.
She thought of her Identify skill, and began to wonder what it would do as a bestowed enchantment. Mana rushed from her hand, filling the ball of frost as it formed into another ring. She turned her attention inwards, and found the structure of her Identify skill in her soul then pushed its form into the frosty ring along with the name Bartholomew, and finished it off with her Everlasting Enchantments and Enchantment Bestowal skills.
When the ring went on her finger, nothing seemed to happen besides the familiar pull the skill gave her. Telling her that it was doing something, changing something. But she couldn’t see what, though she supposed she was never able to identify herself in the first place.
Zoe hopped down the ladder to her library and found Emma laying in her bed with Fennel.
“Hey,” Zoe said. “What do I identify as?”
“Hmm?" Emma hummed as she rolled over. ”Two eighty seven mage still, why?“
“Oh. Was hoping I’d show up as Bartholomew.” Zoe chuckled.
“What?" Emma blinked a few times as she sat up. Fennel meowed and hopped off her bed to sit on the floor and clean himself.
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“I enchanted this ring,” Zoe held up her hand to show off the ring. “With Identify and then used my Enchantment Bestowal on it. I kinda hoped it would hide my level.”
Emma squinted as she looked at Zoe’s hand. “Your hand shows up as Bartholomew. But maybe it’s just the ring. I dunno.”
Zoe shrugged. “Alright, thanks. I’ll come pester you if I figure something else out then.”
Emma nodded and laid back down. “Okay, I’ll just be here. It’s my lazy day, and I’m gonna be lazy.”
Zoe smirked and walked back up to her enchanting workshop, dissolving away her frosty ring. It would have been nice if it worked, but if it was so simple then other people would have figured it out by now. Though, maybe other people have figured it out, she thought.
Maybe there was some underworld that people were unaware of, handing out pendants that hid people’s levels so they could wander through towns unimpeded. Maybe she’d walked past red marks, maybe she’d even walked past some light green marks and not known because they were hidden away by an enchantment she was unaware of.
She looked through her skills, wondering what else might be useful, if any of them would be able to help solve the problem. Or the two problems, if Zoe understood Emma’s description well enough.
The first was one of mana, which Zoe thought would be fairly simple to resolve. Her simple Frost wasn’t the best for enchanting, and bestowing an enchantment that would cover her entire body in its effects was difficult. She’d need to use something better, and maybe something more central to her body for it to actually cover her entire body. A necklace, or maybe an enchanted shirt.
The second problem was that even if she did manage to bestow an Identify enchantment to herself, that didn’t seem to hide her normal Identify prompt. Window? She wasn’t sure what to call them, but if she bestowed an Identify to herself, she would have two of them.
The months flew by as Zoe split her time between experimenting with different enchantments and helping Emma inch closer towards getting the Time skill. Her progress had accelerated rapidly, and Emma was able to disrupt Zoe’s time magic at a moment’s notice, though not precisely enough to form the structure needed to have the system grant her the skill.
Zoe’s enchanting experiments however; proved even more fruitful, and she’d managed to accomplish a rudimentary disguise for herself through a complicated, personalized process. On anybody else, her enchanted gems did little more than make somebody’s identify seem like a mismatched magic eye picture. But on Zoe, at least according to her friends, it held up under minor scrutiny and made her seem like a normal level one hundred three dark red mage.
The process required two separate enchantments that Zoe had to wear for it to work, which Zoe put into gems that hung from a string around her neck. The first enchantment was a combination of Stealth, Identify, Enchanting, Meditation and Cosmic Familiar. It’s purpose was to obscure her normal Identify tag, preventing people from being able to read it as easily as they would normally.
And then the second was a simpler enchantment of Identify, Enchanting, Meditation and Cosmic Familiar, with a specific Identify that hid the imperfections of the first enchantment while putting on prominent display the level she desired.
With the addition of Cosmic Familiar into both of them, she was able to enable and disable the enchantments with a wave of mana depending on if she wanted her level hidden or not. The process was not without its downsides though, but it worked well enough to let her get by for a while at least, she hoped.
The biggest downside was how difficult making the enchantment was. If she levelled up, she wasn’t even sure if the enchantment would still be working. And without a notification of when that happened, or how close she was to levelling up, that could happen at quite the inopportune time. And if she were to stick around in a town for a while, then a mere level one hundred and three mage would accumulate at least one or two levels, but Zoe’s enchantments wouldn’t change. She’d seem stagnant, which would be fine if she pretended she was at her cap but somebody sticking at a level cap for so long had its own set of problems, as Zoe knew.
Zoe shrugged. It was good enough. Some people would see through it, and some people would question it. But that was better than everybody seeing her at almost level three hundred, she thought. An odd look as somebody noticed something that seemed a little off was better than the alternative.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the trapdoor above the ladder from her library slamming open, rapping against the wall behind it as Emma climbed up.
“I DID IT!” She shouted.
“Did what? And did you have to slam the door open?” Zoe asked, taking a deep breath to calm down from the sudden noise.
“I got the skill!” Emma grinned with glee.
“Time?" Zoe asked.
“Yeah!” Emma shut the trapdoor as she came up into the workshop and walked up to Zoe. “I got it!”
“That’s awesome! Congratulations. Now we’ve just gotta find out how to combine it with Space and we’re golden.” Zoe smiled. Her friend was aging, and it showed. Zoe tried not to bring it up, but she hoped that Emma would take her immortal class soon, just to help delay the process if nothing else. Combining the skills could take more time than they had, and Emma’s mortality loomed over Zoe like a giant pink elephant that waited in the corner.
“About that…” Emma said, failing to hide a smile. “They already did for me?”
“What? How? What?” Zoe was baffled. She’d had the skills for so long with nothing happening, but Emma gets the Time skill and they combine at once? She laughed as she rocked back in her chair. “That’s so awesome!"
Emma grinned. “Yup. So you’re gonna be stuck with little ol’ me for a while now, whether you like it or not.”
Zoe jumped up from her chair and embraced her friend. “I love it. I’m glad.”
Emma hugged her back and nodded. “Me too. The older I get, the more I find myself worrying about the boys. What would happen to them if I got too old to care for them? I’m glad it worked out quick, I think in another year or two I would have needed to take that stupid class.”
Zoe laughed. “I wasn’t gonna say anything, but I was kinda hoping you would.”
Emma nodded. “I know. I just felt like if I already had immortality, I wouldn’t try as hard at this? Like, it’s cool,” Emma said as purple shapes twisted into reality around her then faded away. “But I dunno. I think if I had the class, I would have just been content. Maybe in another ten or twenty years I would have figured something else out, but not this quick. Thank you, Zoe.”
“Anytime.” Zoe said.
Emma sighed. “So you’re gonna leave soon then?"
“Probably. I wanna say goodbye to everybody first, though. Maybe we have some people over tomorrow for dinner?" Zoe asked.
Emma nodded. “Sounds fun, I’ll let them know. We’ll have a going away party for you and a happy immortal celebration for me.”
Zoe laughed.