“Now the real game begins,” Stratos declared, provoking a round of raucous applause from about one-third the assembled Players, and a more scattered, less enthusiastic reaction from the rest. Every Player had received a notice the morning after the Tutorial ended, telling us to muster in the arena in one hour. That was a little over an hour before.
I’d found a place in the upper part of the stands where I could get a good look at the rest of the Players because I was hoping to figure out who’d been recruited onto which team and evaluate them to see what kind of teams they were. I could easily find the other team builders, even without All Shall Be Revealed: they were the ones in the middle of clusters of ten happy-looking people, mostly positioned in the bottom part of the bleachers. The raucous ones.
Wait a second. I was surrounded by the ten members of the team I put together. Look how bright eyed and smiley they are. What was I even doing there? I wasn't one of them. Why did they all follow me up to this spot? They should’ve sat down there, where the real teams were, and I should’ve been with the other teamless scum. Free agents, Stratos called us. I never liked those condescending lipstick-on-a-pig euphemisms.
Looking back, it makes me cringe remembering how I was back then. I knew feeling sorry for myself wouldn’t get me anywhere, but knowing what was wrong and doing something to fix it are two entirely different things. It’s like saying to a depressed person “why don’t you just decide to be happy?” As if mood can be controlled by a toggle. I don’t think that’s possible even for a healthy person, let alone someone wrestling with the black dog. And yet, people really do say that. Take my word for it.
Still, that’s not as bad as “look at those people in (insert wherever on Earth the current war is being fought, there’s always one somewhere), they’ve got it a lot worse than you.” How the hell is that supposed to do anything but pile on more guilt and shame? I mean really! It’s a short leap from “eat your broccoli, there are starving kids in (insert current famine-stricken area of the world here) who’d kill for that broccoli.” But I digress.
So yes, I knew I was feeling sorry for myself, but I also told myself back then that I was just tired and that’s mostly why I was in such a pissy mood, ignoring the whole being left out of the team and struggling all alone thing. I was tired, though.
It had been a late night for all eleven of us. We’d closed out the pub celebrating the end of the Tutorial. I’d stayed with them, but my heart wasn’t in it. I have a lot of experience pretending to enjoy parties and big, loud groups, so it wasn’t a problem. I’m pretty sure a few people noticed I was a bit aloof during the festivities — at different times I caught Jane and Sigrid staring at me with furrowed brows — but nobody said anything about it. They never do.
Even though we got back to the clan dorms late, I’d had a hard time sleeping. My mind was all over the place. At one point I remembered that I had received more Reward Tokens for completing my quest, and that now the Tutorial period was over I should be able to access the Rewards Shop. When I opened it up, it looked just like an e-commerce store, appearing in one of those now-familiar floating screens. I spent some time scrolling through it, but there wasn’t much available, not yet anyway. It scrolled on and on, but nearly everything was locked and hidden. It’s not like the items available for purchase were bad, there just weren’t that many of them. You could pick up potions for healing or to recover mana for a few tokens each, and I grabbed a few of each. I was curious about the field where you could submit a request for something that wasn’t in the Shop yet, and I wondered what kind of items you could ask for.
The most interesting thing in the shop at that point was a teleportation scroll that could be used once and only once to move yourself instantly from wherever you were to the city’s town square, an Oh Shit Scroll as they came to be known. I could’ve bought one, I had enough tokens, but I decided to save them in case something better got unlocked later.
In the end I gave up on sleep, got myself up early, and used the time to practice in the central court. I’d come to the conclusion that Stratos had been trying to give me a hint during our conversation in the clouds, and I was keen on experimenting with my skills. At the very least I wanted to raise my mastery of more affinities up to Competent, but I also wanted to test a few things, like how quickly my Mana replenished and what it took to raise other skills. If I was going to be doing this alone, I needed to up my game.
Jack Of All Trades was a skill monkey power. Sure, Good At Everything seriously nerfed it by limiting how far I could master my skills, but in all fairness, if there wasn’t some kind of restriction placed upon the myriad skills that Jack Of All Trades promised to give me it wouldn’t be, well, fair. I had been dealt a hand that gave me quantity over quality, so what was I going to do with it? Specialization is good, for sure — everyone wants to be the best at something — but there’s a lot to be said about versatility. Pity the archer who only knows how to use a bow when a swordsman gets within arm’s reach.
Stratos had said that I didn’t fully understand my abilities yet, so I had decided that I was going to figure out what they meant, then plan my next moves armed with that knowledge. After all, knowing is half the battle.
It was still very dark outside when I left my room. I made a quick pit stop in the communal kitchen before going out into the training courtyard. I intended to use a lot of mana and I’d need to keep eating to replenish it.
After several cycles of using an affinity until I ran out of mana, eating, then repeating until I rose from Novice to Competent in it, and then doing it all again with a different affinity, I was taking a rest when Sigrid exited a dorm room and came out into the courtyard. I couldn’t help but notice that it wasn’t her room she’d come out of, it was Andy’s. She looked appropriately disheveled. She didn’t notice me, and it was good to know I didn’t register as a danger to her spidey sense. She went into her own room, then emerged a few minutes later wearing her exercise clothes, hair pinned up in a ponytail.
She headed toward my door, no doubt intending to give me an early morning wake-up call, then did a double-take when she noticed me already up and sitting on a bench in the court, trying to avoid getting squirted while peeling an exceedingly juicy sort of fruit that was like an orange, but which we all decided to call a blue, for reasons which would be obvious if you could see one right now.
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“What are you doing up already?” she said.
In reply, I used Nature to make a shrub beside her shoot out a branch that wrapped around her leg, then used Death to make the shrub shrivel up before returning it to its normal state using Life. “Practicing.”
“So I see,” she said. “Does this mean you’re all warmed up?”
“Hold on there, you don’t expect me to go on another run, do you?”
“Nope, you need at least one day off to recover.”
“Oh thank god.”
“I don’t want to kill you, just make you stronger.”
“Which I suppose means that anything that doesn’t kill me is fair game?”
She flashed a devilish grin. “Today we’re doing strength training instead. Now drop and give me thirty, chump.”
“Shouldn’t that be champ? I think you got it wrong.”
“No. I meant what I said,“ she said, still grinning.
I gave her the finger, which might have been more impactful if it hadn’t been stained blue by the fruit’s copious juice, then dropped onto my fingertips and toes and did as I was told.
She proved to be a hard but thoughtful trainer, making me work various muscle groups until exhaustion, “just to get some benchmarks in place.” She did some of them with me, mostly to show me how to do them properly, and spent the rest of the time chowing down through my supply of blues.
I was doing what felt like endless squats when she asked me, very nonchalantly, “So how long have you been out here practicing?”
“You mean did I notice which room you came out of?”
“Busted,” she said, laughing without a trace of embarrassment.
Squats had been done, and I was midway through interminable crunches when before I knew it she’d jumped on top of me, legs straddling me as she sat directly on my poor abs. Her hands pinned my shoulders to the ground while her face loomed over mine, long blonde hair making a curtain around both our faces. Her bright blue eyes bore into me.
“You know,” she said, “I have two kinds of friends.”
I wheezed. It’s not that Sigrid was all that heavy, it was just that my core muscles were as pitifully weak as the rest of me.
“Oh?”
“There are friends with benefits, and there are actual friends.”
“Oh?” I wheezed again.
“I want you to know that the ones that actually matter to me are not the benefits kind.”
“Sigrid,” I croaked, “is this your way of apologizing for not wanting to have sex with me?”
She bounced once on top of me, sitting down hard, and I wheezed even harder. “Jesus, this is the exact opposite of an apology.”
“It’s fine,” I gasped, “I didn’t want to have sex with you either.”
She laughed. “You are a terrible liar.” She let go of my shoulders and put her hands under her breasts, lifting them in front of my face. “Who doesn’t want a piece of this?”
It was my turn to laugh, which proved to be too much for my tortured lungs and the laugh quickly turned into a coughing fit.
“Seriously though,” she said, “I want you to know that I—”
“Sigrid, it’s fine. I get it.”
“Do you?” she said earnestly.
“I feel the same way.”
“So...partners?”
“I’d like that,” I said.
“Thank the Lord that’s over with,” came Jane’s voice. Sigrid and I both turned to see her standing in the doorway of her room watching us, the usual impish grin dancing on her mouth. “The sexual tension between you guys was getting oppressive.” Before I could think of a good comeback she winked and sauntered off toward the bath with a swagger that I suspected was mostly to tease me. She was wearing nothing but a very short robe that only barely covered her behind, long bare legs stretching way down under it, and she knew how good she looked in it.
Sigrid put her hand under my chin and turned my head to face her. We shared a smile then she climbed off of me and bounced to her feet. I held out my hand and she took it, helping me to get up too. We started making our ways to our own adjacent rooms. “That was a good workout,” she said as we walked.
“Which one?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“The one with me this morning or the one with Andy last night?”
“Ha! You’re forgetting about the one with Andy this morning as well.”
One of the immediate benefits of Sigrid’s tortuous workout was that I was exhausted afterward and finally ready to get some sleep. All I wanted to do was collapse onto the bed and pass out. The spartan bed was firm to the point of unyielding, but it felt amazing to lie down on it and as I was just about to give myself over to blissful rest when the notification arrived:
System: All Players must assemble in the arena stands in one hour - come prepared
Come prepared? That’s ominous. Prepared for what?
And that’s how I ended up there, sitting at the top of the stands with the team — all of us kitted out in full armor and weapons with packs and inventories full of food and supplies and literally prepared for anything — feeling tired and bitter and confused about what I should do next, and trying to focus on what Stratos was saying.
The setup was the same as when we’d first arrived: the Players all in the stands and Stratos down in the middle of the arena floor under a spotlight, flashing a set of whiter than white teeth and giving us their shpiel. This time, they’d dressed themself in a jaunty purple toga with strappy sandals on their feet and a golden laurel wreath crowning their head. A short sword with a fancy hilt hung from their belt in a bejeweled scabbard. I think the effect was supposed to invoke the impression of Julius Caesar, or maybe Augustus, but for some reason all I could see was Caligula or Nero.
When the cheers and applause died down, Stratos continued. “Some of you were put into teams yesterday. As a result, I see some concerned faces among you today. If you do not have a team now, don’t fret. Consider yourselves free agents, contractors, or even mercenaries if you prefer, able to work with any team. If you can convince them it’s worth it to work with you, of course.”
If you weren’t smart enough to figure it out before, it was pretty easy to tell who had been placed onto a team and who hadn’t by the way they reacted to this.
Stratos continued. “You are all still Players, and you are all still playing the game. Always.”
I think the last bit was supposed to give hope to teamless Players, but to me it sounded even more ominous than being warned to come prepared.