Chapter Two

One year after I had developed the rare phenomenon of linked skills, and thanks to those linked skills, had also discovered an unexpected healing property to a common species of dungeon mushroom, I was on top of the world.

My mushrooms, now named after me, had made me famous and respected in academic circles, and the new discoveries I was making every other month on their properties and uses amazed the same teachers who earlier had bemoaned my slowness in grasping the basics of the subjects they taught.

Meanwhile, commercializing the use of the mushrooms in healing salves and potions had brought me fabulous wealth, enough to move my family into a three story house with more than one bathroom, and me into a smaller but still spacious loft apartment near the University and near adventurer school.

...

Boy, I really wish that was how things had worked out.

In real life, I'd only made one more useful discovery about the mushrooms - that they recovered even more HP, if the spores got carefully heated to the right degree before being mixed into salve or potion. After that, though, all the new discoveries were made by Magister Benzoledek or other lecturers at the University. Which only made sense, with them being experienced alchemists and wizards, and me only being a kid from adventurer school, but I still sighed the day I found out the mushrooms were now being called "Benzoledek's species".

Heating the spores made them more effective, but it also added a side effect to the salve or potion; it made the affected body part feel numb, or made the adventurer who drank the portion feel sleepy. These drawbacks limited the usefulness of the items in dungeon crawls, which meant we lost a lot of the market right there.

So even if all the profits from the mushroom-enhanced items had come to me, it would not have been enough to fund my house-and-separate-loft daydream. And if you're guessing that, due to my bad Haggle stat, I actually wound up with almost none of the profits, you'd be correct. Facing a consortium of the district's apothecaries, I made what I thought was an obvious win-win proposition. They saw immediately how they could cooperate among themselves to make it a win-lose instead, with the "lose" being my portion. I wound up with nearly nothing for my discovery, except a little continuing pocket money from a few regular customers who said they preferred the items I made, even if those of the apothecaries were almost equal in terms of HP.

I wound up waiting for another discovery to emerge from my linked skills, so I could try again. Or for a new skill to develop, one which would maybe be C-, or even B- or A-rank. Or for something, anything to happen that would show fate hadn't made a mistake in granting me that small sliver of potential.

As far as my family was concerned, a fluke was exactly what it was. My brother Fennek ragged me mercilessly for having bungled the potion negotiations, and losing my chance at wealth. His employment was - still is, for all I know - in a butcher shop. He chops the meat according to the shop's procedures; he salts it and cures it according to the shop's recipes. To be mocked for mishandling something new and different, by one who'd never tried anything new or different, grew to be a constant torment in my life.

And this is what led me down the path of addiction.

"Ahh, my most faithful customer," said the bearded man behind the counter, looking at me with a leer I didn't like. "You'll be wanting one of everything, won't you?"

"That would be ridiculous," I said, feigning cool detachment. "No, I'm far too busy to indulge to that degree. I just need - that is, I just feel like, like, a little diversion. That's all. Nothing more than that."

He chuckled, unpleasantly. "Oh, is that so, young fellow? I reckon you'll change your tune soon enough, when you see the merchandise."

"What do you take me for?" I demanded. "Yes, I've spent a few coppers here from time to time, but I can stop whenever I want - and in fact, I shall! Beneficent gods, you mistake me, if you think I'll dance to your tune merely for -"

"A crossover," he said softly, holding up a bound sheaf of paper sheets.

My heart - I never knew it could leap and sink in the same beat. "I - I have no interest in such a thing." But we both recognized my feeble lie.

"Oh?" I would swear, the Demon Lord himself never gloated so much in victory. His fingertip riffled the pages. "As I understand the plot - Bhobb of Johnes, the powerful stock trader, has finally been accepted to... Oh, I can't remember. What was it again? Oh, silly of me, you wouldn't know, as your interest in these stories is so casual -"

"The Yacht Club?" I trembled in excitement. Sixteen installments had built up to Bhobb's entry into that circle of power.

"Ah, yes! That was it. He thinks he's truly foxed his rival, the evil Sam von Schmith. ... Until suddenly Bhobb is arrested by the dark-clad minions of the Order of the SEC, and taken to their underground lair!"

"No!" The cry escaped me.

"He angered the SEC by breaking their rule against 'offsider trading'!"

"Impossible!" I pounded on the counter. I wasn't even sure how I'd gotten from the door to the counter. "Bhobb of Johnes doesn't cheat! He makes masterful trades with the SS-rank 'Spotting Trends' skill he was granted upon reincarnation!"

"Ah, but can he make the Order believe that himself? Or will he need rescue from..."

I trembled. Somehow I knew - it was too good to be true, but I knew...

The merchant held up a second sheaf of papers. "... From the masked avenger known as 'The Lightning Lawyer', Portia Purtoon!"

I sagged. Defeat was crushing, and yet, somehow, sweet. "How much for one of everything?" I whispered.

I do not know how much later I exited the shop, except that dusk was starting to overtake the day and shame had started to overtake the heady pleasure of indulgence. My head throbbed from stuffy air and vicarious tension and the awful letdown of the return to daily life.

"Oooh! There he is! My favorite mushroom guy! Rheen! Rheen! Luni, I'll introduce you!"

I turned, and forced a smile onto my face, greeting Zindee the Unstoppable, one of the five top-ranked students in adventurer school. I liked Zindee a lot, I really did. But her naming-day skill was a C-rank skill - she had started out at the level where I seemed to have petered out. And that naming day skill of hers? It was "Boundless Energy". No one else in the city had that skill, meaning no one had enough energy to keep up with her.

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Most people find these minor faults quite forgivable, because she's extremely friendly and quite a caring person. Also, because she's a tall, jaw-droppingly gorgeous blonde who favors high-stat bikini armor.

She was of course wearing that bikini armor as she bounced up to me. The girl who followed sedately behind her wore a more modest outfit: a style of cloak favored by spellcasters and healers, with the ends of the wide sleeves sewn into multiple small pockets. Zindee's skin was tan and her polished armor ruby and gold. This contrasted with her friend, whose brown skin was set off by the forest green of the cloak and the more varied green hues of the robes beneath.

"Luni, this is Rheen, he makes those really good potions I told you about that help me sleep when I'm in the dungeon. They don't even taste gross! Rheen, this is Luni. She's from the Southern Coast; we've been pen pals for a while and now she's an exchange student who's going to be with us on our senior dungeon crawl."

"Oh, have they decided where that's going to be?"

"Yes! Didn't you hear? They took forever to give approval, but they finally gave the go-ahead! We're crawling the Citadel!"

I gaped. "The Demon Lord's Citadel? It's been ten years since they approved a crawl there!" The "they" who had to approve in this case included not just the Adventurer's Guild, which usually went along with the school, but the Church, the City Council, and Her Majesty's Minister of Antiquities. Getting all those guys to approve the same venture was like some rare astrological conjunction.

"I know, right?" She rolled her eyes to signify the drama. "It took them fooooreeeeeeeveeeer to talk talk talk it all out! But they fiiiiiinally decided that our party has got a good balance and enough elite-rank skills that we should be safe."

Luni spoke up, lips twisting into a smirk. "Ah, you found a way to work it in."

I didn't know what Luni meant, at first. Zindee seemed to, but her response didn't make it any clearer to me. "I did not! That's unfair, Luni, I didn't have it when the application was made! You're being mean!"

Luni made a negating hand motion. "Don't get me wrong. It's understandable if you want to make a big deal of it. " I was getting more and more confused, until Luni said "They call it 'elite-rank' for a reason."

My face froze. Zindee had gained an elite-rank skill. She already had so much, and now she had even more.

Why, why, why did the beneficent gods give us our skills so unevenly? Why was it that one person might work months and years, accumulating a veritable mountain of XP, and in return for all that effort, the gods would grant them only one skill, fixed for life at F-rank? And another might make a single dungeon crawl, attaining not even enough XP for a single level, and yet emerge with a skill at one of the elite ranks, capable of moving to an even higher rank in time? Why did the gods see fit to grant such unearned -

"... rude here, Luni," Zindee was saying. "If it wasn't Rheen, who's always supporting me - Eh?" She stared at the smarting spot on my cheek, where I'd just slapped myself. "Rheen?"

"Insect," I lied. Anyone who didn't give Zindee credit for working hard and earning her success deserved some hard slapping. "Continue?"

She shyly asked if I'd like to see her status screen. I said I would, so she came around to stand beside me, putting her arm around my shoulder in a friendly way. I tried not to be distracted by the generously sized armor piece right next to my eyes.

The first thing I noticed was that her status screen, both rectangle and text, were copper instead of white - an effect of advancing levels, which I knew about but had never seen personally before. The second, standing out in glittering gold text, was her literally shiny new A-rank skill, "Phoenix Whirlwind".

"That sure sounds like a neat skill," I said. "Is it useful?"

"Well, it was sure useful when it came to me," she said. "We were on a crawl in the Garrison of the Night Army - you know, that fort south of the city? Our party got split by a teleport trap, and before I could catch up with the others, a mixed crowd of ghouls and Living Armors caught up with me. Now just a few of them, I would have been okay with, but they just kept coming! I was really starting to worry!

"And then, well, you know how it is when a skill comes in. One moment, you don't know what to do, and the next moment your mind and muscles know exactly what to do, and you throw all your will into it to make it happen."

Something in that description made my brows furrow, but because it was Zindee I didn't really have a chance to follow up. "Whoosh waah waah wooo-ooohh!!" She mimed her sword slashes and imitated the sound they'd made. "The ghouls caught fire when the flaming blade chopped through their undead flesh! The Living Armors crumpled under the blazing strokes! Soon enough I had destroyed or driven away every one of my attackers!" She paused, but only for a second. "And honestly, I think I might have overdone it, the more that I think about it. Because don't they say Living Armors are supposed to have really good equipment drops? Especially armor pieces, which makes sense when you think about it. But there was barely anything left of the Armors afterwards, so maybe I need more practice. Yeah, definitely practice." She nodded firmly, making her blonde hair dance. "Hey! Rheen, would you like to come with me and Luni this weekend on a practice crawl -"

"Um, problem with that," I said hastily. "Any dungeon that's high level enough to give you your practice is one where I'll be way over my head."

"Really?" She blinked. "But the last time I saw your status screen, it looked good, so if you've been keeping up a good pace of development -"

"But I haven't," I cut across her. I forced a smile onto my lips, and closed my eyes so that I wouldn't see looks of pity or contempt. "I'm pretty much where I was the last time you saw me. I don't know why I'm not moving forward that much, but there it is."

There was a long pause. "Maybe if you practiced more?" Zindee offered finally. "Some place easy, like the Ice Bat Cave?"

Luni sighed. "I'm not from here, so I don't know this Ice Bat Cave, but - is it actually an easy dungeon, or just easy for someone with strong fire magic?"

"W-well, of course fire magic would make it easier, but..."

Luni pressed ahead. "And how 'easy' are swarms of flying bats for someone with a weak overhand swing?"

"How would you know whether his overhand -"

Zindee's hot defense of me was shut down immediately as Luni's fingers squeezed the underside of my arm.

"I can tell by this flab," Luni shot back. "It doesn't matter if your Dex stat is gold off the charts, if you can't put any power behind it, it's not going to do any good."

At that point, I was half embarrassed to be talked about that way, and half grateful that Luni was breaking the news to Zindee in a way I couldn't. But the next thing she said drove out all thoughts of gratitude. "No matter how much you babysit this kid, Zindee, he's never going to catch up with you."

If my head hadn't hurt so much, at that moment. Or if my mushroom discovery had not been so long in the past. Or if my brother had not ragged on me that very morning, right up until the moment I slammed the door behind me. Or perhaps none of that would have kept Luni's words from hitting me like an Ice Hammer spell to my chest.

That's right, whispered the cold gray voice inside my heart. Doesn't everything make much more sense, now that someone came out and said the truth? You knew it all along. You're not your own person. You're just a pathetic child - a child who needs babysitting.

None of the sounds in my ears made any sense. They didn't have to. I was finally confronting the sense, the knowledge, that I had denied for so long. Catch up with Zindee? I wasn't even going to ever catch up with me - with the me I would have been, should have been, if I hadn't been frittering my life away on nothing -

Suddenly my legs were moving for me, on their own, running in the direction of my house. I would change everything, starting now. I would throw away everything holding me back, starting with that shameful pile of all the phony stories I'd collected about stock traders and lawyers and all the other people who only existed in fantasy worlds. No, better than throwing them away, I'd burn them to ashes -

"Rheen, LOOK OUT!" Zindee screamed.

I turned in the middle of the street just in time to see a hippogriff-drawn cart hurtling right towards me. That was in the last second before my whole world exploded in pain.

Distantly, very distantly, I was aware of Zindee and even Luni screaming and crying over my broken body. A body I seemed to already be outside of.

That was probably the dumbest thing I ever did in my life, I thought foggily.

Also, the last?

I considered momentarily. Yeah. Probably.

But as I was going to discover, things could still get worse.