I ran a hand over the back of my neck, trying to chase away the shiver that had just ran down my spine. He’d always been raised to be a child soldier, and the book and its sequels never let him become anything beyond that. This went back to the old argument of nature versus nurture, and the question of Cain even being able to become anything else than his destiny.
“Before you suggest school, because I have a nagging feeling that will be one of the next words to come out of your mouth,” Cain spoke, “There isn’t much I can learn from adults who’ve grown up on lies, or kids who can’t control their skills. You haven’t gotten into any fights with E’s and D’s whom you couldn’t fight back against out of pity, and it shows.”
“If only you weren’t an S ranker …” I muttered.
“You’d be dead.” He shrugged. “Or very badly wounded at the hands of Mister Solomon. I’d ask you to teach me, but I don’t think I have much to learn from you,”
“Manners for starters,” I interrupted with a bemused scoff.
“I meant about combat and the System.” He corrected himself with a sigh. “You don’t know much about your own skills. It would be unfair to ask you how to optimise mine.”
My eyes went wide with the realisation that it was the other way around. His skills had been described in detail, thanks to Huang’s POV. And even though I hadn’t studied his character as much as I had studied some others, going on deep dives on forums and web archives, I remembered a fair bit.
“Your shadow puppet skill had a range for duration and power trade-off. You like to miss on purpose when you use it at 100 to 500 meters, to hide that fact. Primal hunger had a cap of 100 luck per hour, which will reset if your own luck drops to 0, making it a dangerous skill to use mid-battle, especially considering the 3-second delay between luck gain and consumption -” I cut myself off just as I was about to say ‘of flesh’. I had gotten so into this mindset of proving him wrong, that I had forgotten how dark some of his skills were.
“How could you possibly know that?” He looked at me in stupor.
“The book. The one I told you about,”
I realised that I hadn’t told him he was in it. I’d always spoken about it as if it were only linked to me, and even then in an indirect way. I scratched my cheek, as I tried to think of a way out of this.
Cain grabbed my arm, and pulled it back down to the table.
“I was in it?” He wasn’t asking per se, but he was unsure of his words.
“That’s how I knew where to find you.”
“Yes, you told me that, but I thought, … you never told me I had a part in the story-” he looked to the side, struggling to decide if he should be upset or excited. “Who was I? What did I do? Wait, was I with that man of yours or against him?”
“You were … a fighter.” I chose my words carefully. “You fought alongside Huang, who I can’t reiterate enough has nothing to do with me, in his quest for immortality, at the-”
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“Yeah, yeah, you told me about him this morning.” Cain interrupted, having settled on excited. “But if you know who I was in the book, you can make me into that person. We can stop with this chit-chat of my future and all that, and you can write down a training routine,”
I grabbed one of his hands, interrupting the sudden and overenthusiastic outburst.
“I know you don’t see a problem with focusing on nothing but fighting, but at your age you,” I shook my head and pulled away. “Never mind. I’ll tell you what I know about your skills.” Last time I’d made a decision for him, it ended very badly, with my suicide in Canada, so perhaps it was best I let him have this. It wasn’t as if I had much to teach him anyway, as my knowledge from the books did not directly translate into much of anything in regards to the System.
The way his eyes lit up as I said that didn’t sit right with me.
“On one condition though,” I continued, “You need to give some serious thought to what you want to do in life. Fighting isn’t a profession.”
“It’s a calling. Or so they’ve told me at least.” Cain corrected. Thankfully that seemed to have struck something within him, as he glanced away, thinking. “What’s your profession? What do you do in life?”
“I’m a barista.”
“But you don’t really like it, do you?”
“Hey!” I protested out of habit. He had a point.
“Can I see your ESW?”
I scoffed. I did not remember what state I had left that thing in after my last session of figuring it out, and I was worried that I’d lose all my credibility if Cain were to see it.
“No, but I can tell you whatever you want to know.” I replied instead.
“I want to know what you were meant to do.” He grunted in annoyance, as if that was the obvious answer. “What are your top skills in each category?”
“Planar shift, Mirror, Traitor’s lament,” I read out. “And a whole set of data analysis skills I will never get to use.” I added, not without a touch of nostalgia in my voice.
Cain hadn’t said it, and he likely wasn’t thinking it either, but he had a point. I had a life before this, with goals, and milestones, and more to it than day-to-day living, and surviving monster attacks. I sighed, and shook my head:
“You and I are like two different engraving on the same side of a coin; facing the same problem of an uncertain future.” When I saw Cain’s confused face, I smiled in amusement. Although, it remained to be seen if he was confused by my theatrics or by the point I was trying to make, so I continued, “Let’s take it one day at a time for now. I can recap all I know about your skills one of these days, and we can see if we can find some of those documentary series on various jobs.”
I almost wanted to add that those might convince him to try out school, but from the way he spoke about it, it seemed he’d already given it a shot, likely back in Canada, and it hadn’t stuck.
“Why can’t you tell me today? I won’t run away afterwards, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Because we’ve just come out of a near-death experience not even a full day ago, and I’m not sure you’re in the right mindset to memorise things.”
“Hmpf.” He hopped off the kitchen stool, and stormed off to the couch, arms over his chest.
“I’m not in the right mindset to remember everything, for sure,” I added.
Remembering was the easy part, but combining what the book said with how the world and the System actually operated was another. At the same time, I felt bad for keeping Cain hanging. But this was better than taking risks and experimenting with his skills without fully understanding their effect.
“Hey, do you wanna go to a Wild Land this afternoon instead?” I asked, trying to brighten his mood.
He mumbled something about it being a mediocre replacement but went to his room to get changed anyway. I used the opportunity to check my phone, and smiled when I saw a text from Etienne confirming out date for tomorrow. A quick search also showed that the weather was starting to improve, with below-zero temperatures, but no snow. It was the perfect weather for a date, even though we were planning on spending most of our time indoors. Those words gave me the strangest feeling of deja-vu, but I shrugged it off and quickly went to change as well. After all, the weather could be perfect for many things.
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