ILIAS PAYNE
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One by one, the other participants returned to their tables, celebrating how they were getting another week off. Thaddeus chugged his drink smugly.
Asher snarked in the corner. “Your theory is highly plausible. You’re smart for figuring it out, but an idiot for sharing it.”
I shook my head at Thaddeus. “Do you know how to whisper? Why didn’t you bother to keep that between the six of us?”
“Or kept quiet until you get back to your room and share it then?” Roswaal asked. “So only the three of you know.”
“Or keep it to yourself to drastically raise the chances of you passing the exam,” Erina asked.
“I realized then and there and got excited, okay?” Thaddeus replied. “When you come upon a realization, don’t you blurt it out in celebration?”
“Well, this is a very different situation. Blurting out things that could’ve given you an advantage is stupid.”
“Besides, if I had an advantage, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“There is no such thing as fair during a fight.” Zwergin slammed his mug on the table. Loud enough to draw our attention but quiet enough that he was still calm. “You’re not trying to sabotage us with fake information, are you?”
“He’s not,” I said. “He’s not smart enough to do that.”
The dwarf howled. “Alright, that’s enough for me then. It looks like you’ve convinced everyone that the test won’t be happening until next week, including me. But just to be safe, I’m still going to assume that X-day will be falling this week.”
The topic died down, giving us a chance to clean our plates and empty our mugs.
Thaddeus returned after getting a refill. “Who at this table knows what the others' abilities are? You don’t have to say what the ability is, just who knows.”
“Is this another trick?” Zwergin asked.
“I just want to know who knows each other’s secrets—a little icebreaker. If I wanted information on what everyone’s abilities are, I would’ve approached each person alone and asked separately.”
“You did,” Erina said. “You asked me if I knew what everyone’s abilities were earlier this morning.”
“Liar! I did not!”
Erina was either indifferent or serious most of the time. This was the first time I’d seen her try to jest with us.
“Me too,” I said. “You asked me when we were in the hot springs last night.”
“Liar! You didn’t come to the hot springs with me. You said you were too tired.” He pointed an accusing finger at us. “You two are liars!”
Chris raised a hand. “You asked me as well.”
“No, I didn’t! We didn’t haven’t seen each other since we climbed off that dragon.”
“Now that you mentioned it, someone slipped a note under my door this morning asking me to meet up in the bar tonight,” Zwergin said. “That must’ve been you.”
By this point, Thaddeus’ eyes began tearing up. “I didn’t do any of these… That wasn’t me. Why am I getting blamed?”
He really does have sensitive feelings.
“Oh.” Roswaal chuckled. “That was me.”
“It was?” he sniffled. “You can do that?”
“It’s one of my abilities. I thought it’d be fun to mess with the others.”
Thaddeus wiped his tears, his eyebrows pulled together giving him the look of a toddler throwing a tantrum. “It’s not funny.”
When Thaddeus wasn’t looking, Roswaal gave us a wink.
Thanks for taking one for the team.
“To make it up for Thaddeus, I think we should do his little icebreaker,” Roswaal suggested. “We’re only saying who’s abilities we know, not the ability itself. We’re also not allowed to ask someone to reveal another person’s ability.”
The rest of us seconded it.
“Good, I just activated a contract when everyone agreed to the second part,” Zwergin explained. “Now if any of us breaks that contract, the others will know which two people broke it.”
“Smart intuition, old man. Since I instigated the prank earlier, I think it’s only fair that I go first,” Roswaal said. “Everyone in this room knows what Erina can do. When Zwergin and I rescued Billie and her bird, I saw him use one of his abilities. Thaddeus also revealed his cards when he tried to break out of my Jailhouse Rock. Ilias, Thaddeus, and Erina’s party name was Earth, Wind, and Fire. Thaddeus is earth, Erina is fire, which means Ilias must be wind.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
People believing I can only perform wind is good. It’s true that I’m most familiar with wind, but that doesn’t mean the other elements were off-limits. I just wasn’t as smooth with them.
“One of his abilities,” Zwergin repeated. “Ha! I know more about Roswaal’s abilities than any of you. We saw what Thaddeus can do; as well as Erina. And with the pattern Roswaal pointed out, you can throw Ilias in there as well.”
Erina set aside her plate. It was so clean that there wasn’t a single spec of scrap on it. “For me, I only know Master Roswaal, Master Ilias, and Master Thaddeus’ abilities.”
“Everyone here knows what I can do,” Thaddeus claimed. “But I only know what Ilias, Erina, and a little bit of what Roswaal is capable of.”
“I guess it’s my turn,” I said. “It looks like all of you know what I can do because of a pattern Roswaal noticed. But only Thaddeus and Erina know the specifics.”
There was only one person at the table whose name wasn’t mentioned. We all turned towards her.
“Yay!” Chris wiped the beer foam on her lip, slamming her mug on the table. “No one knows what I can do! Nya!”
“No one knows what you’re capable of?” Thaddeus asked. “Zwergin, you liar! You said you took the exam twice with her.”
“That doesn’t mean I know what she can do,” the dwarf retorted.
Chris leaned back in her chair, grinning slyly. “I’d give you a hint, but I don’t want to enhance your chances of finding a counter to my ability.”
She always had a playful personality. We’re never going to guess what her abilities are until she uses them.
“Are you a skin-changer?” I asked.
Chris pointed at me. “Nya! Very very very very very good guess. But unfortunately also very wrong.”
“Skin-changer?” Erina asked. “What is that?”
“For you to know what skin-changers are, you need to know the history of beast people.”
Before there were five, there were only four great races—terrans, nandirs, elves, and dwarves.
At the beginning of King LaFleur’s reign, several jynxists decided to try and impress him by artificially creating new creatures by splicing together existing ones. Their goal was to create strong and obedient creatures that could be used as super-soldiers.
During the early years of their experiments, the spliced creatures would die within a day. But the more time they devoted to this project, the longer the lifespan of their experiments were. Soon enough, the experiments would live the average lifespans of whatever animals it was made of.
These experiments were named chimeras. The jynxists designed the chimeras so that all were biologically female and had no reproduction organs. It would be impossible for them to reproduce if two or more escaped.
Each chimera sported a different look at first but as the jynxists combined them, they all began sharing a unified look—insect-like creatures with bodies made of only muscle and skin.
One day, the facility holding them caught fire and the chimeras escaped, wreaking havoc and causing ecosystems to fall out of balance. Luckily they were scared of humans. The jynxists didn’t want to be held accountable and kept quiet because, without the ability to reproduce, these chimeras would be gone after a generation. King LaFleur found out and heeded the jynxists’ advice to wait for the chimeras to die out before having them hanged.
One generation came which turned to two which turned to five, yet the chimeras continued to wreak havoc and, according to reports, it seemed as if they were growing in numbers.
That was when a discovery was made—since chimeras lacked normal reproduction organs, they reproduced through consumption. The chimeras operated like ants, where the queen’s only job was to eat and lay egg sacs of its offspring. The offspring would be a hybrid of the last two creatures it ate. These offspring would become soldiers whose jobs were to scavenge for food and bring them back to the queen.
With their sheer numbers, it was inevitable that chimeras began to see humans as prey—which was what happened when a terran child was captured by chimera soldiers and devoured by a queen. The next batch of offspring were humanoid hybrids of higher intelligence and strength. Some even having the ability to perform basic jynx. This in turn caused the chimeras to develop a taste for humans.
Child and elderly terrans, nandirs, elves, and dwarves were picked off and devoured by the chimeras throughout the country, causing their diet to be made up of fifty percent humans.
With these new humanoid hybrids, King LaFleur declared a state of emergency and ordered the extermination of the chimeras.
During this Chimera War Of Extermination, the humanoid-hybrids began becoming sentient—gaining humanistic attributes such as empathy and individualism. This caused the humanoid hybrids to draw out their humanity and desert their chimera hierarchy to start their own isolated villages throughout Armestis. They were scared to go back to their queens or join the humans’ side. But some of these deserters had a strong enough resolve to confront King LaFleur and beg them to spare the humanized chimeras. The king gave them an option to either help exterminate the chimeras or be hanged.
The answer wasn’t hard to pick and, within two years, the chimeras were wiped out. These humanoid-hybrids then begged King LaFleur and the four great races to spare the others that had settled peacefully.
Against everyone’s protest saying that these humanoids would become violent like they once were, King LaFleur swore to protect them, saying that it wasn’t their choice for their ancestors to be eaten and for them to turn out the way they were. But it was their choice and humanity that compelled them to help exterminate their own kind. For that, they had the right of living normally like any other race.
The people despised these leftover chimeras, segregating the ones that moved into human settlements and treating them like demons. But over the next hundred years, they were slowly accepted into society. King LaFleur gave them the name beastfolk as he didn’t want them to be associated with chimeras. Due to their important settlements and sheer numbers, their status was promoted, making them the fifth great race.
“Ah, so that’s why Ivan and Chris are both technically beast people despite looking completely different.” Thaddeus scratched his head. “But what’s a skin-changer?”
“Some beast people had the ability to temporarily transform into whatever animal is mixed with them. They were called skin-changers,” Chris explained. “If I could skin-change, I would turn into a giant cat. If Ivan could, he would be a giant chameleon. But as beast people were slowly accepted into society, their ability to skin-change slowly disappeared. There hasn’t been a skinchanger in over eight hundred years.”
“I’m pretty sure the ability to skin-change is a type of self-contract,” Zwergin theorized. “I think the beast people that had the ability made an unconscious contract with themselves. Whatever the conditions were, it must’ve been specific to back then.”
Chris laughed nervously. “Anyways, you guys lose. You still haven’t figured out my abilities.”