There was a lanky kid standing across from me, an opossum-sized, black-furred rodent under his arm. It had no skin or flesh on its head, with a clean, white, oversized skull. Beady eyes glared out from deeper in their sockets than they’d usually be set on a critter, and it wiggled its legs and flexed its long, scaley tail impatiently now and then. ‘Kid’ may have also been an unfair assessment of the chainer; I could tell he was younger than me by the odd shininess to his skin that people under twenty all seemed to have, and shorter than me (which was rare since I was only about five-foot-eight), but there was no weakness to the set of his jaw. There was casual confidence to his posture born not of youthful arrogance but having encountered the tide of the world and not getting crushed under its wake, and he held his squirming esper effortlessly in place despite its protests. He couldn’t have been younger than fifteen or older than twenty-five, and for that reason I still reserved the right to consider him a ‘kid’, but Red assured me there were no taboos in the Commonwealth about taking his money, so I believed him.
“Nice esper,” I nodded at him.
“Yeah,” he responded, somehow putting a drawl into one plain word.
“So the rules is simple; I want a good, clean fight. Nothin’ to the reproductives, no deathblows, and both sides can choose to throw in the metaphorical towel an’ forfeit if ya feel things are goin’ too far South. The bet is twenty gold standard. Any questions?”
“Uh… sidebar, Red?” He padded toward me and I leaned down to whisper in one of his overlage ears. “We don’t have twenty gold.”
“I know that,” he responded in a low, mumbling tone. “This is a grift, Glenn. You wanna make a nickel, or a dime?” How do nickels and dimes exist in this world!?
“All right, but what happens if we lose?”
“In that unlikely event, I’ll convince him I meant the pot is twenty gold, so we only pay ten.” He must’ve seen skepticism on my face, because he doubled down sternly. “Trust me on this one, chief, I done it a hundred times before. Besides, I got faith in Wysteria.” He patted me on the shoulder and moved back toward the middle. “All right, any questions from you?” The youth shook his head and lowered the skull-rat just above the earth. It grasped greedily at the ground, and a grin started to form on the kid’s face. That was the first time it occurred to me he didn’t seem to mind that my bound esper was the one running the show. Did he know? Could other chainers just… discern that? And if he did, why was he still so confident? “Let’s get it on!”
The second the rat touched the well-trod earth at the edge of town where we’d arranged our battle, it dug in with all four paws and tore a furrow toward Wysteria. Patiently, she blinked. Slowly. First her right eye, then her left. It was like they were operating in two different places on the timestream; she in some limpid pool of serenity and the skull-rat on a raging river rapid with extreme speed metal screaming in the background. It collided with her, forehead-to-forehead, and both of her eyes bulged in surprise and pain as it struck, a small burp-like noise escaping her body. The skull-rat bounced off and rebounded, once again digging claws into the earth to avoid skidding too far away. Wysteria only just now seemed to realize she was in a fight, rotating her body slightly to face the rodent with mild affront. The esper dashed toward her again, this time opening its mouth wide to show off those huge incisors. I felt a pang of concern in my gut, but as she hunkered down to build tension for her eventual leap it abated; the internet had often described frogs and toads as ‘mostly mouth with just enough leg to throw the mouth at food’, and Wysteria was no exception. In this instance, however, she kept her mouth closed and threw her full, considerable weight at the other esper, slamming down with great force. It seemed stunned, wobbling out from beneath her, and Wysteria held her head high and inflated her throat sack proudly.
“Don’t let her daze ya, Scrabbles! Bite her!” The kid’s yells of direction reminded me of two things; a pro wrestling manager yelling advice at ringside, and the fact that often in the fiction esper battles reminded me of, the animals’ handlers acted in part as coaches. Apparently, my efforts to push it out of my head in order not to assume things paid off. It seemed unwise to shout commands mid-combat; that would make it easy for the other chainer to counter, and that would result in fights being two spellcasters shouting commands and counter-commands while the espers stared awkwardly at one another. Still, between the two of us I assumed I had more experience with JRPG battles than Wysteria the terramor toad, so we’d go the ungraceful route for now.
“Use your Venomous Vapors!” I encouraged.
Wysteria turned to cast me a confused glance and it left Scrabbles with enough of an opening to bite into her meaty side. She was harder to puncture than I feared, but it still broke the skin, fresh claret leaking from within. I don’t know why, but I expected it to be a different color, and the brilliant scarlet was in such stark contrast to her muted earth tones that I felt a little weak in the gut. Wysteria wasn’t quite so shaken, however; lavender clouds flowed out of her mouth, and she used one arm to bat her opponent in frustration. I couldn’t imagine her slaps did much harm, but the lungfuls of noxious gas seemed to have an effect, as it started coughing far more adorably than I expected. I felt kind of bad; skull-faced or no, Scrabbles resembled an animal enough that my instinct to prevent creatures that don’t quite understand our world from getting exploited by it kicked in, but a glance at Red reminded me that they are fully sentient beings capable of communication and informed decision-making. Somewhere along the line, in some respect, for whatever reason, this rat agreed to fight. I couldn’t burden myself with the implausible responsibility of trying to make sure every single esper in the world was being given proper agency. At least… not yet.
The skull-rat stumbled out of the gas, which dissipated into little more than an aggressive stench of swamp water after it spread roughly five feet away from Wysteria. It tried to shake its head and get a deep breath, but that only sent it coughing again. The kid looked concerned, but less like I’d hurt his beloved pet and more that he was about to be out twenty gold. Wysteria saw her opportunity and hunkered down for another pounce, flattening her rival with her impressive belly. That blow was apparently enough for Scrabbles, as it didn’t get back up. I nervously watched to make sure it was still breathing, and allowed myself to exhale when I saw its chest rise and fall. The youth sighed and collected his combatant, weaving his fingers quickly over its body with annoyance. I tried to study his movements; focus my eyes on how the magic was interacting with the esper, spreading small, slow, white sparks from the magic-user to his charge.
“I didn’t know she could do poison,” he grumbled, tossing a small bag of gold with a braided drawstring that landed at my feet. “I’ma want the pouch back.”
“Sure,” I picked it up and took the twenty shiny coins contained within, then closed the gap between us and returned the soft cloth sack. “Good fight.”
“Yeah,” he said dejectedly, accepting it. I could’ve been a jerk about his sportsmanship, but I had a hard time believing I’d be in a better mood losing to some rando with a strategy I didn’t expect. I let the youth walk away, turning my attentions to my own esper pal.
“You gonna be OK, Wysteria?” I hunkered down to her level, examining the wound on her side, being careful not to touch it. A series of what sounded like noncommittal noises gurgled from her lips, and she relaxed her posture a bit.
“She says it hurts, but it ain’t that deep,” Red translated for me. “You think you can go another round?” He nodded at whatever Wysteria said, then turned to me. “Twenty turns into forty pretty fast. Maybe even a hundred if we’re smart about it. You want I should go track down another yokel for us to trounce?”
“Hang on just a minute,” I answered, “I wanna check something in the book first.”
We’d scouted a nearby secluded location before arranging the fight; a small copse of trees with decent cover and tufts of grass that made for perfect sitting. Red agreed it wouldn’t be wise to just whip the book out in public, and back alleys were often a better place to attract unwanted elements than the town square. It felt a little absurd, being so surreptitious about things. I never really had anything to hide in my life, no secret smuggling I needed to accomplish. There was no sneaking out past curfew in my past, no doing drugs or even smoking cigarettes; that came later and was ultimately a very brief flirtation with the habit. Other kids and teens wandered into the woods in a pack and caused trouble, and I’d heard more than enough salacious and dangerous stories about summer camp to make me both a little regretful and a lot relieved that I never had the opportunity or inclination to go. I wasn’t a perfect child, by any means, but I tended to only break the rules of minor consequence. I pirated music, did a little underage drinking in a controlled environment monitored by responsible adults, and fooled around with a couple of my exes while wearing protection. In some ways it felt like wasted youth; I could’ve done so much more stuff. Could’ve already had so many more experiences. My twenty-eighth birthday wasn’t that long ago, but I was closer to thirty than my teens by a long shot, and it seemed too irresponsible to be trying to make up for lost time. Beside that, I wasn’t sure I could take the risk of it all. Case in point; presently I was examining the roots of the tree to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally squish an errant beetle or something when I sat down. I’m not sure I was at any point in my life ready for the terrifying thrill of being chased by police while high as a kite. Pushing those thoughts out of my head, I planted my back against the bark of an old sycamore and cracked open the grimoire.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
First, an entry for ‘SKRAT’ had materialized within the pages, as well as an illustration of a skull-faced rodent that looked appropriately like the one we’d just fought. A lot of the details were still garbled, but we had slightly more information than the oeivolant. Nothing critically useful like elemental typing or weaknesses, but I’d already surmised that either wasn’t a thing in this world or it was merely dictated by logic. I skipped ahead to some of the other mundane things I expected to see; ‘Beginner’s Luck’ in the Record of Achievement to mark my first esper battle victory, as well as ticking off Lion’s Head in the Exploring Teren Balt list. My experience had also increased to twenty-four, which was just strange. For the first few days of travel, I checked the book rather frequently, both for lack of something better to do before bed, and overall curiosity about the system and how everything worked. Not once had my Xp increased, and the one night I forget to look, when we finally got to town, and it goes up twice. Was it counting social encounters? Why didn’t the innkeeper at the White Lion Inn count? Or the various shopkeepers and citizens I spoke with briefly throughout the day? Did the kid and his skrat count as two separate encounters for the purposes of Xp gain? Or was the clown factored into things for some reason? It was maddening. I had already lost whatever miniscule desires I might’ve had to game the system, but at least an understanding of when I could expect to receive Xp if I was pressed would be nice. An inkling of something to do to force the gain if I needed to grind.
The main event was under my Spell Index, and while there wasn’t a fully-described, brand-new spell there, there was another heading that read ‘Purge Condition’ with the details below it obscured by the dancing letters from an outdated dyslexia awareness commercial that I’d come to expect. I couldn’t tell you why I decided to pass my fingertips over it, but when I did it lit up and seemed to raise off the page a bit, the details becoming a bit clearer. ‘Will your power into another creature and direct it to remove all fatigue, temporary blindness or deafness effects, and purse all poisons, mundane diseases, venoms, and toxins from their body.’ Just like Parting the Veil, it had a listed cost of one quarter of my maximum mana and a casting time of a Direct Action. I flipped to my Personal Record again, and my Xp was similarly upraised and only listed fourteen. Certainly, this was the book giving me one last confirmation notice before I accepted learning the spell, and indicating that it would cost ten experience to do so. For the time being I wasn’t interested since Wysteria was immune to poisons, toxins, and venoms. I assumed I could keep the option in my pocket in case one of the other listed afflictions fell upon her, learning it if and when the need arose.
More importantly, this proved my theory; whatever magic was in this world, I had a basic enough grasp of it that I could learn spells with as little effort as focused observation, so long as I had the experience to spare for it. I did wonder what that meant in regards to Traits; why I hadn’t seen similar options available to me next to Entertainer or Knock on Wood, but it was a question that would have to wait for another time. Suddenly inspired by a stray thought, I flipped to the Esper Records and played my fingers over some of Wysteria’s listed information surprised to find I could now increase one of her Attributes, which would cost twenty Xp. I couldn’t figure out how to expand on her abilities, but as successful as her fight against Scrabbles the skrat was, I assumed her current options would suffice for now, anyhow.
“Anything new?” Red asked as he moseyed over.
“Yes!” I replied with a wide-eyed grin. “Literally the best-case scenario. It looks like I gain the opportunity to learn a spell by observing it in use, and can then choose to permanently memorize it later by spending experience points!”
“The stuff most games use to level up, right?” I’d been filling Red in on the finer points of tabletop game design during the last few days. We needed to talk about something, and we swiftly got tired of me asking ‘does X exist?’ questions about Barbavia and the Esperwild, both because he wasn’t an encyclopedia, and I was worried I’d spoil things for myself that I’d rather discover organically. “An’ you get four of ‘em every… uh… did we ever figure that out?”
“Still no clue! But~! It means we don’t have to grind up so much money before we go on the next leg of our journey. I wanna register with the esper League and see Barbavia. I wanna learn magic and have more esper battles… maybe even climb the ladder to the top!”
“One little win in a Podunk town an’ you’re this full of fire, eh?” He chuckled and shook his head in amused disbelief. I didn’t blame him; I hardly recognized the excitement welling inside me. It was a feeling I hadn’t been familiar with in longer than I was comfortable admitting. “All right, chief. We’ll set you up a couple more matches, get you some more capital to take care of all the expenses, an’ then you’re off on your journey.”
That curbed my enthusiasm a little. ‘We’ will set up fights and make money, but only ‘I’ would be off on the journey. It was the terms of our agreement, but it hurt a little to be reminded of it. I liked Wysteria, but we had no way of communicating; Red was my only friend in this world, and I wasn’t exactly flushed with them in the previous one. I forced myself to shake it off. I was glad to have him at my back for this first leg of my adventure, and the help he’d given me so far had been indispensable. Who knows how much he’d risked his neck searching for opponents, or how much more trouble he might get into finding the next one, or the one after that. I couldn’t ask him to keep at it if he had other matters to attend to, and I definitely had no intention of trying to force him.
The next fight Red arranged was against another terramor toad, therefore Venomous Vapors was useless, but Wysteria still managed to out-slam her opponent. Not only did we more than double our savings through more of Red’s chicanery, but I was also able to observe the chainer tending to her wounded comrade and made Healing Touch available to me for purchase. After enough spellwork to satisfy whatever a Direct Action was, it granted ‘fast healing’ to my target for the expected price of one quarter my maximum mana, and that persisted for my Charisma in turns. This was the first time I’d seen an effect reference a ‘turn’, and combat between espers certainly didn’t seem like one fighter was waiting on the other to move. Then again, in tabletop games actions were sort of broken down and abstracted. Different characters’ turns often overlapped, with initiative setting the stage for how we determined who reacted the quickest. While a player might take a few minutes to decide what they wanted their character to do, roll for it, and play it out, it was commonly accepted that the actions only took up six seconds of time within the game world. Most fights were over inside a minute or two, no matter how dramatic or how long they took in reality. Assuming that persisted here, the quickened recovery granted by Healing Touch would last eighteen seconds, which didn’t seem like a lot of time until I purchased the spell with a flourish of golden motes and tested it out on a battered Wysteria. The worst of her injuries vanished in what felt like an instant, and I felt another surge of enthusiasm pump through me.
We kept up the cycle until late evening; Red would find a mark, we’d place our bet, and Wysteria would waddle into combat. We drew a small crowd of curious onlookers as the hour grew late, and once the fight grew so rough that I was worried she’d be injured beyond what I could heal. We lost a sizable payout in forfeit, but through effort and determination we returned to the White Lion Inn with two hundred forty-six gold pieces, agreeing that festivities were in order to celebrate our gains. Only one small matter remained before us; unsurprisingly I hadn’t seen a chainer sever the link between them and their esper, so I would need to find tutelage for that, at the very least someone to demonstrate it for me. Red assured me he had a plan, we’d talk about it the next morning, and that I should relax and enjoy the feast for the night. I didn’t argue, and went to bed with a comfortably full belly and a light, exuberant heart.