Akemi sat down in Agnor’s throne, and kicked her feet up.

“Ah,” she sighed, grinning. “Agnor, would you like some tea?”

She poured a steaming cup from her mother’s tea kettle into a pristine little cup.

As it turned out, that illusion persisted even after his death, like a strange, lingering middle finger.

Agnor’s disembodied skull, situated on the red velvet table in front of her, just stared back at her. No response.

“No tea for you? Sad. All mine, then.”

She took a long, piping hot sip as she reviewed her notifications.

You have leveled up! [Lv. 4 -> Lv. 5]

[+1 SP] [+1 STR, +1 DEX, +1 INT, +1 CHA] [+10 HP, +2 MP]

She opened her skill point shop. Her Level 3 Accountant skills were still locked.

Ugh, why?

Going by the logic of her last quest, she’d probably need to complete the current one to unlock the next rank of the Accountant skills. She wondered if she could acquire another class in the meantime. Seemed a waste to let the skill points linger.

Unless there’s a finite amount of skill points, like some kind of level cap mechanism. Then it might be best to put them all in one place.

She exited her notification panel and set her tea cup down. The best course of action was to be patient, she decided. She’d head out for Grimguard soon, hunt down that Accountant Office, and then go from there.

An aggressive pounding resounded from the front door.

“Agnor? Everything going alright in there? Your roof is, uh, on fire.”

Brutus. Akemi sighed.

She lowered her voice, trying to emulate a grouchy old skeleton.

“It’s going just fine!”

Persuasion Check (Easy)

Failed!

“Akemi?”

Shit.

Was worth a try.

She bolted out of the chair and hoisted herself atop the nearby bookcase. She scaled the books as if they were holds on an indoor climbing wall, ascending carefully until her hands found the smoldering hole in the ceiling. She managed to haul herself onto the roof just as Brutus heaved himself at the front door. The unsteady wooden thing fell like butter off of its hinges, and the guardsman trudged into the room, looking first concerned, then—stunned.

“Is that … is that Agnor’s skull?”

Brutus came to a halt by the table, stupefied. Akemi would have expected him to drop to his knees in mourning, or to throw his axe at her like a ginormous, deadly boomerang, but he did neither—opting to stand, bewildered, examining the skull in a doctorly fashion, as if it was a strange insect or an unusual fabric.

Akemi considered taking the obvious opportunity to make a run for it—the sun was sinking quickly over the horizon, and she doubted Brutus would chase her through the forests once she vaulted over the town’s flimsy fence—but something in his solemn, muted behavior intrigued her. A buffet of questions presented themself.

Just what kind of spell did Agnor have the townspeople under?

And what happens now that he’s dead?

Her morbid curiosity getting the better of her, she obliged.

“Yep, that’s him,” she responded, gazing down at him from her perch. “I didn’t behead him and melt his skin off, if that’s what you’re thinking. He was some sort of undead skeleton that had all of you fooled. Made you all out for a bunch of suckers. He called himself a .. mindshaper?”

The seconds ticked on as Brutus digested the information, like a newborn baby trying a particularly seasoned bit of food. He went pale, then a bit green.

“A mindshaper, aye? I can’t believe it,” he said, voice hollow. “That explains this strange feeling I’ve got wrapped around my head. This odd—numbness? Like all the unyielding loyalty I had to him just evaporated in an instant.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He glanced at the skull, and back to her.

“So then the real Agnor…”

“Try the basement,” Akemi said. “Heard his corpse might be rotting down there.”

He huffed, shaking his head. He seemed at a loss at what to say.

“‘Thank you Akemi’ would do just fine,” she added teasingly, feeling a bit too high off the kill.

Strangely, he didn’t seem offended—in fact, he seemed to agree.

“Yeah, thanks. I might have been stuck protecting that bag of bones for my whole life. So,” he clapped his fleshy hands together. “You did me a solid, I’ll do you a solid. Get on with ya.”

She raised an eyebrow. That wasn't the response she wanted. It left her feeling disgustingly... heroic.

“So you’re just… letting me go?”

She had planned on jumping from the roof in the next few seconds regardless. But she found his change of heart intriguing. Any kind of class that could invoke that amount of fraudulent loyalty in someone for so long was something to be both feared, and, more importantly, studied.

Maybe I could take Mindshaper on as a secondary class someday. I still have to figure out how all that works.

“Well, don’t make me repeat myself,” he said, waving his hand at her. “Either way, I’m not about to get stuck mucking about in some crime scene. I’ll let some other sorry fellow discover this one.” He scratched his head, then sighed. “What am I even doing here? I was supposed to check on my daughter hours ago. Sheesh, if I even have a daughter. This mindshaper really got his claws in deep, didn’t he? My head’s scrambled like roadkill.”

He left her without another word, slamming the front door behind himself.

—

So, to recap: Agnor’s Rest was in utter disarray, its townspeople walking about like headless pigeons, but, what mattered was thus: Akemi was now the proud owner of two new shoes.

That had been her big goal, after all.

She smiled, self-satisfied, as she walked down the gravel road away from the Rest, not feeling a single pebble between her toes.

It had been sixteen hours of straight walking. The sun had risen, the sun had fallen. It was a feat that would have flattened her on Earth. But here, in this new, artificially-strong body, with these supernaturally comfortable shoes? It was like gliding on clouds. The more she wore them in, the more they melded around her feet, until the leather fit like a perfect glove.

She didn’t intend to walk the whole way there. She just wanted to get out of dodge. Far enough from Agnor’s Rest that no one would recognize her. She was done relying on her Charisma—that was to say, her worst possible quality—to get her out of tricky situations.

“Eep. Eep.”

Akemi rolled her eyes. The pika, who had annoyingly decided to join her on her journey, didn’t seem to share her endurance. She had charitably let it sit in the hood of her jacket (as long as it agreed to temporarily mute its tail fire, something it could apparently do on command), but now it was getting hungry. And it would not let Akemi forget it.

“God, fine,” she said. “We’ll get you some berries or something.”

“Eeeep.”

“What? No berries? What are you, a carnivore?”

“Eep.”

“Seriously?”

And so Akemi’s curiosity got the best of her, and she presented the pika with a variety of foods. A satchel of green berries—possibly poisonous—that she foraged for in the nearby woods, a pigeon that she surprise-attacked with a display of knives, and a few toadstools.

The pika ate the pigeon, whole. Two bites, at most.

“Oh, so you’re terrifying,” she noted. “Got it.”

Akemi became immediately more fond of the animal.

They carried on until Akemi’s own stomach churned. She spotted an encampment off the side of the road: a small wooden fence encasing a couple of canvas tents. A small fire burned, reminding her of the one her and P sat by. She wondered if she’d ever meet her again. She had a strange sort of desire too—she wasn’t exactly sure what the feeling begged of her; was it a desire for revenge, for stealing all that potential experience? Not quite.

Maybe she just liked the way the woman smelled of freshly cindered flesh.

She thought about it idly as she hopped the short wooden fence. It occurred to her briefly that it probably wasn’t best to be so willy-nilly about jumping into someone else’s campsite, but she was feeling cocky after her win against Agnor. The world felt like her oyster. Plus, the tents were shabby and hacked together. And there were only two of them. Best case scenario, she’d have two more free kills under belt. Worst, she’d run as far as these turnshoes could carry her.

Pitched onto the fire was a hunk of meat, struck through with a metal bar. It looked delicious.

The pika agreed with an eep. Akemi shushed it, mouthing be quiet.

Carefully and quietly, she slid the steak off of its rod, letting it fall onto the wooden slab on the ground—some sort of makeshift cutting board. She then took the meat and the slab into her inventory. Would be best to consume it somewhere safer, away from prying eyes.

Akemi stilled when she heard voices stir within the tents.

“Did you hear that, Jore?”

“Hear what?”

“Like you left the meat sit out too long and now it’s melting off its stick?”

“Nonsense. I always cook a steak to perfection. And this one’s got another two minutes on it. Anything less and it’ll be as soft and milky as a newborn calf.”

“Gross. Just go check on it, idiot. Maybe some kind of were-rabbit got to it.”

“Sheesh. They don’t actually have were-rabbits out here, do they?”

As the voices bickered, Akemi crawled into a nearby brush, on the perimeter of the campsite. Just far enough away where she’d be comfortably out of view, but she could still see and hear them. She wanted to evaluate if they were worth staying around to stab.

“Don’t know, don’t care. Whatever answer gets you out of this tent faster.”

The front of the tent shrugged open, canvas falling away. Two horns peeked out, and a goat-ish face followed, looking back and forth with poorly-hidden fear. The figure had red ruby eyes, and a shaggy, furry face. His ears were pierced, with golden jewelry running up the lobe.

Jore D’Crosse | Level 2 Line Cook

Level 2. Akemi smiled wolfishly and stepped forward. The pika was getting well fed tonight.

Reputation: Lesser Villain

She halted in her tracks, staring at the notification before her. She’d never received one about someone’s reputation before.

Tutorial Tip! You can always see the reputation of people at a lower level than you.

But a villain? She hadn’t encountered another villain outside P and Nocturne, especially one who was below her level.

Suddenly, plans had changed.

Time to get some answers.