The days following the delving incident were odd. It felt weird that after everything, he could just get up, walk around, and go about his day like nothing happened. But something had happened. Zach was living proof, a reminder of everything they failed to account for.
A news crew came by on the third day, and was seen off just as quickly by Hammond. They accepted his ‘this is private property, screw off’ explanation after he faked a small earthquake to scare them back onto their chopper. And even then the reporter looked like a fisher reluctantly reeling in an empty net.
Rift accidents are probably not even that uncommon. Most of Wett is deep sea or uninhabited shallows. Rifts have to be popping up everywhere, why should they be so interested in us?
He still went to do his ten kilometer jog around Seagull Island, like he always did in the morning.
“Anybody signed up for tours today?” he asked Miss Barnabie, drying his hair with a towel.
“None, hun,” Miss Barnabie yelled from across the diner.
“Oh. Can I help with something else?”
“You can go home today, nothing much to do but stare at the chalkboard.” It sounded like she was trying to be considerate.
She knows what we did. Can’t keep secrets from anyone here.
“Hm,” was all he answered with.
“I’ll give you a holler if anybody does decide to show up.”
“Mhm.” He tore his eyes away from the chalk timetables. “Thanks, Miss Barnabie.”
He left for home, nearly tripping a dozen times as he made for the orphanage, where a basket of laundry was waiting to be strung up. The cheap baseline material felt so soft and pliable in his hands. A bundle of bedding had gotten bundled together, but when he gave it a good tug like always, he heard a distinct and awfully loud riiip.
The duvet covers were untangled, but one of them now had a new peephole in it.
Carpcrap. That one was getting old, I guess.
He went and did the same for another bunch of covers, and one of them ripped again. That was when he realized the issue.
It wasn’t the covers, it was him. He’d tiered up barely two weeks ago, then again a few days before today. That was why he was tripping as well, his mind wasn’t quite used to his body yet.
Is this how Claire felt when she first settled here?
He was about to turn around and ask her for help when he noticed the gaggle of little orphans watching curiously from beyond the clotheslines. The moment they caught his attention, they mobbed him, bombarding him with all kinds of questions while pawing at his T-shirt and practically clambering all over them.
“Isaac! You’re alive.”
“Of course he’s alive.”
“I heard he lost a hand!”
“I heard he lost his nuts.”
“Did you get any loot?”
“Isaac’s a delver now. He doesn’t have time to answer your stupid questions.”
“You’re stupid!”
“Nuh-uh!”
Panic rose. He raised his hands, trying to get them out of the way so he wouldn’t hit any of them by accident, but that just gave the little shits the opening to start tickling him.
“The rift, tell us about the rift.”
“Isaac! Did you kill a dragon?”
“Stop, sto-op, stop!” He’d practically yelled that, but it had come out a bit more loud than he had intended. The kids stopped to stare at him. For a moment, he thought that they were scared of him, and he realized that nothing terrified him more.
“You’re so loud,” said Kyle, a notable troublemaker in the making. “You’re like Hammond when he farts!”
Isaac blinked. Right, they were all kids twelve and under, they probably couldn’t imagine all the things Isaac could do if he slipped up.
He wasn’t going to slip up. That was his responsibility.
“Yes, I was in a rift. And it was a crab,” he said, “with five eyes and ten arms. Big as a house, and as loud as Kyle.”
“Did it shoot lasers?”
“No, but it was poisonous. It knocked me down, and was almost about to pinch my butt with a big claw when Zach stabbed it through the noggin. And that’s how it died.”
“Then how did he lose his hand?” Kyle asked, and wasn’t that still a fresh wound.
“Well… I tripped, and when he tried to help me up, the crab in its dying breath snipped it off. Blood gushed everywhere. I could see his bones.”
There. That’ll scare them.
Most of them didn’t ask for another rendition after that, most except Kyle.
“What did the blood look like?” he asked. “Was it red? The crab-blood I mean. How far did it spurt? I’ve never seen a bone before, not on someone alive. What really happened to Zach’s hand? Did you pick it up? Can I see it?”
Isaac breathed in and out unsteadily, then took a clean bedsheet and wrapped Kyle up in a big burrito, before rolling him into the living room where everyone quickly caught on that rolling and spinning a helpless nosy kid was pretty fun. They made a game out of it, something between twist-like-a-mink and spin the bottle.
Hopefully that would keep them out of Isaac’s hair. Just because there wasn’t much to do didn’t mean he wasn’t busy. There was laundry to do, Fluffkins needed cleaning and walkies, and—
Lost in thought, he turned a corner into the kitchen and bumped into Claire.
“Claire,” he groaned. “Why did nobody tell me that tiering up made easy things harder?”
“Because normally, people don’t go as fast as you,” she said, bopping him on the nose. “And they have rest periods, tutors and tutorials. Is something bothering you?”
“I ripped two sheets and then got scared when the little ones started mobbing me.”
“Ah,” she said as he showed her the latest victims of his increased strength. “I understand. Come, let us join in conversation and in making the laundry.”
+++
So there Isaac was, doing laundry with Claire on a fine summer midday, with so many questions bubbling up his throat and so much he couldn’t say.
“You handled them fairly well,” she started, nice and welcoming. “You know, I always envied people with people skills like this. But of you, I am always proud.”
“Hm.” Not my greatest answer.
“Is everything a-ok?” she asked.
“We could stand to use less detergent,” he said, getting to work on the basket of bedsheets and pillow covers.
“I am talking about you.” A pair of cool hands clasped around his chest. “Any nightmares? Anything you wish to talk about?”
“Some.” It felt like the lion’s share of the wave of strain was rearing back to hit him later, or be paid in rates, possibly forever. “You were right about the sleep by the way. I only need six hours now instead of eight.”
She scrutinized him for a long moment before breaking out into a sigh. Her features softened.
“Isaac, you do not have to make yourself feel like you need to do this.”
This. She always called it this, because adventurer was somehow too hard to say. “I’m not. I always wanted to become an adventurer.”
“When you were little, yes.” She paused. “Is that still true?”
He hung up a double-mattress as a screen between himself and Claire. Nevermind that she could burn it, tear it apart with her bare hands, or just walk around. She leaned over it, just two eyes peeking above the wall of white.
“We start your training in two days, but we can delay it if you want.”
“No.” Anything but that. “No. I’m doing fine. I’m practically all healed up, except for my fingers.”
There was a scrutinizing silence followed by a sigh. “Get your skill traded and absorbed into your core. And make sure that old coot gives you the right amount of change.”
“Alright.” He would do it tomorrow, or maybe the day after. It was a skill after all, the thing Zach lost his hand for. He couldn’t trade it in poorly, couldn’t make a bad decision and fail.
He frowned, and continued to hang up laundry in silence.
+++
Another day, another run, another series of obstacles.
Getting out of bed felt hard, harder than usual. Isaac put it off to the weather, got dressed, and headed out.
The run was over in the blink of an eye. It wasn’t the comfort he knew it to be, the solvable problem he had every answer for. He spent so long staring up at the shower afterwards that the water had turned cold.
Keep moving. Maybe try for a second round.
He blinked some water away, and realized that maybe he could do a second ten kilometer round. He was Tier 2 now, and the feeling of energy and lightness ran through every limb. The first run had still been exhausting, but not quite exhausting enough. Usually Sophia was only five minutes behind, but he didn’t have to cede the shower until twenty had passed.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“So, finally decided on your skill?” she asked as she exited the shower with a towel wrapped around her head. It made her look like she was wearing a beehive, though Isaac wasn’t up for cheeky comments.
“Skill.” Right. He’d immersed himself in the catalog for days. [Water bolt] was sitting in his pockets, ready for a trade. “I’m getting a… skill.”
“Hey. Isaac. You doing ok?”
“I…” They stopped in the middle of the path to the orphanage. It was a thin path hewn into the side of a hill, fastened with wooden logs and guard rails where it became too steep. Nobody was around, but just standing there with his back to Sophia, it felt like he was getting in everyone’s way.
And that finally did it.
“It should have been me,” he said after a much too long break. “Down in the rift, I fucked up. Zach was reckless, yes, but bravetoo. He knew what he was doing. Me? I got knocked on my ass twice. I’m supposed to be the big one, the strong one. How could I fuck that up?”
Sophia was silent. It allowed him to pretend that she wasn’t there, and that nobody could see him cry.
“That second time, if I hadn’t frozen up, Zach wouldn’t have lost his hand. If I hadn’t told him, none of this would have happened. It was my fault. Me.”
And he didn’t deserve tiering up after all that, gaining a mana crystal worth twice his entire savings, and a skill to boot. He didn’t deserve the care and attention that Claire and Hammond were giving him, and would give when the training started for real. And above all, he didn’t deserve that no one was even the tiniest bit angry with him.
“If you say one more self-deprecating word, I’ll kick you.”
He turned. Sophia looked about as uncomfortable and upset as she could be. She didn’t deal with emotions well.
“Sorry. I know I can be… abrasive. And violent.” She said it as if the words alone were trying to crawl back down her throat. “If it makes you feel better… you can punch me back once?”
Isaac slammed a nearby gnarled fig tree with his bare fist. The bark cracked, but the wood beneath was still hard and hurtful.
“Ok, point taken,” Sophia squeaked quietly. “Now it feels like I am the stupid one for wanting to join you on the adventurer exam as a Tier 1. Maybe that’s the uniting factor between Zach, you, and me. We’re all idiots trying to help eachother out-idiot ourselves.”
Isaac chuckled. He didn’t even want to. He was still wiping his embarrassment from his eyes.
Conceptualizing what the exam represented was about as difficult as trying to understand how exactly it would take place for seven million people on the same day. Sure they were spread across the planet, but if one examiner took care of a hundred people, that still required seventy thousand examiners.
That was a lot of high-tiers.
“Is everyone there going to be Tier 2?”
“No.” But just thinking about it was helping him center his thoughts. “We’ll be at a disadvantage, even if you weren’t Tier 1. I looked it up; there are people that have prepared their entire life to get a place among the lucky one hundred.”
“So what? Moping isn’t productive. You earned whatever you got from the rift, the good, and the bad. You're an idiot, but not as big an idiot as Zach, which is why you’re in a position to fix his mistakes as well as yours. Not that anyone is expecting that of you, but it’s what you want, right?”
“So true.” Maybe it was just his own expectations that were weighing him down so much. Maybe he just needed to recontextualize what he was going to accomplish over the following months in short, simple terms.
It’s not over. I can fix this. I am going to become an adventurer and fix this.
“Thanks Sophia. I feel a lot better now.” He stood up and let out a deep breath. “One step at a time.”
“That’s the spirit. Now, what skill are you trading your [Water bolt] for?”
“Oh, is that why you’ve been following me around all day?”
“I’m hurt. You think I’d exploit your emotional turmoil just for that?” She batted her eyelashes innocently. “I would only do it ironically. Now out with it.”
“A skill. I am getting a skill.”
“Har Har. Secrecy doesn’t suite you half as much as Zach. We’re adventuring together, y’know.” Sophia bumped his hip with hers. “Come on, give me a hint. I’d be very disappointed if your whole plan hinges on blowing everything around you and yourself up with a [Final Detonation].”
That wasn’t a bad plan. Assuming you could somehow become invulnerable to explosions. But Isaac had a better idea.
+++
Torwig’s Skillshop & Sundries beckoned with the suspicious mundanity of every kiosk that sold magic and had some sort of interdimensional pocket door in the back. There wasn’t even a hole in the wall where it used to be, just a wall and shelves filled with overpriced seashells.
Suspiciously. Mundane.
“Is Fluffkins in?” Isaac asked. “I’d like to thank him for a few things, and clean his fur out. I also brought some tuna.”
“His vacation is over,” Torwig muttered, taking the can. “He’s back with his master, doing gods-know-what.”
Isaac nodded wisely. A dog that knew how doors worked could go wherever he wanted. Wait, that meant he couldn’t take him out for walks like he’d promised. But looking at him, he didn’t seem to mind.
I’ll file it under ‘to do later’.
“I assume you’ve come to trade in the skill you found for a more useful one?” Torwig asked.
Isaac nodded, and pointed at the catalog with a splitting grin. “Page 327-2. [Ball Lightning of Orbiting] is a skill that can target people, won’t hurt the target, and is within my price range.”
“A [Ball Lightning] variant?” Torwig asked. “Boy, you can stop someone’s heart with those.”
“It is not a lethal offensive skill, it’s a defensive skill. The ball always orbits around the caster, its people’s faults if they walk into it.”
He was quite proud of himself for having discovered that much. His brick really was handy for saving all kinds of information, even if sorting through it had been quite the ordeal.
It was a good idea, judging by the smirk on Torwig’s lips. “Not bad, kid. Just one little problem. That price tag,” he said, tapping the catalog with his pen, “is from last year. If you’d come to me then, exchanging it for your [Waterbolt] would have been an even trade.”
“What?” Isaac frowned, as Torwig added three zeroes to the price tag. “Torwig, I thought we were friends.”
“Not much to do. Some schmuck found a new support skill in an undiscovered rift that enables a bunch of lightning-focused builds. If a build becomes popular, everything that makes it up surges in demand as well.” He shrugged and it was all Isaac could do not to scream.
Tapping his feet, Isaac stared at the ceiling for a long time. If skirting the rules wouldn’t get him anywhere, then there wasn’t much else he could choose from.
A light fist tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, brosef, tell me what build you’re going for so I can help you out.”
“I was going to go for a sort of infighting-mage build.” If he couldn’t contend with others in melee skill and his range was nonexistent, he’d just have to hit them from point-blank.Not that it would work without at least one offensive spell. A mage focused on his castable skills for maximum impact after all, and he needed something that would get him a shot at the adventurer exam.
Even finding the right true skill was hard. It needed to work first and foremost, and couldn’t be lethal to use on himself. No matter how much he wanted one, it couldn’t be a strengthening skill or a healing skill because those were the most expensive categories of skills, worth orders of magnitude more than [Water bolt]. He’d looked up videos of people using [Water bolt], and determined that while the bolt of pressurized water was conjured out of mana from roughly an arm’s length away, it was too fast to dodge, and he’d have to aim at people behind him, which was equally as infeasible.
He was drawing blanks with all the popular skills, when he turned to look to Sophia. “Interraptor.”
Sophia paused. “You’re serious? That old fantasy?”
“I live to make other’s lives miserable.” I seem to be pretty good at that. “Like what you did to those delver girls, except instead of a social disaster, I’ll be a physical one.”
Sophia snorted a laugh. “Rude. But sure, go for it.”
“You should be absolutely certain about your first skill,” Torwig warned. “It’ll stay with you the longest. The more you practice, the more you’ll learn the secrets behind each one.”
“I’m certain.” He pointed to the catalog. “That one please.”
The old man took an agonizingly long time to wet a finger and turn a page on a magazine for dog owners.
“As it happens, I do have one specimen right here. Serial number #F04104, not exactly popular.” He reached under the countertop and pulled up a fancy little casket lined with some sort of expensive fuzz. It had a little code-thingy Isaac could scan, and the moment he did, his brick showed him the description of the skill.
[True skill - Cavitate: Choose a location and abruptly pull the surroundings towards the center]
There was technical data too, as well as statistics of every kind and variety, notable builds and support-skill combos.
Cavitate was an interruption skill, usually cast at range, though it didn’t start with a long range in the first place. He’d watched plenty of videos on skill demonstration and some niche use-cases in tournaments before deciding on this one. It wasn’t useful offense-wise, but it wouldn’t hurt him, and it even started with a casting time a whole second faster than the average combat skill, something Isaac could make even speedier with practice.
“An uncommon pick,” Torwig said.
“I wouldn't know why,” said Isaac.
“Doesn’t look good on TV. Nobody wants a skill that doesn’t have a flashy or immediately useful effect.” Torwig sniffed. He put a hand over the lockbox. “Are you sure you don’t want something else? Something cheap, plus a support skill maybe? I could hook you up with an [Empower], or an [Increase range], if you have the funds. If not, then that makes—”
“Torwig. Is that really an even trade?” Isaac crossed his arms. “[Water bolt] is a popular offensive spell. I’d like a support skill on top.”
He was pushing it, but [Cavitate] was cheaper, just not by much.
“What support skill did you have in mind? There aren’t many—”
“That one.” He scanned the page with his brick, to make sure it would work together with his skill as intended.
[Support skill - Karma: Divide supported skill into two versions with opposite effects. Mana spent on one decreases its power and increases its opposite’s power.]
“This one? Boy, you…” Torwig’s forehead scrunched up. “We’ve barely had a dozen orders for this over the last century. Nobody, and I mean nobody, takes that support skill.”
“Why?” Isaac asked.
“Because it’s finicky, and hard to predict what it’ll do exactly. A [Healing touch] skill could turn into a ranged heal, or it could disassemble something you touch. On top of that, if you heal too much, suddenly you need to go and kill something for it to even back out again.”
Isaac gulped. “I’m fine with that. I think I know how it will work with my skill.”
Torwig looked at him long and hard until eventually he shrugged. “It’s not yours until you buy it. I assume you have your piece of the bargain?”
Isaac pulled out his pearl, staring at it for a wondrous moment.
[Water bolt]. You looked great on my side table. It was a pleasure waking up to the sight of you every morning. But it’s time for you to make someone else happy. Adieu.
Reluctantly, he placed the pearl on the counter, where it was immediately accosted by Torwig and a tool somewhere in between a barcode scanner and an inside-out spider.
“It’s authentic. Good on you for not trying anything.”
“Could’ve taken my word for it,” Isaac grumped.
“It could’ve been a fake, swapped out without you even having a chance to notice. [Water bolt] is a skill worth stealing, fairly common on water worlds, but always high in demand. Now, the one you asked for… it was quite difficult to source. Only one planet produces it, and on that planet it is dropped by only one rift.”
“Let me guess: it was forged in the fires of a mountain of doom and torment, drenched in the blood of ten millennial elven virgins, then polished with emperor Gwenaiwen’s tissue before finally being sprinkled with a bit of himalayan salt and fairy dust? You know as much as I do that the himalayas don’t exist. And as if you’re not running a profit and getting rid of undesired stock.”
Torwig scoffed, then scoffed again as he tucked the skill pearl away and flipped the two caskets open. In a small pillow of velvet, a small pale-blue pearl beckoned innocently towards Isaac.
“Go on,” he said, pushing them over the counter. “They’re all yours.”
He reached out for it with a trembling hand.
“It’s pretty,” Sophia said and Isaac could only nod.
Where [Water bolt] had looked like a deep blue pearl, both [Cavitate] and [Karma] were exactly the same size.The former was translucent with a shining dot in the middle and a tapestry of spheres and planes like distorted spiderwebs that were frozen amidst being pulled in towards it. The latter was two halves of a whole chasing each-other’s tails, eternally mixing and unmixing themselves.
And now they were his. It wasn’t his first choice, and by Maerdon was it not perfect, but it was his, and he was going to make it work.
“So, what do I do now?” Isaac asked, rubbing his eyes.
“You eat it.”
“Eat… the pearl? It’s the size of an avocado seed. I have two of them!”
Sophia rolled her eyes. “Just put it in your mouth one after the other then, true skill first.”
He did just that. The moment it hit his tongue he could feel it fizzle, and his mouth was filled with the most wonderful airy sensation. It ran down his throat in cool rivulets, then pooled somewhere in his chest where his Tier 2 core ought to be. It was divine, and like taking in essence, likely addictive too.
What the heck? It tastes like… like apple-chocolate-maracuja-lemon, except instead of clashing, the tastes all multiply in a way that is just better. It’s like I’m eating an actual forbidden fruit that I never knew was my secret guilty pleasure.
He swashed it around.
I guess rifts really know how to make you come back again and again.
“Now stay like that for half an hour,” Torwig said and laughed as Isaac nearly choked on it.