Having a skill was weird. It was less like having a button and more like an extra muscle strapped to your head. It practically begged to be used, and it was as easy as trying to think on it really hard. He could feel a coolness leave his chest when he did. That was likely the mana, the cost for every skill, produced in his Tier 2 core.
He played around with it on the way to the dojo-slash-pok-ball-field, never quite putting enough juice in to activate it. Even though it was unlikely that his skill was going to use his entire mana pool, he didn’t want to risk overdrawing, or spilling his mana into the air. ‘Overdrawing mana isn’t lethal,’ Claire had once said, ‘but it feels like a couple icepicks to the brain.’
They arrived at the pok-ball field. And still, Isaac took his time exploring this new weird magical muscle.
“Have you used it yet?” Zach asked.
“No. You’re still in range.”
Zach raised his arms, taking a step back while Sophia tried to weave a stick into Isaac’s hair. “What about now?”
“That’s good.” Isaac flicked some sort of bug that was tickling him off his forehead. “Dammit Sophia, I’m trying to concentrate.” He breathed out evenly. One cast of the skill took roughly a twelfth of his entire pool, which made it quite cheap even before his boon kicked it, making all area effects more efficient.
The pink slip says it scales, but no idea how much.
At Tier 2, it added only around two extra casts. But those casts could go far if they were used to interrupt a [Fireball] or [Pseudo-mana slash] which cost more than twice as much. Forcing an opponent to miss either of those skills at a critical moment could be the thing Isaac would be good at. Mana pools just weren’t that large at low tiers, which meant that other skills needed to be polished just as much as skill usage.
Either way, he didn’t want to overdo it, so he’d stop at six casts for today. “Alright. Test number one.”
He pushed his mana into the skill. Nothing happened for five whole seconds. Then pebbles, dust, and a pok-ball suddenly launched straight for Isaac, pelting him from every angle.
“Ack!” He spat dust and leaves, rubbing his eyes. His hands came back coated in a thick layer of dirt, sand, and what have you.
Zach and Sophia were on the floor, creasing.
“H-holy shit, this is so much better than [Water bolt]ing yourself in the face!”
“No, stop, it’s a good skill,” Sophia giggled. “It’s very good at covering your skin in an instant layer of dust. [Insta-dirty]!”
“[Dustify].”
“[Undignify].”
That sparkled another round of laughter. He activated his skill again, but in reverse. With [Karma] attached to [Cavitate]’s one empty slot, it turned into a skill his brick called [Karmic Gravitate]. He could pull things towards himself, though he knew that if he did that now it would be slightly weaker. When he pushed it away, the dust and dirt flew right off him.
“Huh. Do you think I can take less showers with this?” He looked to Zach and Sophia, who were now spitting and trying to get the dust off their face.
They looked at eachother, and broke out into more laughter, alternating between coughing and trying not to giggle themselves to death.
When the initial wave of gaiety had petered off, Isaac finally found it within himself to start approaching this skill-business a tad more seriously.
“So, [Cavitate]. It works with [Karma] as I thought… mostly. It needs five seconds to activate, starting from the point when I start pouring mana in. The range is… Zach?”
“I’ll be honest, I wasn’t entirely paying attention.” Zach went to push up his glasses, then paused in confusion as he remembered why his right arm was wrapped in bandages. “About two arm-lengths maybe?”
“Let’s do another test.”
He tried again and this time, a random stick almost poked his eye out.
“Alright, you were correct. Pretty strong force too.”
“Might just be the same force applied to everything,” Zach noted. “That would cause smaller objects to accelerate more quickly, and to higher speeds. You better get armor or get used to having pebbles whack welts all across your arms.”
They tested that too. This time, Isaac was in full pok-ball gear, with shin-guards and a helmet.
“Sophia, stand there for a second.”
He activated his skill and after the five-second wait, a gust of force pushed everything towards him. Sophia was standing at the edge of the effect, and Instead of flying like the pebbles or the stick, she just stumbled into his arms as if she had been abruptly kicked.
“Alright. So, it pulls everything towards you, smaller items at a larger speed, and acts like a strong kick to the butt to people-sized objects.”
“A pretty strong kick.” Sophia rubbed her butt. “Hey, wanna try something new?”
“Sure?” She tossed him a bat and picked up a ball for herself. Isaac immediately knew what she was going for.
He activated his skill, and Sophia pitched past his head after four seconds. Then his skill activated and the ball swerved heavily mid-air, streaking straight over his outstretched hand, and smacking him in the face.
Zach winced. “Oof, that’s gonna need some practice.”
“Tell thadd do my poor nobse,” Isaac groaned, massaging his face and smelling copper. He should’ve pushed instead of pulled.
“I wonder where the upper limit is?” Zach mused. “Like, how much can you move a half-ton boulder with it?”
Hopefully not much, since it would then be rolling straight for him. But the skill didn’t seem like it was made for heavy-duty pushing, not without the right support skill. It was a sphere of force that had just enough kick to disrupt anyone trying to beat him up close. The force applied quickly once the skill activated, so dodging was likely out of the question. It was the ideal disruption tool.
Still, five seconds. That was a lot of time to wait for just one little effect.
The ground rumbled a bit. Likely just another small, distant earthquake—
“Gotcha!”
A pair of hands came out of the ground, grabbed Isaac, and buried him up to chest-height before he could react. Isaac’s brain was still trying to figure whether to run, think, or panic when a hole opened in the ground and a figure walked out. He was bulky, dog-ears flapping as he shook his head, clumps of dry dirt-balls as large as a fist flying everywhere.
Oh thank god, it’s just Hammond.
“Well, good morning to you too,” Isaac muttered.
Hammond looked around. He crossed his arms behind his back and with his chest stretched out, he was the image of an army sergeant, or a particularly professional bouncer. “I see you’re already practicing, Isaac. Good. You’ll need to give it your all to upgrade your chances from abysmal to simply not great.”
Isaac gulped, tasting sand. “I thought having a skill would have already done that much.”
Hammond snorted. “Technically, you’re correct. Every few years, just on Wett millions of people enter the exam, and most of them don’t have a single skill, or are even still baseline. But let me tell you this: Those millions, there are hundreds of thousands that are Tier 1 and do have a skill. They’ve likely practiced with it for most of their lives. You have six months, closer to five. I’ll hammer the most important skills into your head, but what comes of it is entirely up to how much effort you put in and how quickly you learn.”
That Isaac could do, the effort part at least. As for learning quickly, well… the lessons would hopefully stick better than math and geography classes.
“Lesson number one: Your situational awareness could use a bit of refining.”
“Well excuse me,” Isaac said, trying and failing to move much at all, “that I wasn’t expecting to be ambushed from the ground in our own playing field.”
Hammond looked at him, then sniffed. “Well, you should have. Starting today, whenever you go outside, be prepared for ambushes, traps, and anything else that might inconvenience you on your way to your real training.”
“Oh.” I guess he’s serious about training me for the exam. “And what do I do when I arrive?”
“You do your daily obstacle course and ten-k jog. Then you do it again. Once a week, you’ll do it three times. Sophia will have to do just as much. You can help each other, but note that I will not lower my bar if I catch either of you slacking. And I do look forward to you slacking.”
The excitement in his voice was foreboding. “What exactly did you have planned?”
“Stances, stress training, survival training,” he said, counting off his fingers, “ropes and knots, as well as a bit of sparring on the side, both hand to hand and with training weapons.”
That’s… not a lot of fighting. “Isn’t that a little light on the combat?”
“Boy, life isn’t just about beating someone’s noggin’ in. During my adventurer exam, they dropped us in a savannah, then told us to survive for seven days without our packs. Tell me, what do you think kills you quickest in a situation like that?”
“The lack of water?”
Hammond shook his head. “You can survive ten seconds without air, ten minutes without shelter or proper clothing, and a whole heck longer than that without water, even in the hottest deserts. But since you’re so enthusiastic about beating things, let’s get right to it. Who knows, maybe you’re a savant with that spear over there.” He stared at Isaac before giving him a toothy grin. “Of course, Sophia’ll have to dig you up first.”
To her credit, she was on the job immediately.
“What do I do?” Zach asked.
“You go back inside and get bed rest like the damn doctors prescribed. Or do I have to carry you?”
Zach looked between the three of them and left, grumpy. Once Isaac was dug up and had run his daily cardio routine, Hammond immediately started with the second lesson.
+++
Hammond stared at the fire gently crackling in the living room, one hand around Claire’s shoulder as she tried to get accustomed to her new tablet. It was fighting her every step of the way if he judged her growls and clicks of frustration right, and he rarely didn’t. Canids had a nose for emotions, which was why he’d assigned himself as her liaison when a naive young Claire had been fresh off her homeworld, its wetness still evident in her scent.
Nowadays, she smelled like Wett through and through, from the slightly salty sea to the sun-baked leaves and earth and sand. It was a nice smell, and if he had wanted, he could have closed his eyes and let his nose play that symphony forever.
The kids were in bed, Zach had his meds, and Sophia was not sleepwalking today. The chores were done and besides worrying endlessly, there was nothing else to do. And Hammond was not a worrier.
Claire growled as her tablet — failing to keep up with her lightning-quick inputs — switched screens three times, flipped twice, then froze again before reminding her that she needed to update the firmware, as the old calendar system was being rolled into some new app-suite. With a final bit of resentment, she gently placed it on the table and turned it off as if she was snuffing out a flame.
“I hate these doodads,” she said with a huff. “They just cannot stop making new things better-worse.”
“Lausch is getting awfully comfortable with his little monopoly.”
“That has got to be against non-interference clauses, somehow.”
There was some superhero flick going on, the locally produced kind, with cheesy special effects and unskilled actors imitating higher tier skills. Arguably worse than what most planets had, even with the constant expansion of interplanetary cable, but the animatronics had their charms. It was enough to make her relax, normally, but the tension was practically blistering the air.
Stolen story; please report.
“So,” he led, “mind sharing your displeasure?”
It was a normal question for the average merfolk, as they indeed seemed to share everything with those close to them.
Claire practically exploded. “Everything! It is Ortho’Wuur, who cannot seem to fathom why I wouldn’t abandon my place here just to play the card of whimsy at his court. It’s the rift, the coming tide, Zach’s injury, news-reporters and Tierists demanding we leave or cripple ourselves so they don’t have to be afraid of a ghost of a person halfway across the globe.”
“So, you’re displeased with people then.”
“People!” she huffed. “Some days when I wake up and make oats and clams, I just feel the need to, to… graah!”
She got up, and he had the foresight to knock open the door with a wedge of gravel before she stormed out and was on the beach in seconds. He was right behind, and only arrived as Claire was charging up one of her special [Giant Greater Fireball]. The first thunked into the ocean a few hundred meters out, throwing up a metric ton of steam.
By the time she’d run out, the ocean had swallowed seven of the balls, and so, so many curse words.
“Blew off enough steam?” he asked as they lay on the beach side-by side. Her heavy panting filled the air, and the smell of hot stone. He would have to check the beach for any glass shards and dispose of them later.
Eventually, Claire sighed, and found his hand to intwine it with hers. “I feel like the day we first came here, helpless to help, useless to worry, and incapable of not doing either. Did I make a mistake, am I in the process of making another? If I do, will Isaac be alright, will Sophia, and Zach?”
“I wouldn’t worry overly much,” Hammond said. “They’re already bouncing back, already learning.”
“Progress comes slow when it needs to be ready now.”
He looked her in the eyes and just basked in the large round doors to her soul. There was a touch, ethereal and immaterial, that rippled between them, deeper and more fulfilled than any physical longing could ever satisfy. “The empire is changing. Soon, reform will come. Wett will be uplifted to Tier 7 at least. It’s only one jump away from the sector capital.”
She leaned into him. “It will be decades until then, too late for my mudskips and cuddlefish.” Her eyes were closed as she hummed a distant tune, one from the homeworld that had denied her comfort. “How goes training?”
Hammond drew in a long, painful breath.
Claire perked up. “That bad? Is someone hurt? You didn’t go too hard, did you?”
“No, no.” But how was he supposed to say this nicely? “Today we discovered that Isaac is not a savant with spears. And he’s not one for bow and arrow either, that takes too long to train. He doesn’t know how to defend himself and he hesitates too much to attack. Yesterday he almost cut himself on a blunt training sword I still had lying around. At this point, I’m afraid of giving him a kitchen knife.”
“He respects the blade, and what it means to hold one.”
“It’s as if he’s afraid of anything sharp.”
“Then give him a club,” Claire said, and he had to hold back a laugh.
That bluntness, that was part of why he’d decided to partner up with her in the long term. It was refreshing to see someone cut through all the social tapestry that smelled of misplaced anger, fear, and so many lies. People of every species rarely knew how to be honest, with themselves and others. She was an exception.
“He takes after you, in this case.” He smiled as Claire let out a small snort of affront.
“Then focus on what he is good at,” she said, and he could see in her reflection on the screen that she was fighting a battle against a yawn and losing it.
“The boy’s tenacious. No matter how many times I knock him down, he just keeps on bouncing back, like one of those inflatable tubemen.”
“Good.” Claire yawned, in a high-pitched way that humans barely couldn’t perceive, like a cat, or a bat.
“He’s a mean grappler too, and I mean mean. Maybe if he disarmed someone, then got in close, he could put them in a headlock.”
Claire turned in the sand and snuggled into his arms. “That’s good. Teach him something like that.”
Maybe. Martial arts were hard to use if you were outclassed in weight, size, or the opponent just had a weapon. But Hammond had some ideas.
+++
Isaac was on the run. He’d already passed the ten-k mark a while ago, and he was sweating a waterfall. Sophia had already lapped him, but he didn’t mind since they were doing entirely separate courses. He rounded a tree, and listened for any potential cue.
His brick suddenly made a sound like a roaring fire that was quickly approaching.
Fireball, he thought, skidding to a halt before throwing himself behind a thick enough tree. That should count.
<
He groaned and took off again. Running with a pok-ball bat in hand was surprisingly difficult, but he supposed anyone in the adventuring or delving business did this on the regular.
The hanging choconut shells were next. With swift taps — not too fast, but not too light either — he hit them once, alternating between attacking from the left and the right. .
Tak-tok-tak-tok-tak-tik.
That last one was off.
He reached the end of the course. Sophia was already sitting on the ground cross-legged in front of Claire, practicing whatever lesson she had prepared next.
“Isaac,” Claire said with a smile, “Come join us. We will learn about knots today.”
“Oh, just knots? I thought—” the earth rumbled.
Isaac climbed onto the nearby palm quick as a squirrel, which was only just fast enough to evade Hammond’s hand as he burst from the ground, showering everyone else in dirt.
“Hammond!
“Sorry…” He looked to Isaac. “Good reflexes.”
“Not being hit is lesson number one in damage mitigation.” Isaac parroted.
“Number two is not being acquired in the first place. If you’d run any quieter, even someone a tier higher would’ve had more trouble noticing you.”
“How am I supposed to run fast and quiet?”
“There are techniques.” Hammond shrugged, helping Claire dust off. “Some people do it even at baseline.”
It was probably a question of practice, the same way reducing the cast time for skills was. The muscle that was his skill was always ready to take in a flow of mana, but put in too little and the activation slowed to a crawl, and put in too much and you ended up bleeding almost half the initial cost in mana into the air. Claire had said that she wouldn’t even let Isaac hand in his entrance papers if he couldn’t get the casting time down to two seconds.
It took a lot of head-splitting lessons, and would take a lot more. But he could do it, he had to.
Isaac was still a bit lost in thought when Claire’s lesson started, surprisingly, in P’cleek, the merfolk language. She got a rope, just a normal one, and began unfurling parts of it, pulling strings through hoops and loops all the while slowly explaining and reiterating what the benefits and drawbacks of every knot were.
“That is a clove hitch, that is a bowline knot, that is an angler’s knot — you already know that one. This one is for climbing, this one gets tight, this one never does, this one binds two together. Make a figure eight, and follow after me. It is easy, see?”
“Yes, I, er… string… good?” he said and Claire looked so disappointed.
“We will have to start our P’cleek lessons from scratch, I see.” She shook her head. “Never underestimate how useful it can be to learn a language.”
“Even when it’s so easy to automatically translate them?” Isaac asked.
Claire, through some mixture of incredibly high speed and finesse, yoinked his brick directly out of his hands faster than Isaac could perceive. “Still easy?”
It was not. But Isaac was going to be damned if he failed the exam because he mistook a slip knot for a slipped half hitch, and plummeted off some cliff. That was all it would take. Wrong knot, poor execution, fall, scream, splat.
More motivation not to screw up.
He was going to be so good at P’cleek and knots.
+++
One night, with his body full of bruises and his muscles singing the song of ow-everything-hurts-ow-ow, Isaac was lying awake, staring at his helpful brick’s screen. The adventurer exam was getting close, and yet, with all the time he had to think, he had realized that the skillset he was training wasn’t just applicable to adventuring.
Sure, he was going to try and do his best in the exam. Chances were he would fail at some point along the way, which was why it was good to have backup plans.
He rolled over in bed, listening to Zach and Sophia’s quiet breathing.
So, delver, soldier, or adventurer?
If he joined a delving guild, they would loan him gear and skills, which he would have to pay back first. However, they were well-connected when it came to organizing rift slots, and if he proved he could take it, they’d allow him to push for three delves a week. The guild would take their share of course, and after taxes and a miscellany of expenses, he could maybe squirrel away a fourth of a mana stone each delve.
Times four hundred, divided by three delves a week, divided again by fifty-four weeks to a Wett-year makes… I’d have the money for a healer in two and a half years.
That’s pretty quick, he thought. Now, where is the part that says I’m wrong?
He hadn’t factored healing costs in at all. If he was absurdly lucky, he could go two and a half years without critical injuries, but he didn’t know if it was at all likely, or how much mending something like a broken arm would cost. Two and a half years was an optimistic estimate; he could be stuck for four, or eight.
I shouldn’t make Zach wait that long. How much are healing potions?
He looked it up. The smallest doses cost somewhere between two to four Tier 1 manastones.
Expensive. Right.
Becoming a soldier was another option. The legions offered big sign-up bonuses, so if the goal was just to earn money, that would already get him partway there They were also the most likely to sponsor some useful skills, maybe buff skills with area effects, as long as they thought his boon made them worth putting on him.
Maybe they’d turn him into a wandering beacon of buffs. But no matter what they did, it would be out of his hands, and saying ‘no’ to too many skills would be a sign of lacking commitment.
If I want to make the big bucks, I’d have to sign up for border duty instead of peacekeeping duty. Question is, do I even want to be a soldier?
He weighed going back into rifts full of terrifying monsters versus fighting people who maybe possibly deserved it, and often maybe possibly didn’t.
I’ll slot it in behind delver if nobody wants to take me.
That left becoming an adventurer. It almost felt sacrilegious, looking up the empire’s handy helpers only to see how well saving people’s lives was paid. Last week, he’d made a daytrip all the way to Pirth just so he could update all the repositories saved on his brick, as well as a blog he had been following. But after looking up the relevant information, as well as pestering Claire for any insider news, he concluded that their earnings looked a bit better than those of delvers. A lot better, actually.
I could make four years of delver’s income in less than one.
Why was that? The blogs he frequented only offered speculation and snarky comments. ‘They evade taxes, they marry the rich, they’re just very good at delving’. Looking any deeper turned into a tiring slog. There were so many opinions. Some of them hurt his face to read.
‘They’re helpers, they’re annoyances, they’re heroes, they’re terrorists, they’re taking our jobs, they don’t care for your feelings, they are government workers, they’re just like delvers, right? They are adventurers.’
He stopped diving through obscure comment chains, and turned to who was becoming his favorite representative of the voices on the net. Richy-O was a sort of hanger-on of the exams, who tried to hitch rides so he could catch all the adventurer exams as an official observer. Later, he then sold the info on his blog. Access didn’t come cheap, but as Claire said, ‘dumb rocks sink faster’. To Isaac, Richy-O was a savior, a genius who managed to dig through the haze of misinformation and cut to the chase in a way even he could digest.
Every time he opened his blog, the canid’s big-nosed profile picture was bulging outwards ever so imperceptibly more.
It’s like he’s trying to sniff you through the screen.
“The first thing you gotta realize about the adventurer exam,” his latest post wrote, “is that the adventurer association doesn’t want you. They don’t care about your feelings, your Skills (capital S), your bloodline, your status, or how pretty your calligraphy is. They are an organization that first and foremost serves the role to sort the cream from the crop. It doesn’t even want the cream, it wants the sprinkles on top, and of those only the best. Most of us are swimming way under the cream, but here’s the kicker: You don’t have to win every round of the exam.”
He’s not exactly right here, Isaac thought as he waited for Sophia to finish her shower. If you get sorted out in rounds one or two, you’re pretty much out for good.
Rumor had it that by making it over halfway through the exam you could earn a sort of letter of effort, a certificate for those who were simply good instead of great. And academies and companies worldwide loved that slip. Any certificate of the adventurer association was their holy grail, equivalent to an entire grade for your highschool degree or a letter of recommendation from the most respectable of employers. It was maybe enough to cancel out a D+ boon.
He eyed the blue light on his brick.
[Adventurer application form.]
[In signing this form you agree to put yourself under the scrutiny and authority of the adventurer association aboard Numa 2.]
[You may leave the exam at any point in time.]
[Fill out the following personal information…]
The adventurer exam was not just one exam, but a collection of exams, and since adventurers still needed qualified personnel that wasn't all about delving rifts and saving the day on the big screen, there were options for that too.
The combat track would likely see him beating things up, possibly monsters, possibly other people.
The crafting track required either a degree or some other sort of certificate to even let you in, which, compared to having to risk your life in a rift, made the combat track seem rather irresponsible.
The medic track was quite self explanatory, as was the intelligence & public relations track. You couldn't have a wounded adventurer die, or get sent blind on a suicide mission, and someone needed to jump in and get footage of their latest heroics on the ground and present it to the public so people wouldn't start calling them a waste of time and money.
He even found a track for management and logistics, which had so many requirements that they were simply linked to in a separate file.
Haha. Yeah, no.
So, since he hadn't learned a craft, and lacked skills for pretty much every other compartment, Isaac was looking at the form for the the combat track. He had it all filled out, down to his blood-type. His boon information was there too, of course. The ‘send’ button hovered in a green that just screamed ‘press me now’. There was nothing to do but click it, and yet his finger had been hovering over it for the past fifteen minutes.
Don’t be an idiot. They won’t instantly deny you just because you’ve got a D+.
He pressed send and was immediately confronted with a response.
[You have been accepted. Congratulations, contestant number 6.849.512]
[The maximum Tier for this exam is: Tier 2]
[Further instructions will come by mail]
Huh, that was fast. Almost seven million contestants this year. And there were still a few weeks until the sign-up period ended. But he was in, somehow, and that was all that counted.
Now he just needed to train and hope, hope that he could make it at least halfway through the exam and get that writ of competence.
It was a plan and like a liferaft, Isaac clung to it. There was no better option anyways. And when he closed his eyes, tired from the weight of expectation and crunches, he fell right asleep, his stomach swirling with a growing storm of equal parts guilt and giddy anticipation.
His eyes shot open not even ten seconds later.
Wait, we don’t have WettNett on Seagull island. How the hell…?