There was an army of highschool zombies hiding somewhere in the halls and empty classrooms, and Isaac was sure that they weren’t going to play fair. He wouldn’t if he were in their situation. A thousand gups was a lot of money for just tagging someone. But he wasn’t here to donate to the public schools or their victims, he was here to win and possibly, maybe, finally get to the starting line of the exam.
He’d run around the outside and now he was staring down the one hallway in front of the room. A zombie ‘scout’ was having a discussion with his buddy as they tried to peek through the safe-room door window. They wouldn’t be able to see anything but varnished wood and whatever people scribbled on tables at school. They certainly wouldn’t be able to see Andri or Sophia. And his job was to make sure that they did see him, and only him.
“Ahem,” he cleared his throat as the zombie kids turned around, and raised a hand. “Hi.”
He’d never seen a zombie’s mouth gape in shock before, but there was a first time for everything. The two quickly recovered and disappeared into a classroom at illegal zombie speeds. Before long, the entire corridor was filled with groaning and overly theatrical moans of the walking dead.
“I’m just going to go this way, alright?”
Isaac turned around the corner, making sure his steps were as heavy and loud as they could be. He wasn’t expecting anybody at school to have a skill, but he checked the dark corners and unlit rooms anyways. He caught an ambush early, two kids practically leaping out of their classrooms and tumbling across the floor a meter in front of Isaac.
“Wow, flying zombies. You guys should make a movie about that.”
The kids blew him a raspberry and he blew one back as he set off in a comfortable jog. There was an old clock that was hung on the far wall inside a classroom.
Forty more minutes.
The plan was to distract most of the zombies while the other two snuck off towards the library. By their combined reckoning they assumed that zombies would initially avoid the library because those were generally places of great boredom, and because this one was far inside the compound. By now, Sophia and Andri must have made their way to it and started searching for the three books that would hold the answer.
Sophia had her boon to make her quieter and less noticeable, while the way Andri moved from cover to cover made him hard to spot by default. They would do their part and Isaac would do his by being bait.
And he was going to be the best bait ever.
Someone tried to jump him again out of an open classroom door, but just as he dodged to one side, the tingling ambush-sense Hammond had drilled into his head screamed at him to move. He twirled, twisting around and catching the second ambusher by the hips.
“Gotcha-aaAAH!”
Wait a second, I recognize that voice.
“You! You?” Isaac huffed dramatically as he swung Ana, the deep-sea delver, around, before putting her into an armlock. He could do it, but with some difficulty. Tiering up generally exaggerated existing strengths rather than shoring up weaknesses, and she was short, lightweight, and not at all geared for physical confrontation.
But where Ana was there was… there!
He dodged as her teammate Yvonne came in for a lunge. She rebounded off the wall like a rubber ball, ready to strike again, but Isaac took her shorter friend in the classic arms-barred-noogie position, also known as a chokehold.
She stopped, eying Isaac warily. So far he hadn’t shown any sign of fighting back, or his skill.
She knows I’m Tier 2, but can’t figure out how. Better lean into that.
“Hey,” he said, “didn’t expect to meet you two here.”
“We went to school here,” Yvonne said, circling around him like a tiger. “Teach’ asked us to come back for one last job.”
“You seem a lot more mellowed out since you came to our island,” he said, matching her step for step. “I honestly thought we’d meet as contestants.”
“I got promoted,” she said. “I’m a team leader now. Can’t exactly leave after people put their trust in me, ya catch?”
“Oh, I do.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. They were in a deadlock. He needed to move past her before other zombies caught up, and she needed to tag him, and free her teammate. Ana, after trying and failing to get out of his grapple, was now just hanging limply like a sack of potatoes. “You didn’t say ‘brains’, by the way.”
“Aw shoot,” Ana coughed.
“You’re choking her.”
He lowered down to whisper into her ear. “Is she right? Should I stop?”
The girl wiggled and squirmed in his grip with heavy huffs. It wasn’t a ‘no’ wriggle, he knew from countless times grappling with Sophia and Zach. She could even talk if she wanted to.
“I think she’s quite comfortable.” He said. He redid his grip on her arms a bit more tightly and for some reason, she shivered.
“Hey Eev, can we keep him?” Ana asked between coughs. “He’d make a good vanguard. I’ll ask management really nicely.”
“Ana, that isn’t how this works.” They circled each other for a moment. The corridor in front and behind was still empty. “Unless you want to apply to the Bluewater Guild?”
“I don’t really do water,” Isaac added.
Yvonne dropped her hands to her side and looked at Isaac. “But you’re an islander.”
“It’s called island, not iswater.” Not that a month went by without Claire gently prodding him into finally taking swim lessons. “Can you promise you won’t tag me if I let her go?”
“It’s actually quite comfortable…” Ana said.
Yvonne scoffed. “Fucking —Alright. Fine. We give up. Let her go.”
Isaac did just that.
“So, a thousand gups. What do you even need the money for?” he asked. “You’re delvers.”
“Healing potion prices have been going up for the past months,” Yvonne grouched. “And we’re collecting money for a friend. He died, and his mum still has some outstanding medical bills.”
He stared at them for a couple moments. Everybody seemed to have their own sort of tragedy on Wett, even if just by association, and everyone did what they could to get by. His pinky ached.
“Fine. You can have one of my lives.”
The two girls stared blankly at him.
“You don’t have to—”
Yvonne elbowed Ana. “No. This is fine. More than fine.” She slapped him across the shoulder, leaving a green handprint. “Now go, the little gremlins are quickly approaching.”
Well. This went better than expected.
Isaac had barely turned around when he suddenly had an idea.
“... you two don’t happen to know any of these questions, would you?” He showed them a notebook where he had noted down all the questions needed for the quiz.
Yvonne shrugged. “Nope, sorry. Not much of a school-girl myself. Been helping my dad with delving support since I was twelve.”
“That’s… fine.” He wasn’t expecting to get any useful information like this anyways. And what fell under the umbrella term of ‘delving support’? Did she make his lunches, polish and oil his gear, maybe do his taxes?
“Um,” Ana raised her voice. “I know the minotaur stuff.”
Oh thank Maerdon.
“Scribble it down right here then,” he said as they exchanged notes. Once that was done, he turned to both of them. “Could you maybe not go after my sister? Short, black ponytail, punches people.”
Yvonne shrugged and Ana squinted. “Sorry, but she’s as fair game as anyone.”
“She’s your sister?”
“That’s a no then?” he asked.
Giving them a free thousand gups only goes so far.
I guess I can be a little mean.
Isaac heaved a disappointed sigh. “Well, I guess we’ll have to foreclose the orphanage then.”
“You will?” Yvonne asked.
“You didn’t know?” he asked, feigning bewilderment, followed by a bit of sadness. “It’s just too expensive. But if only one of us makes it even halfway through the adventurer exam, we’d be set. That’s why I gave you my last life, to give my little sister a chance. She’s much smarter than I am, she’ll pull through.”
The two delvers looked bewildered for a moment.
“Yvonne, for the love of all that is good and holy, please don’t do this to him,” Ana hissed. “He’s just a poor kid.”
“Doesn’t look that poor to me.”
“A poor lil’ guy.”
“Also not that small.”
A swift kick of Ana’s boot set her mind straight.
“Alright. We’ll not go after your sister.” Ana sent Yvonne a glare and she cleared her throat. “In fact, we’ll stall any little zombies trying to follow you.”
“Thanks,” he said, massaging his eyes for those extra crocodile tears. “It means a lot.”
They didn’t know that he still had one life left, and they didn’t need to. He left them as they were bickering, whistling to himself as he jogged down the corridor.
Sophia and Andri should be back by now. Let’s hope they found the books and didn’t get tagged.
+++
Normally, Sophia would have been anything but angry at being stuck in a library. It was a place where she could spend hours leafing through old encyclopedias and weird pop-science literature. This one was even twenty times larger than their multipurpose school room back home, with a balcony running along the edges of a second story filled with even rarer goodies.
Reading was fun. Reading under time pressure was not.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Trying to find the books with the right information to three separate banal questions by flipping through their indices and inventories, just to find out that the books were either borrowed, missing, or noted as ‘casualties of the noodle incident’, well…
This would be a whole lot more fun if I could actually be useful.
She always had the feeling that she was perpetually catching up to everyone around her, always one step behind.
Isaac was big and strong, Andri was swift and accurate. He wielded those circular blades with the same finesse as Hammond, could see things from way far away, and had ears like two radar dishes. Sophia was also the quiet, scouty-knife-type, but if it came to a fight like in the belly of the Foggy Dreamboat, she knew she would only be half as useful as he was. And there would be more fights, if they overcame this challenge.
She didn’t want to fight for her life. She didn’t even want to become an adventurer, and she’d already turned down three separate delver’s contracts, not because they were predatory, but because the idea of making money by plunging into the death-machines known as rifts seemed insane. It was as far removed as could be from her ideal future of peace and quietude, diving the reefs and inspecting local wildlife for diseases, mutations, or sudden additional species popping out of a rift break.
The clock was ticking, showing ten minutes to seven. And the crowd outside was not helping them along at all.
“Let us in,” came the muffled voice of some tenth grader, who was standing behind the library door with a gaggle of his friends. Andri had locked the double doors with a broom. She would have thought of that, just… Andri was quicker, and the plan was working so well. Nobody had been coming after them and at the time, paranoia didn’t seem like a sound investment.
“No,” she called, scanning disorderly half-empty bookcases.
“We just want your brains.”
“Come get us then.”
“We’re not allowed to break any more school property,” said the tenth grader.
“Yeah, Jeremy got suspended after he ‘fell’ through one of the windows,” said another chubby one.
Tough luck for Jeremy. Rules are rules for a reason.
She turned back to her search. Every tick of their old tower clock was working towards setting her off. Something or someone must have ticked the schoolkids off about their time limit, because they had begun chanting ‘read, read, read’ over and over.
Finally, Sophia felt herself reaching a limit. “They don’t have an atlas. Why don’t they have an atlas!?” They were supposed to have five. But none of them were where they should have been. “Do people not care about expensive books on the mainland? Am I daft? Are they daft?”
“Andriii,” she groaned, tiredly bonking her head against a chronicle of the great merpeople migration, “any luck with the math stuff?”
There was an annoyed yowl from the table where the mink slammed yet another math book shut.
“He says he has found that answer, and that it is stupid,” Bird said from where he was comfortably sitting on an armrest.
Oh. Nice. That still leaves two questions though, she thought, staring to the side only to see Isaac heaving himself through an open window.
The first thing she noticed was that he was winded, but smiling. The second was the yellow paint smeared around him liberally.
“How many lives do you have left?”
“One.”
“Carpshit.”
He didn’t sigh. That meant there was a silver lining to this… or he was just enjoying the challenge, for whatever reason.
“I learned the minotaur stuff. For… reasons.”
Sophia just gave him a look. Slowly, it dawned on her that they may still have a chance.
“Then we just need to find the atlas.” Which was nowhere to be found. She'd already looked everywhere, from under the beanbags in the beanbag corner to behind shelves, on the receptionist desk, in the trash, on top of…
“Pick me up.”
She didn’t need to ask twice as he lifted her on top of his shoulders so she could peek over the bookshelves. There, a dash of color caught her attention; the navy-blue cover of the massive and ubiquitous Atlas: Worlds within an Empire was unmistakable. It was lying on top of a bookshelf on the second story, so high up it had to be a setup, or a prank that brought it up there.
“It’s right there,” she said, Isaac catching her as she hopped off. “Holy crap, I’m an idiot.”
“You aren’t. Nobody could’ve guessed.”
It was frustrating enough that she wanted to pull her hair. Isaac didn’t need to be told twice to offer a leg up. Sophia hadn’t done too much climbing during their half year of training, but she’d always outpaced both Zach and Isaac when it came to flying up a tree. As a Tier 2, he’d likely knock the bookcase over with his weight anyways. It would be better to quite literally launch her all the way up.
They didn’t even need to exchange a look to know who had to do what. She wiped the sweat from her hands, made sure her ponytail was tight—
And as she did that, Andri took the offered leg up, Isaac launching him a good three meters in the air where his claws clacked on the wooden shelves. He scampered up, swiped the book, then bounded back down in less time than it took Sophia to lodge a protest.
Oh. Yeah. Catman. That is the smart choice.
It was another little sign of change coming, another prick in their supposedly unending unity as a pod. Brother and Sister and Brother, but not forever like Claire would have liked. They were human, and pods were a merfolk construct. Life made sure that their futures were always drifting apart.
Sophia sighed as she watched Isaac and Andri high-five excitedly over their prize, and all she found in her heart was worry.
Sophia was not an adventurer. She’d give her idiot brother all the support she could. And when he passed the finish lines, she’d be on the sidelines, waving.
+++
Sophia seemed a bit annoyed that Isaac didn't throw her, which, in Isaac’s reckoning, was an odd thing to be annoyed by. But she seemed to get over it quickly as they volunteered her for presenting their answers.
“...thus, the important part of a ritual for the presenting minotaur is to act strong, yet humble, brave, yet honorable. Traditionally, the greatest friendship is said to spawn from the victor and the challenger who defeated him, sometimes even leading to a romantic relationship, much to the dismay of the often picky female minotaurs. This has spawned a wide variety of novels of the genre Bovidae amoris, in which—”
The old teacher stopped him there. Isaac put down Ana’s note, hoping that all their answers were right. The clock in the safe room read three minutes to seven.
It better be accurate.
His brick was showing the same time, but if they missed it because of something as simple as that, he would be at least a little angry.
The old crone sitting at the teacher’s desk was staring at him from above her glasses.
“Ten questions,” she croaked. “Ten answers. You have correctly answered… nine. The name ‘miceman’ is a work of fiction, but the Rattus Philosophus exists, if only as a small subpopulation on Nursing world #1294. However, if you answer this last question in one minute, you may pass: Why do you think you deserve to be considered for the role of adventurer?”
Isaac paused. That was… it?
The clock was ticking.
“I need the money, for my brother. He lost a hand.” He eyed the clock nervously. “I don’t know if that makes me worthy or not. But if I could help him, that would be enough.”
“Hm. A bit lacking in ambition, no?” Her face didn’t flinch an inch as she grunted and noted something down in front of her. “And you?”
Andri meowed something.
“Ahem,” Bird said. “He says, and I quote, ‘I deserve it’.”
The old teacher raised an eyebrow.
“‘I worked my claws dull to save a week of shore-time. I am worth it. You don’t believe me. I’ll prove it. Whatever it takes, I will.’ Or so young Andri claims.”
“Confident,” she said, noting the answer down. “Desperate. And you?”
Sophia could barely raise her voice.
“I don’t deserve it.”
“Don’t be too humble deary, you all made it this far.” With a click-clack, she sat her pen down and peered across the room at them. The clock ticked to seven on the dot.
“I’ve certainly had close calls, but never has anyone arrived this late,” she said.
“We kind of got duped,” Isaac said, before adding. “It was mostly my fault. If anybody should fail, it should be me alone.”
There was that raised eyebrow again, as if he was supposed to read an entire conversation out of it. The unlike with Zach and Sophia, Isaac couldn’t hazard a even a poor guess as to what she really wanted, or what she was thinking. What did she get out of this, a couple thousand gups for her students, some pension money for herself? If money was all this was about, she should be sympathetic.
Maybe she didn’t need the money. Maybe she already had a strong idea about what adventurer candidates should be like. Maybe they had failed somewhere between the docks and here, and this was all just some spiel to make them think they were still taking part in the pre-selection process. Maybe…
A white token the size of a small dinnerplate with a number on it appeared on his desk, and one everyone else’s. He was number 342, Sophia 343, and Andri 344. Isaac looked up.
“What are you waiting for?”
The teacher was already at the door behind him. He hadn’t even heard her move.
“So… we passed?”
“You were cutting it close for a time there. Now come, I won’t ask twice.”
The three of them practically shot to their feet, filing in behind her as she walked through the corridor. All around, kids their age and a few years younger were jeering. For them, this was probably a whole lot more fun than a normal day at school.
I wonder how many people they caught in the end? And what if they had been real zombies, would we still have made it?
Chillingly, he realized that if they had been real zombies, turned through one magical influence or another, he would have been expected to use force against them. After all, that was what an adventurer did — brave the danger so others didn’t have to.
They reached a small elevator, the kind exclusively used by the janitor, and shuffled in after the old crone. The numbers on the keypad only went from three to minus one, but the moment the doors closed, the elevator went down way past that. Isaac eyed the old woman.
“You’re not a real teacher are you?” he finally asked.
The corners of her lips twitched upwards just a bit.
“What’s your name? I’m Isaac.”
“If it gets you to stay quiet, find out how I made the elevator start, and then I’ll tell you.” she countered.
Right, when did she have time to push the button? Scratch that, what skill did she use? I didn’t hear or feel anything.
They were well past ninety floors underground when the elevator slowed down.
“You used [Swift Technokinesis] to manipulate the lift controls, and [Subtle Dampen] to quiet the noise. Is that right?”
He wasn’t expecting to get laughed at for making a guess, but here he was, and the woman’s laugh was quite shrill. “A good guess, young Isaac! But not good enough.” She held up a finger, and if Isaac was supposed to see something, he failed at that too. “Let me tell you: You don’t need a skill for everything.”
His brick floated out of his backpack, landing in his palms with a ding. There was a notification congratulating him for finding one of the entrances to the 3.152nd adventurer exam. It also had an attached file detailing all the important things he’d signed off on when sending in his application a month before. It included everything from waiving his right to sue the association in case of his wrongful death to free allround healthcare that would fix every injury that could be fixed pro bono.
If Zach had lost his arm during the exam, he could have had it back just like that.
According to Claire, if a healer was healing you, they were likely to fix any small kinks like scars or tuberculosis while they were at it, small things that didn’t cost them much mana.
The association even offered therapy for psychological damage incurred, which only horrified him moderately less than the fact that they had set up a daycare center in case someone was stupid enough to join while still having to take care of a toddler.
Stupid or desperate.
He wasn’t stupid enough to think that neither applied to him at least a little bit.
As they followed the old woman, out of the elevator, the ceiling opened up. They were in a tunnel, roughly fifty meters wide, and so long he couldn’t see the end of it. The place was packed with people, too many of too different sizes for them to have all come from Wett.
Andri walked up next to him, scrunching his nose.
<
“That it does.” A chill wind picked up the body odors of at least two hundred different people that had traveled from far and wide to get here.
<
“Me… me too.” He plopped his luggage down on the cold, hard ground, and before he could do anything further, Andri flopped over and onto the sparse cushioning.
He looked at Sophia, who looked back at him as the selfish mink stretched wide and promptly began his nap.
“Our sleeping bag is still in there.”
“You only packed the one?”
“I needed the space for ropes.”
Sophia just nodded and shivered. The tunnel had a near constant push of wind traveling from one end through to the other. She stared down at Andri, who was blissfully unaware of the gears likely turning in her head.
“I’ll take the right side.”
“And I’ll take the left.”
When was the last time he, Zach, and Sophia had slept in the same bed? Probably around the time Hammond forcefully separated the three of them when he turned fourteen. They always chuckled at it a bit behind his back, because they would just share their single bunk with the three of them. It was cramped, and just about as uncomfortable as he was now, but it was more to show him that as a pod, they took the whole ‘together forever’ part of it pretty seriously.
Claire had just laughed. She had looked so proud. And now he and Sophia were here, and Zach was stuck floating dirt back on Seagull island.
I miss Zach. Isaac blinked. Holy shit, I think I’m home sick. It’s barely been a week.
Andri was already asleep, grumbling quietly as Sophia finally dared to poke his fuzzy ears. He looked so peaceful, and yet when his shirt rode up, Isaac saw a stomach lined with scars.
He’s not like Zach, he tiredly thought to himself. That’s… not why I decided to help him.
His eyes were fluttering closed. Somewhere in the distance, a loudspeaker was giving off an announcement in a garbled, but almost recognizable voice.
“Attention examinees: due to a cave in, the exam is delayed by a couple of hours. Welcome this rare time of respite. You will need it, come morning.”