Sam

After her encounter with the monster—a troll, Will had called it—training was kept light for the rest of the day. Will had her dig some tree stumps out of the ground with an axe and an iron spit, then they called it quits.

Sam had a much easier time falling asleep that night, despite throbbing bruises and pangs of growing pain. Now that she knew she definitely wasn’t in a dream, she found that she felt too awkward to initiate anything with Will, even though she badly wanted to kiss him. She settled for running her fingers over the scars on his chest, which he did not seem to mind.

Mongrel returned from his trip to Sheerhome in the morning, interrupting breakfast by charging into the kitchen with an expression that could curdle milk.

“You won’t believe this!” he shrieked.

“I’m sure I won’t,” Will sighed without looking up from his food. “Good morning to you too, by the way.”

“Yes, yes, now listen to this; Annie went and quit on me!”

“No!” Will cried, his one eye widening in pretend shock. Then, in a more dull voice, he said: “Who’s Annie?”

Mongrel was outraged at this despicable lack of common knowledge, and looked around the table for support. When he received none aside for a vaguely apologetic shrug from Nyx, he huffed angrily. “Only my favorite working girl at the Red House!”

When it became clear that he was expecting further prompting, Will sighed, then obliged: “Right, of course, your favorite prostitute. How could I forget. What about her, Matt?”

“They don’t like to be called prostitutes,” Mongrel corrected with a wagging finger, then pulled out a chair to drape himself bonelessly over.

“Mmhmm.”

“Anyway, Annie went and got married to some Trader from Octant Seven and quit the business, can you believe it?”

“I sure can’t.”

“I had to settle for Georgina! She’s a shrew!”

“Oh dear. Well, I’m glad you survived that horrible ordeal.”

Mongrel huffed, crossing skinny arms atop a round belly. “You people are all heartless. I really loved that girl, you know.”

“Aw, poor thing,” Nyx murmured. She hopped up on the table, tiptoed deftly around plates and mugs, and dropped down in Mongrel’s lap. “I’m sorry, Matthew. I know how you mortals love your love.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Will muttered into his food.

“Please encourage me,” Mongrel whined. “I think I’m going to kill myself.”

“There, there,” the demoness purred, giving his chin a scratch. She sounded so aggressively sincere that she looped around again to sounding sarcastic.

After breakfast, Will took Sam out into the yard, explaining that she was ready to begin training in earnest now that they had at least established a baseline for her abilities and she had gotten used to the way her improved body functioned.

He tossed something at her that had been stood against one of the porch pillars, and she caught it on reflex. It was a long wooden dowel—sanded smooth and almost perfectly cylindrical—that fit well in her hand.

“Practice sword,” he elaborated before she could ask the question.

“You want me to train with swords?”

“More or less.” He motioned to one of the chimps, Number Three, who had lined up on the other side of the open space between the cluster of buildings. “We’re going to have you practice against Number Three here. Keep going until you’re able to beat him.”

“Wait, where are you going?”

“I’ve got work of my own. There’s not much to supervise here, so I’m sure you’ll be fine on your own.”

“What if I hurt him?”

Number Three grinned, and Will shrugged. “Don’t worry about that. Mongrel has made the boys into familiars, which means they don’t exactly work like regular animals anymore. A familiar only dies if its master does, so even if you knock Number Three’s head off he’ll come back in a day or two. Probably a bit pissed off, but otherwise perfectly all right.”

“Oh…” Sam spun her dowel, testing its weight. “What if he hurts me?” She noticed that Number Three was hefting a heavy wooden mallet that looked like it might easily crack someone’s skull open, and the chimp seemed eager to use it.

“Don’t worry about that, either. Between your Stoneskin passive and your points in Toughness, he shouldn’t be able to hurt you too bad. Just come fetch me if he hits you on the head hard enough that you go blind or start throwing up.”

“Will—”

“Have fun!”

Will strutted off around the side of the farmhouse, soon slipping out of sight, and Number Three took that as the bell being rung. He hobbled toward her, surprisingly quick despite his stiff bow legs, swinging the mallet over his head with one hand and knuckling the ground with the other.

“All right, let’s—”

Number Three let out a howling war cry and dove for Sam, swinging his weapon in a downward arc. She stepped back and felt a whoosh of air as the blocky wooden head passed just clear of her nose and hit the ground between her legs. Realizing that there was no way for her to beg off this task, she raised her own glorified stick as she retreated across the yard, catching a second blow that rattled her arms with the force of it.

Number Three was relentless, swinging his mallet and swiping with his off-hand so that Sam was forced to cede ground until she was backed up all the way to the woodshed. Kicking off the wall, she ducked under a horizontal hammer sweep and brought her own weapon to bear, but the chimp caught the dowel in his fist to divert her attack and laughed a shrieking laugh.

At least he wasn’t able to pull it out of her grasp, grunting in annoyance when he tried. But then he abruptly let go, which had Sam stumbling. He stayed right on top of her, hooking the back of a leg with his mallet to flip her onto the ground, then bringing the heavy flat down square on her head, which had her seeing double and staggering drunkenly when she tried to stand up, forced to ask for a short break.

After what felt like an endless series of sparring sessions, Sam came to the conclusion that Number Three was the most cruel of the boys, taking great pleasure in knocking her down and laughing mockingly whenever she was too weak to continue.

It didn’t help that his brothers had all taken off work for the day to come watch, smoking on the porch while signing to each other and snickering.

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Luckily, Sam was well familiar with humiliation. It wasn’t that it didn’t bother her; rather the opposite—each failure stoked a fire in her, fueled her to try harder.

So she kept going.

By the time Will returned in the afternoon to let her off, she was battered beyond belief, feeling like she’d been hit by a car that had then backed over her a few times for good measure. He offered an arm to help her inside, and placed out an array of little potion bottles on the kitchen table that she had to drink before she was allowed to start on her dinner.

“It’ll take the edge off the pain and help with your recovery,” Will explained. Sam found that her hands were too shaky and raw to work properly and he helped her cut up her food so she could eat.

“That was awful,” Sam said, feeling sorry for herself. She was hardly even hungry. “I barely landed a single hit.”

“Number One said you did well,” Will pointed out.

“He did?” Number One was her favorite of the chimps, not least because he had saved her ass during the troll incident.

Will nodded. “Yeah.”

That made her feel a little better.

Sam decided that her arms were too weak to operate at all, which forced Will to feed her. She’d earned that much, with the day she’d had.

“Sorry for going so hard on you right off the bat,” he said, feeding her a bit of mashed potato.

“No!” Sam said quickly. “Don’t hold back for my sake. I can take it.”

He smiled. “I figured you’d say that.”

“I’ll do better tomorrow.” It was a promise to herself as much as anyone else.

* * *

Sam was so exhausted when she went to bed that night that she forgot to feel nervous about sleeping in the same bed as Will, passed out almost as soon as her head hit the pillow. She felt a little better when she woke up, but her body was still a wreck.

She did fare better during the next day of practice sparring. Made familiar with Number Three’s aggressive fighting style by having it literally and thoroughly beaten into her, she was able to better anticipate his attacks. Additionally, with such a wanton focus on offense, the chimp often left gaps in his defense, letting Sam get a sharp poke in with her stick every now and then.

The wooden sword was unfamiliar to her—she had never practiced with weapons before, so she wasn’t sure what stance to keep or how to leverage her sword other than the most obvious swinging and jabbing movements. When the dowel eventually broke into two splintered halves during a clash with Number Three’s mallet, she decided not to ask for a replacement. Fists and feet had always been good enough for her, so why change anything now?

Despite her decreased range, she immediately found that her performance improved without a weapon. Focusing on slipping and weaving, she had become more fearless of the wicked mallet after feeling its sting hundreds of times at this point, and she began to be able to catch or divert it with her palms. Every once in a while, she managed to give the chimp a good solid smack in the face, which was more satisfying than she cared to admit. Maybe she would have felt bad about hitting an animal if he wasn’t such a sore winner.

Only a few rounds after she had broken her stick, in the middle of rolling away from an attack, Sam felt a flash of impressions pop into her head.

[Congratulations! You have reached Level 2!]

The distraction of it caused her to take a mallet to the side of the head, but Will praised her at dinner, so it was more or less worth it.

“I don’t feel any different, though,” Sam said, slumped into her seat like a corpse.

“You need to wait until you fall asleep,” Will explained, patiently holding up a spoonful of stew for her to inch her mouth toward. “Then you’ll meet the Concord Ghost, and he’ll let you allocate your level-up rewards.”

“Concord Ghost?”

“Yeah, he’s like some kind of system administrator. You’ll see. As far as I know he doesn’t actually have a name, so people call him the Ghost.”

“He’s some kind of demon, then? Like Unger?”

“Maybe, but I don’t think so. He might just be some kind of ethereal manifestation created by the system.”

“Spooky.”

“For Level 2, you’re going to get an extra upgrade point to spend on unlocking a new passive or add a rank to an existing one. For Level 3 you’ll be getting more attribute points—four instead of the usual two, mind you—and it’ll switch back and forth like that every other level. Ten, fifteen, and twenty are special, but you don’t need to worry about that right now.”

“All right. Any suggestions for what I should pick?”

“Just don’t put another rank into Tenacious.”

“Why?”

“It sucks, Sam.”

“What! No it doesn’t! It said something about not being able to get knocked out.”

“Yeah, exactly. Usually something that hits you hard enough to knock you out would probably kill you outright anyway, so what’s the point?”

Will had no idea what he was talking about, but Sam sensed that she wasn’t going to convince him of anything, so she allowed him to continue living in delusion.

“Something like Shock Absorption or Heat Resistance would probably be good options,” Will suggested. “Shock Absorption will let you protect your internals better. Stoneskin isn’t very good at mitigating concussive damage, since it's more for diverting bladed weapons and such. Heat Resistance is good for countering Spark builds. They’re quite common, so you’re bound to get on the wrong end of one sooner or later. That being said, another rank in Stoneskin can’t hurt either.”

“Got it, chief.”

Sam was a little apprehensive to fall asleep that night after what Will had told her about ghosts and stuff, but she was too tired to stay awake long anyway. As soon as her eyes fell shut, they opened again, and she found herself standing in… a library, of all things.

I don’t think I’ve been in one of these since I was a kid, Sam thought as she took in her surroundings. I remember it used to really annoy me when Will insisted on reading all these books while I was over instead of actually hanging out. Like I was just some kind of inconvenience to him!

She stood in the very center of a large, vaulted chamber with stone walls and thick support pillars, the intricate floor pattern running so that it converged into a circle of whirling designs right under her feet.

Countless shelves lined the walls, filled with old volumes whose cloth-bound spines made a faded rainbow tapestry. More bookshelves covered parts of the open floor plan as well, grouped into different sections. Tall, fogged-up windows running dozens of feet from the floor almost up to the arched ceiling let in stark white light.

Sam turned and turned, but couldn’t see any doors. Wherever she was, she was stuck here.

Directly in front of her was a help desk shaped like a crescent moon, lit by a single yellow lamp that naturally drew the eye with how washed-out everything else appeared. A tall figure stood behind the desk. Sam could not quite begin to make out its features, even as she walked closer. It was clad in dark robes tossed by a wind that did not exist, sleeves coming down past its hands, and a drawn hood plunged the face beneath into near-perfect darkness, leaving only a vague outline of a head-like silhouette visible.

Even once she put her hands on the help desk to stare up into the person’s face, she could not make out any specific features. The darkness was too complete, looking almost artificial.

“You’re the Ghost, I guess,” Sam said.

The figure seemed to nod almost imperceptibly.

She held out her hand for him to shake. When he did not take it, she eventually let it drop. Sighing, she went on. “All right, so what do I do here?”

The Ghost waved a voluminous sleeve, and a large tome appeared in the air between them, causing Sam to jump back when it thumped onto the desk. It opened on its own with a crackling of ancient leather, revealing pages that at first appeared blank, but began to form symbols in ink that gradually darkened.

[Choose.]

The instruction buzzed around inside her skull as well as on the page, leaving no room for misinterpretation. Before she was able to ask what she was supposed to choose, exactly, the squiggles in the book continued to shift, forming letters she was able to read. It was a list of abilities much like the one Unger had presented her with in the Tower, and as she flipped the pages she found that it continued on for a while, before abruptly terminating in the middle of a page.

Sam could probably have spent the whole night reading over the abilities and their descriptions, but she didn’t see the point in worrying too much about it. Given how badly Number Three had been battering her for the past three days, she thought that something to alleviate that might be the best way to go, so she went ahead and picked one of the passives Will had suggested to her; Shock Absorption.

Shock Absorption (_)

Tier: 3.

Requirements: Builder, Entertainer, or Laborer.

Type: Constant.

Description: Your body is better equipped to withstand impacts and concussive forces. Suitable for work in hazardous environments or around heavy equipment.

She placed her finger over the entry on the page, and looked to the Ghost. He inclined his head slightly, and Sam was flashbanged with another message, arriving with the same suddenness as the others.

[Ability selection accepted.]

[Goodbye.]

Right. So much for customer service, I guess.

Before Sam could so much as wave a farewell, the library seemed to collapse in on itself, walls and ceiling drawn toward her in distorted spaghetti strings until it was all a mess of color and light. It closed in on her, enfolded her, wrapped her up like a mummy, and darkened until everything was black.