I woke up to the swirling aurora above me, its ebbing lights flowing above me like a sea of starlight. Its beauty, its undeniable majesty, removed none of the terribleness of the evening's events.
“Hello there,” Sophy called out cheerfully, “How are you this dark and stormy night? Ready to finally get rid of all this strain on the soul?” she asked, presumably gesturing up at the light.
“The night is terrible, and I just want to curl up and stop existing. I would say die, but that’s a meaningless idea at this point,” I moaned.
She snorted, but I couldn’t even bring myself to get annoyed.
I had fucked it up. We had been going well; we had had a conversation. I had aired my heart and fears, and she had accepted them and comforted me. And then, a scant few hours later, we walked back, and it all exploded. It felt like I had been pulled away from her.
“Saphine, don’t be such a whiner,” she called out to me.
“I’m not. It's over, and honestly, I would prefer dying to the lightning than this,” I whined.
“The only thing over is your honeymoon period, you moron. It was an argument and, honestly, a rather soft one by literally any metric. That’s normal. The only thing it means is that you don’t parrot one another. Congratulations, you are individuals with different views!” she complained, “The only things that even crossed any line were a few of the low blows. Hell, she even told her mother to fuck off because she was yours. You hear that fur brain? She was literally claiming you as her’s!”
I let my head flop to the side, turning towards her voice.
If it was still there, the bump was so small as to be unnoticeable. Instead, she stood tall and built. She had a kind of androgynous but mature form. Before, she had been shorter, somewhat human-sized, though on the shorter side. Now, she would come up to my height.
I wondered if that was intentional. If she had wanted to look at me, eye to eye?
Speaking of eyes, her squiggles were denser, the shapes taking on a measure of definition compared to her featureless form. Braided strands of squiggles acted like lines to break up the chaos, like ink on a sketch. If before she was noodles, now she was a block of noodles, so dense that there were no holes in her surface.
She was turning into a real girl.
It was weird, especially when the characteristics were so different, like her fingers or how she had no anatomy or clothes like a doll.
Because of that, I could actually make out a kind of scowl on her face.
A part of me wanted to ask her why she was trying to pep me up. Why she seemed to care? She had already explained she didn’t really get it and didn’t particularly care about the details of living as a being of flesh, with our emotions and meatiness.
“The low blows?” I asked her.
“She called you out for most of them, using her against her mother was a low blow, and also rude, but also the last line… Though I admit, it was a good last line. I can’t tell if you’re the worst possible pairing or made for one another… Ridiculous, you know that? Utterly ridiculous,” she continued complaining.
“Uh… Sorry?” I tried.
“Oh, shut it, you,” she huffed before sighing. “Honestly. Get up. Stop wallowing in your pointless, baseless misery. Find your backbone. Gods, you have one little argument, and the whole world is ending with you.”
“I’ve never had much of a backbone,” I agreed.
“That’s not- ” she started before rubbing her head. “I don’t even have a brain, and you're giving me a headache with this defeatist drivel. Get up, you disgraceful loser baby; we need to give you your levels before you wear down your soul. You have nine class levels, three skills and a choice to make.”
That was more than I had last time, but then again, I had been close to getting one in each of my main classes. On top of saving Anna, presumably saving my mentor was worth at least one level.
I looked at her and just wanted it to be over, though her words made me want to wince and gave me a fleeting seed of hope.
Maybe I wasn’t hopeless.
More than that, I knew she would keep pestering me and would necessarily stop me from the blissful, nonexistent sleep provided to me.
I sighed, defeated, and asked, “Choice first.”
She nodded, her gaze intent on me as she asked, “If you could jump past [Journeyman Death Mage], the equivalent of a journeyman, to [Practicing Death Magus], would you?”
It was a weird question. A weird and specific question.
“Sophy, can I do that?” I asked her, “Because when you get weird and specific, it generally means you're trying to lead me on.”
“I don’t try and- No. I’m not leading you on…” she told me before continuing quietly, “I just need your opinion on if you want to do it, even if it’s a bad idea.”
I looked at her, and then the thought of it bloomed into my head.
If [Death Mage] was a weaker class, and I could skip it, jump right ahead to [Death Magus]… It was the kind of power boost that would help me fight.
I had been closer to the monster's level of power this time, mostly because of my skills and less in stats, but I had been closer. If I could jump ahead in power something like fifteen levels at level 20?
“Good gods, I could fight that thing with power like that. Skills two ranks higher? Is that right? Does it skip ranks?” I asked her, my metaphorical mouth metaphorically salivating at the potential for that kind of power.
What could I even do with that? Could I have blocked the lightning bolt? Could I have saved more people? Would it be right to even turn down something that could lead to so much good?
“This.” She said, pointing at me, “Is exactly the problem with offering this. Do you understand the differences between General and Specific skills? There's a similar difference between complex and basic advancement.”
“General is weak but broad, specific is more powerful but narrow?” I asked her.
“Yes, good. You have a framework for it. You need to understand that a specific skill can be about as powerful as the next tier’s general skills.”
“Why would that even matter?” I asked her, “I could get… Fine? Fine skills. By the tide, that would be insane. Unusual skills with a power level of fine skill? I could annihilate that fucking thing with skills like that. I could… I could…” I said, my mind spinning.
“You could permanently weaken your growth and end up 15 levels ahead but ten times weaker at that level,” Sophy explained.
I turned at the word ‘weaker’ and focused, my awe falling away as I stared at her. Her words made no sense. Fifteen effective levels were 15 effective levels in my book.
“Explain; I think that would be a good idea. Because if it's not that bad, I’m going to take it, hands down.” I told her seriously.
She sighed, muttering, “It’s always like this, isn’t it?” before speaking up. “A basic advancement is a nice, stable form of growth; it forcibly ties a class to another class via a skill, like splicing a rope. When you… There's got to be a better word for it… Let's see…” she said before muttering, “Western? … Yes, that would work.” I watched her carefully as she explained, “When you gain too many levels, you experience a strain,” she said, gesturing at me, “You know that well enough; you’ve experienced it half a dozen times at this point. That is the anima being soft and unsupported; your skills are… Shaken. In the West, that is called having a shaky foundation, like for a house. Skills of a given level of power strain your soul, both when you first acquire them and when you use them. That foundation firms back up quickly; it only takes a day or two to firm up for you, but that’s because you're only firming up A. One class, and B. Because you have enough skills to stabilize that class given your level of power.” She said.
She glided toward me, her movement wraithlike in the witchlight of the aurora, her feet barely making ripples on the surface of the inky sea of my essence beneath me.
She reached me and gestured for me to sit up, and I obliged her weakly, my arms falling behind me to prop me up lazily. Nodding in thanks, she reached her hand into me and tugged, pulling two skills, their complex folds shifting.
They resisted as if they were held in place by an invisible wire, but she coaxed them out and held them before me for my perusal.
One was rather simple; it was [Tool handling Proficiency], a skill so basic and general it was omnipresent in my life shaped like a hand clamped around a shaft; next to it was [Guide plant], a less used but still recognizable skill its folds almost shaped into a hollow in the middle, its void shaped like half a dozen recognizable, and dozens more unrecognized plants.
“Look very closely; you should be able to see them if you strain your eyes right,” she said, two fingers thumbing at something invisible.
No, not invisible, just fine. So fine as to be impossibly hard to spot. They were fine as spider silk, finer, even. It was so fine as to be the next best thing to invisible, but with her thumbing, the dark background, and the backlight of the sky, I could just see them as they moved.
“What are those?” I asked her.
“Those are your foundation. They’re the reason why your skills firm up so quickly, and they act like connective tissue for your soul. It's an anima cytoskeleton. They hold your skills together and distribute the load of their use. They connect with other skills, which is what lets you use multiple in conjunction. Do you notice the difference between the two?” she asked.
I looked closely, the gentile movement of her hands letting me just spot them now that I knew what I was looking for.
“One has more strands than the other?” I asked.
“Yes. Good. Those threads are how you can envision your foundation. A general skill connects with more skills. They can be used by more skills, and they can, in turn, distribute the impact of using them. A specific skill is more specific; it doesn’t connect to as many, or rather, as many immediately as a general one; it's more vicarious, a strand connected to a strand, and on and on. All of your skills, or almost all, connect to each other like this.” She said, triumph in her voice.
“That’s all well and good, but how-” I started to ask.
“Think woman. If more powerful skills are more strenuous and would thus require more of these filaments to remain stable, and a higher level general skill, one that is more stable, it’s the equivalent in power and strain as a specific skill of a level lower… What happens when you get a specific skill that powerful? Go on, guess for yourself.” She hissed out.
I looked at the strands. I imagined the strain of getting five levels and how soft the entire class was. Suppose that was the strain of one or two skills of a comparable level… skills that, once stable, took an unbelievable amount of effort to weaken. A specific skill took less than a general skill, a level above that, and a level above that.
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“It would… It would ruin my ability to use the skills?” I asked.
“Yes. It would. Each tier is about an order of magnitude stronger. Same with spells of a higher tier. Just using it would shake your foundation. And it wouldn’t just affect one class's skills.”
It wouldn’t if basic advancement was one class via one skill. Advanced was more than that. "It would probably need to connect to multiple classes and multiple skills." I told her.
“Yes, exactly. These little filaments can be strained to the breaking point if you try hard enough, but the main connections that connect class to class would be strained beyond that. The filament would tear, placing more force on those, and those would fray and snap. You could just lose the ability to use a set number of skills, you could denature the anima and need direct aid from me to restore them, you could destroy the connections, undoing them, and thus, weakening anything you build upon those unstable skills in the future… Or you could loose them entirely. They could simply be destroyed.” She said straightforwardly.
It was… It was like a cursed bargain. Power at a price. A deal with a demon… Or…
“It would be like a literary deal with the dark one,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” she said, with none of the tone one would associate with such a serious topic, “This is exactly the kind of deal one would make with the dark one or its servants. Power now, but power and stability. The dark one wants monsters, they want weapons. So they give power and provide stability to use them but at the cost of servitude, reverence, and their own future. Honestly, they’re like you, just… wrong.”
“They’re nothing like me,” I hissed.
“Poor phrasing, they’re like a [Saint]. You have a skill so powerful it would flat-out destroy your soul by just using it without your tie to a god. Not just, oops, the skill is gone, but literally, shredding your essence into dust, kind of destroying it. Using [True Immortality] without that connection would unmake you. The difference is that Death provided it in a way that wouldn’t destroy you or your foundation. She takes the strain, and she provides the power for it to work. It's one of the only skills that isn’t connected to anything, and if you eventually do connect it, it would be at a point where you can take it.” she explained in a calming voice.
I could scarcely imagine.
An army of improvised murderous [Saints].
It made a part of me throb with hatred. The idea of someone like me being even remotely similar anathema tied a knot in my heart.
“It seems you understand why I was reticent to give you this. Even if it's for the wrong reason, I should note that not every complex advancement is like that. Going from a journeyman to a full mage is similar, but it's one step up, and it’s a stable pattern. That one was worked out by a meticulous and benign god, not a… well, The Monster.”
“No,” I said resolutely, “Absolutely not,” I told her.
“To the complex advancement?” she asked to clarify, “Because if you're just going to disagree with my comparisons, we’ll be here all night.”
“No to the complex advancement. I’ll take just the normal one.” I agreed.
She let go of my skills, which pulled back into me with an unexpected snap that made me move instinctively but without an associated impact.
“Fantastic, that's out of the way," she said, and not without some relief, "we have a few levels and two skills, one unusual, one uncommon. I’ll let you pick so we can get them all out of the way back to back. It would probably make it easier on you.” She said chipperly.
“Ok,” I sighed, “Give it to me.”
Class:
[Journeyman Mage]
Levels Gained: 2
Skills Gained: 2
Skill Quality: Uncommon
Top Three Picks:
[Decay Resistance]
Passive.
Resist the deleterious side effects of death mana inside your body.
[Aura of Death]
Passive.
Bolsters and accumulates death mana around the target, creating a passive shroud in the presence of death mana.
Extends effective reach, allowing for manipulation of death mana within the Aura.
Effect radius scales with proficiency bonus (pb/2)
[Death Dart]
Spell.
Death Magic.
Form death mana into an agile dart before hurling it at an opponent in a line.
Upon impact, Death mana will decay active magical workings in a small blast around it.
Top Three Picks:
[Aura of Decay]
Passive.
Projects an aura around the target that collects death magic. Decays life mana into death mana around the target.
Effect radius scales with proficiency bonus (pb/2)
[Imbue]
Passive.
Allows the wielder to imbue an implement, such as a magical tool or stave, with a mana type.
It can be used to fuel mana affinity-specific spells.
[Empower]
Spell.
Death Magic.
Allows the spellcaster to empower an object with mana for one minute.
During this time, the object holds the mana before it is harmlessly expelled into the environment.
Any mana affinity can be utilized.
Class:
[Forester]
Levels Gained: 2
Skills Gained: 1
Skill Quality: Uncommon
Top Three Picks:
[Brushwalker]
Passive.
Walk through brush with greater ease. Skill pushes away brush, and while clearing, brush scatters debris away from you.
Increases the effectiveness of tools while clearing brush.
[Pursuit]
Passive.
Gain improved speed and surefootedness while pursuing a target.
This increases the effects of perception and acuity while pursuing obscured or hidden targets.
[Felling Blow]
Active.
Let out a strike to feel a target; power scales with strength and perception.
That was certainly a pickle.
At least I knew why two of the skills were always passive now; the passive skills were often more general, which would help me build a solid foundation.
It was a clever thing that, a good practice on average giving two passives to every active.
I looked at the mage skills. The resistance skill could let me drain myself more; the auras were… Well, probably a must-pick, but damn, did that hurt, and the melee skills were… Well not complicated, but it just sucked, was all; I couldn’t take both, and the Auras and both sets intrigued me. I discarded [Death Dart] right off the bat, along with the resistance skill. If I could cast a spell a tier about it, I could learn to cast it, just like its piers.
“Ok, so I’m seeing a few things that are suspiciously similar, but one is a spell, and the other is a passive skill. What's the deal with [Imbue] and [Empower]?” I asked her.
“One is a skill, and the other is a spell,” she said mockingly, “Empower takes time to cast and will scale based on spell stuff, but it has a limited time. It's only uncommon, so you can't push too much mana in without some serious magical control, but with your stuff, it is also cheap, dirt cheap. It's similar to Dart, with about 140 mana once you're used to it. Imbue is a skill that activates whenever you want but drains more mana and needs to be used continuously. The upside is that you can flush it with tones of the stuff. Both are based on what you did during your last fight. One is a prolonged cheap version that can make your magical attacks have death mana in them, and the other could blow the limb off that monster again while you run around free as a bird. You will need one of those now or a stronger one while you’re a [Journeyman Death Mage].”
Empower would be a rather useful spell, and it was a spell, but if I couldn’t push much mana into it, I couldn’t land big blows. It would lock me into fighting for longer; it would mean I needed to land more hits.
With [Imbue], I could still land more hits on other things, but I could also use it to absolutely wreck house on a big enemy like the Beast I had fought more than once.
I could take one now, or I could take a different one later… Actually. Would one later be better? [Aura of Decay] gave me a feeling similar to [Aura of Renewal], only backwards; it did that, but with life mana, if I could take both aura skills and get a better striking skill later…
“What are the later skills like?” I asked her.
“More competitive. I have a really good combo lined up for your level 20, it's complex, but a complex skill, far and above easier on you than a class, but think about it. You’ll get something like six skills. And each will be better than [Imbue] with the reliability of [Empower], wrapped up in a single skill.”
She said it as a warning, but all I heard was [Imbue] and [Empower] wrapped up in a single skill, and that made my choice clear.
As for the [Forester], skills…
Well.
Maybe I was getting some choice skills in my other classes, but the way they felt was just… So weak.
[Brushwalker] was just a throwaway. Any skill that could be replaced with practice and a knife was not worth the slot. [Felling Blow] could be useful; it could probably synergize with my attacks and [Rapid Action] to make my strikes that much more lethal, but I could also spot hidden threats and track down that monster if I ever ran into him again with [Pursuit].
I sighed. It was a sad thing that I had chosen the path of fighting, and not the path of hunting down my prey like the rat he was.
“I’ll take the two aura skills and [Felling Blow],” I told Sophy.
She nodded.
“Alrighty then. Are you ready to level up? You are a great big whiner,” she asked.
I opened my mouth to respond, but she knew I would do that. She seemed to enjoy teasing me by cutting me off with my mouth open.
“[Journeyman Mage] has gained a level and is now level 15!
[Journeyman Mage] has gained a level and is now level 16!
[Journeyman Mage] has gained the skill [Aura of Death].
[Journeyman Mage] has gained a level and is now level 17!
[Journeyman Mage] has gained a level and is now level 18!
[Journeyman Mage] has gained the skill [Aura of Decay].
[Journeyman Mage] has gained a level and is now level 19!
[Grave Digger] has gained a level and is now level 29!
[Verdant Nexus] has gained a level and is now level 29!
[Forester] has gained a level and is now level 11!
[Forester] has gained a level and is now level 12!
[Forester] has gained the skill [Felling Blow]
Congratulations, you are now level 22!”
I fell backwards as the aurora above me collapsed into my soul, then essence, and did my best to roll with it. I hated how much it affected me, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
Sophy was faster than last time; her fingers nimbly pulled lengths of Anima from the essence, pinching and shaping them, skills unfolding like wiggly animals that wanted a home, and they found it.
She reached into me, my feeling numb and unaware of it as she connected skills up.
And then it was done, and I could breathe a sigh of relief.
“How’s that feel?” She asked.
“Not great,” I told her honestly.
“Then stop levelling up so much; it's not like I want to take time out of my busy day to come to help you, you know,” she said, a lie so obvious even my clueless ass could pick up on it.
“Yeah, right. You just want more time to watch me blow up my love life and break a promise.” I told her while the slight excitement of levels passed me.
She snorted.
“I think you're misremembering in your old age furbrain. That’s common for fleshy's like you, so I’ll remind you. You promised not to make her cry and to be better. So far as I could say, she was afraid, sure, and she probably cried, but if taking a bolt of lightning is not being 'better by her side', I, quite frankly, don’t know what is. As a rule, you know I don’t like you getting yourself killed, but with how happy she makes you and the nature of what happened, I would honestly approve of that death.”
I rocked back, her words giving me a kind of whiplash I wouldn't have expected.
“But you always get on my case? What about self-love or whatever?” I asked.
“Your action is bound to cause some grief in the short term, but you showed backbone and protected something special to you, even at the cost of that grief; I would say that's a good step in the right direction. It wasn't you getting yourself killed for a principal or out of neglect, but for something that has markedly improved yourself. Take a look at yourself once and a while and just how far you've come from the girl that was fine with her death because she didn't want to live, protecting that, is self-love, just don't actually demean her by treating her like a hollow egg.”
Sophy looked smug, but I just couldn’t see it.
It was somewhat absurd to me.
“Are you ignoring-” I started.
“None of that, Saphine. My time is short, so I’ll give you a little nugget of wisdom. When people say a bunch of things back to back, the earlier the thing, the more important. Think over what she said early on to you that seemed out of place, and think about it. Now. I’m a very busy Guide, and many people are levelling tonight; I need to head off, and you need some sleep. Think on it a bit, and push for reconciliation when you get a chance; I doubt Anna wants to call it quits.”
And with that, the world seemed to fall away from me before I could get a word edge-wise, and I fell into the ink.
***
I watched Saphine tumble into dreamland and rubbed my temples or the closest bits to them.
I didn’t exactly have a head, just a head-shaped ball of highly complex Anima that gave me a familiar profile, but such was life as a sentient anima phage.
“I swear that girl is going to somehow give me an aneurysm one day. I hope she works out her shit before I keel over from something impossible,” I murmured to myself.
It was a habit; probably a bad one, but you could only spend so much time alone and around the mortals before they rubbed off on you. In all honesty, I was starting to go native, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. I had even taken on a closer form to them. The me of years long past would have gaged if that was a thing I had done back then.
Drawing in the presence of Saphines rich essence like a mortal did breath, I pulled back the curtain of her soul and glided out onto the outside world, quickly wrapping the spiritual plane's boundary around me like a blanket to keep the mana out. I didn’t want to ruin all my hard work so easily, especially not with how long it would take to fix it the hard way.
Honestly, proper souls were such a cheat.
I skated out in time to see Saphine wake up as a bolt of lightning struck in the distance and woke her up. She scrambled around as she woke, cussing in confusion, and I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself. So much for her getting sleep.
She couldn’t tell it, even as close as I was, she just didn’t have the stats to sense me, even with her funky skill. Regardless I kept my distance as she had a little roll around, as her dumb ideas of failure that tormented her faught with the little seed of hope I had planted.
“I sure hope they work it out… Now… Where is my next visit? Let's see… There she is,” I murmured to myself.
I glided off, safe in my little pore. They were close.
After all, my next stop was Anna.
I got there in time for her mother to rejoin her.
Readying myself for the confrontation, I reached into myself, puling out my rations for a snack and watched the show.