Old habits die hard, especially eight years strong, but Blake still had to stop drinking. He couldn't keep going on getting shitfaced as often as he did. It wasn't an honest lifestyle.

Now that Sophia was around, Nash's education stopped being Blake's job, though there was still the occasional thing they needed his help with. Aside from that, he was free to do what he had to do to rank up from rank E to rank D. Sophia wouldn't support his journey financially. To fend for himself, he needed to be able to take real jobs. Rank D was important. He repeated it to himself over and over, all in the name of financial stability.

He spent his time getting his monster knowledge up to the baseline. The days passed, and as the days passed, some of the fog in his mind dissipated.

Doing this was enough to raise his level and ascend to guild rank D. Or maybe it was beating Sophia. He wasn't really sure. Either way, it was confirmed the next time he talked to the clerk.

"Good job! Now get out there and go clear some of those new undead dungeons!" she said.

"No way, I am not letting you drag Nashie down into one of those things, not until he's a full-fledged medic," Sophia said, clinging to Nash from behind.

"Okay, so I still need to wait a while on dungeons. Not like it's urgent for me to make lots of money super fast now that you're here for Nash. Still need to make it to Queensland, though..."

He checked the job board.

"All the good Rank D jobs are gone."

"Ah, yeah, a high-ranking party came through and cleared them all," the clerk said, from afar.

"Come on, leave some for the little people..."

"Bandit bounties have a posting limit, so there are usually new bounties ready to go when the old ones get wiped. If you come back tomorrow there should be more work."

"What a drag... Isn't there some kind of better, more stable work? Or is the guild the best employer in town, for freelancers?"

"Hey, you could always give up on the adventuring life and become a househusband. I could use someone like you to play around with. Oh, the fantasies!" Sophia said.

"No thanks. All I care about is getting to Queensland," Blake said, heading for the library. Riley followed. The others followed later.

At this point, he was out of common monster lore to learn, so he decided to poke at any spells he might be able to cast. This was a fantasy world, after all. There was probably something for him, magic-wise.

He ended up going down the lowest-rank spells of all six major schools of magic from a universal magic primer. These spells required only incantation, no training, and worked at all levels.

Oh, huh, these magic schools map to that card game's card suits. Red magic's swords, blue magic's fists, black magic's wands, white magic's hearts, time magic's sands, and holy magic's flames. That's funny. Oh, I guess this would be a logical thing to base your card suits off of!

'Words have power', the primer urged, instructing him to state spells' names when attempting to cast them.

"Uh... Tempered Blade!"

No dice. His strange Bladescribe class couldn't cast Red Magic.

"Imp's Fury!"

Nor Blue Magic.

"Fireb—Wait, that's dangerous in here—Candle!"

Nor Black Magic.

"Painkiller!"

Nor White Magic.

"Haste! And Divine Wind!"

Nor Time Magic. And neither Holy Magic.

"I'm fucked. Unless it's in the obscure schools... Man, this sucks."

He kept looking. Surely there was some school of magic he could use. It would be a real damn shame to live in a fantasy world entirely locked out of magic like this.

The minutes passed.

Eventually, at long last, he found it.

"Veil of Ignorance!"

Stolen story; please report.

It worked, and it was added to his spell list. Casting it on himself, he immediately got very, very depressed. Depressed in the way someone might feel if they were pulled outside of the world and given a back door through which to perceive all of its inner workings, all of the subjective experiences felt by any experiencer to ever experience anything, weighed by their uniqueness, time, quality, so on, just to then put it all together and observe that nothing adds up, reality is a rigged game, go home, the battle's already lost. What a mortal's mind would do to itself if given an intractable amount of data to weigh and consider—give up, look away. The calculation is impossible, and cannot even be approximated, says the reeling mind.

Not that there was anything wrong with attempting to think through such ins and outs, but Blake was certainly not equipped to so much as experience an attempt to do it, even vicariously. The human brain was just not strong enough, and Blake was no exception.

His mind did not actually go through such a process, of course. It was just the magic making him feel that way, cutting straight to the depression and forfeiture. The depression was real. And it was hitting hard.

"Ugh... Hell fucking no. Dispel!"

Thankfully, he could instantly dispel self-buffs and self-debuffs, just like this primer's intro section said people always could, and all the magic's effects instantly disappeared.

"I'm never casting that again. It's not worth it." He paused. "But god damn it. Not Mind Magic. There's only like a dozen spells in the whole list. Everything else has hundreds, sometimes thousands. Oh I am so not happy about this."

Riley sat behind him, flipping through some sort of strange graphic novel where, when opened, there was an illustration on the left and a wall of text on the right. It was a dramatized account of ancient history. The illustration currently shown was of a strange dress. She turned to the next page.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Oh, you know, I got to the end of the primer and literally the very last school of magic is the only one I can use. And as far as I can tell, it sucks."

"Hey, at least you can use something. I can't use a thing."

"What's your class again?"

"Wrecker. Pure hand-to-hand melee."

"Bad with weapons, right, I remember."

"Yeah. I drop stuff and accidentally cut myself a lot. Sometimes weapons just break on me for no reason, or, like, break apart when I hit things with them."

"Did you ever try magic, though? Or are you just not supposed to be able to use it?"

"Uh... Well, my old 'owner' made sure I couldn't use anything."

"Ahh, right, magic would be a problem for slavery... Do slaves get, like, mana drained?"

"It's like, companions like me usually get our magic shut down with enchantments, if we're dangerous. But they didn't do it to me because I can't use anything."

"Right. But was that because you couldn't use magic or because you weren't a threat?"

"Like I said, I can't use anything. They never bothered trying to keep me from using it, so I..."

"You never know until you try. Or check. Here, There's a list of common classes and what they can do in this book."

He took a book out from the shelves and sat back down with it next to her. Eventually, they found the Wrecker section, as a stub in the corner of a late page, and Riley's eyes snapped to it.

"What? Really?" she said.

"Yeah, apparently Wreckers can use Red and Time magic. The more you know! I'm not surprised your owners never bothered to lock you out of using it, these schools don't look dangerous."

"That's great! I'm so happy! I'll learn the basics right away!"

"While we're here, let me check Medic and... Uh... Are Witch and Druid classes? Sophia called herself witch-druid when we fought her. I should look for those."

He flipped through the pages and found the Medic section.

"Wow, Medics can use White Magic, what a shocker," Riley said.

"I know, right? Anyway..."

Over to look for Druid and Witch. Sure enough, they both existed as independent classes.

"Can you multi-class?" Blake said.

"If you train really, really, really hard, for a really long time, or something weird happens to you, yeah."

"Huh. That's a surprise. Okay, let's see... Black Magic from being a Witch, and Holy and Blue Magic from being a druid. Wait. That covers every single major school of magic between you three."

"It does? That's incredible! What great luck!"

"No kidding. So, what're you reading?"

Sophia watched from a far away table, helping Nash with his own spell book.

"Ah... He's serious. And he's double-checking everything," she said.

"Sis? What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing, I'm just talking to myself."

She turned back to Nash's book. When she did, a voice yelled out.

"You have a gym? What the heck! Why didn't you guys tell me!"

Huh? she thought.

She looked back. Oh. It was Blake. He's going to the gym. Hmm.

"Nash, you okay here for a little while on your own?"

"Huh? Yeah... You going somewhere?"

"Just a walk. My legs are getting stiff."

"Okay. I'll be right here."

"Yep. If any weird characters bother you, yell at Riley for help."

"Okay."

She watched. The minutes passed. The minutes became an hour. She couldn't stop herself from watching. She didn't know why.

"You know," Blake said, "you don't have to hide around the corner like that. Nothing weird about you being here. Were you worried I might hurt myself?"

Sophia gulped.

"Uh... Yeah! I figured the equipment would be a lot... Different!"

"Well, it's all the same idea as the stuff where I came from, it's just only the low-tech stuff. If I didn't know any better I'd think someone from Earth designed it all."

"Oh, they might have. One of the things the Hero of the Demon Wars did during his job was set up these 'gym' places to train at, and everyone else copied their designs. I always assumed he invented it all, but..."

"Nah, it's a straight-up copy of a normal gym. Bog standard. Just less gear. I was shocked at how normal it all looked, nothing fantasy-like about it. Just kind of a little janky, that's all."

"Oh, that's a relief, I was worried you might hurt yourself," she said, reinforcing the lie.

"Yeah. Thanks. Is Nash with Riley?"

"Mhm."

"Great, let's go check up on them. Oh, and we should check the job board. Maybe there's something safer than a dungeon but still not 'basic'."

"Good idea!"

Crisis averted, Sophia thought to herself. She had no idea how she would've explained it if he realized why she was watching.

She shook her head. It was a very glad sight—she was never going to forget it—but she didn't want to think about it in front of him.

Blake went back to the library. Riley wanted to see the end of that book, the one with the illustrations. It seemed like she wanted to share it with him, even though she didn't need him to read.