The guildmaster’s flute-spun spell sent me, Val and the geode-clutching blacksmith flying from the man’s personal quarters, tumbling across the tiled stone of the courtyard.

‘Ow…’ I grumbled—this both sincere and part of the plan.

‘Do you see what happens when you mess with the Bard’s College Of The Eastern Tundras?’ he bellowed, resulting in a round of applause from the other members of the college.

This was our cue to run away—before the other bards could realise that maybe they should restrain attempted burglars until the guards could arrive. Val led our motley trio—or quartet, I guessed, including Crystal—out of the compound, and we ran down the streets of Murderpost until satisfied that we’d escaped the college students.

‘You’re right,’ I said through gasps for breath. ‘Bards do suck.’

‘Pieter does not lie,’ the blacksmith said.

‘Nobody should be that well-groomed,’ Val agreed.

Val and I saw the blacksmith and his igneous lover back to his store, and after the burly orc had lovingly placed Crystal on “her spot”—a task that involved a surprising amount of kissing—we finally pressed the matter of the deal.

‘Out with it, Pieter,’ Val said. ‘Where’s that customer of yours got to?’

The blacksmith sighed. ‘His name Lev. He my cousin’s mother’s aunt’s roommate’s soon-to-be-ex-fiance’s godson. But we not that close.’

‘Where, Pieter? Where’s he gone?’

‘You find him in Carn. He has family there.’

Finally, Val and I could relax. ‘Thank you, Pieter,’ I said. ‘I hope you and Crystal have many happy decades together.’

‘We will,’ Pieter replied, and then turned to Crystal as she glowed brighter. ‘Crystal say thank you as well. And also you have lovely bum. They her words, not mine.’

‘I…’ I started, and a nudge from Val interrupted me from my instinctive response. ‘Thank you, Crystal.’

We said our final goodbyes to our new friend, and made our way back to the southern gate. From there, it was a good two or three days travel until Carn, and neither of us wanted to wait around any longer—it wouldn’t do to faff about and miss our chance at tracking this Player’s assistant down.

So we headed out back into the countryside in good spirits, Val nattering on about a book she read a few years ago—something about Crystal reminded her of it—while I shifted my attention to the notifications from the guildmaster fight.

Ability selection unlocked

Select an ability from the list below:

Option 1: Slice II (Knifework) — Upgrade to Slice. Slice the enemy for physical damage [+20%] worth weapon’s base damage and additional damage scaling on [STR].

Snore. Upgrades of abilities were never the most fun option, but I forced myself to consider it nonetheless. After all, often upgrades to core abilities actually made them more viable long-term; that had been pivotal to my success in my past life. I wouldn’t have made it as far as I had without a few such upgrades. Still, I could at least review the rest of my options first.

Option 2: Execution (Knifework) — Attack a target while undetected for +100% damage.

So I was still eligible to unlock Execution, but I wasn’t so high a level yet that it skipped to the next upgrade. If I’d been able to jump straight to Execution II—whatever that might have entailed—I might have been more likely to go for it. As it stood, though, I ruled this one out.

Hidden condition met! Alternative ability choice unlocked.

Option 3: Closed Reach (Knifework) [Requires: ‘Worldbender’ class defeated or Alteration studies] — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Has mana cost.

My heat skipped a beat; that was a magic ability. Never had I thought that this might be an option, that Knifework, under the right conditions, might veer off into magic opportunities. Maybe that encounter with the worldbender hadn’t been such a pain after all, if it started to open a route into magic skills…

I turned to Val. ‘Can I ask you something?’

The sorcerer shrugged. ‘Sure.’

‘How do you unlock a magic skill?’

Val came to an abrupt halt, then turned and narrowed her eyes. ‘Did you unlock something, Styk?’

‘...Maybe.’

The sorcerer raised her eyebrow expectantly.

‘Defeating the cultist, back in the Hound & Hound, it’s got me a hidden ability choice. And I was wondering—’

‘If using that ability would unlock the associated magic type?’

‘Exactly.’

Val shrugged. ‘I guess.’ With that, she continued walking.

‘You don’t sound keen. Surely having some magic up my sleeve is better than if I just stick to the Knifework? Wasn’t the whole benefit of this do-over to, you know, actually do things differently?’

‘And worldbending is a perfectly acceptable type of magic. If you want it, get it.’

‘But you’d advise against it?’

Val shrugged. ‘I didn’t say that.’

I raised an eyebrow, but kept my mouth shut; something about this line of questioning was getting on Val’s nerves. It wasn’t like I knew the woman well, I supposed—perhaps she had a history with worldbenders. Either way, I figured I liked the sound of having a magic skill.

Ability unlocked — Closed Reach

Closed Reach (Knifework) — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Uses mana.

Class evolved!

Stolen novel; please report.

Level 5 Novice Bladespinner

Race: Human

There it was; not a magic ability in and of itself, but well on the way to unlocking me a magic skill tree. All I needed to do was find a suitable way to use it.

We continued our journey west in silence for a time, me not wanting to risk getting on my new acquaintances nerves any more than I already had, and Val apparently not wanting to share exactly what it was that she didn’t like about my new route of progression. After a time, she looked at me, the intensity in her gaze now faded some, compared to earlier.

‘You took it, then?’ she asked.

‘How’d you know?’

‘New class.’

‘Ah, right, yeah,’ I said. ‘Far better than peasant, isn’t it?’

Val cracked a small smile. ‘It still has “novice” in it, I wouldn’t get too excited.’

I returned the smile, and we continued our long walk to Carn in silence once more. Val surprised me by saying nothing to ruin this moment of quiet—silence wasn’t exactly a core tenet of her personality, it had seemed to me—and it was me, in the end, who shattered the silence.

‘Val…’ I started, already chickening out of this line of questioning.

‘...yeah?’ she responded.

‘You don’t have a problem with me picking up Worldbending at some point, do you?’

Val sighed. ‘No, I suppose I don’t. It’s your progression, and you’ve got to make the choices that suit you best. And Worldbending combined with Knifework? I can see some interesting combinations there already. It’s just… not all of us had the freedom to choose, like you.’

‘You wouldn’t have chosen Sorcery? You were forced into it?’

To this, Val gave no reply, and I knew better than to push the matter further.

* * *

The sun set on our first day of travel, yet Val and I pushed on into the night; there was no knowing just how long our target was going to be in Carn. Any casual conversation had gradually faded away as we’d grown more and more tired, until—as was the case now—we trudged on in silence.

As we grew closer to the northern coast of the Iron Sea, the tree cover grew thinner and farther between, and instead this fertile lowland was used for agricultural purposes. Hedgerows and low stone walls marked the edge of one farmer’s land and the start of another, but certainly these weren’t stopping anyone getting onto the land, considering I could just… step over them.

In my tiredness-induced haze, I found my footsteps starting to grow hypnotising. Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. Those were mine. Tap, tap, tap. Those were Val, spritely and small as she was. Crunch, tap, crunch, tap, crunch, tap, thud, crunch—

I stopped.

Thud, thud, thud-thud-thud.

Nope, I didn’t know whose footsteps those were. I turned to the source of the noise, saw a man charging at me, yelped, and then stumbled backwards over a low hedge.

It wasn’t, perhaps, my finest moment.

But quickly I gathered myself, springing back to my feet just in time to see Val cast a spell that flicked loose gravel into the face of our would-be attacker.

The dual-knife-wielding man dropped one of his blades to paw at his eyes, doing his best to wipe the small stones from them and regain his vision.

I took advantage of the distraction to press forward, reaching my knife out and slicing forward with it, over the hedge, causing my stamina bar to drain ever so slightly. At my current distance, though, I missed. My initial instinct was to leap over the hedge, but I caught myself; what was this if not the perfect opportunity to try out my new closed reach ability?

I prepared myself to slice again, this time combining it with the activation of my closed reach skill. This time, as I struck, the world seemed to fold back on itself, bringing my target in range of the knife—or my knife in range of the target, perhaps? This time, it wasn’t just my stamina bar that drained some, but my mana bar too—the latter nearly depleting from just this one move. But that was just not having invested in Intelligence, I supposed.

My wrist jolted as my knife made contact with the bandit’s shoulder, and in my surprise that this had worked, I accidentally lost my grasp on it.

The bandit looked at me, then down to the knife wedged in his shoulder, then back at me again. ‘...Ow,’ he said, then he punched me in the nose.

I stumbled backwards, forsaking the retrieval of my basic cooking knife to clutch at my nose. A strange red liquid seemed to be flowing from my wound, and I couldn’t seem to do much about it, considering that it was flowing between my fingers.

Ah, yes. Blood. I remembered blood.

I grabbed a cloth from my backpack, clutching it to my nose, and then turned to charge at the bandit once more. While Val distracted the man with root-binding magicks—this, I was starting to understand, was a favoured strategy of hers—I leapt over the hedgerow somehow even less gracefully than when I had fallen over it, then grabbed at the knife once more. No closed reach was required, this time—it had already found its target, now it just needed… some twisting.

The bandit roared with pain as the twisted knife ripped open the wound.

‘Last chance to run,’ Val said, raising her hands in the beginnings of another spell.

She wasn’t even done speaking when the bandit turned on the spot, and began bolting away.

‘My knife!’ I called after him.

In the distance, I saw the fleeing man rip the knife from his shoulder, throwing it clattering to the ground.

‘Nice,’ I said.

‘Not a bad move,’ Val added, and I took this as her coming to terms with my new magic leanings. Speaking of—I had notifications to investigate.

Petty crook defeated!

Wow—that was a terrible class. At least mine sounded cool. I brought up the rest of the notifications.

Knifework — +800xp

Worldbending unlocked!

‘Got it,’ I said to myself. There it was; my first ever magic skill. Not level 1 yet, and therefore not even a basic ability attached to it, but… I had it. It was there. ‘I’m gonna need to start putting some points into Intelligence if I—’

Blood pouring from my nose muffled the latter half of my sentence.

‘Ah, right,’ I blubbed, turning to Val. ‘Forgot about that. Any chance you could heal this?’

Val stepped closer, gesturing for me to remove the cloth from my nose so she could take a better look. When I did so, she grimaced.

‘That bad? I hope it hasn’t ruined any of my good looks.’

‘That’s a very vain thing to say.’

‘Yet I don’t hear you arguing it.’

Val leaned in closer to my nose. ‘Yeah, that’s broken. A cut, like before, sure—I could fix that. But I’m not advanced enough to fix a broken bone, like this.’

I pouted. ‘What’s the point in having Healing as a skill if you’re not going to—’

‘It’s literally just for hangovers. We used to have a woman called Tokas, back in our old party. A very talented healer, among other things. She would’ve been able to sort it out, but…’ Val trailed off.

‘But?’

Val shrugged. ‘But the days of that party are behind me, I suppose. Look: I have some spare coin. We’ll stop in at the next village, get their local healer to give fixing it a go.’

‘You think they’ll have experience with broken noses?’

‘Out here?’ Val replied. ‘In the middle of nowhere? All there is to do is get into bar fights. I’m pretty sure a broken nose is the only thing they’ll know how to fix.’

With that, we continued onward, and even a broken nose couldn’t ruin my good mood.

"Styk"

Level 5 Novice Bladespinner

Base Stats:

Vitality — 4

Intelligence — 5

Dexterity — 12

Strength — 25

Wisdom — 8

Charisma — 0

Skills:

Knifework — Level 10

Identification — Level 4

Stealth — Level 1

Abilities:

Slice — Slice the enemy for physical damage worth weapon’s base damage and additional damage scaling on [STR].

Stab — Put your weight behind your wielded blade and force the tip through tougher hides and armour. Damage scales on [STR].

Closed Reach — Bend reality to narrow the gap between blade and target by up to 8 inches. Uses mana.

Basic Stealth Attack — Passive. 10% boost to damage when unnoticed by enemy.

Basic Identification — Discover basic attributes for a particular object or person. Ability scales with [WIS] + [INT].

Active Effects:

Legacy of Sisyphus:

XP gain increased by +400%