I wound up having to sign a contract, but there really wasn’t much to it at all. It more or less just said ‘this is a contract that Senwyn is in this company and has agreed not to do the following things’ with a list of the rules we went over. There was a few other miscellaneous ones but as Roland had told me, it was all pretty common sense stuff along the lines of ‘don’t be an asshole to your company mates.’ It had an indefinite term, but they didn’t make you jump through hoops to leave, either. If you had stuff that was given to you, you talked with the company leadership to come to an agreement on how to handle the resources and that was about it. Francois was brought up to go through it with me and to act as a notary for the contract, and then that was all squared away.
I still had a ton of questions, but Roland told me that he had to attend to some things before it got much later in the day. He was going to take me to introduce me to two women who would help me get set up. Had nothing but a change of clothing in my tenement room that I wasn’t particularly attached to, and the little bit of money that I had after I pre-paid for Yorrin’s training and ‘protection’ was with me on my belt. If they were going to have a place for me here, and provide food and basic essentials for me, then I felt zero need to return to the poor quarter and officially quit my job at the slaughterhouse. In fact, the concept of quitting was sort of funny to me. It was basically a day labor arrangement, we were paid out at the end of a shift, and if you missed shifts it was just assumed that you were dead, drunk, or had quit.
The worst part was that after the paperwork was done and it was just Roland and I again, my stomach started growling like a beast once again. I frowned and rubbed my chest. I felt hungry, but that didn’t make any sense, the extent to which I’d gorged myself earlier in the day was off putting to me.
“Hungry?” Roland asked me as he loaded some documents into a beat up scroll case.
“I don’t understand how I possibly could be, after what I ate this morning,” I said.
“Explain?”
I rubbed my forehead and sighed. I told him I had a weird eating skill that I was granted and that I had quite literally eaten my own body weight in raw meat that morning, sparing him the gristly details.
He straightened up and looked me over, rubbing his chin, and I felt a full-body tingle again as he hit me with some kind of skill. Finally, he said: “No, actually, I think that makes sense, and I know how to fix your problem.”
I cocked my head to the side some, and I felt my spirits rise with the news.
“Follow me, I’ll introduce you to the ladies who are going to act as your daily contacts, and who will also be training you up. I hope you take the time tonight to prepare yourself for some extremely hard work and unpleasant training starting tomorrow. We’re going to be training you like you’re level 100 and not like you’re level 10. Not physically, of course, but with the skills and knowledge of someone much higher level. I think it’s best you are prepared from the start and not handled with the kid’s gloves. Do you agree?”
I hesitated a moment, and asked: “Is it going to hurt?”
Roland looked directly at me, and I brought my eyes up to meet his gaze. “Skills are as equally important as levels are, Senwyn. Some would argue they’re more important, even. You get class levels by fighting, and you get skill levels by experiencing, using and growing those skills through hard work and practice. So to answer your question, yes, it’s going to be very painful at times. But I’d ask that you trust me and the other members of the company who have thousands of skill levels worth of experience. It is much, much easier for you to suffer now than it is for you to suffer later. Suffering now means you’re breaking down and building up your body here in the city and in peaceful areas in the tower. Putting it off until later means that not only are you going to have to go through the same thing, but you’re also going to have to be doing it on floors in the tower that are going to be actually dangerous. Does that make sense?”
I clenched my jaw and nodded to him.
If I have to do it sooner or later to be able to not get stuck like others during their leveling process, and I can climb even close to as high as him and some of the other members of the company, it’s going to be worth it.
“I’ll try hard to catch up to the others. Will the women you’re introducing me to be able to guide me on my skills?”
“I don’t doubt your commitment, Senwyn, or I wouldn’t have invited you in the first place. And yes, they’re both on their way to 300 and besides the numbers, they’re heavily experienced. They won’t lead you astray. Let’s go.”
I followed him out of his office and down the staircase to the main room of the first floor. Roland mumbled something under his breath a few times along the way, but I didn’t catch what he was saying. It wasn’t intended for me, I half-expected that he was using a whisper rune. When we got to the main room, I saw that there were a handful of people seated at the bar and tables now, and there was a fire going in the hearth. Several people greeted and waved to Roland and I felt eyes tracking me as he lead me through the room, past the bar and down another hallway to a closed door. He opened it and gestured for me to enter saying: “I’ll see you in the next few days and we can talk more. For now, Eilyen and Phyara will handle all your needs. They’re your bosses, act accordingly.”
I dipped my head down in thanks and acknowledgement and entered the room. It was a multipurpose bathroom, much like what I was used to at work. There were banks of showers, lockers, benches, mirrors, bathroom stalls and half a dozen quite large wooden barrel style bathtubs. It smelled clean and fresh and was extremely well lit with bright mage lights regularly placed every few feet along the walls and dividers in the room. Two women were waiting for me, and I briefly glanced at each of them.
Oh no. They’re twins. And they’re elves. I am in so much trouble right now.
I hated to be the stereotypically horny human in the room, but I really did have a thing for elves. As a general rule of thumb, they were always tall, slender, athletic, and good-looking to a fault. And well, both of them were all of those things.
Let’s try and get the painfully awkward part over with as soon as possible.
“Er, hello. I’m Senwyn and just joined? Roland told me that you were going to be training me and helping me with getting uh… integrated?”
Fuck. I’m blushing and I’m wearing gear that may or may not be seen as equally bad as rags.
The elf on the left had her long blonde hair clipped and arranged into an arrangement I didn’t recognize, with a tightly wound bun on the back of her head. She had fine, lightly colored eyebrows over intensely green eyes, a perfect nose and full lips. Both her and her sister had similar builds for the most part. They were over six feet tall, but I couldn’t quite tell exactly how many inches. Somewhere between two and six. They were slender compared to their height, but both of them were rather shapely and had lean, wiry muscle tone. The elf on the left had slightly larger curves than the elf on the right, who had slightly more muscle mass.
The easiest way I had of telling the two apart was that the one on the left was smiling the entire time and looked friendly, and the one on the right had her arms crossed over her chest and wasn’t quite scowling but didn’t look overly pleased. Oh, and the elf on the left had a bun, and the one on the right a braid. Both of them wore similar long-sleeved, flowing tunics and tightly fitted leather pants with short boots.
“Welcome to the company! I’m so excited to have you here and to have the opportunity to train you! We’ve never had anyone like you before, this is going to be great! Oh, and I’m Phyara!”
She was practically bubbly with her energy, and she gestured heavily with her hands while she spoke. I had to drag my eyes away from her to inspect the wall just behind her.
The elf on the right grunted and said: “Eilyen. Welcome to the company.”
Hoo, okay. Sweet and sour. Let’s see what they are…
[Consider]! [Consider]!
Phyara was a [Level 289 Elf Elemental Spellsword]
Eilyen was a [Level 270 Elf Swordcaster Sentinel]
What are those classes? I’ve never even heard of them, they both sound awesome!
I felt the tingles I’d started to associate with higher-level perception abilities course over me back to back. Each one was slightly different: the areas they focused their attention on around my body differed.
“Wow, you really are something else, huh? Come on, let’s get you cleaned up and into some clothing.” Phyara told me and gestured for me to come over and stand next to her in front of one of the sinks. Meanwhile Eilyen went over and started rummaging through a handful of lockers and a closet.
Blushing furiously I asked: “Should I uhm…” and gestured at my chest and legs.
“Yep! If you don’t mind. It’ll make it a bit easier to get an idea of what we’re working with and gather measurements.”
Blushing beet red, I stripped down and arranged my belongings on the bench. It only took me a moment before I was standing in the nude, looking at myself in the mirror and standing next to Phyara. I was forced to admit that I sort of looked like hell. My five foot even frame and scrawny build looked pathetic next to Phyara. My hair and eyebrows were a dark chestnut that looked black in most lighting. My hair was loose and flat and hung down to the middle of my neck. I’d lost my hairband at some point, so I’d been forced to center part it and tuck it behind my ears.
I’d like to think that I had the foundation pieces to be facially attractive, but I didn’t quite get there. My dark eyebrows were a bit thicker than average, but not in a bushy or truly defining way. They had a nice natural curve to them, and I didn’t have to fuss with them, at least, I hadn’t yet. I always felt like my nose was a bit too long and unfortunately for me, I had several bumps down the length of it where it’d been broken multiple times growing up. At least it was straight and fairly narrow still. It was easy to tell the people who were true brawlers because their noses tended to flatten and broaden out. My mouth was wide, and I had fairly full lips; I just never took care of them.
My body was an entirely different matter altogether. I could pretty myself up and make myself look nice from the neck up, but I really disliked how I looked below the neck. Being a scrawny kid and a girl in a large, busy orphanage was a recipe for getting abused by other kids. Most of the time that took the form of stealing food. We had three meals a day, but they were sorry things. Gruel for breakfast, sometimes with some egg, sometimes with left-over meat that’d been diced up and dumped in. Lunch was bread and cheese. Dinner was typically bread and watery soup. In summary, the nutrition was pretty bad, and that was when the orphanage wasn’t having financial problems and had to cut corners even further. Add getting my food stolen on top of that, put over low heat and let simmer, and you’ll wind up with me.
For the past three years I’ve been working hard through my job, which included a lot of physical labor, and training on top of that, all to try and build strength and muscle. It’s where I invested my stat points when I leveled, also. [Strength], [Agility] and [Endurance]. I also spent the last level entirely on [Vitality] and will be spending more on it in the future. I was frail, which was far from ideal as a front-line class like a [Fighter]. I’d built muscle over the past three years, but I didn’t move the scale much. I think I gained maybe five pounds at the most. I usually barely tipped it over into the triple digits.
My shoulders were narrow, and my arms as well. What muscle I did have was wound tight and didn’t really protrude much at rest. Wiry would be the way I would describe my arms and legs. I pretty much didn’t have a chest to speak of. I had two bumps that hurt when they got hit. My bottom two ribs were visible. I had a nice looking belly, my abdominals were visible, but weren’t really anything to write home about. When I wanted to show some skin, that was my go-to, a short, cropped shirt.
My hips were wider than my shoulders but certainly weren’t what I would call womanly. I always felt it was more of a function of how narrow I was up top. I was proud of my butt, at least. It was small but round and nicely shaped. Both of my legs fared better than my arms did, what power I had in my body was in my lower half, probably a function of being on my feet and moving constantly at work and while training. There was a gap between my thighs, that seemed to go in and out of fashion in Foundation seemingly at random, much like the fashion most places, I expected.
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I said that I felt like I looked like crap because it looked like I’d lost a few pounds with the whole getting shredded and healed bit. I was used to riding the line between unhealthy looking and really skinny, but I was firmly in the first category now. My eyes looked a bit sunken and my lower ribs just a bit more prominent than usual. I sniffed and wiped away a bitter tear that’d broken free. I’d fix myself someday, it just wasn’t going to be today. I wasn’t foolish enough to think that people like Roland, Phyara and Eilyen had gotten to look the way they did overnight.
Phyara moved behind me and gently placed her hands on my shoulders and squeezed them. In a soft voice, she asked me: “Why do you cry when you see your reflection, Senwyn?”
I gave her a slightly mucousy-sounding laugh and told her: “Sorry, you’re just so beautiful that it’s hard to go from looking at you to looking at myself.”
She shushed me and squeezed my shoulders again. I thought I heard Eilyen put some things down on the bench behind me and off to the side, I felt the scanning skill tingle sensation once again, and she left.
“When’s the last time you had a nice hot bath?” Phyara asked me.
“Too long.”
She walked me over to one of the smaller tubs and pulled the levers to get the water flowing. She had me dip my fingers into the combined stream and showed me how to adjust it to my liking. Once it was suitably hot enough to soak out the full-body muscle tension I was feeling, I climbed in and rested my back against the high walls of the tub. My face barely came over the wall, and I giggled, feeling like I was a kid playing in the tub.
Phyara walked over to the pile of stuff that her sister had gathered and put on the bench and grabbed it, bringing it over next to the tub. She slid a stool over and set next to me. The water feed into the tub was pretty strong, so I wound up getting to my knees and shutting it off when the full was nearly all the way filled. Steam rolled off the water, and it felt lovely. Phyara smiled at me, pulled out a few bottles of what looked like soaps and oils and asked: “May I?”
I quickly nodded, which kept dipping my nose under the surface of the water. The beautiful elven woman poured two different bath oils into the water, and then a soap of some kind. They were pleasantly scented, if a bit on the strong side, but I was not going to complain. This was like a slice of heaven!
Phyara unbuttoned the cuffs of her tunic and rolled the sleeves up her arms as high as she could get them to go. She commented: “I’m very surprised that you have your bath water this hot at your level. Is your [Pain Tolerance] or related skill very developed?” Not waiting for an answer, she leaned forward and dipped her arm into the tub and stirred the water around to mix up the oils and the soap. “Perhaps an elemental affinity?” She queried, raising one of her eyebrows. I got lost in her eyes and blushed before looking away.
“I just put it up to where it felt good and hot to get my muscles to relax,” I said, feeling a mix of lame and puzzled simultaneously.
“You realize that this is as hot as it will go, and just below boiling, yes?”
Was it!?
I shook my head and kept my eyes averted over to the side.
“Well, listen, Senwyn…” Phyara said, letting her sentence trail off until I turned back and made eye contact with her.
“Roland mentioned that you were special, but that’s all he told us. If you want to tell us about it, it would be helpful, because we’re going to wind up finding your limits one way or another as part of being good trainers. I promise you my sister and I won’t judge you for it, and I’d go so far as to say the same is true of everyone else in the company right now. You don’t have to tell us if you don’t want to, but like I said, it might help us give you better advice for your training and development if we can understand you.”
I blew a raspberry, splashing some water in the process and let out an extended sigh. It wasn’t so much that I needed to make up my mind to tell her, more that I needed to gather my nerve to talk about it again so soon after losing it upstairs. They say telling the truth can feel liberating, right?
“I went and got all emotional in Rolan’s office earlier talking about it,” I said.
Phyara nodded slowly and handed me a soft washcloth. “He’s very good at listening, I think a lot of people tend to get emotional in his office, especially if he’s sounding them out for membership.”
“Is it so obvious that there’s something wrong with me? You both, you and Roland I mean, you seem like you can just… tell.”
Phyara hummed a little and rocked her head from side to side. She was clearly thinking about how she wanted to say what was on her mind, and I cringed a little internally and braced myself.
“No, you don’t have something wrong with you, that’s not how I would phrase it. You are very… different. It’s one of those things that is hard to put into words, but I’ll try. It’s your presence. And give me a chance to fully explain what I mean here: Your look and your feel are very jarring, it’s very noticeable if you’re actively sensing. When I look at you, my eyes tell me one thing. And what my eyes tell me is backed by what the system tells me when I look at your stats.”
I nibbled on my lower lip and nodded slowly, understanding part of what she said. If I was here to learn and train, though, I was going to ask questions. “What do you mean by presence and actively sensing?”
Phyara broke into a broad smile at my question, but it was another voice coming from behind me that answered me. It startled me a bit.
“Your body is composed of mana, like everything else is. Active sensing is being aware of, feeling and paying attention to the mana that surrounds you. Living creatures all collect and condense mana. The more complex and powerful the organism is, the denser they and their mana becomes. This concentration of mana has effects on all the mana that surrounds you, like how water ripples when you splash it. That effect is what people call having a presence. Everyone has one, and it’s considered common courtesy to suppress the effect your mana is having on things around you, which diminishes your presence. Most monsters don’t tend to do this, but some of the nastier ones do. It’s mostly a thing among sapients.” Judging by how similar they sounded, I was guessing that Eilyen had returned.
Phyara confirmed it for me when she said: “Yes, what my sister said.”
I thought about what they told me as I scrubbed myself under the surface of the water.
“So what is going on with my presence?”
Phyara spoke this time, saying: “Well, as I was saying before, if you look at you and if you identify you, you look, sound and feel like what you would expect a level 10 [Fighter] to be. But your presence is something totally, completely different.”
“It’s monstrous, is what it is.”
I flinched, hard, when she said the M word. It felt like I’d been slapped across the face by her words. I felt my jaw tremble, and I clenched it, determined not to fall to pieces a second time.
Phyara yelled “Eilyen!” at her sister and gave her a seriously dirty look.
Eilyen came around to the other side of the tub from her sister, and I looked up at her. Her resting bitch face had softened, and she squatted down to put our eyes on more of a level playing field.
“I’m sorry for hurting you, it was a bad choice of words on my part. When I said… that word, I was trying to describe the size of your presence, not ah… the nature of it.” Eilyen, for her part, did look sorry for what she said. It helped a little, but I was certainly sensitive to the topic.
“Some…one… put a monster core in me,” I said quietly, putting words to what was gnawing away at my conscience.
Both of the sisters frowned and shared a glance with one another. Eilyen spoke first: “What makes you say that? It’s not that I don’t believe you, but what you’re saying isn’t possible. Do you think it could have been something similar to a monster core?”
I wanted to say something, deny her disbelief and double down on what I saw and felt, but grudgingly, I gave her the benefit of the doubt and thought it over.
“I worked as a [Butcher] up until, well, today. Point being, I know what monster cores look like and how to harvest and handle them. I’m nearly certain that what I saw was a monster core, but I do admit that it wasn’t quite like any monster core I’ve ever seen in my life. Even the ones that we were told were extremely rare and to keep a lookout for.”
“Can you describe it?” Phyara asked me.
“It was like someone took the biggest monster core I’ve ever even heard about and then had it taken to a [Gemcutter] and had it cut and polished. But besides being huge, cut and polished looking, it was also just so pure, and I’ve never ever seen anything like it.”
“Pure?” It was back to Eilyen this time.
“Yes, it looked like a gemstone, like I don’t know, a diamond or citrine or something like that. And not because it was cut and polished, sorry. Probably being confusing tripping over my words here, but I mean it was clear, you could see through it like a pure crystal. And it was filled with this intense, bright orange light and, and…”
Gods damn it!
My eyes were dripping again. I clenched my fists, grit my teeth and took several long, deep breaths.
In and hold it… And out…
It took me a moment to get things back under control enough that I felt confident talking about it. “It was putting off heat like a forge, or steel taken right out of it. It burned so, so bad. It burned and boiled my skin away and burned through my chest. I passed out while it was being… inserted.”
Phyara put her hand out to the side of the tub, and I took it. She squeezed my hand tightly. Eilyen looked pale. She held her hand out as well, but like she wanted to touch my shoulder.
“Will you allow me to look into you, look through you? I should be able to see it, if it’s still there,” Eilyen asked me.
I nodded quickly, and she squat-walked up against the side of the tub and slid her sleeve up to her elbow. When she was ready, she told me: “Take my hand and put my palm over where you felt it when you’re ready.”
I think I must have turned as bright red as I possibly could go at that moment, and I hesitated in taking her hand.
The first time someone’s going to feel my chest and it’s a gorgeous elven woman, but it couldn’t possibly be less sexy or exciting. Bluh.
Eilyen’s brows were starting to crease, and she looked like she was about to ask me something when I just took her hand and pressed her palm directly against the center of my sternum. An ah-hah look of comprehension crossed her face and she closed her eyes to focus on whatever it was she was doing.
I felt a strange sensation coming from the palm of her hand a moment later, like miniature fingers caressing my skin, and it was pleasant up until the point where they started to go deeper into my chest. Then it was just… weird. It felt like she was slowly, carefully feeling around inside my chest, touching different organs which would respond with tingles of their own in return. Left lung, right lung, esophagus, heart, then she touched something else in the same area.
What she touched didn’t respond like my other organs had, which had sort of given tingle echoes in response. No, what she touched immediately felt like it exploded and burst into rolling flames and churning magma. Eilyen let out a loud gasp and yanked her hand back, jumping up to her feet and several feet back from me. She shouted something and shot her hand forwards, palm out and used some spell or skill, and her sister went flying backwards off her stool and across the room. Meanwhile, all hell had been let loose within my chest. The lava feeling in my heart was spreading like molasses outwards, heading towards my throat, arms and thighs in five distinct lines.
“Get out! Get out of the tub!” Eilyen yelled at me, and I had to agree with her astute assessment. I wanted to curl up as tightly as I could, and I couldn’t do that in the tub without drowning. I hopped out of the tub, slipped on the stone floor and fell on my side, but I barely registered the pain of my ass and elbow colliding with the stone. Instead, I did what I wanted, and brought my knees up to my chest, wrapped my arms around my shins and buried my face. I squeezed my eyes closed and pulled my legs against my chest as hard as I could. The experience of that liquid fire flowing through my body so slowly and lazily was agonizing.
It might sound stupid, but the fire in me chest wasn’t really all that painful. It was hot, extraordinarily hot, but it was also comforting like a hot bath, hot meal or hot towel was. No, what was making me want to curl up and want to fucking die was the five fat slugs of magma digging through my body. They wormed through my belly and entered my thighs, spread across my chest, through my shoulders and down my upper arms. And the fifth one was taking it’s sweet time coursing up my neck. It was nearly at my mouth, at least. I took deep breaths and wheezed the air out.
I tried to flex and flare [Fighter’s Grit] to try and alleviate the pain, but it didn’t’ do anything. The magma still carved it’s way through my body in what felt like big, fat tunnels that were incinerating my flesh from within. The burning sensation started to cool the farther out they went, at least. Not the tips where it was digging, oh no. Those were white-hot agony. The start of the tunnels was cooling. It wasn’t much relief, not really. Only having half your body on fire really wasn’t that much of an improvement over having it all on fire. Being on fire was just sort of a bad experience all around.
“Get out! Out! Everyone fuck off! We’re handling it!”
“What’s going on in there!?”
“Is the building on fire? I smell smoke!”
“Come on you two, the baths aren’t the place for training accidents!”
The shouting continued for a few minutes. Like the collision with the stone floor, I barely registered it.
Then the sisters started arguing with each other.
“Phyara, no! It’s too dangerous!”
“I don’t care, can’t you see how much pain she’s in?!”
“And what happens if you wind up getting burnt to a crisp?”
“Just put up the gods damned wards already!”
Things seemed like they were getting better. The evil slugs had made their way down to my feet and to my palms and they seemed to be poking around some, but they were cooling off in the process. I hazarded announcing a reprieve: “I-“ I hacked, and it sort of felt like I burped at the same time. I tried a second time: “It’s cooling off, I’m starting to feel better.” Something else was happening, in my neck and in my gut, between my rib cage and my navel.
“Something else is going on in my stoma- huaaa!” My sentence turned into a groan as a new, much worse form of misery started to spring up. The dreaded lava slugs made their presence known once again. One on top of my neck decided to start tunneling into my brain which was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, breaking my record from just a few days ago when I had experienced what I imagined having a blob of molten steel shoved into your chest felt like. In addition, the slug in my belly started ballooning in size, and the outer surface of his wretched skin was incinerating my guts.
I clutched my hands to my head and squeezed as hard as I could, and I felt myself flopping around on the floor like a fish out of water. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t think. I wasn’t even sure if I was breathing.
Time passed, and I thought I was going to die again, but I didn’t. Eventually the worm in my head expanded until it basically felt like it’d eaten my entire brain and then it stopped. There was burning going on at the back of my neck, the base of my spine and between my shoulder blades as well, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as feeling like my brain was getting char broiled. The monster in my belly stopped around the size of a smaller melon. Eventually they both started to cool off, and I went as limp as a ragdoll.
I kept my eyes closed, because my eyes hurt so bad that the thought of opening them made me want to vomit. My ears were ringing so loud all I could hear was muffled voices. Someone sponged me down and washed me off, then put a shift or something of the sort over me. I think I might have pissed and shit myself, but I wasn’t sure. I had a sort of mostly numb feeling throughout my entire body. It was sort of like when your arm or leg falls asleep, and you poked at it. You could feel pressure, you could feel your skin shifting around, but in a very detached way. I was picked up and princess-carried somewhere that was quiet, cold and pitch black and put on a soft bed. That was great, fantastic really, because the dark helped my eyes, the cold felt refreshing, and the silence didn’t further irritate my ears.