Several minutes passed before Guin looked around the space skeptically. She double-checked the quest in her log, but the summon ability was greyed out. Tsk-ing, she looked around.

“Hello?” she went out loud, shrugging. “Anyone there? Amikavi? Yes? No?” She clicked her tongue. The quest was supposed to have summoned Amikavi, was it not? She reread her quest log to see if there was anything she had missed, but there was nothing more enlightening than what she already knew.

Removing the cloth from her head, she put her ears up, then back, then up again. She was familiar with their mechanics because of her fox form, but it was a surreal experience to have them in her human form. Standing tall, she moved them around, listening to the sounds that may have been her new reality.

Skittering and scattering. Scratching and clawing. Clinking and scraping. Dripping. Thunking. She pulled her ears back. The sounds were dizzying—perhaps more now than they had even been in her fox form.

Her sense of smell, too, seemed stronger than it had been. Luckily, the hall she was in smelled more like a Buddhist temple than gangrene, though there were traces of sickly sweet and feces-like odors that still occasionally reached her nose.

She tried to focus on one thing at a time. The smells, the sounds; she tried to envision how close or far away they were, what shape they took. Mice with light paws. Rats with heavier ones. Skeletons with clinking bones sounded hollow and dull, while the chainmail their warriors wore clinked like shattering glass with every rickety step they took...

The torchlight whirred and crackled, sputtering slightly as a gentle breeze carried a strong aroma of the earthy incense.

Guin lifted her head. A breeze? She looked in the direction it had come from and met the gaze of a small, glowing white fox. Its pink eyes stared at her as it sat perfectly still.

“Friend or foe?” Guin asked, facing it fully. Its nose twitched, and it stood, turning from her to go in the opposite direction. “Are you going to help me find Amikavi?” she called. After looking back at her expectantly, it started down the hall with soundless steps. Sighing heavily through her nose, Guin muttered, “Fine. I can take a hint,” and went off to follow it.

The fox trotted through the hall like it owned the place; its head held high, and its feet set a purposeful march.

Feeling more comfortable that she had found a direction, Guin went about her investigation of her newly acquired character oddities. Able to follow the fox easily in stride, she started with her stats. They had been shamefully neglected since she entered the catacombs. She still hadn’t spent her skill points from level nine, so she had a good boost to her stats from that, in addition to the increase in combat-based stats she had gained from fighting.

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Her [Body] and [Reflex] scores were quickly catching up to her prized [Intellect] and [Spirit] scores. With the group, her more magic-based strategies had been picked up by Ibraxis and Tea, so her benefits from using those skills had decreased.

I guess that’s what I get for not having a class... Guin sighed internally. She was level ten now; she would have to stop playing around. Keeping a careful eye on the fox in front of her, she clicked through her other screens.

TheirWorld was an extremely free-form game with very few limitations on what a player could or could not do. Though there were certain skills you could only learn by having a class, for the most part, the game had no issue with people playing a sword and shield-wearing mage class. The distinction, Guin well knew, was that your real ‘class’ was defined by the abilities that you put time into leveling. In other words, even if she chose a caster-based class, it would do her little to no good if she never used her magic.

Even during the tutorial, she saw how out of control it got. She had a long list of skills and abilities, but compared to the skills she had used over the last ten levels that were now on the verge of evolving into more powerful versions of themselves, they were already incredibly weak. She could only imagine what kind of imbalance there would be after twenty or more levels. Sure, it would be possible to take the time to raise a few abilities in late game, but why bother?

She would have to decide what abilities were worth putting time into carefully—and the more she chose, the slower they would level. Sucking on her lip, she considered. TheirWorld was a game that advertised freedom, the ability to be whatever one wanted. But what it really was, Guin was slowly discovering, was a game to find out who one was in the first place.

Though I never considered myself someone who wanted to rip people apart and eat their livers, she twitched as her eyes fell on the [Gumiho] trait. What rubbish.

She nearly tripped over the fox as it stopped dead in its tracks and looked up at her. Guin closed her windows and watched it turn its head down a new hall. It repeated this movement a few times, and Guin stepped forward, going down the hall alone.

It ended with a set of heavy-looking wooden doors with no handles. Guin pushed on them, but they showed no signs of moving. Knocking on them only confirmed for her that they were quite solid. Hands-on her hips, she stepped back.

The last door puzzle she had solved had had a clue—maybe this one did too. It was a simple thing; a door you may have found in any classic medieval castle. It wasn’t intricate like the door of gold had been, so her skills as a scribe and art appreciator wouldn’t help her this time.

Her newly sharpened eyes looked carefully around the door frame and the walls and floors. There has to be something...

A small hole on the right-hand side of the wall made her pause. Among all the cracks and crevices in the bricks, she may have overlooked it without her enhanced sight picking up on it; its unnaturally perfectly shaped form stood out. Kneeling, she peered at it closer.

It was a keyhole.

A keyhole? Guin furrowed her brow. It couldn’t be... She pulled out the key that the rats had dropped earlier. It was the key that the High Priest had lost—a treasure door key? Her mind wandered as her mouth watered over all the potential loot she could get exploiting this quest if that were true. Then, lining the key up to the hole and sliding it in effortlessly, she turned with a grin as she watched the doors swing inward violently, hitting the hall walls with a shocking but firm smack!

All the blood drained from her face. Had anyone been standing in the path of those doors, they would have walked away quite flat, if at all. Safe over by the keyhole area, she carefully took the key out and placed it in her bag. The High Priest had lost quite the treasure indeed.

Walking through the doors, she was greeted by a large, open room, well-lit and seemingly constructed of fine marble with golden inlays. But what caught her eye was in the center of the room, on a diaz of glistening gold hung the snow-white pelt of a large nine-tailed fox.