When he emerged from the room, Tom was relieved to discover that the other children had found choosing their name to be as emotional as it had been for him. Briana, as Bir had chosen to call herself, waved frantically to get Tom’s attention where she hid behind the table. Kang, stoic as always, was standing guard over her.
Tom held his position for a moment longer as he assessed the room. Treating the situation like a battlefield to manage his emotions, he clinically read the new names of his classmates and noted how they looked. Ma had chosen the name Eloise, and she was hysterically happy because her not-parents were with her. Tom hadn’t seen them since the encounter at the very start of his new life, but he understood they had visited a couple of times since. As before, they had no fate, so Tom couldn’t assess the size of their pool, but they had a reputation. Despite having a child, both of them set a rigorous adventuring schedule. It was two to three months in the wilds, then a week in town. Those two were definitely not unnerved.
Tom’s mood dropped as he finished his assessment. He had screwed up. Nobody was sad – instead, most children were happy, with a couple of outliers appearing unfussed, like Kang. That sign off-line on the obituary had really thrown him. Even though he had kind of known that the losses were going to be high, seeing it written had forced him to confront the truth. His group had been effectively one of three groups of ten, but out of those original thirty, only six had made it. Those odds were pretty horrific, with less than twenty percent of those who started surviving to the end. It was even worse if Tom counted those like Sven, who had died before the trial had appeared, blocked the exit and effectively forced them to enter it.
A girl now named Adele came toward him and, recognising in his emotional state that he was out of his depth, he retreated into the pseudo-system room. It was prudent to let the perfect acting of the title shield him from discovery.
After a few minutes, with him tracking the screens only partially, he managed to get his emotions under control. Almost half an hour of real time had passed, but the sacrifice was necessary. Ready to act his role once more, he took control of his body back.
Morning classes were cancelled, as they were all expected to use the time to learn the names of everyone in their cohort. Tom was hesitant to do so, and he was aware enough to know why. Bir, or, more precisely Briana, as he was supposed to think of her, had wormed herself under his defences. He was viewing her more and more like his sister Emily, which was an entanglement he recognised he wasn’t going to shake. He just didn’t want any more people to gain that status. Keeping a healthy distance was important.
Reluctantly, not to mention compelled by the need to fit in, he played the games the adults were forcing them to play. Every kid had to introduce themselves to everyone else and explain why they had chosen the name they had. It was interesting to hear about the reasons for the different choices. About half of those with not-parents had taken the name they had been called as a kid before getting to the orphanage. One of those who had not gone with his childhood nickname had instead chosen the name Tom.
He managed not to flinch as he met the other boy’s eyes. All he could think of was the power that was hunting him, the force of nature who presumably knew his name. He fervently hoped that the blue-eyed skinny kid with curly hair would not become their prey.
“Why did you choose Tom?” he asked.
The boy looked at him curiously. “Why? Because he was the best of the heroes of humanity.” His voice had risen in excitement.
“Yes!” Tom exclaimed forcing himself to cheer about the idea. “Go Heroes of Humanity!” Then he offered the other Tom a fist-bump to celebrate. He reciprocated, while the boy’s parents watched over him indulgently.
“I wonder how Tom fought,” the boy mused.
The mum looked at the dad in a warning manner. “Lightning and earth, sweet pie.”
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Tom felt sick at how famous he apparently was, but he noticed there was no mention of his tanking responsibilities that he had taken on to maximise his contribution to the group. He fully understood why the mum would take that line. If this was Em, his sister, then Tom would have encouraged her to take ranged magic as well.
That thought sent his mood crashing down further. They were losing in the competition, and the image of his innocent sister coming into this world in the conditions caused by failure made him want to scream.
“Are you okay, deary?” the other Tom’s mum asked, looking suddenly concerned.
He made a show of clutching his stomach and ran off to the toilet. There, he just sat with his head in his hands, trying not to think, trying not to remember their place on the competition ladder, trying to block out that echo of memory. He prayed to DEUS that, if worst happened, Emily would be okay. He would do all he could to change things for the better, but no matter what, he wanted her to flourish and be okay.
He was still disturbed at lunch. Kang picked up on it and made sure that Tom was at the edge of the table, with only Kang himself sitting next to him. After that, he ate in silence, no one attempting to speak to him.
When he got into the isolation room, he glanced around it and pondered about everything that had happened to him and the Lair Boss. Even if he had gotten Touch Heal to its final form, it wouldn’t have helped in that fight. Spark, on the other hand, might have.
It was a decision that had been building up in his subconscious for a while, so he went straight to the relevant folders and pulled out the lightning one.
The spell form for Static Shock, one of the precursors of Spark, was hauntingly familiar. Spark and Touch Heal had been the two spells he had invested years of practice into within the tutorial. He didn’t assume that would help much with the initial acquisition. The lesson the healing path had imparted had taught him a simple truth. All those years where he had considered himself to be making progress in mastering something, he had been deluding himself. He had only ever been changing the spell in the outer layers, not manipulating the inner core of it. The add-ons and flourishes he had successfully implemented had shaped various outcomes, but had left the simplicity at the core untouched. Recreating that was what he needed to do now, and the only relevant experience was the effort he had put into acquiring his healing spells.
While he had never mastered the inner core of the spell relying on the system to do that, he was not concerned. One look at the wire frames told him that Spark would be easier to master than Touch Heal. However, he also had another, better idea, and he knew electricity intimately. With an efficiency well beyond what he had managed in his first attempt, he built a ‘ladder’ to reach the locked cupboards and pulled out the spark machine. Then he started it up, letting the sparks it generated strike his lower leg as he attempted to apply the lessons he had learnt in getting his precognition spell.
A touch of his other hand against the healing crystal healed the internal burns the lightning shocks caused. Tom kept going, and, while he focused on manually creating the Static Shock spell form, he also tried to sense the incoming sparks of electricity to absorb them. The first step was to feel the energy and the next one to generate it, but, thanks to April, he knew how small a gap there was between those two activities. It would probably take him over a year, but he would put the hours required to learn a lightning skill in.
The cut on his leg was dripping, and he focused on it clotting faster. The basis of his build development before getting full access to the system was going to be Healing, Lightning, Earth, Spear and Precognition. It was his plan to have both Skills and Spells in each of those disciplines in order to support his push toward an integrated domain. That choice would give him offensive options, with the final addition being Teleportation to get him in and out of combat. Danger Sense plus Teleportation was, to him, the perfect combination to avoid damage. The only reason he wasn’t doing anything to create Teleportation directly was because Dimitri had as good as told him that it was not something that could be developed organically.
So, Tom would ignore it for now, but once he turned fifteen, he would use challenge trials to gain expertise. There were two that were close to New London, the town he was in. Those two together, providing he was successful, would elevate teleportation into being a core part of his skill set. Then, if that wasn’t enough, he would take a dedicated class to fill the gap and let him achieve his vision of himself as a warrior.
His calf bled, lightning crackled and burned into his leg, and he practiced his new magic whenever his mana built up high enough. Of course, he made no quantifiable progress, but it was a start.