My current tool for stealing access to other people's abilities: light conversation. Apparently getting access to extra items to Soulbind was pretty straightforward: You buy or steal something that wasn't already Soulbound and then take the time to attach them to your character. Simple enough. For Superpowers you need a good look at their genetics. I could apparently buy a sensor that could do that for me without needing blood, but it wasn't a priority until I could actually use what I got out of it. For magic, however, you needed to watch the person using their skill and have them talk about what they were doing for a few minutes. Apparently magic is complicated and, without something making it easier, the precision required to reliably do the simplest spell is literally inhuman. Even trying to teach the skill to a normal person, without supernatural levels of teaching ability, was also impossible. So how does the system know that you should have access to the 'blueprints' of the skill without requiring that either the teacher or the student has supernatural levels of skill or ability in some unrelated area? It shortcuts things by allowing a demonstration of the skill and some light conversation about it to be 'good enough'.

Not that this was the normal way that people got access to any of this stuff. People would still buy stuff but, if it was really an important item that you couldn't Soulbind, most techies would get a fabricator and the blueprint and build it themselves. For Superpowers and Skills it was even simpler; there were little gift-card looking things that would sell you access to the Upgrade.

And now I can't get the idea out of my head of sending someone a greeting card that said, 'Happy birthday! I sent you a gift card with the power of flight and/or laser eyes!'...

My question to the information broker on how I could make use of those explanations to get access to some worthwhile upgrades resulted in him handing me a bunch of drained power cells and 'hiring' me to go get them recharged. The upside was that he was paying me with a couple of the power cells and it resulted in me getting access to the electricity magic that was used for recharging. The downside was that I had just spent well over an hour listening to a overworked wage-slave gripe about his job. Later on I would be talking with those other two mages from before; the one who's hand I nicked to test out my theory on getting access to new abilities and his overly dramatic friend. The dramatic one could make water, which was a good one-point upgrade, and I was glad that I wouldn't have to listen to him for long to get what I needed.

The other one, the more normal guy of the duo, could apparently modify energy from spells and weapons into different forms. I'd seen him turning his relatively weak laser gun's shots into electricity and fire and ice. It wasn't exactly strong, but the secondary effects were quite helpful. This included effects like giving the enemy a jolt that halted their movement or slowing them from the cold. The energy transformation spell was especially interesting since it used magic as a mediator for the transformation and could, theoretically at least, be cut off halfway to use the magic for something else; something like using electricity to cast spells. The process wasn't super efficient and had limited power that got even less efficient if you tried to use it too fast, but it would still be more efficient than casting with my own power.

Apparently there was magical equipment out there that would do the same thing but easier and more efficiently. Apparently it wasn't available in the Tutorial for reasons that would make the tutorial mad at me if I knew them. Whatever. The Tutorial should be over soon enough and those questions will become more answerable by then.

My next stop had been to buy first aid supplies, because nobody questions why you are trying to get access to their blood when you carry a first aid kit. Was it a scummy reason for trying to heal people? Maybe. But you could make a strong argument that money was just as bad a reason, but that hadn't stopped a sizable portion of the doctors in the medical profession.

But enough about the mercenary nature of the medical profession, I had a weapon's dealer to go see.

I walked in a small entryway, no more than a door with a carryout window next to it, to find a much larger room as I had come to expect. Encased in every wall and one long counter turned display case were weapons of all sorts; though most were guns, swords, and spears. It honestly looked a little like a pawn shop except that it lacked a backdoor or a cash register. One weird thing about the room was that the door opened to the room with the shopkeeper across from me but the window opened to the right of the counter in some sort of weird twisting of space that I didn't want to think too much about. The proprietor was a tan skinned man with well developed muscles and sandy blonde hair; the guy could have been completely human if it wasn't for his pointed ears. He gave me a serious look that was all business, something that comforted me after dealing with Roman and the guy who charged my batteries.

He looked me up and down before he spoke. "I got a message that you would be coming by and that I should take care of you. I don't ask and I don't want to know. I take my job as a weapons designer seriously, so don't expect anything less out of me. My first order of business is to ask you how much you think you know about weapons in The Game?"

I shrugged. "I know there are light sabers and laser guns, but not much else. I'm not one of those people who figured everything out before I went in."

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He nodded. "Good, no bad habits." He then reached under the counter, to what looked like it should be within the display case but wasn't, and pulled out what looked like an ordinary kitchen knife before slamming it down on the counter. The action didn't look angry or violent, it was more like this was just how he moved. "This is a basic knife. Well-made with decent materials, but ultimately the type of thing you new-worlders might find in your houses. It is so cheap that you can't bind it with points; so cheap that if you had it on your person when you died it would likely come with you like any piece of mundane clothing." He looked directly into my eyes before he continued. "It is also strong enough to kill me if you shoved it in my eye, and I have ten times your levels. Probably a lot more. I don't care, it's a lot."

He moved the knife off to the side and pulled out something that looked like an alien handgun, with the handle being a little too long and the trigger guard a little too small, and a length of wire connected at both ends to the center of a pair of handles that I suspected was a garrote. "These are all mundane weapons but absolutely deadly if you can use them to damage your enemy. Do not make the mistake of believing that bigger is better when it comes to weapons." He turned and pointed at a large gun on the back wall. It looked like someone had taken a four and a half foot section of tree trunk, coated it in metal, and added multiple handles and targeting displays all over it. "This is the Firodine AT36 mining laser. It will burn straight though a modern tank's shields and superstructure like it was nothing. It is the most powerful weapon I have in the store. It is also absolutely useless as a weapon. The charge up time is atrocious, the coherent light generation mechanism gives a clear demonstration of where you are aiming, and you have to hold your target for it to do its full damage. Nobody in their right mind would sit there while it happens. You are more likely to kill someone with that knife than with this thing."

He swept all three 'mundane' weapons up and tossed them back under the counter into whatever extradimensional space existed there. "Attack and defense are in a constant battle for supremacy. Attack always seems to win, considering how little it actually takes for something to be deadly, but in truth it is defense that has the upper hand. Every time a focused or well calibrated attack breaks through you think that the offense won. But when two or more killers face off and one of them ends up dead, that means that defense worked for one of them. Every time various similarly sized and equipped militias or armies face off and it isn't mutual destruction, defense won. Every time you walk through town and don't have someone try to murder you for whatever loot you might drop, defense won."

He cleared his throat, "Not that you can get loot from your fellow Tutorial Students, those in charge aren't that dumb. But there is always someone who wants to try and suffers the consequences."

"What happens if you do kill someone in the Tutorial, one of the other new people I mean?" I asked, thinking about what had happened during the first round.

"On purpose? Unprovoked?" he asked with a raised eyebrow. I nodded. "They target you first during the next round. The rounds are designed like tests, to see who has the will and ability to survive and to be worth wile allies in the future; but nobody wants to let someone pass who might shoot them in the back if they later get teamed up on the same side."

I nodded. It was something to let the rest of the group know and yet another reason to get far away from the Cheaters.

"Back to what's important, the weapons. In order for a weapon to be effective it has to get through your enemies layers of defense. It doesn't matter if you have a mundane dagger or that mining laser if you can't bring them to bear on your target; neither one will kill your enemy and anything short of death, if you can't follow it up, will be healed in short order. The value of a weapon is in how well it penetrates one or more types of defense. Rapid-fire or lock-on weapons makes it hard to dodge. Corrosive or phase shifting weapons can break through shields. Penetrating or multiphasic weapons can break through armor. Turrets and auto-targeting weapons make it hard to hide. Stuff like that."

I nodded. This sounded familiar. We had something similar on earth but not as many ways to get past the defense and likely far fewer types of defense. "To clarify: What are the different types of defense?"

He nodded back. "There is no set types of defense, and some might work against some attackers while some defense may be ignored. Just remember: the farther a weapon is from hitting your target at the center of their layers of defense, the worse off you are. The more layers of defense they have, the more work you have to get through them all. Think of it as though you were to be the one defending against an enemy. If your enemy doesn't know you are out there then they won't look for you. If they can't find you than they can't target you, even if they know you are out there. If they don't think of you as an enemy then they won't target you, even if they can find you. If they lack the weapons to attack you without unacceptable losses or collateral damage then they can't attack you, even when they want to attack you. If you force them into a bad political situation then they won't attack you, even if they could. If you dodge than nothing they throw at you, no matter how nasty, can affect you. If you shield or deflect the attack than you won't take any meaningful loss from their attack, even if you get hit. And if you block an attack with something like armor than it won't risk hurting you personally, no matter how targeted it may be to you personally. If you ever take damage that isn't self inflicted, you screwed up your defense."

"Right," I answered as I thought about what he had said. Politics and friendship weren't the first things I thought of as being weaponizable, but I'm sure others would jump right to them. "So what do you suggest for a weapon that will help me as much as possible. Just remember, I'm on a budget."

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He showed me a lot of very interesting guns with a lot of extremely useful features. The guy was a weapons smith, first and foremost, and nothing else mattered to him beyond the challenge of crafting the perfect weapon. I never even found out his name.

In the end I bought myself a four point dagger for twenty thousand credits. It was a very good dagger, though.