The night came and went as I napped on the roof, and at dawn, I stretched, shifted to the humanoid form I used the day before, and hopped down the two floor building I’d been on all night, before walking right up to the gate. A gruff voice from the gatehouse asked for my token in a single word, and I wordlessly handed it over before being allowed inside. On the other side, I got my token back, and was directed down the hall to an open courtyard.
Once I got there, a buff man in a one piece, form-fitting suit of leather armor greeted me excitedly while leaning on a massive wooden greatsword, and I noticed that there wasn’t anyone else there who looked like they might be a fellow examinee. Not too surprising, I did arrive at the earliest opportunity, after all.
“Oh, our first examinee this time! Very punctual... what’s your name?”
“Glatisant”
“Hmm, doesn’t ring a bell. I didn’t read all the application forms I got last night, so if you applied yesterday I might have missed yours”
“That I did. If you’ve got them with you, you might as well read it now, if it matters”
He looked over at a desk in a shaded portion of the courtyard, grimaced, and looked back at me.
“I mean, it’s probably got nothing of great importance, I will get to see all of your skills today regardless”
“No, trust me, you’re not going to regret it”
“Don’t tell me you treated it as a joke... right, let’s see”
He hefted the greatsword onto his shoulders and walked over to the desk, leaned the sword against the wall, and sat down. After pulling open a drawer on the side, he flipped through until he found what he was looking for, pulled out a stack of 20 or so pages, and searched through them to find my application.
“Okay, what have we here... Glatisant, race is left blank, a poison type, okay. Considering your build, that is a sensible choice to make up for a lack of physical strength. Level 15, venomous reptile, probably the source of your poi- wait, level 15 but you’ve got an elemental seed? And you don’t want to say what type... suspicious. Killed 30 or more people, a respectable number for someone who’s not a hired killer already. Highest level killed is WHAT? What the FUCK?”
With a grin that he couldn't see beneath my mask, I replied to the rhetorical question with a most unhelpful response.
“You haven’t even gotten to the interesting parts”
“If it’s crazier than this, you’re going to give me an aneurysm, and I agree with the two highly skeptical stamps I’ve seen this far, and I can see several more down below... oh dear”
From my position on the other side of the page at a fair distance, I could see there was a backside that had the receptionist/interviewer’s own comments and additions, and I could even read parts of it, including what I assumed was recounting the conversation that immediately followed the skepticism stamping about me tailing a blood gold shadow who failed to kill me. I only could make out a few words and phrases here and there, but as that section did include “blood gold”, “tracked”, and “survived” I think that was a fair assumption. At the end there was another section that included the phrases “half a block”, “successfully lost” and “shadow specialized in”, not sure what that’s about.
“Okay, survived a level 53, impressive, wonder how you pissed them off”
“It was a blood shadow, I had a bounty on my head under another identity that I think is now presumed dead”
“A level 53 blood shadow was sent out to kill a level 15 pipsqueak?”
There was a lot wrong or missing there, and I corrected most of it, though I elected to ignore the pipsqueak comment.
“At the time, level 12 or 13. They weren’t the first, nor were they the last. Some of those 30 kills were also blood shadows who came to kill me, by the way”
“What the hell... okay, onto the self assessment”
He fell silent, but his face was screaming clear as day that he was shaken, having gone far beyond the realm of mere “disbelief” or even “incredulity”.
“An 8 on stealth is impressive but believable. 10 for killing with a sneak attack, do you possess the fucking tenth millennium poison or something like that? And you gave yourself infinity on survival? How and why?”
“I survived dozens of blood shadows several times my level, up to and including the gold rank, all out for my head. If I can survive getting sneak attacked by them, I can survive getting my cover blown when I’m on guard”
“A GOLD? You’ve gotta be shitting me, no way am I gonna believe that for a second”
As he was spluttering that out, another person walked in, this one clad head to toe in dark grey vestments, with wave-like embroidery mimicking the designs on the cerulean robes by the clergy of the Church of Azure Tides.
“Welcome, I’ll be right with you, I just have to finish seeing just how much bullshit this guy put on his application. Let’s see, where were we... ah yes, frontal combat is your weak point... but you still say you can survive or escape it no matter what. Fair enough, you haven’t died yet, so you’re cocky”
I really wanted to correct him again, but saying that I actually have died, numerous times even, would only serve to make him even more mad, so I bit my tongue.
“Traps are... even more abysmal, wow. But your tail evasion is impressive, though it does generally reflect your stealth skills to some degree. As for the highest levels you think you can kill or survive an encounter with... Hoo boy, that’s an impressive amount of confidence in your belief that we won’t call your bluff”
“Oh please by all means do call it, if you’re willing to sacrifice someone of that high a level for me to prove my poison would work on them too”
“There’s the confidence that we won’t, coming out once again”
I’m not getting anywhere by talking to him when he’s convinced it’s all a bluff, am I? I’ll just let his colleague correct that notion, and if he still isn’t convinced, my actions will speak for themselves later.
“Oh, by the way, there’s a backside to this one I think”
“Yeah, I know, the interviewer usually puts some basic remarks back there after you leave”
“Well, check it, just to be safe”
He flipped the page over once I said that, and began hyperventilating soon after. To this day, I still have no clue what exactly was written there, though I did later hear that part of it was mentioning how I managed to ditch the tail they had following me out of the association before I even got half a block away, despite them being a silent silver shadow specialized in that exact type of job, and they couldn’t even figure out how I did it, I just vanished after turning a corner.
The other applicant, and one more who entered without me noticing, saw the examiner red-faced and struggling to breathe because of my application and looked at me with a mixture of awe, curiosity, and doubt. The examiner, meanwhile, put away the stack of papers and just sat in the chair for an hour while a bit over a dozen more people walked in, most of them wearing black or grey clothing, many wearing a mask, and very few showing much skin at all. The main exceptions were a redheaded muscular guy wearing nothing but rough leather boots and a fur loincloth, carrying an oddly-shaped stick, and a green-skinned girl with purple hair who was wearing if anything even less than that guy, exposing so much of her body that I can’t really say what exactly was covered.
“Okay, the sun is fully visible over the wall, so it is time for this examination to begin! Everybody, listen up! I am your examiner for today, Arctos Black, you can call me Sir Arctos! Now, form three orderly lines over there, and when I say to begin, start running laps clockwise near the edge of the courtyard! Don’t hold back, I want to see your top sustainable speed! And go!”
Several minutes later, I was near the back of the group but one of the least winded, while the fur guy was both the fastest and least winded of them all. After that was a dodge test, where the examiner and a few others would throw palm-sized bags of rice at the group from various directions including above, and if you got hit once you were to lie down and pretend to be dead. I lasted the longest out of everyone, second place going to the nearly-naked girl. After that we had a fight against the examiner himself using wooden weapons. If his greatsword landed a clean hit on us, we were out. If we landed a clean hit in a critical area on him, we would be considered to have won. None of us managed that, however, but I did get close.
“Glatisant, you’re up last! As with everyone else, pick your weapons from the rack, use whatever tricks and techniques you want to win besides deadly poisons or curses, and if you can get a clean hit on me or force me out of the circle, you win. Come on, let’s go!”
I picked a pair of single-edged shortswords, the closest they had to Fives, and stepped into the circle. He didn’t even wait for me to get into a stance, he just swung the sword horizontally, and I blocked with just one of my blades, coated with active Nothing. That one block, however, cut his sword in two like a hot knife gliding through butter, and my other blade, this time coated with solid Nothing to extend the blade to nearly twice its actual length, looked like it wouldn’t reach his arm but still managed to get through his leather armor and draw a lot of blood with a deep cut into his bicep, almost reaching his bone if I had to guess. However, that wasn’t a critical enough hit, and he sent me flying out of the circle with a swift kick the next second.
“Okay, initial physical exams are over! I was impressed by a few of you, most notably Malva, Glatisant, Satanta, and Arsandr. On the other hand, several of you are pitiful, and I’ll be sending you to The Bucket for a final filtration. For now, you, you, you, you, you, and you, go stand over there”
He pointed out half a dozen participants, leaving ten of us standing in front of him. Among us were the two nearly-naked people and the person in the grey vestments reminiscent of those of the Azure Tide Church.
“All of you will be getting personalized tests tailored to your killing methods and self-reported skills. For those of you who overestimated their own skills, you’ll be finding yourself struggling greatly”
He gave me a pointed glare with that last part, before calling us up one by one to the desk to receive our personalized testing instructions.
The beginnings of the man who transcended time, part 1
10th of Midwinter, roughly 350 years after the end of the Major Realm of Time’s 518th upheaval.
My name is Domovoi le’n Charybdis, great great great grandnephew of The Azure Thearch, Charybdis. Ha. That’s such a weak relationship it might as well not exist. I don’t deserve the exalted name of Charybdis, I might as well not have a name at all even. I’m an ancient fossil of a man with nothing, no family, no disciples to inherit my knowledge, nor any hope of advancement for myself. All I have is a cave hidden in the woods, far away from any other humanoids.
I know I shall soon die, my paltry studies into the essence of Time and Truth make me keenly aware of my own impending expiration. I won’t live to see the buds of spring, I shall die by winter’s end. I wish for my corpse to be sealed away, buried beneath the earth, but there is nobody who could do that for me. All I can do is to seal myself in a stone sarcophagus in the back of my cave, and wait out my remaining days within it. This will be my last addition to this compendium. May he who finds it place my bones into the earth. If there is anything of value left in these caves, you may take them.
That is what I left as the preface to my notes, my compendium of knowledge. I spent thousands of years seeking the truth of this world, advancing my studies far beyond anything any of my tutors might have learnt. And the fruit of my labors... only benefited another. I don’t begrudge him his gains, but I do wish I was able to apply it to myself, and break through the shackles of my lifespan.
Thanks for the chapter.
🍪