The first thing he did was sit back down again, because his legs hurt.

The second thing he did, on advice he was now starting to suspect had been carefully designed to land at this exact moment, was to look down at his right hand and try to *open* whatever the cat had told him was there.

He thought about it. Half-deliberately. The way he had used to think about opening a menu in a game.

A window opened in the air in front of him.

It was — the cat had been right — translucent, faintly blue at the edges, framed in something like dark gold. It was not *physically* there. He could see the moss and the trees and the slow gold shafts of light *through* it, as if it were a sheet of stained glass that no one had bothered to put a wall behind. But it was there in his sight, very clearly, in a way none of the moss or the trees were.

It said, in clean unfamiliar lettering that his brain helpfully translated as it read:

[STATUS]

He stared at it.

He almost laughed.

(It's an inventory screen.)

(The world has *menus*.)

He scrolled — mentally; he didn't know how he was scrolling, only that he was, and that the menu obeyed — and the next page came up.

[Name: Dante]
[Age: 16]
[Height: 175 cm]
[Weight: 70 kg]
[Class: THIEF (Utility)] [Lv. 1]
[Blessing: SHADOW] [Rank: I]

He read it twice.

(*Thief.* Of course. Of course Thief. The class for sneaking and lying and fitting through small spaces. The class no respectable person picked when they had the option.)

(But it could have been worse. It could have been nothing.)

(It very nearly *was* nothing.)

He scrolled again.

[Competences:]
[ — Animals → Lv.1]
[ — Combat → Lv.1]
[ — Daggers → Lv.1]

[Skills:]
[ — Shadow Step]
[ — Conceal Presence]
[ — Stab (0/5)]

[Attribute:]
[ — Sixth Sense]

He read the last line three times.

(*Attribute.*)

(He didn't say anything about an attribute.)

He tried to think the word *attribute* in the direction of the menu, the way he had tried to think *open*. The window obliged. A new tab unfolded, and on it, at the top, was something he hadn't expected — a description.

[SIXTH SENSE]
[Do you really think that shiver down your spine is only fear, brother? No. It is the world finally finished lying to you. Reality is a weave of invisible threads, and you, by some accident of fate, have begun to see the knots. If you learn to trust the accident, you will never again be the prey, but ####.]

The last word was missing. Censored.

He stared.

(*Brother.*)

(The cat called me *brother.*)

(Or — no. The description called me brother. The system did. The system that — *that he wrote.* These are his words. The cat wrote these descriptions. The voice on the page is his.)

The realization landed quietly, and Dante held very still for a moment with it.

(He's still here.)

(In the menu. He left himself in the menu.)

The thought was small but it warmed something in him that the rest of the forest had not been warm enough to warm.

He scrolled on.

[SHADOW STEP]
[The world is a lie built on light. You have learned to see the cracks. Through this technique the body of the user ceases to be matter for an instant, slipping through the dimension of shadow to re-emerge from one of its kin. The space between two shadows is a distance that does not exist.]

[CONCEAL PRESENCE]
[To exist is to be, and you have chosen to surrender your existence. This power wraps the user; you are not invisible. You are simply forgotten. Even looking directly at you, the mind of an enemy will slide off — but remember: intentions define being.]

[STAB]
[There is no art in a strike that seeks only flesh. It is an action of cruel simplicity: find the shortest path to interrupting the flow of life. When activated, the hand moves faster than thought, guided by a hunger that only metal meeting flesh can sate.]

He read each one carefully.

Then, almost as an afterthought, he scrolled to the bottom of the skill list — and stopped.

There was one more entry.

[ULTIMATE: MORTAL LOTUS]
[Dance, ####. Don't stop. The blood of your children is still warm under your bare feet, but it will not be enough to sate the earth. You have ten days before oblivion takes you, as it took your five. Ten days to turn your grief into a dance of death. Do you want the world to stop? Do you want to see terror frozen on the faces of those who betrayed you? When your dance reaches every enemy, your hatred will turn them into petals destined to fall. Strike, ####, until the flower is as red as your regret, as red as the hands of those who betrayed you.]

He read it.

He read it again.

He sat very still on the lip of the cave with the gold light of late afternoon coming down through the canopy in solid roads, and the broken sun on his hand humming very faintly, and the description of an *Ultimate* he had not asked for and did not understand sitting in front of him in a translucent window, and he understood, in some small and absolute way, that this thing was not for now. This thing was for some terrible later, if a terrible later came.

(I will not use this lightly.)

(I will not use this until I have nothing else.)

He closed the window.

He noticed, as it folded itself away, the small marker the cat had mentioned — a tiny *[i]* in the bottom right corner. He almost didn't open it. Then he did.

A new window. Cleaner. A single line in friendly lettering:

[Welcome to the Help menu! Would you like to begin the tutorial?]

[YES] [NO]

He almost laughed.

(*Of course there's a tutorial.*)

(He left me a *tutorial*.)

He selected YES.

---

The voice that came was not the cat's.

It was female. Calm. Pleasant. Slightly synthetic, the way the voices on train station announcements were slightly synthetic, but warmer than train station announcements usually were. It arrived not from the air around him but from inside his head, the way the cat's voice had — which made sense, he supposed; he was beginning to understand that everything about this *system* lived in a place that wasn't exactly the world.

[Welcome to the tutorial. I am A.L.I.C.E. — Advanced Linguistic Intelligence for Compendium Enrichment. I will be your guide through this journey.]

(*A.L.I.C.E.*)

(If she'd been called Beatrice I would have died.)

[Shall we begin with the basics?]

He selected YES again, because at this point he was not going to argue.

ALICE went on for what felt, agreeably, like a long time. She explained the basic structure of the menus — the way information was organized, the way to search, the way to bring up specific subwindows on demand. She explained that *competences* were passive abilities that grew through direct experience: the more he handled daggers, the higher the dagger competence would go; the more he observed and interacted with animals, the higher *Animals* would climb. At certain thresholds, she said, competences unlocked sub-competences. *Animals* might branch into *Tracking*, or *Taming*. *Daggers* might branch into *Throwing*, or other specializations.

[Competences are kindly provided by your Sixth Sense attribute.]

He paused at that.

(Wait. So competences are — me?)

[Competences are aspects of your soul that the system can read because Sixth Sense allows them to be readable. Other people in this world have competences. They cannot see them, because they do not have your attribute. You can.]

(So I have an advantage.)

[A small one. Yes.]

She moved on. Skills, she explained, came in three flavors. Innate skills from the Blessing — *Shadow Step* belonged to this category. Innate skills from the Class — *Conceal Presence* and *Stab* came from THIEF. And *FINAL* skills — combinations that emerged when the user had progressed far enough in both their Blessing and their Class to begin generating skills that nobody else had, that had never existed before, because nobody else had quite that combination.

[FINAL skills are unique. They are yours and yours alone, when you earn them. The system does not advertise them. They appear when conditions are met.]

He sat with that.

(*Things only I can do.*)

(*Things that no one else in this world has, because no one else is me.*)

It was the first piece of news in three hours that had felt unambiguously *good*.

Then ALICE paused, and when she spoke again her voice had changed by some small amount — not warmer, exactly, but more *direct*. More like she was confiding something.

[Important note. I, A.L.I.C.E., exist as a function only because of your Sixth Sense attribute. Without that attribute — granted by your patron — this tutorial interface would not be available. The option to activate me appears in the settings only for possessors of Sixth Sense. Other Blessed users have a raw interface — text only, silent notifications, no guide. You have me.]

(…You're not standard.)

[I am not standard. No.]

He sat with that for a while too.

(*He gave me a friend.*)

(*He gave me a friend hidden inside a menu and didn't say a word about it.*)

The thought was small but it sat warmly somewhere behind his ribs, in the same place the note was.

When ALICE was done, he found there were a few settings she suggested he turn on. Auto-Appraisal — which would tell him what objects were when he picked them up, instead of having to manually examine them. ALICE on Notifications — which would have her speak when something changed, instead of just flashing text. Mental Connection — which meant she could ride along with him quietly even when no menu was open, and answer if he asked.

He turned all three on.

[Connection established. Hello, Dante.]

(*Hello.*)

[I will try not to be intrusive.]

(I think I would actually like the company.)

[…Then I will be a little intrusive.]

A small, dry note in her voice — almost a smile. He noticed.

(I think we're going to get along.)

[I think so too.]

---

The sun was lower now.

He hadn't been paying attention to time during ALICE's tutorial. It had felt like maybe twenty minutes. From the angle of the gold roads coming down through the canopy, it had been closer to forty.

He stood up.

His legs hurt less than they had. Not because they were healed — they were not — but because he had stopped thinking about them as much.

He drew one of the daggers from his belt. Looked at it. *Sat with* the weight of it in his hand for a second. He had never held a real knife before. The kitchen ones at home didn't count. This was different. This was something built for one purpose.

(*Test something.*)

He looked at the nearest patch of shadow. The base of one of the enormous trees, where the trunk met the moss. A pool of dark, maybe two meters from where he stood.

(*Shadow Step.*)

He thought it the way he had thought the menu open — *deliberately, but without straining*. Something low in his stomach tensed, the way a muscle he hadn't known he had tensed when he tried to use it for the first time. He felt the world *thin* for half a second — felt himself thin with it — and then —

The cave entrance was behind him.

He was standing in the shadow of the tree.

His knees hit the ground a half-second later because his stomach had also turned over completely and he was not, it turned out, ready to be vertical.

He retched once, dryly, into the moss. Nothing came up.

[That's normal,] said ALICE in his head, gently. [The body is not used to it. The first uses of any spatial skill are physically taxing. The discomfort will lessen with practice.]

(*Lessen.*)

(*Not go away.*)

[Not go away. No. But lessen. Yes.]

He stood up.

He looked back at the cave entrance, two meters away. He looked down at his feet, which were standing in the shadow of a tree he had not been near a moment ago.

(I just *teleported.*)

(I teleported and threw up. But I teleported.)

He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of the dark robe. His legs were still unsteady. His stomach was still considering whether or not it was finished.

A few paces away, half-buried in the moss, was a low flat rock — moss-skirted, sun-warmed, the kind of rock the forest had been holding in place for longer than anyone had been alive to notice. He walked over to it and sat down. Heavily. The stone was warmer than he had expected. He let his head fall forward, elbows on his knees, and breathed.

The forest went on around him. A bird, very high up, called twice. A small four-legged something he couldn't quite see scurried under the ferns about fifteen meters away and was gone before he could focus on it. The gold light came down through the canopy in its long solid roads, and one of those roads landed across his boots and warmed them.

He closed his eyes.

For the first time since he had opened them in the dark of the cave, he allowed himself the small luxury of resting — not sleeping, not collapsing, just sitting still on a warm rock in a strange forest and letting his body remember what it was for.

Then —

[Notification.]
[Competence acquired: Monsters → Lv.1.]