James had been asked by Arthur if she had a Skill plenty of times over the past two weeks when he came to eat lunch at the infirmary. And at this point even she couldn’t say anything about it. The correlation between her panic attacks and the monster onslaughter had held true through three more barrages. There hadn’t been a single one that she hadn’t been able to predict several minutes before-hand.

Granted, her prediction was a panic attack, so she wasn’t exactly aware at the time that it was happening if an attack was going on or not. Still, goblin bodies littering the ground and an increase in patients after a panic attack was convincing enough. It was exhausting, even more so than any of the normal panic attacks she’d experienced.

But every time Arthur came to “talk” with her, she got more and more uncomfortable. Even Christian was observing her more and more closely. She could feel their added scrutiny, and in turn everyone else’s, so acutely it hurt. The only thing holding her together was Christian’s Calming Aura.

There had been other changes too. For one, her discovery of the goblin’s blindness had reverberated through the camp and even now could be heard being repeated like a prayer. It had been the first real indication of the human’s superiority. The goblins might be eating into their numbers, but they couldn’t see. They were blind.

Still, it was clear that they could see, or at least perceive what was around them. Both she and Christian were confused about the how, especially since they didn’t display any echolocation behavior and did have eyes, if unusual ones. Well, they might have echolocation, but nobody could really tell when they were in the middle of a fight.

A second change was the appearance of the clearing. While before it was only protected by spread out guards, slowly Arthur had made the building of a fence, and eventually walls, into a conditioning exercise. They were ugly, there had been no builders in the group, but they were functional enough. The new walls were adorned with spikes so that the goblins couldn’t climb them properly.

The new construction effort coincided with the clearing’s supply of bullets eventually ending. The group had started to train, clumsily at first, with spears. Consequently, many of them gained related Skills, with the most coveted one so far being Spear Initiate. When people realized this was a way to gain more Skills, the push to learn more traditional weapons descended on the clearing. Suddenly instead of hearing the occasional gunshot, the thud and clang of weapons rang out through the meadow.

One thing that hadn’t changed much was James. She still didn’t feel like she was a part of the group. She didn’t know anybody’s names beyond Christian, Jean Paul, Louis, and, of course, Arthur. Though to be fair, that group of people had begun feeling familiar enough with her to question her about her name. She had been wondering when those questions would come, it was inevitable. At least the questions weren’t of the goading variety and a simple shrug had been enough of an answer. Why expand that her parents simply didn’t care enough about her to choose a proper girl’s name?

Everyone else, though, remained a mystery. One that she wasn’t eager to solve. She was almost quarantined away in the infirmary. Always near people, and yet apart from them, it was truly the worst of both worlds for her despite Christian’s Calming Aura.

Jean Paul and Louis had remained loyal, standing by her side as she collapsed every time, screaming. Her reactions had improved a bit over time, but that didn’t stop the headaches, the freak outs, or subsequent “reload” period. And even if Jean Paul and Louis were loyal, she knew it was more of a loyalty to the group, the little tribe that Arthur had built.

For all his lip service that she was the most important person in the clearing, it felt like James was really the most important prisoner. There was no cage, and she was let out into the yard with her guards, but she had no illusion about her freedom.

She had also finally discovered where she was: the Southwest of France. She had been able to figure out a way to turn off her Permanent Skill A Thousand Questions for a couple of minutes in order to properly register the language. She never mentioned where she was from to anyone. It felt like just another nail in her self-made coffin certifying how weird she was compared to everyone else.

Every morning Jean Paul and Louis collected her from my morning studying in my apartment. They would then follow her out to the clearing in silence and earlier than most because, somehow, she was never bothered by monsters hiding in the forest though they did sometimes get looks or bared teeth. They would then check in with Christian, get shooed away, train, and go back to help him for the rest of the day with meaningless menial tasks anyone could do. After she had freaked out that first day being alone in the infirmary, Christian never left her again.

She learned a lot during training though, and it was one of the few times Louis would actually speak up, correcting her form, teaching her how to kick, fall (that lesson had taken up a whole miserable day), and her guard’s favorite lesson: running away.

In their own words, the only reason she’d be using any of this was if the whole camp were overrun. James even gained some physical stats, a discovery she shared with Christian. This got him very excited since everybody that gained any physical stats had only done so after they gained a Class. Glancing at them again, she noted the single digit increase in Endurance and the two extra points in strength. She had still declined to shar her stats with Christian, preferring to keep them private, especially since she knew she was still way below average.

If there was an attack, whatever part of the day it landed on would be skipped as she struggled against the mental pressure. Despite all this, she never gained a Class. She did get a few Skills, though. Her training really had seeped into her, it seemed. She got the Skills Running [initiate] and Exercise [initiate]. In spite of this, no new fighting-related Skills appeared in her repertoire, and she secretly worried they never would.

She hated having bodyguards and if she had no fighting-related Skills she couldn’t justify losing them. Of course, this omission of a Skill type only gained her extra suspicion with Arthur, something he never mentioned but was clear to her. She wished it really was duplicity and not reality, but that wasn’t the case. Her lack of Class did bug Christian, though. Most everyone at camp had a Class by now. Personally, she thought it was because she didn’t have a real role.

James hated it. While everyone participated in an attack she would be protected in the infirmary with Christian by Jean Paul and Louis while she lay curled on a cot somewhere in a fetal position. She was slowly wasting away. While before she was used to days by herself, going to online classes, doing her homework, applying to internships, etc. she was now beholden to others’ needs. And they didn’t even really need her! They had built walls and growing stronger, so strong that her measly number of physical stats couldn’t even really hope to catch up, even when considering the Title she continued to keep to herself.

James had tried leaving her apartment early one day, slinking away into the forest for a couple of minutes to be by herself. But she had found a sleeping Louis outside her unit. There really was no reason for him to do that, there hadn’t been any reports of the goblins being able to enter the doors. She tried staying late in her apartment instead, but Jean Paul and Louis had persistently knocked on it until she couldn’t take it anymore. That was the day she started to think about the ethics of escaping. Because it would certainly be an escape.

She wasn’t dumb, her advanced warning certainly helped. And James wasn’t sure she’d be able to live with herself if she was confronted with the number of people she could save if she stayed and chose to leave anyway. But she was equally unsure if she was able to live with herself now, a prisoner in everything but name.

This was a new world, one where the strong prevailed and the weak suffered. And she was currently weak. And that wouldn’t change unless she left this gilded cage. Because she couldn’t help but think about the future. Because while nobody voiced it, everyone knew this must be a Tutorial for the real post-System world. And the real world is always worse.