“That’s all for this class. Congratulations on making it to the end of this course. You will have the weekend to meet with your teams before you’re given your first assignments, but until then you have the rest of the day to yourselves. You’re dismissed.”
I stretched my arms above my head, letting out a soft groan as Tera dismissed us from the final class of our one-month-long course.
I certainly enjoyed the courses, but I was starting to feel a bit restless. I wanted to actually be doing something now. I hadn’t gotten a lot of time to actually train my skills or anything. We had also spent a lot of time trying to get me a support buff skill over the week, but either it was too far outside my current build direction or we were just missing something because I never got an option for it.
I did manage to get something else though, we spent a bit of time sparring usually, much more relaxed than it had been the first time that Jazz and I had fought.
‘Ping’ A new general skill [Lightning Defense] has been acquired.
Channeling this skill allows you to defend yourself from attacks. Ones you can see, and ones you can’t. As this skill is channeled whenever an attack is sent your way the skill will automatically call out a bolt of lightning to intercept the attack, negating its force. Costs 500 mana to cast and an additional 500 mana for each blocked attack. Efficiency increased by 0.8% (0.8%) per level.
I’d also learned several other techniques that didn’t quite make it into being skills, but they would definitely be useful. Remember the vision thing from before? Well, vision and light form off of electromagnetic waves or something. I don’t really understand the science behind it, but given that there’s some fundamental aspect of electricity to it, that means I can control it.
It’s just really fucking hard.
That is NOT what she said, Lea already made that joke.
Anyway, using my meager understanding of it I was able to actually increase the visible light spectrum of things I could view. The colors were strange here. I couldn’t describe it. Literally, there are no words designed by language to explain things we can’t comprehend normally. Suffice it to say, there was more to color than the naked eye could see.
But that wasn’t where my vision adventures ended. I also managed to twist light around to give myself infrared vision as well as thermal, x-ray, and microscopic vision. It was really hard to maintain the focus on the skills, but thankfully I had a multitude of minds to handle the tasks for me.
It was also great training for [Accelerated Thoughts] and [Parallel Minds].
A lot of these ideas were suggestions for Tera, we’d had a few subsequent conversations after I realized that I wasn’t quite getting the support skill I wanted, according to her it might just not be possible for the spell-blade class to get anything like that. And I wasn’t necessarily interested in dropping any of my skills in my mage class.
Maybe I would in the future, but for now, it was staying as it was.
There were a few other things I was working towards as well, since I was bending light around my eyes and whatnot to perceive things I normally couldn’t, it should also be able to theoretically go invisible by bending light around me so that people couldn’t perceive me. They would probably still be able to sense my mana and whatnot, but the fewer options people had the better.
But it wasn’t coming along well, the few times I’d tried I’d very quickly drained myself of huge amounts of mana.
I just couldn’t sustain the mana necessary for such a task, which seemed odd given that my skills were capable of calling in entire thunderstorms and blanketing an entire area in lightning. Bending a bit of light in a contained area should be a lot easier by comparison. Or at the very least cheaper.
And yet it wasn’t. I had to be doing something wrong, I just didn’t know what, and I wasn’t sure how I would actually go about figuring that out either.
Needless to say, I’d keep working at it until I could figure it out. If I could, that would give us a stealth option we wouldn’t normally have. Especially since I could cover the entire group.
Another problem I needed to address with these skills is; how hard they are to use on the move. I could do all the vision tricks… while standing still.
But the second I started moving, everything fell apart. There was so much information to keep track of, even while standing completely still. The second I started moving I had to account for a massive increase in variables. There was so much math and information that it gave me a massive headache the first time I tried.
Maybe this was why people generally didn’t have a lot of techniques. If the System made them this much easier to use…
Well, I wasn’t going to give up that easily. If I kept pushing myself, eventually I’d get to the point where my brain could handle everything and I’d be able to start acquiring techniques left, right, and center without issues.
But it would be a long arduous journey before I could get to that point. And it wouldn’t be reached by me being lazy.
Which would have seemed directly at odds with how my personality used to be back on Earth if you had known me. I had seemed like the epitome of a lazy slob.
Which… was true to a degree, as I enjoyed sitting around doing nothing. I enjoyed it still if I was being honest.
But I could be dedicated when I wanted to be, as I had shown many times before. Even on Earth, I had shown that. The problem was just that not a lot of things interested me enough for me to be dedicated to them.
Here, that was a completely different story. Everything was new and interesting, therefore I was easily able to dedicate myself to the tasks, a large portion of that probably also came from cultural differences. For example, it’s easy to be excited by things like the System when, to you, it’s like a video game imposed on real life.
If I had been born into this world and it was just a fact of how life was rather than a massive change to how I’d been living for the past 26 years…
I felt a slight pang of nostalgia at the thought of my age. My birthday had come and gone while I had been stuck in Alixia.
It’s been about a year since I showed up in this world. Had people given up on me back on Earth? Was I even missed?
I’d like to believe I would be.
It was… confusing.
On one hand, I’d want them to look for me, in some vain hope that they’d be able to find me. Because I did want to go back to my family, to let them know I was alright.
On the other hand, I didn’t want them to mourn for a long time, thinking I had left them because I was unhappy and just deciding to completely cut them out of my life by crossing the country and starting a new life. Or that I had gone somewhere and possibly died and they would never know about it.
If that were the case, I’d rather they forget about me so they didn’t suffer. But I also didn’t want to be forgotten, no one did.
I can’t remember who it was, but someone said something along the lines of ‘People die twice. Once at the end of their lives, and again when their name is spoken for the last time.’
That saying had always sparked a bit of dread inside me. I had no misconceptions about my life, I wasn’t going to be anyone famous. I wasn’t going to change history in a great way or become anyone important that people looked up to.
And that meant there would come a day when the world forgot that I had ever lived. That had happened to trillions of other lives and it would happen to me one day.
And honestly? That thought scared me. A sort of existential dread on the realization that I would just become another one of the nameless masses, forgotten to time.
I let out a sigh as I walked into the training room that Lea constantly kept reserved for us to use.
She was already there standing in the center of the room running through some sword drills. I walked up, catching the glance of her eyes as she took in my presence before setting her attention back on the drills she was working on.
I ended up taking a seat nearby, but sufficiently out of the way, and decided to make us all little food baskets again. I didn’t mind fruit, but I was starting to get a craving for some meat and bread. I’d been saving my money up until this point, maybe I should splurge a little bit?
Maybe I deserved a little snack.
It didn’t take much effort for me to finish making the assortment of goodies. I made three baskets, one for each of us. As much as I disliked Jazz, if I excluded him from stuff it made Lea angry.
And I wasn’t in the business of pissing off people I enjoyed being around. She was a fair person, she treated us both as equals despite having been raised in a station far above everyone else around her.
She was basically the epitome of the perfect girl in an anime or something. Kind, smart, athletic, good-looking, high social status, etc.
She basically ticked all the boxes. Normally you’d think such a person would be unrealistic, and yet the living proof was right in front of me, diligently practicing her sword skills.
‘Ping’ [Plant Production] Has leveled 1 > 2
Oh? It’s been a while since I’ve had a skill level. Not that I’ve been spending much of my time trying to level them recently.
Jazz walked in a short moment later while Lea was still working on her warmup drills. As he approached I gestured to one of the baskets.
He didn’t take one, but neither did he scoff this time. An improvement, I also knew he’d take it when everyone else had left. Probably some residual pride about not taking handouts maybe? I never quite understood that.
Rich people on Earth were obsessed with getting things for free if they could. Especially if it meant they could screw over someone else in the process.
Or at least that’s what I had managed to glean from most of them. Sure, there were some who were somewhat decent people, but they were the exception, not the rule.
A short while later Lea finished her drills and turned to look at us, flashing a smile.
“You’re both here, wonderful. Congratulations on making it through your courses! We won’t be running drills today in lieu of a celebration. We will be meeting tomorrow as usual, but for now, take the day off. Relax, spend some time with friends. That’s all, have a good day.”
With that, she picked up one of the baskets and walked off.
Well, now I needed to find a way to kill the rest of the day. I didn’t have any homework and had no classes coming up next week. I genuinely just had a day where I had nothing to do but wait until tomorrow rolled around.
I stood up, picked up one of the baskets, and left as well. Letting Jazz finally be able to grab his when he thought no one could see him and walk off to wherever it was he planned to go.
I made my way back to my room. It would only be my room for another few days and then I’d be sent off to wherever they thought my team would work best. I was pretty interested in seeing what job they gave us, but until then I had some time to kill.
Entering the room I was surprised to see Adrian was there.
He looked up from his desk and raised an arm in greeting, giving me a warm smile.
“Alex! Classes finish up alright for you?”
I nodded, closing the door behind me, “Yeah, nothing too exciting. Just turned in our final assignment and then the instructor ended the class and sent us all out of here letting us know that we’d be receiving our assignments at the start of next week.”
He nodded as well, “Pretty much how mine went as well. Got any plans for the next couple of days? Any gatherings you plan on going to?”
I shook my head, “Not really, trying to figure out what I should do for today to kill time. But otherwise, my team leader has plans for us over the weekend.”
“She’s making you guys train over the weekend, hoo that’s rough.”
I shrugged, “I don’t mind, honestly. I don’t have a lot of other things to occupy my time besides training. So it works out for me that she’s a bit more dedicated than the others. What about you? You making your team do anything over the weekend.”
As I had assumed a couple of weeks ago, Adrian was the leader of his own team. Team 65.
He had a four-person party as opposed to my three-person, but it looks like they had doubled up on front-liners for his group. Two heavy front-line melee fighters and two ranged in the form of a ranger and a mage.
An interesting setup. Once again, no rogues.
I had to wonder about that. Where were they sticking all the rogues? I saw plenty of them walking around in hallways whenever I moved between classes and such. But I hardly noticed any of them in the obvious training areas after the fact.
Something was fishy about all of that.
“Nah, I’m giving them the weekend off. They’ve been working pretty hard, I felt they deserved a little bit of time to relax before they inevitably get crushed by the workload they’re going to put on us.”
I raised my eyebrows, “Oh? You think they’re going to run us ragged out there?”
He nodded, looking around like someone might hear us before leaning in and lowering his voice a little bit, “Yeah, you didn’t hear this from me, but some of my family works in National Security. Tensions between us and Alixia are tight right now after the invasion last year. The Queen is putting a lot of pressure on them, trying to find out why people bearing their colors invaded us if it wasn’t them.
“Basically, we’re seeing a lot of political strife. Since then, banditry has gone up almost 80%! Something is happening, nobody is quite sure what yet, but it’s happening. Because of that, they need more people than ever to start cracking down on outlaws. I’ve heard of some groups that will clear out five or six dens before reporting back to HQ, resting for a day, and then going right back out to repeat it. They’re getting absolutely run into the ground right now with workload.”
I stroked my chin thoughtfully. Interesting, this definitely had the marks of a type of foreign invasion, maybe a retaliation from Alixia for being falsely accused? It seemed too obvious, surely they wouldn’t do something that would throw more suspicion on them.
Right?
I had to hope that was the case.
That left two other options. An unknown enemy.
Or Ili’kithari.
My money was on it being her, but what did she gain from doing this? What could possibly arise from her seeing that more bandits appeared in Seltas?
Unless this wasn’t just happening here and it was instead happening all over the world. That would make a bit more sense, but it still didn’t answer the why, or even the how. Why was she doing this, and how was she getting enough people to do this?
Questions, questions.
And not nearly enough answers.
