Chương 19: Chapter Nineteen: In Retrospect, She Should Have Played More Games

That evening she sat on the edge of her bed and opened the screen. [Observe] Lv. 10 (MAX) It had been sitting at ten for days now. She had used it constantly, at the pitch, at the church, on every marsh run. Ever since it reached Lv. 10, it had not moved. The MAX obviously stood for Maximum, but Alice had always assumed that skills would go up to Lv. 100.

The speed with which she was leveling up her skills had started to decrease, yes, but it was still pretty fast and she had thought that a more significant slowdown would happen before she hit the maximum level. Additionally, if Lv. 10 was the limit, more people should be hitting the limits of their skill purely unintentionally. A month of work for her to reach it on purpose, but if it took someone more than six months to reach the first ten levels just on passive use alone, she'd be shocked.

She thought about what she knew from games. She regretted not having played them more often in her past life now, but regardless, wasn't something supposed to happen when you reached a limit? Something like evolution or an upgrade? Currently she didn't have any idea how to advance further. And if she tried to expand the skill itself… [Observe] Lv. 10 (MAX) Maximum threshold at current tier reached. Upgrade requirements not met. Whatever came next required something she didn't have yet.

And apparently it would kill the System to provide any clues of what the requirements were.

Alice covered the usual route quickly and without incident. Two regular Boggarts in the southern stretch, she dealt with them methodically, iron to fur, and came away with only scratches. They had become, somewhere in the past few weeks, more like maintenance training rather than a genuine problem. She should have felt proud for her progress, and she did on some level, but overall, this mostly worried her. The Lesser Boggarts were predictable.

They did not hide well and their main form of attack was simply to lunge straight ahead. Was it dangerous to do this alone and uninformed of their weakness to iron? Yes, of course. Alice had been seconds away from dying the first time she had encountered them. But with support and some practice, you could easily forage in the first few sections outside Londinium. So why didn't more people do this?

Even if it was highly discouraged by the Crown, the Compact and the Church, there had to be more people who would be willing to risk social shaming for money. She wouldn't know the answer to that by just thinking about it though. Maybe she could ask Nell, and she would have some answers. As Alice cleaned her knife, it occurred to her that this was her last or second to last unlicensed run. The thought of it happened regularly and in fact, hadn't left her ever since she went home from Baxter's office.

It had been gently annoying her since. Which was ridiculous, the registration changed nothing about how she actually gathered, only how she reported it, but the principle of the thing sat poorly with her regardless, and she was allowed to be petty inside her own head, where nobody could see it. She shook her head. The marsh opened ahead of her. Afternoon light lay across the dirty water.

The reeds were the wrong colour for this hour, too amber, and the sky above the northern reed line was the bruised blue color of a rainless day. Three hours till sundown, perhaps four. Right. She had work to do. Not long after, she picked up signs of her desired prey near the red reeds. Pressed ovals in the mud, widely spaced, a scatter of reed stalks bent and not sprung back, and bare earth in a patch that had not been bare last time she passed here. [Track] – Passive.

Even without the perceptual certainty of the active skill, she knew she needed to head northeast. Past the red reed beds, toward the open section where the land rose slightly. She had gone that far twice before. This time, she went east first to come at it from the longer way around, through firmer ground, until she reached the flat stretch past the reeds and could see across it properly. There. The spacing of the ovals told her wolf-sized at minimum, and the depth in the mud meant it was a recent passage.

She stood still for a moment. The first time, she had not gone looking for Marsh Boggarts. One had found her. It had nearly killed her, leaving a handful of Vigour points between herself and a grave, and wounds that had taken days to heal even with magical tonics. Even revisiting the memory alone required some emotional distance. But now… She looked at the tracks. Then at the terrain. Attributes Vigour Lv. 5 (29/50) Acuity Lv. 7 (35/70) Alice moved northeast.

She was going to see what happened if she started the fight.

The approach took four minutes. She used [Silent Step] from forty feet out, sustaining the skill for five seconds at a time before she had to breathe and reactivate, one point of Vigour per second, the numbers dropping in small increments. She watched it with a part of her attention and kept her pace slow and her feet placed carefully on the firmer ground. The wind held, coming off the northwest, carrying her scent away from the reed bed where the Marsh Boggart was waiting.

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. Skill [Silent Step] has leveled up. The notification arrived not long after. She noted it and kept moving. She was close enough now to see its shape. It stood low to the ground, and was darker than the reeds around it. Its body had the sort of absolute stillness that indicated watchfulness and not sleep. The Marsh Boggart had its head angled toward the water, and seemed to be tracking something else.

You have encountered a [Marsh Boggart]. This was her moment. Attributes Vigour Lv. 5 (19/50) Acuity Lv. 7 (32/70) She stopped. Took one quiet breath." Sprint." [Sprint] – Active. She kept it barely a sound. The skill activated and she committed fully and immediately, because the first rule she had learned about fighting beasts that knew what iron did to them was that hesitation was an invitation.

She closed the remaining distance in barely a second and her knife came in toward the near shoulder, at a clean angle, when the Boggart moved. It still surprised her how fast they moved. Its large body uncoiled from stillness in a single motion, and she caught it across the top of the shoulder instead of through it, the blade raking rather than driving. It wasn't clean or ideal, but still, " Strike!" [Strike] – Active. It screeched and turned on her with a sound like tearing cloth and came for the throat." Dodge!"

she shouted. There was no need for mumbling now. [Dodge] – Active. Her body moved before the thought of where to go had fully formed, and the teeth closed on air a half-second behind her. She put four feet between them. The long fingers raked across the back of her forearm in passing and she checked it automatically. There were two parallel lines, and her coat was torn, but it was shallow, not a particularly worrisome scratch, though it burnt like all wounds did. She moved her eyes back to the Boggart.

It had not charged again. It stood and looked at her, and that was the thing about Marsh Boggarts that she detested: they thought and planned. The amber eyes moved between her face and the knife, slow and steady, and she could see it reconsider. She did not give it time to finish." Sprint!" She closed on [Sprint] and aimed for the same shoulder, iron into the wound already open, but it anticipated the angle. It went low. It didn't attack immediately as before.

It dropped beneath her reach and turned into her, and she caught it across the skull with a hit that skipped rather than bit, the knife sliding on bone rather than piercing through. The Boggart's shoulder connected with her lower ribs in passing and took her sideways two steps before she found her footing. She turned. It had not pressed the advantage. It kept watching. One exchange to learn the approach, she thought. Two for the counter. She moved right. The amber eyes tracked.

"Stri–" It moved on the word. Not on the knife movement or her body movement, but on the words she said. The Boggart had not waited to see the swing coming, it had recognised the activation and was already moving sideways by the time she followed through. The knife caught the outside of its forearm instead of the chest. Iron on fey-adjacent tissue registered as a burn and the Boggart screeched and pulled back two steps. But it wasn't harmed to the extent she needed to. I knew it, she thought.

Those ridiculous voice-activated skills are too obvious a tell. Still, she had the advantage and she pressed it." Sprint," she said, closing fast. It dropped again, and her momentum took her over it. She caught herself on her hands and rolled before the claws came down, and one caught across her shoulder through the coat. She came upright four feet away with her shoulder burning and her heart too loud. She checked it without stopping. Shirt torn, three new lines across her skin. Shallow.

The Boggart had not charged again. Clever creature. It was standing between her and the open ground, bleeding from the forearm hit, and the amber eyes had changed, but not in anger. They had stopped tracking the knife. They were tracking her mouth. She needed to break the pattern before it finished working out what the next word meant." Notice Detail." [Notice Detail] – Active. Two seconds of absolute clarity. The Boggart sharpened in her vision.

The old scarring at its left shoulder, the way its weight was sitting fractionally forward, with the right side as its preference, the right side was where it was going to come from. One more second. It lunged from the right, she dodged out of the way and took the moment to look at the terrain, firmer ground behind her, a slight incline to the east, the reed line three feet to the Boggart's right. Knife in hand, she waited and pretended to speak.

It came from the right again, as she had read it, and she was already moving across its angle when it started. The knife went into the shoulder wound, the same one where the tissue was already open. [Strike] – Passive. This time the contact was clean enough to matter. The boggart screamed, high and grinding, and wrenched sideways from the blade. She let it go. She wanted distance, and she wanted it angry, because anger was how it stopped thinking and started moving predictably. It came back in a rush.

With a combo of [Sprint] and [Dodge], she managed to close in again and drove the knife in twice at the base of the neck, saying " Strike" once for each. The second one landed and a spurt of Boggart blood flew off the blade. It was over. [Marsh Boggart] killed. Combat event logged.

Progression threshold met. You have leveled up!

Skill [Dodge] has leveled up. She stepped back and let herself breathe. Maybe a little pride was alright.