Chương 27: Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Murder, Professionally Speaking

One moment Alice was walking the northern track through the last stretch of reed and scrub she knew well enough to walk with her eyes half-closed, and the next the light had changed, gone green and layered and considerably less interested in reaching the ground, and the marsh smell of standing water had given way to something colder and older, wet bark and leaf-rot and a silence that seemed to hold physical weight.

She touched the collar of her coat without quite meaning to, the way she'd caught herself doing a dozen times in the past week. The pin was small, dull, and the worn colour of a coin that had spent several decades face-down in a gutter. It was likely pewter, she thought, or some cousin of it, stamped with the Compact's mark in a shape she still hadn't fully decided was a rose or a wheel.

One shilling to register, and then two more a month, forever, for the privilege of a badge that told any warden with eyes that she was legally entitled to do the exact thing she'd been doing unlicensed for a month already, considerably more cheaply. She had handed over the money to a clerk who had not looked up from his ledger, and she had walked out of that office feeling, on the whole, robbed. She stopped at the tree line and looked up. The marsh, for all its dangers, was quite flat.

She could see trouble coming from four hundred feet in every direction. The forest beyond it did not offer that particular courtesy. It had verticality, undergrowth, sightlines that ended eight feet away in a wall of bracken, and, if Nell's information and her own assumptions held, considerably better foraging for exactly that reason. Well, she thought. Someone has to find out how bad an idea this is. She had been putting it off for several days now, telling herself it was prudence, and it had been, mostly.

But the marsh's wild stock, while reliable, was also thoroughly picked over by herself and every other freelancer with a license and a grudge against poverty, and her margins would soon be flattening. Even magic strawberries couldn't sprout anew every week. Fresh territory or a smaller profit. She had already made her peace with which one she preferred. [Threat Detection] – Passive. Nothing yet. Good. She adjusted the basket on her arm, checked the knife was where it always was, and stepped under the canopy.

The Gallows-Crows found her before she found anything worth picking. Up to this point, she had mostly dealt with threats coming from the land. So she heard them before she saw them, a low chorus of clicks and rasps that didn't sound like ordinary birdsong. The canopy of trees above her thinned in a patch and she caught sight of black shapes moving between the branches with a coordination that no crow back home had ever managed.

Eight of them, she counted, wheeling in a loose formation that kept adjusting itself, herding something toward a stand of close-packed saplings where the undergrowth thickened into a genuine problem for traversing. As she got closer, she realized the something was her. You have encountered a [Gallows-Crow] (8). Oh, for God's sake. She did not exactly have a weapon suited to this. Her knife could only be thrown once, before she became weaponless, after all.

However, she had managed to procure a fallen branch, stout and about the length of her arm. She had picked it out because it had looked usefully solid and she had learned, by now, not to walk into danger holding nothing at all. Once she was close enough, the first crow came in low and fast, aiming for her face, and she swung the branch in a flat arc without waiting to see if it was a good idea. It connected with a satisfying, unpleasant crack and the bird went sideways into a tree trunk and did not get up.

[Strike] – Passive. This was going to be easier than she initially thought. The second, third and fourth came together, taking advantage of the angle she'd just opened by turning to track the first, and she understood in the half-second before they reached her that this was not going to be a video game where each enemy waited its turn politely.

Eight birds was not eight separate attacks, it was one attack with eight components, and she was going to end up blind to at least one or two when each came from separate directions. So, she dropped instead of dodging, and felt something rake across her shoulder blades where her head had been a moment before.

From the ground, she swung the branch up and caught the fifth bird under its own momentum, which did most of the work for her, and rolled clear of the saplings before the sixth could finish whatever the formation had been building toward. Three down. Five to go. And the five seemed to be rethinking their plan. She could see it, the wheeling pattern breaking and reforming, a new hesitation that hadn't been there when there'd been eight of them and one of her. Skill [Strike] has leveled up.

She stood, slowly, branch up, and did not run, confident she would win relatively unharmed. Unfortunately, she underestimated her opponents' intelligence. The remaining five broke formation entirely, scattered up into the canopy in three different directions, and were gone. She stood in the small clearing they'd made of the undergrowth, breathing harder than she wanted to admit, three dead crows around her and one very bruised set of shoulder blades. [Gallows-Crow] (3) killed. Combat event logged. Damn.

There went her chance for easy practice. She crouched by the nearest body and said, " Observe," mostly out of habit now, because the lesson about corpses and lost information had cost her enough embarrassment the first time that she was not eager to relearn it. Gallows-Crow Race: Corvid Type: Forest Beast (Subtype: Natural) Evolution: Tier I (Common) Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Level: 5 Attributes Vigour – (Deceased) Acuity – (Deceased) Spirit – (Deceased) Skills (RESTRICTED) Traits (RESTRICTED) Weaknesses (RESTRICTED) Quests (RESTRICTED) Nothing especially useful past the level, since she couldn't see the attributes of deceased creatures and the rest of the terms were restricted anyway, but at least she had a concrete example of her skill: level five prey was well within her reach, and even with eight of them, she had survived with just a stick and good dexterity.

As she thought that through, she wondered whether the feathers were worth something to somebody, when the smell reached her. Cold earth. Not the ordinary cold-earth smell of a forest floor in late autumn, which she'd been breathing for the last hour without particular alarm, but something underneath it, mineral and old and wrong. T he type of wrongness she'd apparently learned to recognise somewhere she had no memory of learning it. [Threat Detection] – Passive. Every hair on her arms stood up at once.

She did not look for the source of the notification. She had learned that lesson by now: you did not go looking for the thing your body was already telling you to run from. You trusted your instincts and you moved." Silent Step," she breathed, and turned south, away from the smell, placing her feet with great care and as fast as she could. [Silent Step] – Active. She caught one glimpse of it through the trees before she was too far away. It was low, black, and built like something that enjoyed a chase.

She did not slow down to get a better look. The smell told her enough. Whatever the crows had been, this was a different creature entirely. The sensible response was not tactics but distance, and she had exactly enough sense left to run for it. She kept the skill active until her Vigour decreased enough that it was becoming its own kind of risk. Then she kept walking without it, slower, listening. Nothing followed.

She made the tree line with her heart still working harder than the walk alone justified, and stood there for a moment looking back at the forest the way you'd look at a large, unpredictable animal that had luckily chosen not to bite you. Alice had gone in with a plan that amounted to ' see what's there' and come out with barely anything more than she had gone in.

The forest paid better, in the sense that everything in it seemed to be worth more, cost more, and could kill her considerably faster than the marsh ever had. She had not even gone that deep. She had assumed, at some point, that levelling up meant the world got easier. It didn't. It meant she got handed a slightly larger, slightly worse version of the same problem, over and over, with no obvious ceiling in either direction. For a moment, she wondered what happened to her recklessness.

Why did she, at the first sign of a threat, feel the need to run away and not investigate or examine what was happening, as if something far worse than the initial threat awaited her? She pondered on that for a moment, frowning, unable to determine what had led to that series of thoughts, before shaking her head and simply deciding to end it there that day. She had enough money by now that could miss out on hunting and foraging once in a while.

She scrolled back through the skill list on the walk home, mostly to keep her mind off her worries, and it was somewhere around the chandler's corner that the scrolling stopped being just idle accounting. STATUS Name: Alice Darling Race: Human (Common) Class: Novice Thief Level: 10 (Rank: Ignota) Title: Chosen One Conditions Minor Anaemia · Persistent Cough · Anathema (Alien) Attributes Vigour Lv. 6 (21/60) Acuity Lv. 7 (52/70) Skills Tier 2 (Uncommon): RESTRICTED Tier 1 (Common): [Arithmetic] Lv.

5 · [Advertise] Lv. 4 · [Bluff] Lv. 5 · [Britannian Language] Lv. 5 · [Convince] Lv. 6 · [Disguise] Lv. 1 · [Dodge] Lv. 5 · [Drop Safely] Lv. 3 · [Feign Ignorance] Lv. 5 · [Forage] Lv. 7 · [Francian Language] Lv. 1 · [Garden] Lv. 1 · [Hide] Lv. 6 · [Intimidation] Lv. 2 · [Latin Language] Lv. 4 · [Lie] Lv. 5 · [Local Slang] Lv. 4 · [Maintain Alias] Lv. 5 · [Map Building] Lv. 4 · [Mental Skill Resistance] Lv. 4 · [Mending] Lv. 4 · [Notice Detail] Lv. 7 · [Observe] Lv. 10 (MAX) · [Pick Pocket] Lv.

1 · [Prusijan Language] Lv. 1 · [Reading and Writing] Lv. 6 · [Recall] Lv. 4 · [Silent Step] Lv. 6 · [Spot Tail] Lv. 3 · [Sprint] Lv. 5 · [Squeeze Through] Lv. 2 · [Strike] Lv. 6 · [Tailoring] Lv. 1 · [Threat Detection] Lv. 7 · [Track] Lv. 5 · [Vault] Lv. 2 · [Weaving] Lv. 1 Quests Main Quest: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Sub-Quest: Find the White Rabbit Sub-Quest: Off With Her Head Several skills had all ticked up in small increments, and she had even reached Lv. 10 overall.

She had a feeling that if she looked more deeply into it, expanding it for example, she would trigger a notification for some sort of threshold change, like a new feature as in most games. Perhaps she would gain the strange Spirit attribute, or she might be offered a class change. She was not quite sure. But while that did sound quite exciting, her eyes wouldn't move from the near bottom of the list, wherein sat a skill she did not remember acquiring at all. [Mental Skill Resistance] Lv.

4 Resistance to targeted mental and perceptual effects. Source and Duration may be determined depending on rank and level. She continued walking, as if this information did not rattle her. She had become aware of the existence of this skill since last week and yet… it still surprised her every time she read it. Not only did she have no clue where she got it, even worse, the skill was not badly leveled.

It wasn't just a random one off, where she had gained a skill from some half-remembered brush with an idea and then forgotten. No, instead it had leveled up three times, which by every pattern she'd learned so far on this system worked meant repeated, meaningful, recent use. It was the kind of number that did not arrive from nowhere, just like the original Alice's skills did not come from nowhere.

Something had targeted her mind, more than once, thoroughly enough to create a skill, strongly enough to build resistance to it, and she had no memory whatsoever of any of it happening. The thought of it alone left her shaking. Was she missing something? But when? Where? She had looked through her memory carefully for anything that felt slightly too smooth, too convenient, too manufactured and yet… Nothing surfaced. That, she thought, was itself the answer, and she did not like it.

If I would not remember someone trying that on me, I would notice the gaps, she told herself, and did not entirely believe it, because the whole design of a skill like that, if it worked as well as three levels of resistance implied it might have, was that you wouldn't.

She put the thought away before she reached Pell Street, not because she'd accepted it but because there was nothing further to be done with it standing in the street with a basket of dead crow feathers, and because some part of her, the part that had survived death once already, knew that one should not look too deeply into the abyss. Not until they were ready for it to stare back. Somewhere behind her, deep in the shadows, something shapeless moved about. She did not look back to check.

For once, it was not the most unsettling thing on her mind.