Chương 28: Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Roads Not Taken

In the next few days, whenever there was a moment that could be deemed as quiet enough, she caught herself doing the thing she'd promised she wouldn't do. Resistance to targeted mental and perceptual effects. Source and Duration may be determined depending on rank and level. As such, she had ended up reading the description perhaps twenty times alone by now, the way one prods a bruise to confirm it still hurts.

She was doing it again now, walking past the chandler's with a basket on her arm, turning the words over for anything she might have missed the first dozen times. Stop it. Saying that to herself didn't work very well.

This was, she had decided somewhere around the third sleepless night, the correct and only sensible approach: whoever or whatever had gone digging around in her head, if there was a whoever at all, and not simply some passive hazard of this world she'd blundered into without noticing, like having touched the memory manipulation equivalent of poison ivy, should see absolutely nothing change in her behaviour. No visible caution. No sudden new habits to check her status screen over and over.

And definitely not hesitating a half-second longer anytime she spoke to anyone at all. She tried hard to convince herself that the passive approach was the best one in this case. She was severely outmatched. She would check on the skill, quietly, from the corner of her eye, to make sure her memories weren't being tampered further, and she would not go looking for the person, or thing, that could erase her in ways more frightening than death. Mostly, this approach was working better. Somewhat. Maybe. Alice sighed.

The outer sections of the marsh had grown thin, she hadn't been wrong in noticing this last time. Not empty, but she'd picked it over enough times now that she could feel the difference in her own basket, lighter than it used to be for the same two hours of effort. So as it had become her new routine, she pushed further out, past the edges of red reeds and into deeper ground that stayed wet even where it looked dry. Everywhere she walked, there was standing water.

Pools of it, black and flat and mirror-still, reeds thinning to nothing around the edges. Alice crouched at the edge of the nearest pool, said " Observe" out of habit at the reeds growing along its lip. It was nothing dangerous, just a decent yield of watercress-adjacent something that Hyde or an herbalist would maybe pay for. She reached in to cut a handful free. The water took her wrist. It rose up to her wrist and pulled her in.

She had exactly enough time to think, oh, that's new, before the grip travelled up past her wrist to her forearm and the thing under the surface pulled. You have encountered a [Riverwrack]. A bit late for that, she thought annoyed. It happened quickly. She went into the pool up to her elbow before her knees caught the bank and stopped the rest of her following.

Cold water, colder than water this shallow had any right to be, and something underneath it with a great many limbs, or possibly one very long, very dexterous limb, coiled tight enough around her forearm. She felt her own pulse in the fingers going numb. Damn, she thought trying to gather her bearings. Panicking had never once helped. Alice did not pull back immediately. Her feet were at a good angle for the moment, so she just held on. She didn't want to end up in an attritious tug-of-war for long.

She was quite certain should lose in due time if she tried. Instead she stretched her body carefully over the dried parts of land, making sure she had as much hold onto it as possible and then leaned into the pool, driving her free hand down through the black water until it closed around something that felt like a fistful of wet rope and old leather, and hauled at once. The Riverwrack came up screaming.

It was a long, glistening, eel-bodied thing with too many jointed limbs fanning out from a head that was mostly mouth, and mostly wrong about where a mouth should be. It writhed in the open air with fury and desperation. It had not expected to be dragged up, weightless and transparent, out of the one element that made it dangerous. She threw it onto land, where it wiggled helplessly, a true scene out of nightmares.

She stood up and ran to where she could plant a boot on its coiled length and pin it flat against the bank. Alice raised the solid branch she had picked up earlier. [Strike] – Passive. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. She hit it several times, aiming for the mouth, wincing at the sounds it made, and on the fourth hit something in it gave with a wet crunch and the limbs went from frantic to twitching to nothing at all. [Riverwrack] killed. Combat event logged.

Skill [Strike] has leveled up. She sat back on the wet bank, her sleeve soaked to the shoulder and her whole arm throbbing in a way that suggested bruising rather than breaking, and allowed herself a few moments to breathe before another notification stacked on top of the last one. Progression threshold met. She went still. You have reached the maximum level for your current class. Level Up is unavailable until class evolution is completed. She already knew what came next.

She'd expanded the notification the night before, lying awake staring at the ceiling, doing nothing interesting, and she'd had a full eight hours to sit with it before the marsh gave her anything to distract herself with. Class Upgrade Available Tier Upgrade: Intermediate Thief (Common) Rank ceiling: Probata. Existing level retained. New Thief skills offered.

Lateral Upgrade: Novice Scavenger (Common) Rank ceiling: Nota. Starting skills: [Forage Sense], [Salvage], [Weather Sense]. All current leveling progress lost. New Scavenger skills granted.

Lateral Upgrade: Novice Hawker (Common) Rank ceiling: Ignota. Starting skills: [Patter], [Haggle], [Crowd Read]. All current leveling progress lost. New Hawker skills granted. She'd looked at these options so much the night before that the words had started to lose all meaning. She'd gone to bed hoping, that something in today's marsh run would tip a fourth option into view. A better lateral. A new path for her to choose that offered actual power and not just means for survival.

But as she checked, sitting on the wet bank with a dead Riverwrack cooling by her boot… same three options. No dice. Fine, she thought. Fine. Let's actually think about this instead of sulking about it. Novice Hawker was, on paper, the sensible choice. [Patter], [Haggle], [Crowd Read], those were the skills of a girl who ate regularly and didn't get looked at twice by a constable. A Hawker had a stall, or the promise of one eventually.

A Hawker had a story that made sense to everyone who heard it, cover included, no effort required, because it would simply be true. Society liked a Hawker. Society had never once liked a Thief, and she was fairly sure society was going to like a Thief even less the longer she stayed one and the more levels she gained in it. And that was exactly the problem with it. She thought about her ambitions, if she could even call it that.

The word felt faintly absurd applied to herself, a dead woman wearing a dead girl's hands, but there it was… and Hawker didn't serve them. Becoming a Hawker was about comfort. About a version of this life where she stopped needing to know things she wasn't supposed to know, stopped needing doors that weren't supposed to open for her. It was a quick exit into obscurity and that was not what she was looking for. She wanted the mystery of her murder solved.

She wanted to know what had been walking through her memory at night. And becoming better at haggling wasn't going to be how she achieved it. Scavenger was closer, honestly. [Forage Sense], [Salvage], [Weather Sense], that was just her life already. What she did most days on her marsh runs. But she didn't want to remain where she was, foraging the wilderness for the rest of her life, just becoming slightly better at it with time. Which left Thief.

Which had always, if she was honest with herself, been the only real option on the table, because Thief was the only one of the three that didn't ask her to become smaller. Alice dwelled on this for a moment. Scavenger and Hawker weren't random offerings. They were her, reflecting her actions and habits in the past couple of months. Foraging and selling. The two things she actually did, every day, with or without the system's help. It seemed the options didn't reflect potential.

Instead, they offered her a mirror, and asked whether she liked the woman holding it. She didn't. She had wanted options like Assassin, Warrior, Gunslinger! Mage, if that was even possible! Did the system's option mean that one could not join a class without already having proficiency in some of its skills? Did she need to kill someone to be offered assassin? Did she need to join a war for Warrior or own a gun for Gunslinger? And how could someone practice magic without being a Mage?!

Alice took a deep breath to calm herself. It wasn't the time to hate on the system. With my current options, she thought, and made herself sit with this part properly, if I keep doing exactly what I've been doing, foraging and killing the odd thing that gets in my way and calling that a full day's work, Level 20 is going to hand me a very similar list again. Except it'll be Hunter instead of Scavenger next time, if I am lucky. And having Hunter or some other class of that nature as my best option is… just terrible.

But it will be fair, and I'll have to say no to that too, because continuing on with Thief is the only way, and I am fairly sure I will end up crying of frustration. She didn't want to be a woman who cried over a lateral class offer. She wanted, badly, to arrive at Level 20 having already proven, to the system, to herself, to whatever was reading her file from wherever these things got decided, that she was something more than forages well, sells well, fights adequately.

Which meant she needed to be doing something else with her days besides walking further into the marsh and hoping it kept feeding her. Alice closed her eyes for a moment and opened them again. Lesson learned. She reached out, mentally, for the only door actually open to her.

"Intermediate Thief," she said.