Chương 27: Prodigy level resistance

Each rarity of skill has its own trade-offs. Lower rarity skills have well-worn paths to advancement - the route is known, even if the climbing is hard. Higher rarity skills offer no such maps. You either find a mentor who has walked somewhere near the territory, or you work it out yourself. Both options are harder than they sound. - Mistifa Rezwan, Professor at University 3, Batches 12 to 31"I should have told you at the start," Kara grimaced.

"I'm sorry. We could have avoided the whole thing." Treehugger waved it off, but her attention was already running elsewhere, lit up the way people get when something has caught them off guard and they aren't done with it yet.

"Don't worry about it. I understand completely why you wouldn't want to reveal a skill like that." She looked at him with the expression of someone who had reassessed what they were looking at and found it more interesting than expected.

"I can count the people outside my tribe who have counteracted my poisons on one hand. All of them are professional chemists or biologists with decades of experience. And you're - how old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Seventeen." She repeated it flatly, the number refusing to fit whatever slot she'd prepared for it.

"To counter all four compounds at Amateur level or above, at that age - in my tribe, only prodigies manage that." She paused.

"You are one, aren't you." It was not entirely a question. Kara kept his face pleasant. She talked about her tribe for a while - the southern jungles, the knowledge that had been passed down and refined across generations, the intersection of plant chemistry and human intent that her people had been developing long before the New Age gave it a scientific framework. She talked about her own skill and how she had come into it, the years of learning that had preceded the first real breakthrough.

All of it warm, sincere, and also clearly positioned. She was drifting fractionally closer as she talked, and the scent in the room shifted alongside it, warmer and more present by the minute, the way a tide comes in without announcing any single wave. He caught it anyway, with the part of him that had spent three years somewhere reading the room was not optional. She was very good. For her this was simply how conversations worked, and three years ago it would have sailed straight past him.

He found this more amusing than alarming, which probably said something about his time on a far off mythical island.

"So," she said, her eyes bright.

"How did you come by such a rare skill?" There it was. He had been thinking about this while she talked. The honest answer ran through a planet with no name, a dungeon inside a tree, and months of being poisoned by creatures that should not have existed anywhere in any known ecosystem. The honest answer would open a chain of questions he could not close without opening more, and the chain ended somewhere he could not afford to go.

He went for the version that was true in the parts that mattered and vague in the parts that didn't.

"Honestly, I think I was just lucky. I've always been a bit of a wild child - exploring on my own, not always where I was supposed to be. I stumbled into a dungeon once. Strange place. Plants and animals I'd never seen before or since. I got poisoned quite a few times in there, but there were antidotes around too, and I had enough time to figure out which was which. By the time I found my way out, there it was. Amateur level." He delivered it as though mildly surprised by his own story. Treehugger considered him.

"That's rather lucky. Where was this dungeon?"

"That's the thing. I've tried to work it out. I think maybe some of the chemicals there affected my memory - I can't seem to reconstruct how I got there, or even where exactly it was." He watched for scepticism and found, to his mild surprise, that this landed better than the first part. She nodded slowly, something shifting in her expression toward professional recognition.

"That's actually plausible. There are compounds that interfere with spatial and temporal encoding specifically. It's documented, if uncommon." She was quiet for a moment, already somewhere else.

"Ancient dungeons - there are rumours. Places the ancestors left behind, evolving for centuries without human intervention. If I could find it..." She trailed off, and behind her eyes teams were already being assembled and sent out.

"I'll look into it." Kara offered a silent apology to the future explorers and let it settle where it landed. She smiled - the full deployment, scent and warmth added to her attractiveness that was probably very effective on most people.

"I know you'll be here for a while. But once you can travel, I'd love to have you visit the tribe." His interface received a location request. He accepted and found coordinates he immediately understood were not for general circulation.

"Ask for me when you arrive. The scouts will know you by smell by now, I imagine." A wink.

"I may even be able to help you advance that skill of yours." Kara nodded politely. He thought about what being known by smell implied about what she had been doing during their conversation. He thought about strange experiments and restricted jungle locations and being escorted by scouts who tracked by scent. He was going to visit that tribe approximately never. Mink was waiting when they emerged from the room, which Kara had been half-expecting.

He turned at Treehugger's entrance with the full warmth of a man who had been looking forward to this moment and had prepared things to say.

"An excellent session, Miss Treehugger. Truly. I myself came away with several new perspectives - quite remarkable." He smiled broadly.

"I was hoping we might continue our earlier conversation. Allow me to escort you back to the Council Building."

"You are too kind, Mr. Mink. Unfortunately, I am running rather late. I'm afraid I'll have to pass," Treehugger answered pleasantly. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. Mink's smile held.

"Of course, of course." He turned to Kara, a man who had located his secondary target.

"And about Kara - on behalf of the University, I do want to apologise for any inconvenience caused by our student's incompetence today. Rest assured we will be addressing it appropriately."

"Oh? How so?" Treehugger asked. Her voice had not changed. Her scent had. Mink blinked.

"Well, simply - a debrief, a reminder of the standards expected - ""I have declared him an honoured guest of my tribe, Mr. Mink." She looked at him with an expression Kara had not seen on her before: clear, level, entirely without warmth.

"I will not allow any harm to come to him on my account. I trust I am making myself understood."

"Ha - of course, naturally, I was speaking entirely in jest - ""Wonderful." She turned to Moghli.

"Could you arrange transport? I really must be going."

"Absolutely," Moghli said, already moving. As they made their way out, Mink falling into step behind them, Kara could feel the glare landing on the back of his neck with the steady warmth of a small but dedicated fire. His face was a study in respectful neutrality. It was the single greatest performance of his life to that point, and nobody would ever know, and he was going to be thinking about Mink's expression for weeks. Moghli and Phinx asked him nothing about the private conversation.

Just straightforward congratulations, and a sincere note from Moghli that the honoured-guest invitation was a rare privilege - the tribe kept to itself, and his own access to Treehugger had only happened because she was in the Area on other business. Phinx said less than she looked like she wanted to. Kara appreciated both. Moghli had somewhere to be, which appeared to be his natural state. Kara let his questions go for the day. He went back to the room, freshened up, and sat down.

Glasses looked at him carefully, holding back the direct question, making himself available instead. Kara decided to talk.

"I wish I had put up more of a fight when Phinx pushed me into being the live subject," he said.

"I had a bad feeling from the start." Glasses' expression shifted to something more open.

"What happened exactly, if you don't mind me asking?" He thought for a moment about how much to reveal and decided that he trusted Glasses enough at this point for this. Either way, if someone really looked close enough, it wouldn't be too hard to deduce what had happened. And so Kara told him - the four poisons, each one doing nothing, Treehugger's growing confusion, the moment he made a decision and leaned in to explain. He watched Glasses process it in real time, the analytical attention turning the pieces over.

"Wait," Glasses said.

"You have a Poison Resistance skill?"

"Yes, at amateur level." Glasses looked at him for a moment, aware he had just been handed something and clear on what that meant.

"That's not common at all outside a few tribes and professions. I can see exactly why you'd want to keep it quiet." A beat.

"Thanks for telling me." Kara nodded. He had made the decision before he started talking, and he did not regret it. He told Glasses the rest - the private room, the conversation with Treehugger, her theory about ancient chemistry and memory, the invitation and the part about being known by smell, and finally Mink.

"Serves that ball of muscle right," Glasses said, with a satisfaction that had been waiting for exactly this outlet.

"He backed down very gracefully, I thought," Kara smirked.

"He backed down like a man who had just been dressed down publicly by someone he clearly wanted to impress."

"Very diplomatically put." They built on this for a while, Kara narrating Mink's expression at the moment Treehugger turned back with increasingly theatrical embellishment, Glasses contributing a running commentary on the likely internal monologue, until both of them were laughing properly, the kind that comes from a long day finally settling down, not just from the joke.

Glasses mentioned how most of the guys in audience were glaring at him throughout the demonstration, to which Kara retorted by announcing his sacred duty as honoured guest to defend Lady Treehugger's honour from all lesser mortals. Glasses just snorted, telling him the title was getting to his head and they bickered a little longer. When it settled, Glasses looked at him, something decided.

"Want to see something cool?" He went to his wardrobe and rummaged with the certainty of someone who knew exactly where the thing was, and produced a small orange box - bright, palm-sized, made with obvious care. He set it down between them.

"Accept the prompt." As if on cue, Kara received a prompt and he accepted. His view changed. He was flying - present in the flight, the air moving against him as a physical fact, clouds below and open sky above. He looked to the side and saw the tips of white wings, wide and still, riding the current. A bird came in from the left and he banked away before he had thought to, the movement already done by the time he noticed it. Then the sky was gone. Deep water.

The kind of depth where light became scarce, where the scale of things became difficult to comprehend. He was moving slowly down the face of a cliff that descended further than visibility allowed him to estimate. It was eerily silent. He felt the whale before he saw it - a displacement of water, a presence that arrived in the body before the eyes had processed it. Then it came into view. The sperm whale moved through the dark slow and certain. Suddenly, it changed direction. A subtle correction.

Then he understood why. The squid hit the whale's face before Kara had processed that the whale had been tracking it. One moment open water, the next a tangle of limbs the thickness of tree trunks wrapped around a head the size of a building. The whale rolled. The squid held. The whale rolled again, harder, and Kara felt the water move with it - a pressure wave, physical even through whatever the drone was using for sensors. Kara wasn't sure who was trying to eat whom.

After a tense few minutes of what looked like a life and death struggle, the whale came out on top, slowly ripping the squid apart. Not that it was unharmed. There were several cuts all along its face that were bleeding. When it was over, the whale moved away. The water settled. Kara noticed he had been holding his breath. They were back in the room. Kara let out a long breath.

"That was incredible," he said, and he really meant it. Glasses had the look of someone who had been holding onto this, waiting for the right person to show it to.

"My family builds drones. This is what I call the black box - it stores whatever the drones capture. That footage was six months ago, four kilometres down." He turned the box over in his hands.

"There's a lot more in here. You'll see." They talked for another hour - the drones, what else the box held, whether the squid had ever had a real chance or whether the outcome had been determined from the moment the whale turned. Neither of them was in a hurry to stop. At some point Kara realised that he had not thought about his brother, or the committee, or Mink, or the results, or any of it, for the last hour.

He had simply been present in the conversation, which was not something he had a great deal of practice at outside his family. He had found a friend. A real one, the kind you trusted with the actual version of things rather than the version you prepared for people. He had not had one of those outside his family before, and he had stopped trying so gradually he had not noticed when the stopping happened. Like a door left unopened for so long you forgot it was there.

He slept well that night and had some pleasant dreams after a long long time.