Chương 8: New skills

With the right skills, even someone at a lower tier can defeat those at a higher tier - those who achieve skill mastery seem to become much more powerful than those with higher attributes but no mastered skill. We have therefore decided that having at least one mastered skill along with being Tier 10 is a necessary condition for a grade-up. However, it is not sufficient on its own.

Each planet produces a unique Essence, and without absorbing the Essence required, no amount of training or skill mastery can push past the current grade ceiling. Both conditions must be met - master a skill before or by Tier 10, and absorb the relevant Essence - for a grade-up to occur.

- From the memoirs of Zen Extra, Fourth Principal of the Progenitor's Faction When Kara woke up, he felt the clarity that comes from sleep so deep it has no edges - the kind you surface from slowly, the world reassembling itself around you at a pace you can follow. He was in the treehouse.

A bed had been arranged from the wood of the tree itself, smooth and dark with age, and beneath him was something that felt like a mattress and looked like nothing at all - invisible, like everything else on this island that he had learned to stop being surprised by. He appeared to be floating a few inches above the wood. He had slept in stranger circumstances recently. Bodo was on his left. Pranky was on his right.

Tremble was at the foot of the bed, which he had not expected, looking at him with an expression he had not seen on her before - something that sat in the neighbourhood of approval if he was reading it correctly. He had prepared a comprehensive list of things to say to Pranky the moment he got out. Expletives, mostly, arranged in order of escalating creativity.

Looking at all of them now, after however long he had been in there, with the dungeon still present in him the way something significant and recent was present, he found that the list had lost most of its urgency.

"Congratulations. Fun little adventure, wasn't it?" A few months ago that would have made his blood boil. Now it landed somewhere warmer than that, which he suspected said something about what the dungeon had done to him.

"What was the point of it though? My attributes are the same. I don't see any rewards either." Pranky chuckled. Then Kite's voice arrived in his head - bright, expectant, coming from somewhere outside the treehouse where Kite was apparently watching through a wall: "Look at your interface, youngling." Kara opened his interface. Attributes unchanged, as expected. He moved to the skills page without much anticipation. His jaw dropped. The first skill he recognised immediately.

Water Resistance (Common, Rookie) - Passive. Provides minor resistance against negative water-related effects. He had picked this up in the Indian Ocean, during the weeks before the storm. It was what let him breathe longer underwater, dive deeper, hold his position in currents that should have moved him. Common, yes - most people who spent serious time in water developed something like it eventually.

But it was his, and it had kept him at the surface during the storm when the surface was the only thing that mattered. The next one he did not recognise. Safe Haven (Uncommon, Rookie) - Active. When in a tense situation, the user can think of a safe haven, which helps them calm down instantly. He looked at Bodo. Bodo's eyes curved in the way they did when he was pleased about something and trying not to make too much of it.

Kara had no idea when this skill had formalised itself - somewhere in the dungeon, probably, in one of the moments before a blade jump when he had reached for the slow rhythm and found it waiting. Uncommon was respectable for someone his age. Most adults had at least one uncommon skill. Most people his age did not. He was already feeling considerably better about the whole experience. Then he saw the third skill. Poison Resistance (Rare, Amateur) - Passive.

Provides average resistance to most poison-related effects. Rare. He stared at it for a moment. Both his parents had a rare skill each, and it was a genuine point of pride in their household - the kind of thing mentioned with careful casualness at social gatherings by people who wanted it known without appearing to want it known. And it had already ranked up to Amateur, which typically took years of sustained use.

He thought about the number of times he had dragged himself to a lake with something dissolving his boot or shutting down his arm, and felt that the ranking was, if anything, conservative. He kept reading. And stopped. Sixth Sense (Epic, Amateur) - Passive. Allows the user to sense things which cannot normally be detected through the five senses. Provides a general direction and vague sense of what it is. The word epic sat in front of him and he read it three times to confirm it was still there each time.

An epic skill. People with epic skills did not have ordinary lives - that was the blunt reality of it, stated plainly in every career guidance document he had ever been handed. Universities competed for students with epic skills the way powerful organisations competed for the students themselves once they graduated. Incentives extended to families. Doors opened that had not previously existed.

His brother had gotten his epic skill only a few months before Kara was pulled here, and the effect had been immediate and significant. An invitation to stay at a University city of his brother's choice, with him attending the University itself, a change in the quality of attention directed at their family, the sports suit that Kara had been able to get with less argument than he had expected. His brother had always been a prodigy.

Three years older, already at Tier 5 when Kara left, with the talent that expressed itself through action rather than announcement. He had been adopted into the family when Kara was four, and Kara had grown up with him simply as his brother - the person who sat with him on the harbour wall without needing to explain why, who communicated what mattered through presence rather than words, who had asked, as the last thing before leaving for university, that Kara start training properly. Not as a command.

As a request, from someone who understood what was coming and wanted his brother ready for it. Kara had gotten an epic skill. He groaned quietly at the thought of what that would mean for the attention directed at his family, which had already been more than any of them had asked for. Then he thought about his parents hearing about it, and the groan became something more complicated - pride and guilt and the ache of something big happening to you with no one you would normally tell within reach.

He would have stayed with that feeling longer, but there was one more skill on the list. He did not look at it immediately. He was aware that he was not looking at it, and that this was a choice, and that the choice was motivated by something like fear - the fear of waking up from something too good to be true. He felt Bodo's trunk settle around him, warm and certain, with the timing that Bodo always had for these moments. He looked. Fluid State (Unique, Amateur) - Active/Passive.

The user can adapt to fit their surroundings. Passive: the user mentally adjusts to any sudden change in environment without disorientation. Active: after spending some time in an environment, the user can physically adapt to it, to a small extent. Kara's knees gave out. Bodo's trunk kept him upright. He read it again. Then again. The word sat there, steady and unchanged, each time he looked. Unique. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The last unique skill recorded anywhere in the solar system had appeared twenty years ago, created by a C-grade Bear-man on Saturn. For humans on Earth, the gap was over a century. Unique skills had been common in the early days of the system - the early centuries, when millions of people were developing abilities for the first time and the space of possible skills was still largely unmapped. Over time, that space had filled. Skills that resembled existing ones were categorised alongside them.

The edges of what was possible had been charted. Unique had become, for all practical purposes, the category of things that should not exist. He understood, in the abstract, how it had happened. Skills were linked to traits - that was the mechanism, the reason higher-rarity skills were more valuable not because they were more powerful but because they aligned more precisely with the trait that had produced them.

A common skill was hard to master because millions of people shared it and the ceiling was set by the best of them. A unique skill had no ceiling because it had no peers. It was, by definition, entirely his. The active component was what made him quiet for a moment. He had spent years managing his trait - slowing it, minimising it, keeping the changes gradual enough not to be noticed. The Fluid State skill meant he could now do consciously what had previously happened to him. He could control the pace.

He could choose. He would no longer have to wait and manage the aftermath; he could decide when and how much, and the skill would handle the mechanism. He would need to be careful. He understood that. But careful was different from hidden, and hidden was all he had ever had before.

"So," Pranky said, from somewhere that sounded like it was trying not to sound too pleased with itself.

"Not worth it, eh?" Kara looked at him. He had the speech ready - the list, the expletives, the accumulated indignation of however many months in a dungeon that a Level 1 had absolutely no business being. He had Bodo to thank, and Kite, and Tremble, whose single nod of apparent satisfaction he had already decided to count as a significant personal milestone.

He had things he wanted to say to all of them, and a reasonable amount of time in the dungeon had taught him that the things worth saying were not always the things you had prepared. He looked at Pranky and dipped his head - a small, sincere bow, the kind that did not require elaboration. Pranky, for once, did not provide any. He simply smiled. The genuine one.

"So does that mean I get to go home now?" For the next two years, Kara would mentally revisit that question on a daily basis and arrive at the same conclusion each time, which was that he should absolutely not have asked it. Pranky's face lit up like a man who had been waiting for exactly this. Three years.

Bodo was not a creature who measured time precisely - time had always been more texture than quantity, the feeling of things rather than the count of them - but he knew that three years had passed, and he knew that three years had been, by a significant margin, the most entertaining stretch of time he had experienced in longer than he cared to calculate. The calf had grown. It was the growth that came from being asked a great deal of and answering - earned, unglamorous, real.

He was still not capable of taking down any of the creatures on the island, which Master had set as the original benchmark and had quietly moved when it became clear that the creatures on the island were not creatures that a G-grade human was going to be defeating in the next three years regardless of the quality of his training. The revised benchmark had been one week alone in the forest. The calf had managed three days.

Master had called this insufficient while wearing the expression of someone who had expected two days and was recalibrating. Bodo had decided not to comment on this. The gibbon had not helped. The gibbon had, in Bodo's assessment, developed a personal investment in the calf's difficulties that went beyond any reasonable explanation - alerting Jupine hounds to his position, triggering traps he had already identified and avoided, appearing at critical moments, plainly finding the whole situation extremely funny.

The Jupine hounds had eventually required Bodo's intervention, which had ended the test, which the calf had received with the resigned acceptance of someone who had learned to be philosophical about the gibbon. The calf had other friends, though. He had an easy way with animals that Bodo had not seen in many humans - something in him that communicated calm and interest, and that the animals on the island, even the more difficult ones, had responded to.

Bears, lizards, squirrels, a family of birds that had taken up residence near the treehouse branch. None of them had been permitted to help with the test, but they had seen him off warmly, and the calf had said his goodbyes to each of them with the seriousness the occasion warranted.

Now he stood in front of Bodo, Kite, Tremble, and Master, wearing his sports suit - invisible below the neck without the hood, the effect still apparently novel enough to produce quiet satisfaction in him - and trying to hold himself together with mixed results. He ran to Bodo first, which was the right choice and Bodo appreciated it.

He held on for a long time, saying things into Bodo's side that were partly words and partly not, and Bodo sent back what he could through the trunk - warmth, recognition, the simple fact of having been glad of his company, which was true and which he wanted the calf to have. When it had run its course, Bodo reached into himself for what he had prepared. The armour had taken time.

It was made from his own hide - a small section, regrown since, brown and dense, the material lighter than it had any right to be given its toughness. Bodo had worked it into a full set, fitted for the calf's current dimensions with the understanding that the calf's dimensions were not finished changing. It would hold. When the time came for it to be needed, it would hold in ways that ordinary armour would not.

"Grow stronger, wear. Protect from danger." The calf looked at it for a moment, then folded it with careful hands and tucked it into one of the suit's pockets. He seemed to understand, without being told, that it was not for now. Kite's farewell required a runway. He launched from his branch, climbed until he was a shape against the sky rather than a bird, folded his wings, and came down at a speed fast enough to miss with a blink.

He pulled out of the dive three feet from the ground with his full wingspan deployed - the sound of it arriving a half-second behind the event - and held the pose, perfectly still, fully aware it had landed perfectly and giving the moment its due. Balanced in his beak, presented with considerable ceremony, was an egg. The calf applauded. Kite received this with quiet satisfaction. The performance had landed exactly as intended.

The egg was transferred carefully to a pocket, which Bodo felt was unnecessary given that nothing on Earth was going to crack it, but the gesture was in the right spirit. Tremble was last among the companions. The calf approached her with the careful respect she instilled in any creature by her presence alone - something beyond the fear she had trained out of him. He stood in front of her. She regarded him for a moment, then lowered her head and placed her nose to his forehead, gently, and held it there.

The mark was invisible. The calf did not know he had received it. It would not announce itself until it was needed, and when it was needed, the calf would understand it without explanation. She raised her head. Her eyes stayed on him a moment longer.

"Every being is guilty of all the good they did not do. However, you must be cognizant of the fact that good and bad are not so simple to judge. Something that is good for one person, might be bad for another, and something that is bad in the short term might be good in the long term," she said.

"Remember that." The calf was quiet for a moment. Then he smiled - the considered smile - the one that meant he had heard it and intended to carry it.

"I will. Always." Master gave him a bottle of Mistwater. Small, practical, yet invaluable. The calf looked at it, looked at Master, and thanked him - for the three years - said plainly and without decoration, the way the calf said the things that mattered. Master looked, briefly, as if he had not expected that. Then he nodded once. They set off - the calf on Bodo's back, moving through the forest for the last time, the trees making their usual room without fuss.

The creatures along the route watched them pass, and some of them followed for a while before peeling off. The forest was itself, full of the quiet continuous activity that Bodo had been moving through for longer than most things had existed, and he found that he was paying close attention to it this morning. They arrived at a beach that was not the one the calf had arrived on, and stood, and waited.

"What are we waiting for?" the calf asked, after about half an hour. The answer came from the water before Bodo could provide it. One arm first, chitinous, covered in suckers, followed by another and another until eight of them rose from the depths, and then the head - bulbous, enormous, regarding them with the considered intelligence of something that had been here for a very long time and saw no need to rush. Myra.

One arm moved with a speed that left no room for discussion, and a sucker found the calf before he had finished processing what was happening, and he was gone. Tremble looked at Master.

"Why couldn't he have just gone the normal way?" Master raised his hands with the expression of someone who had considered the normal way and found it insufficient.

"What's the fun in that? He's off with a bang." Tremble's eyes moved to the horizon where the calf had been a moment ago. Then back to Master. Then she turned and walked back toward the forest without further comment. Bodo snorted. Some things, across all the years and all the planets and all the various configurations of the world, simply did not change. He found that he did not mind.