Chương 10: Skill Choice

My breath was coming shallow. I noticed it before I noticed anything else, the quick rise and fall of my chest, the way my fingertips had gone cold and my pulse was hammering against the inside of my throat... I'd felt this before, usually right before sparring with Bellos, but never the full set at once and never with a real predator looking at me from across a clearing.

"Howl. Howl, move." That was Eydric. He'd taken three steps back already, and his hand was on Rael's elbow, pulling. Rael was moving too, not wanting to provoke the thing that's looking at us, I supposed.

"Howl, come on." I didn't move. My feet were still planted exactly where they had been when Rael pointed, and I wasn't sure why. Part of me was telling me to fall back with the others, and the rest of me wasn't. I opened my mouth, and what came out was, "But the rewards..." I trailed off, because the sentence wouldn't make sense to them. We couldn't outrun these things anyway, and they were already coming at us, so…

"Howl, are you even—" Eydric's voice cut off just as the creature moved. It wasn't a lunge so much as a shift, the creature lifting its head off the corpse and turning the angle of its shoulders toward us in a way that made the sixty paces between us feel a great deal shorter. Its mouth was still bloodied, and its stiff tail flicked once behind it. I could hear others now, calling to each other from different points in the trees, the same shape of sound coming back from places it shouldn't have been coming from.

They were closing in by voice alone. I made myself say the thing I needed to say, in the voice I'd been trained to use when I needed to sound like I was thinking clearly.

"Rael. The side objectives. Hunting these things, does that count?"

"What?"

"The side activities the proctor mentioned. Were beasts on that list?" He answered me without taking his eyes off the creature.

"Marked beasts, yes. These would be worth a point each at minimum, possibly more if the pack is large enough to count as a single objective." Seven, the System had said. That was enough math for me.

"Then… we need points," I said.

"Right?" They were just looking at me without a word, so I moved. The first thing I did was cast fire. Predators built around flesh and motion were built around being afraid of fire so I covered the thirty paces between me and the beast in three steps, channelling as I ran, and by the time my front foot planted at the edge of the clearing the air around my right hand was already churning with heat.

I let it go in a single full breath, and the flame came out of my palm in a wide rolling sheet that caught the creature across the shoulders and down its spine, and it went up immediately, hide blackening from neck to tail with a sound I'd never heard a living thing make. It bolted into the trees on fire, and that broke the pack. The trees came alive. They came at me from three directions at once, low and quick over the uneven ground, and I'd known they were fast but knowing and seeing weren't the same thing.

The first one cleared a fallen log to my right with its claws already extended. I caught it in the air with a tight focused lance that went through its skull behind the eye, and the body collapsed midflight and came down across the log it had been clearing. The next one went for me from behind. I felt it before I saw it, dropped flat under the leap, and put a compressed pulse of force up into its underbelly that lifted it clean off the ground and slammed it into a tree with a sound that ended in a long crack.

I was on my feet before it stopped twitching. That made it two. After that, I stopped counting and just worked. I stayed in the centre of the clearing because the centre was the only place I could see every direction, and I let them come to me one and two at a time the way they wanted to. They were good at picking their angles. They'd hunted things larger than me for their entire lives, and on any other day I'd have wanted to stop and admire the precision of it. Today I matched them.

Fire when I wanted them to burn, wind cutters when I wanted them opened from across the clearing, and the one that came in too close to cast at I broke with a reinforced fist instead. The air filled with smoke and the smell of seared hide, and beneath that the sounds a body makes when it stops trying to get up. Two of them broke and ran when they understood what was happening to the rest. I caught the first with a wind cutter through the back legs and the body skidded to a halt against a root.

The second almost made the treeline, and I put a fire lance through it from across the clearing. The last one was waiting. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. It was smaller than the others, and it had been hanging back behind a stand of young trees, watching the rest of its pack die, working something out about me the others hadn't bothered with. When it came at me it came low and from an angle I hadn't given it, and for a beat I thought it might actually reach me.

I pivoted. The claw that should have opened my thigh raked across the front of my tunic instead, and I felt the badge pinned over my heart shift in a way that nearly stopped my breath. The iron held. I came down on the creature's back with all the reinforcement I had left in my arm and broke its spine with a single closed fist. The clearing went quiet after that.

I could hear my own breathing, ragged and uneven, and the sound of fire still working through the body of the one I'd burned, somewhere in the trees where it had finally collapsed. The rest of the pack, the ones who'd never tried me, were gone. [Quest Complete: 7/7] I looked down at the front of my tunic where four parallel grooves had been opened in the fabric just over the badge.

"That was… that was close…" I turned my head toward where I'd left Eydric and Rael. They hadn't moved. Both of them were standing exactly where I'd last seen them, Eydric's hand still loosely on Rael's elbow from when he'd been pulling him back, both of them staring at me with their eyes very, very wide. They seemed worried, so I gave them a thumbs up, and Rael suddenly burst out laughing then started walking toward me, picking his way around the bodies in the grass and shaking his head the whole time.

"No," he said between breaths.

"No, no. Everything they say about the Axiom. Every word. I take it back. I take all of it back, I'm never doubting an Aridis again as long as I live." I wasn't sure I'd done anything that needed doubting in the first place, but I let him have it. He stopped a couple of paces away from me, hands on his hips, still grinning and slightly out of breath from the laugh.

"You are unhinged, Howl Aridis. Properly unhinged. Do you understand that? You walked into a pack of forest predators on the first minute of the practical exam and took them apart with your hands and a few flickers of fire as if you were finishing a chore. I don't know whether to congratulate you or have you committed." Eydric had come up behind him by then, slower and quieter, his face still doing the unreadable thing I hadn't worked out yet. He stopped beside Rael, his eyes moving from me to the bodies and back.

"That was..." He paused, and his throat moved once.

"That was impressive, Howl." Hey, I'd never been told I was impressive by anyone my own age before. The feeling was… very specific and very pleasant, and some part of me wanted to stand inside it for a while.

"Thank you," I said.

"You guys were also..." This was awkward.

"I mean..."

"Howl." Rael was still grinning.

"Don't. Please. We just watched." I closed my mouth.

"In fact," he went on, "thank you for not needing us on that. I wasn't ready. If you'd waited for me to get my feet under me we'd all three be limping by now." He glanced sideways.

"And Eydric wasn't ready either, don't let the face fool you." Eydric sighed.

"What? It's true. You were as frozen as I was."" Stop it." Rael laughed, looking back at me.

"And just so we're clear, we will be catching up. We're not planning to ride your coattails for fourteen hours, Howl Aridis. We just needed a minute to organize our thoughts. Give us until the next clearing and we'll be useful."

"Oh, right. Sure." Suddenly, a Ding! Then a pale gold text bloomed across my vision. [Quest Reward Granted] [+1 Strength] [+2 Mana Pool] The numbers landed, and I felt them. A jolt went through me from my core outward, and I felt my channels widen along with it. Two more units. From 398 to 400. Strength came a beat after, a brighter pulse, sharper and more physical. My arms felt longer somehow, and my fists felt heavier. From 80 to 81. I let myself enjoy it for a single breath. Then the System continued.

[Skill Reward: Choose One] [Focus - Rank B] [Flight - Rank E] [Night Vision - Rank E] Oh, three of them, this time. The System had never offered me so many before. I let myself look at them properly. There were maybe a hundred adventurer-hero scenes in Nana's old books that would have ended very differently if the protagonist had been able to fly, and I'd wanted to fly for a long time, as it could consume quite a lot of mana. [Night Vision] was less exciting in the abstract but probably more useful in practice.

The exam ran until midnight. I'd be moving through forest at night for at least six of the fourteen hours we had, and being able to see in the dark was the kind of thing my teammates would thank me for later. Both of them were Rank E, though. [Focus] was Rank B. The math was the math. A Rank B skill sat several entire tiers above a Rank E skill in real power and depth, by the rough understanding I had of how the System scaled things. Flight at Rank E would probably let me hop or glide for a few seconds at a time.

[Night Vision] at Rank E would probably let me see ten paces in the dark instead of two. Both useful, but neither remotely competitive with a Rank B skill. So I picked [Focus] then I called up something I liked to call 'status'. It bloomed in front of me in pale gold.

[Status] Name: Howl Aridis Tier 1, Level 22 [Authority] The Dreaming Eyes [Attributes] Strength: 81 Agility: 84 Mana Pool: 400 [Active Skills: 3/7] Mana Manipulation: Level 19 (73%) Fighting Sense: Level 16 (28%) Focus: Level 1 (0%) [Passive Skills: 1/7] Mana Sense: Level 22 (47%) There it was, [Focus] was sitting at the bottom in fresh letters with its single zero proficiency, brand new and waiting to be used.

"Howl. Hello. Anyone home?" Rael's hand passed in front of my face, and I came back to the clearing to find him watching me with one eyebrow up and a slightly amused look.

"You've been staring at nothing for about a minute. I don't know what you're seeing in there and I don't need to, but we should move before whatever's left of that pack remembers how to work as a group. Eydric's already picked a direction." I dismissed the system with a flick of attention, promising myself to try it out later.