Chương 14: Chapter 13 - Appraisal

The cavern came into focus slowly, Mahkir's fur still giving off enough residual glow to let Enhanced Vision work with something other than absolute dark for the first time since Ant had fallen through the gap. He saw the bones first. Old ones, scattered rather than laid to rest, gone grey-yellow with age and half swallowed by drifts of ash that smelled faintly of dust and something older underneath it, mineral and dry at the back of his throat. More than one set. More than two.

He stopped counting somewhere past four and didn't try again. Beyond the bones sat the rest of it. A blade, corroded green at the hilt, its edge long since gone to pitting and rust. The skeleton of a pack — fabric rotted away, only the metal fastenings left to mark where it had once hung off someone's shoulder. A dented breastplate lying flat against the stone, straps gone, as if whoever had worn it had simply stopped being able to stand and the armour had settled where the body eventually wasn't.

This hadn't happened once. It had been happening for years, maybe decades — people finding this same gap in the same valley wall, chasing the same shelter from the same storm, and none of them walking back out through it. He thought of the clan's three expeditions. Properly provisioned. Experienced. High-level pairs, every one of them, sent out to find whatever Adran had found and never coming back with an answer. Had any of them found this instead? Had there simply been nobody left afterward to report it?

He could have been one of them. The thought arrived plain and unremarkable, sitting next to the bones the way it belonged there — no magic, no weapon worth the name, walked through that gap with nothing at all, and the only reason he wasn't part of this scattered collection of the dead was a creature he hadn't known existed an hour ago choosing to stand between him and it. He took a step toward the nearest scatter of debris.

There might be a use for some of it, and a man with nothing had no business ignoring anything that could change that. Then his attention snapped straight back to Mahkir, because some things mattered more than inventory.

"How did you do that?" Mahkir didn't look at him. He'd settled onto his haunches in the ash, studying one of his own front paws with the specific interest of someone considering a task he found faintly beneath him. I was expecting a bigger challenge. The words landed warm and certain behind Ant's ears the way they had every time before, but the tone underneath them was new — something closer to petulant than regal, the voice of a creature young enough to be disappointed and old enough to say so without raising it.

Ant stared at him.

"That was a Dark Elemental. You understand that shouldn't have been possible. The mana cost alone—" Mahkir's paw twitched toward his own face and stopped halfway, as if he'd decided mid-motion the gesture wasn't worth finishing.

"Was that meant to be difficult?" Ant opened his mouth. Nothing useful came out of it. The screen arrived before he could try again. [User: Anthony Byrren] [Kithren: Mahkir] [User Level: 3] [Evolution Stage: 1] [Kithren Level: 2] He looked at the Kithren line twice. Two. He'd climbed from one to three — two full levels off a single fight, more than should have been possible for a man who'd spent five years contributing nothing at all to his own advancement. Mahkir had climbed from one to two.

A single level, off the same encounter, the same shared pool. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. He turned that over. It tracked, in the loosest sense — he knew enough from years of secondhand study to know that pairs didn't always level in lockstep. Some Kithren outpaced their bonded person by a wide margin. Some ran deliberately slow, gaining a fraction of what their person did no matter how the experience was earned.

Mahkir, it seemed, was the second kind.

"You're a slow leveller," Ant said, mostly to himself. I'm selective. There's a difference. He let that sit and turned back to the screen, where a new section had appeared beneath the Kithren skills — User Skills, sitting apart, laid out differently. [Appraisal — Allows the user to identify the level and skills of a Kithren in view. May also be used on certain items. Effectiveness decreases against subjects of significantly higher level, and may fail entirely against subjects far beyond the user's own.] No mana cost listed under it. He noted that — the Kithren skills had each carried a price, a resource spent, but this one drew on a different well entirely, one that didn't seem to run through the same pool at all. Appraisal. A way to actually see what he was looking at — Kithren levels, Kithren skills, all the things a reader lens had shown every bonded person in the city automatically and had never once shown him.

He looked at Mahkir and focused, the same way Enhanced Vision had answered a moment earlier — attention pointed, not effort spent. Appraisal. The four question marks beside Mahkir's name dissolved at once, the way ice let go of its edges the instant the temperature finally crossed some threshold it had been circling for a while. The screen reorganised itself, gaining structure it hadn't carried a second before. Three tabs where there'd only been a running list.

[User] [Kithren] [Equipment] He opened the first out of habit and found his own numbers sitting there — level, evolution stage, the same categories he'd studied in other people's screens for five years, populated now with figures that belonged to him for the first time in his life. He didn't linger. There'd be time for that. He moved to the Kithren tab instead. The screen held a beat before resolving, the same small delay it had carried every time so far.

Mahkir's name sat clean at the top where four question marks had been. Beneath it, the categories he already knew by heart from other people's numbers — strength, endurance, magic, agility, health, mana — except this time attached to a real creature — small, red, and currently ignoring him in favour of its own front paw. He looked at the numbers. He didn't say anything, not yet.

Five years of careful, exhaustive study had built him a working sense of what a Kithren's attributes were supposed to look like at every level, every stage, every documented variant the clan's records had ever bothered to note. None of it fit what he was looking at. He'd come back to it properly — made himself that promise the way you made promises when a thing was too large to take in standing over a Dark Elemental's ash with your pulse still climbing down. For now he moved to the third tab. [Equipment] Empty.

A clean blank space waiting on equipment that didn't exist yet. He lowered his hand from where it had drifted, without him noticing, to his temple — the old habit of checking for a chip that had never been there, and that felt, for the first time, faintly redundant. He looked around the chamber properly. The bones. The corroded blade, the rotted pack, the dented breastplate, scattered across a floor that had clearly claimed more travellers than just him.

Mahkir, who had just burned a creature out of existence that wasn't supposed to be killable, using a skill that cost three times his available mana, at a level too low for any of it to make sense on paper. A system that had arrived with no chip behind it, updating in ways no chip-based screen ever had, answering to attention rather than hardware.

"What on earth is this system," he said, to no one in particular.

"It makes no sense." He looked at the screen one more time, the clean blue edges of it sitting there as if none of what it had just done was in any way remarkable.

"It's almost like it's alive." Mahkir finally looked at him. The amber in his eyes held a look that might have been amusement, if a creature this young and this old at once could be said to find anything amusing. He didn't answer. Ant let the quiet hold. Around them the ash kept its slow settle across the stone, and somewhere underneath it the dead who hadn't made it this far stayed exactly where they'd fallen. He was alive.

He had no real idea how, beyond the small creature in front of him wearing an expression that suggested the whole encounter had barely registered as effort. He looked down at his own hands — steadier than they had any right to be — then back at the chamber, at everything in it still waiting to be gone through properly now that the immediate threat had burned itself down to ash and quiet. There'd be time for the items. There'd be time for a great many things.

For now he stayed on his knees, in a chamber that had killed everyone who'd come through it before him, with a Kithren that shouldn't exist and a system that felt more alive than built, and let himself breathe. When his pulse had settled into something steadier, he called the screen back and opened the first tab again — his own, the one he'd skimmed past too fast the first time. Right, he thought. Let's actually look at this properly before we leave.