Chương 68: Magic Skill Theory

Earlier that morning, before she'd even pulled on pants, Kelly had scoured the net for anything about 'Skills.' The theories were a mess of contradictions. One faction argued for ancient, undetectable portals or a lone visitor who'd tampered with human history, which would explain why magic in their world showed up in pre-Collapse media and ancient human myths.

Their opponents called them lunatics, claiming it was just convergent evolution between realities—their universe accidentally generating a world that matched our stories. The reigning champion was the Many-Worlds take of quantum mechanics, a snooze fest of people saying that with infinite universes, one where magic worked was bound to pop up. Every theory debunked another. Kelly could have spent an entire loop debating them, but she was a practical learner.

She preferred to figure things out by shooting things and the simple elegance of blowing shit up. She thought about them, both of them, The angel and its god, muttering simple words and the world just… listening. It had to be skills, all evidence pointed towards that conclusion. It was like the word 'Status,' or Titles, but so much more powerful and varied. She, as a member of this universe, had no skills. She had to consciously think or say specific prerequisite words like 'equip' to use her Titles.

At first, she'd assumed they were just using a more advanced form of her Titles. But the angel, and the god wearing him, never once said "Equip." And they'd stacked multiple, simultaneous effects, layering power upon power. Merging their effects—a defensive barrier, a concussive blast, that terrifying sense of absolute perception. Titles couldn't do that. You equipped one, you used it, you moved on. She'd even tried it, muttering "Fortress" under her breath like an idiot. Nothing happened.

It was a different system. A better one. The Status had given her the free, 'lite'-version toolkit while the out-of-town deities had the full, paid-access suite. Title switching held a hard limitation she couldn't overcome; she could cycle them fast enough to give a hummingbird a headache, but she was still only ever getting one title's effect at a time. But with skills? Overlapping? She pictured layering Giantslayer and Death's Foe.

That simple combination would compound with her werewolf boost, upping her speed boost by almost five hundred percent. Her other physical attributes would get a three hundred percent boost. Instead of barely reaching the expert stage, it would instantly make her a 'Tank' at the very peak of the stage, almost an Elite. She could finally return all those How to Fight Good: Conflict Resolution Using Only Kicks books she'd never read.

She'd have to cancel her preorder of the sequel, How to Fight Gooder: An Advanced Guide for People Who Already Fight Good, too. Two. Just two skills, overlapped, could make her a borderline Elite. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

That meant no matter how many Titles Kelly stacked on her résumé, she'd still be playing catch-up with the real deals—the ones that could hold a conversation and probably do your taxes while levitating a latte in the other hand, living on the other side of the glowing holes in the sky. So, if she could use the botanical lab to figure out how a piece of dead wood and a crystal could throw a fireball, or how a basic-ass metal axe with a shiny rock in it could split the ground open…

then maybe she could build something to bridge the gap. She could definitely improve her monomolecular switchblade. But why stop at a better knife?

"You and that lady. Everything's a big secret." Luigi shook his head, then gestured at the sphere.

"At least tell me what this one is for." Kelly looked at the sphere, then at him.

"I'm correcting a design flaw." Luigi stared at her. He opened his mouth, closed it, and then nodded as if he'd decided that asking another question would only dig a deeper hole, a gesture of pure defeat.

"Okay, sure." Kelly pressed her palm against the sphere and felt it connect to the port hidden beneath her skin. The sync took a few seconds, and she let it happen while she ignored the fact that the sphere was slowly beginning to feel like her hand was growing a large pumpkin. She didn't know exactly how it worked, or everything it could do, but she knew how she could use it and that was good enough for now. They walked out of the back room, the wall sealing itself shut behind them, leaving no trace of the vault.

Luigi stayed twitchy the whole time, checking the door, the windows, the ceiling, and then the door again as if the homicidal tax-men might rain from the sky just to ruin his afternoon. He kept insisting Kelly stay a little longer, and he even offered her a glass of real coffee, which was a complete reversal from his earlier hospitality and probably had something to do with the fortune she'd just handed him or the people he was avoiding.

She took one sip because real coffee was rare and she wasn't stupid, and mostly because the upgrade she had in mind only worked if she kept moving. Power-ups didn't happen standing still.

"You're nervous," she said.

"That's not a good look on a man with that many guns." Luigi, paling, said, "You know why I'm nervous." Kelly handed the cup back and stood. Tore herself away from the warm beverage. She left Luigi's shop, walked to the truck, and opened the door. Buster lifted his head from the back seat, his ears twitching inside the mask, and gave one low thump of his tail against the harness.

"I know, buddy," Kelly said.

"I was only gone a minute. You should see the guy's coffee setup." She climbed in, started the drive for the East Grid. Then the street exploded. There was an armoured van in the mist, barely visible in the cloying fog if not for the stuttering lights along its frame. The vehicle looked durable, a blunt-nosed slab of a vehicle with a rear hatch built to ignore anything short of a building. A big "O" that clearly stood for 'Obsidian' had been engraved into the side.

The roof had been peeled open and crushed downward and the upper section of the vehicle was shattered metal wreck, because something impossible had crashed into it. An enormous creature, several meters tall and visibly coming apart, crashed through the front of a decayed tenement. It skidded to a stop, shredded asphalt spraying. It looked like a bear made of warped crystal and exposed muscle, with too many jointed limbs. Its many eyes, each weeping a different colored fluid, fixed on her truck.

Its eyes set on Kelly with a raw, consuming hunger as it raised a claw that sparked with unstable energy, its whole form visibly warping and shuddering as the mist twisted it from the inside out in a violent transformation for all to see. People stumbled and ran. A wet, grating noise came from it. Then words, forced out through a throat not meant for them.

"PAIN. THE AIR. BURNS."