Chương 64: [B2] Interlude 1: Left Unsaid

The gallery had watched 1, 024 teams become 256, and had opinions about all of it, but nothing in the season so far had filled the feed quite like class selection week. SUTRA_OX: every season this is my favorite stretch. no fights, just several hundred children opening envelopes that tell them what the system thinks they are LESSER_GOD_THORNE: and several hundred sponsors discovering what they actually bought [MOD CLONE #61]: for the record, class distribution this season is tracking within historical norms.

63% of surviving contestants selected Common-grade, 24% Uncommon, 11% Rare WINGED_KING: you left off the end of the list [MOD CLONE #61]: the end of the list is why I stopped where I did The gallery had already watched the Quetzalcoatl die twice; once live, and once in the highlight compilation that had run continuously for a full day afterward, and had largely finished arguing about whether a classless kill at that level gap was brilliance or luck.

The selections that followed reopened the argument from a different direction. VTHRA_FOLDED: rift huntress: INT-scaling, spatial shot at level one.

she looked at a class that will never once reward her for being strong and she took it without blinking VTHRA_FOLDED: nineteen years they told her what her talents were for. she just told them back PRIDE_AND_PREJUDICE: the golem's advice was sound, for what it's worth. the shadow one is glass now. permanently DARKTURNE: he knows. he heard the warning, understood the cost, and chose the class anyway. i have sponsored contestants for 211 seasons and most of them chose power. very few chose shape.

9TH_MOON: the foxs grandmother would have needed a full day to stop weeping SUTRA_OX: are we not gonna talk about the fourth one BAD_LUCK_CHARM: tf you want us to say??

The fourth one was the reason the feed had not slowed in three days. [MOD CLONE #61]: for the record: Trait Devourer, Legendary+ grade. fourth Legendary-tier selection logged this season out of a starting field of 4, 096. the other three belong to contestants in teams ranked 22nd, 61st, and 140th LESSER_GOD_THORNE: devour. trait memory. cohesion. Damn WINGED_KING: a laboratory: spends twenty years trying to build a creature that takes what other creatures are. fails WINGED_KING: the creature: walks into a jungle.

the system hands him the blueprint for free SUTRA_OX: not for free. for demonstrated method. he has been devouring things the polite way since the tutorial lolol THE_ARCHIVIST: note what he did with it afterward: THE_ARCHIVIST: a friendly team sat in his common room, and he showed them everything except the one thing that mattered. a lie was told. he treats information the way I treat failed attempts: as the only currency that appreciates. PRIDE_AND_PREJUDICE: you sound proud lol THE_ARCHIVIST: I sound correct.

Pride is half of what you do. The Archivist logged the exchange, the class, the small strange fact that its contestant's race entry had shed its parenthetical, and noticed that the one member of the gallery who commented on every exchange it considered 'interesting' had commented on none of this. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

Two weeks later, Enigma stood before 256 teams on the black reflective floor, and prepared to lie to exactly none of them. It had rules about that. Lying was crude, lying was detectable, and lying was, above all else, unnecessary, because 500 past seasons had taught it that a precisely worded truth left gaps that a lie could never dream of. The art was not in what was said, it was in what was not said.

"Congratulations," Enigma said, mouths curving in sequence,"to the 256 teams still worth addressing. World 3 will be different from world 2, in that it will not, primarily, be trying to kill you." It let the murmur build and crest before smiling with a few mouths.

"It will, however, be trying something considerably more interesting. You will each wake inside a borrowed life; a native of the world, with their face, name, history, and every single one of their problems. A glamour will hold your own nature hidden from everyone." A pause, measured to the half second.

"Everyone except for three certain people, who will see through you immediately. Whether that is a mercy or an inconvenience will depend heavily on your teammates." The objective panel unfolded across every boundary at once.

World 3: The Masquerade of Borrowed Lives Goal 1: Locate all members of your team Goal 2: Complete your host's personal objective Goal 3: Complete a Gold-rank Adventurer's Guild request as a full team Leg Status: Complete upon fulfillment of all three goals Enigma watched them read it, and catalogued, with the satisfaction of a craftsman reviewing a finished joint, everything the panel said. It gave three goals; clean, numbered, and verifiable.

It also catalogued, with considerably more satisfaction, everything the panel did not say. It did not say that a Gold-rank request was the only thing that the system would accept.

It did not say that the race's governing authority—themself—had, in its boundless procedural thoroughness, sanctioned certain alternate satisfactions of the requirement, buried in places no team would think to look, ranked and described in ways no team would trust, waiting for the one contestant in a season who read a printed number and asked whether it was lying. Alternate routes existed; as they had in every world in every season.

Across the 501 seasons, they had been found a handful of times, and each finding remained among Enigma's most treasured recordings. Nobody had ever asked whether there was another way. Therefore, they had never been obliged to answer.

"Questions?" it asked. A hand went up from the team slot 091, and a few of Enigma's eyes turned in the contestant's direction.

"What happens if our host dies?" Enigma grinned with all of its mouths.

"I don't die." Then they vanished.

Once the countdown hit zero, 256 teams dissolved into white. Enigma reappeared for a moment on the empty floor, reviewing the season's ledger the way it always did between legs; retention curves, sponsor engagement, the four Legendary-grade selections and where each was likely to bend the field. Professional interest, professionally held. One entry it reviewed twice, and logged nothing about either time.

A creature built to take what other creatures are, wearing a race the system no longer footnoted, walking into a world of borrowed faces with a class nobody but his teammates knew he had. Every season had a favorite. Enigma had watched 501 of them rise and mostly fall, and it knew better than to have one this early, and it had rules about that too. It was, it reflected, breaking remarkably few rules for how thoroughly it was enjoying itself.

"Run the leg," it said to the empty floor, and went to watch someone wake up in a carriage.