The walk back to his apartment gave William space to turn the evaluation over in his mind, the small guardian trotting quietly at his heel, and by the time he reached his own door, the tangle of relief and worry in his chest hadn’t fully untangled itself.
’Nothing changed on their end. My Talent’s still logged as Common grade. Officially I’m the same nobody I was three days ago.’ He shut the door behind him, dropping onto the narrow bed with a tired breath. ’That should feel like a disaster. Instead it might be the only reason I’m not already sitting in some noble house’s private study being offered a contract I can’t refuse.’
He was grateful for it, genuinely, the anonymity a shield he hadn’t expected to receive. But gratitude sat uneasily alongside a nagging unease he couldn’t quite shake.
’If their scanners can’t see any of this, what else can’t they see? What happens the day something goes wrong and I need someone to actually understand what’s happening to me? What happens if the System itself is doing something even it doesn’t fully explain, and there’s no one in this world with the first idea how to help if it breaks?’
There was no answer waiting for that question, not yet, and dwelling on it further would accomplish nothing except souring an evening that had, against every odd, ended better than he had any right to expect. William pushed the thought aside deliberately, the way he’d learned to over seven years of swallowing worries too large to solve in a single sitting, and turned his attention instead toward something he could actually act on.
’The Taming Realm. I still haven’t looked inside it.’
He closed his eyes, focusing inward the way he had with the skill descriptions two days earlier, and reached for the space the system had described as his own private dimension. For a moment nothing happened, and then the world folded sideways in a manner that had no clean description, his apartment vanishing from around him without any accompanying sense of falling or movement at all.
He opened his eyes to soft, even light, sourceless the way the Tower’s floors always were, though warmer somehow, gentler on the eyes. The space stretched out further than his apartment ever could, a wide expanse of pale grass beneath a sky the color of early dawn, three distinct areas visible at rough intervals across the field, each one presumably corresponding to one of his three available slots.
Only one was occupied. Cerberus stood there already, no longer puppy sized, restored fully to its true single headed form the moment it crossed into the Realm, red eyes finding him immediately across the quiet field.
Home. The impression came warm, certain, without any of the hesitation it had shown outside the Tower. Ours.
"You feel different in here," William said, walking closer, taking in the way the guardian seemed to stand straighter, more settled, than it had anywhere in the outside world. "Stronger, maybe."
[Realm Effect: Tamed entities recover stamina and vitality at accelerated rate while present.]
’That explains it. It’s not stronger, exactly. It’s just fully rested for the first time since I tamed it.’ William reached out and laid a hand against Cerberus’s flank, feeling the steady thrum of contained power beneath the fur, nothing like the desperate exhaustion of the creature he’d bonded in that hollow. "Good. You’ve earned some rest."
He spent a while simply walking the Realm’s boundaries, testing its edges, confirming the two empty slots waiting beside Cerberus’s occupied space, before curiosity finally won out over caution and he decided the field offered exactly what he needed for something else he’d been avoiding since the fight. Testing his own skills, properly, without the desperation of a life or death struggle clouding every attempt.
"I want to try Doppelganger," he said, and Cerberus’s head tilted with obvious interest.
[Doppelganger — Activate?]
William focused, and the sensation that followed was unlike anything he’d felt before, a strange doubling pressure behind his ribs, as though his own body were being asked a question it had never considered answering twice. Light gathered around him, faint and pale, and where a moment ago there had been only William, now there were two, standing several feet apart, both blinking in mirrored confusion at the same instant.
’That’s... incredibly disorienting.’ Both copies thought it at once, and William felt the shared awareness settle into place, two sets of eyes, two bodies moving with what felt like a single stretched attention split unevenly between them. He tried lifting one copy’s arm, and the motion came slower than normal, sluggish, his full strength clearly divided rather than duplicated.
[Doppelganger Active: 2 Bodies]
[Stamina Drain: Ongoing]
[Combined Strength: 65% per body]
He held the split for perhaps thirty seconds before a wave of fatigue crashed through him all at once, forcing both copies to stumble, and he released the skill on instinct, the second body dissolving back into him in a rush that left him gasping on one knee in the grass.
"Sixty five percent each," he muttered, catching his breath. "That’s less than I expected. Splitting into three would leave each copy weaker than I am on my own right now."
Cerberus’s head lowered near him, an impression passing through the bond that felt almost like patient correction. Grows. With training. Was mine once. Yours now, still young.
"Right. It’s a skill I inherited, not one I’ve actually grown into yet." William pushed himself back to his feet, already turning the problem over. "So the split ratio improves with practice."
He tried Hellfire Manipulation next, more cautiously, mindful of the description’s warning about stamina drain. A small flame kindled at his palm at his call, black as pitch, and he watched it consume the air around it hungrily, the sensation of its heat entirely different from the crackling elemental fire he’d occasionally seen other hunters wield. This flame didn’t feel external at all. It felt like it was pulling directly from something inside him, a slow, steady tax on his own vitality with every second it stayed lit.
He extinguished it after only a few moments, wary of pushing further without understanding the cost properly, and sat down heavily in the pale grass, Cerberus settling beside him with the unhurried patience of something that had all the time in the world to wait for him to catch up.
"We’re going to need a lot more training before either of these skills are actually useful in a real fight," William admitted, scratching absently behind the guardian’s ear. "You more than fully healed. Me, barely past knowing which end of my own power to hold."
Cerberus’s only answer was a low, rumbling sound that might have been agreement, or might simply have been contentment, and for a while they sat together in the quiet, dawn colored light of the Realm, William turning over stat sheets and skill percentages in his mind while somewhere far above, in the world he’d stepped out of, Ashvale City continued turning over rumors of a Common grade tamer who apparently wasn’t so common after all.