[Mission: Kill your killer. Claim what is yours.]
[Reward: EXP +50 | Soul Essence +10]
Nathan read it, and something in his chest came off its chain.
’Nolan.’
The name had a shape now, the flat voice, the bored certainty, the small lazy motion of a man reaching across a doorway. That thing had a name, and the system had just handed it to him like a gift.
He was moving before he decided to. Two full strides toward the treeline with his hands already closing into fists, and every part of him screaming to find that man tonight, to walk into whatever house he slept in and open him from throat to belt.
Then he stopped.
He stood there breathing hard in the dark, and made himself think.
’And then what.’
’You walk up to him with what. Your hands?’
He forced his aching fingers open and his nails were split from digging and his palms were shredded and the shaking wouldn’t stop.
’He went through you in one move. He didn’t even look at you when he did it. He was already thinking about where to dump the bodies.’
’A man like that isn’t going to be easy to kill.’
Nathan thought as he turned his head and looked back at the flat patch of packed earth under the wide old tree.
’But he’s going to die anyway.’
’I don’t care what it takes.’
The grief came up under the anger the way it kept doing, without warning, from underneath. Images of his mother flashed behind his eyes and he squeezed his eyes shut.
’If I’d been faster.’
’If I’d been stronger. If I’d been anything at all, she’d have gone out the back and been screaming down the lane before he crossed the room.’
’She’d be alive.’
He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until colors came.
’Stop it.’
’That doesn’t fix anything, that doesn’t get him.’
He dragged in a long breath and let it out slow.
’So how do I get him?’
A thought suddenly came to him and he lifted his head.
’The skills.’
He summoned the system screen again, and that pale green light cast a faint glow on his face in the darkness of the forest. T
Nathan looked at the two entities properly for the first time.
There were tools
[Blade of Death]
[Grade: Legendary]
[Active]
[Soul Mark]
[Grade: —]
[Passive]
Nathan’s eyes went past the first word, caught, and came back to it.
’Legendary.’
He read it again, because his brain refused to accept it on the first pass.
Then he sat there in the dark with a dead woman buried six feet away and slowly, carefully, started to put it together.
This wasn’t new, although Nathan had been a low district boy all his life. He had never seen or owned a status screen, unlike the high district kids with holographic screens for everything.
Phones, televisions and so on.
Every child in the empire grew up soaked in this the way they grew up knowing the price of bread, because in a nation built on marked people, the ladder was gossip and gossip was everywhere.
Everyone knew the grades.
Norma, Rare, Epic, Unique, Legendary, Mythic, Divine and Outer.
Normal was the merchant’s daughter with her Hearthward class and her whole family screaming with joy, and they were right to scream, because a Normal grade class still meant food and standing and a life.
Most of the marked in the empire lived and died Normal and counted themselves lucky.
Rare was a noble house’s good year.
Epic had made the entire noble side of that hall murmur this morning. Grown men with crowns on their heads had leaned forward for it and thenLegendary.
Legendary was Keres.
Nathan could still hear it, the whole temple coming off its feet, nobles standing, commoners roaring, a prince trembling in the light with a war god’s name written across his chest.
A Legendary class was a thing an empire built a generation around. It was the kind of thing that got carved into a wall so people could look at it in two hundred years.
Above that there was Mythic, which he had heard of the way you hear about weather in another country.
And above Mythic there were two more words that he was fairly sure nobody living had any business saying out loud.
Nathan looked back at the word sitting quietly on his own screen.
’Legendary.’
The same as the prince.
And here it was, in pale green, in a forest, on a dead boy nobody was going to come looking for.
And Nathan heard the old man’s voice again, tired and kind and absolutely certain.
A Death Knight is a soldier of the dead, a class that wasn’t made for the living.
You’d die, the first time you tried to use what you were given.
You would have been better off if the light had stayed dark.
Morran had said it with certainty. He hadn’t been cruel about it, it was almost like he was sure and also pitied Nathan.
Forty years on that altar, and he had looked at Nathan’s class and written the whole thing off in the space of a breath, and every noble in that hall had agreed with him, and so had every commoner, and so, standing there with blood not yet on his face, had Nathan.
’You were wrong.’
Nathan looked at the word on his screen until his eyes ached.
’You stood there and told me I got handed nothing. That I’d have been better off if no god had looked at me at all.’
He also had a second title if he could assume what it was called, underneath it that the system wouldn’t even rank.
’Maybe it’s better than his.’
The thought arrived so quietly, so matter of fact, that it took him a second to register how large it was.
He sat with that.
Then, because he was not a fool, he made himself sit with the rest of it too, because the old man had said two things and only one of them had turned out to be nonsense.
Nathan glanced down at the stiff black crust on his tunic. At the smooth cool seam across his throat where a professional had opened him and left him for the beasts.
’And what exactly do you think happened to me tonight, old man.’
He couldn’t tell whether that was an answer or just a worse question.
Then his eyes went to the second entry.
The one that didn’t say Legendary.
The one that didn’t say anything.
[Soul Mark]
[Grade: —]
[This ability is not a technique. It cannot be measured against technique.]
Nathan read that sentence four times.
’What is that supposed to mean.’
It didn’t elaborate. It sat there being unhelpful in pale green, and the more he looked at it the less he liked it.
A blank space should have meant zero.
Nothing worth writing down, that was what a blank meant on any form he’d ever seen in his life.
But the system had just measured the other one without any trouble at all. It had looked at Blade of Death, a technique off a god, the same tier that made an empire cheer, and it had written Legendary in the field without hesitating.
Then it had looked at this one and declined.
’You’re not lower than Legendary,’ Nathan thought. ’You’re not on the ladder at all.’
Except that was not the worst of it.
That blank space had reached into the dark after his heart stopped and dragged him back out of it.
He touched the seam on his throat again.
’You closed this.’
’A man cut my throat open and left me in a sack in the woods, and you put me back together and stood me up.’
’And the thing that measured a god’s technique in half a second took one look at you and said the question doesn’t apply.’
Something cold crawled up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the night air.
And then he noticed the other thing.
It had been sitting in front of him the whole time and he’d walked straight past it, because he’d been too busy being dead.
Two.
He had two.
Nathan sat back on his heels in the leaves.
Every marked person in the empire knew how it worked. A Class gave you one skill per Realm. One. That single skill grew with you, nine stages across the nine stars of your Realm, and when you finally broke through to the next Realm the skill evolved with you into something greater. That was the whole climb. That was what all those years of noble tutors were for, squeezing every drop out of the one thing your god had given you.
One skill. Everybody. Prince and pauper.
Keres, standing in the light this morning with a Legendary Legacy off the God of War himself, had walked out of that temple with exactly one skill.
Nathan had two.
He turned it over and could not find a single explanation that made sense. There was no quest he’d completed. No item. No second god had looked at him. He’d stood in a dead light, been handed a cursed class, gone home, and had his throat cut.
’That’s not supposed to be possible.’
’The rules aren’t like that.’
He looked at the second entry again, the one with no grade and no number and no explanation, the one that had cheerfully informed him it could not be measured.
’Unless it’s you.’
’You’re not one of my skills at all, are you.’
The system did not respond.
Nathan let out a breath and rubbed his face.
’Something that can pull a man back out of death,’ he thought. ’I suppose that thing doesn’t have to follow the rules about how many skills I get.’
He almost laughed, it came out wrong and he stopped.
He made himself lay it out cold, the way he used to count coins at the end of a bad week.
Blade of Death, whatever he held became a weapon and Death does not care what shape it takes.
A stick would fell a colossal beast, he had no sword and no money and no chance of ever holding a real blade, and it turned out none of that mattered, because the forest floor was covered in sticks.
That was good.
That was, in fact, extremely good.
’And the rest of it?’
He pulled up the last of the screen.
[Nathan Avenworth]
[Realm: Apprentice — 1 Star]
STR: 2 | AGI: 2.5
VIT: 3 | INT: 4
END: 3 | WIS: 3
[HP: 100 / 100]
[EXP: 0 / 100]
[Soul Essence: 0]
Nathan stared at the numbers.
Then, quietly, he said, "That’s it?"
He didn’t know much, but he knew enough to know that was nothing.
Those were the numbers of a sixteen year old who did his mother’s hauling and ate half of what he should. They were the numbers of a boy.
There wasn’t a single figure on that screen that would have impressed anybody in that temple hall.
One Star of the Apprentice Realm. The first rung of the first ladder, the rung everyone started on, and most people climbed off within a year.
And somewhere out there was a man who had walked into a house, killed two people, and walked back out without his breathing changing.
’Warrior Realm,’ Nathan thought. ’Has to be. Maybe more.’
An assassin the crown trusted with a quiet murder was not a one star apprentice. He’d have stars behind him. Years. Real training, real skills, a proper weapon, and the ugly practiced calm of a man who’d done it enough times to be bored.
Nathan had a Legendary skill he had never once swung, an unmeasurable thing that didn’t follow the rules, a stick he hadn’t picked up yet, and a Strength of two.
’This is going to take a while.’
He got to his feet anyway.
’Fine. Then it takes a while.’
The roar came from behind him.
It rolled up out of the dark on his left, low and grinding, close enough that he felt it in the packed earth under his boots.
Nathan went absolutely still.
’The blood.’
It had soaked his tunic through and dried in his hair and under his nails, hours of it, his own and hers, and he had been sitting out here in the open the whole time, in the middle of a wilderness, radiating the single loudest thing in a forest.
’How long has that been following me?’
The bushes across the clearing moved.
Two points of light opened in the black underneath them. Not reflections. They glowed, a hard pale green not far off the color of his own screen, and they were high.
Cold sweat broke across Nathan’s face.
The thing came out of the dark one shoulder at a time.
It was long, low, and built wrong, all lean muscle under a coat that moved when the air didn’t. Wind curled off its flanks in thin visible ribbons, stirring the leaf litter in a slow circle around its paws, and when it lowered its head the whole clearing seemed to lean toward it.
Its lips peeled back off teeth the length of his fingers.
And a small green tag bloomed in the air beside it, helpful as ever.
[Wind Wolf]
[Apprentice Realm]