Tristan fell to his knees and immediately hugged his own chest, a feeling of warmth beginning from his sternum began to spread all across his body. The light from before was still blinding however it was subsiding, or rather settling and solidifying slowly within himself.
The feeling was like no other; it was heavenly.
The warmth was continuously spreading and strengthening his whole body, he could feel his bones harden and his tendons become denser making him most definitely stronger and faster.
And then finally something shifted.
It felt like two hands finally finding the right grip on the same rope, a settling, a click, something sliding into place that he hadn’t even realized was loose until it wasn’t anymore. For weeks now, ever since he’d opened his eyes in this body, there had been a strange, low-grade friction to everything. Memories that surfaced half a second too late. Instincts that reached for a body he didn’t quite have the reflexes for. A persistent, nagging sense of wearing someone else’s skin.
That friction vanished.
’...Oh.’
That was different and nice.
Tristan came back to the cell in pieces. First the cold, seeping up through the stone at his back. Then the ache in his skull, dulled now but still present, a low throb rather than a hammer. And then, immediately and unforgivably, the chains.
’Right. You. Still here.’
The shackles had gone stiff around his ankles while he was out, biting new grooves into skin that hadn’t fully recovered from the old ones. Every shift of his weight sent the chain scraping against stone with a thin, grinding note that set his teeth on edge. He tried to find a position that didn’t press metal directly into bone.
There wasn’t one.
’Of all the things this world could’ve spared me,’ he thought sourly, shifting for the third time in as many seconds, ’comfortable prison furniture was apparently a bridge too far.’
After a few moments, a soft chime pulled him back from the thought entirely, faint at first, then sharpening into something almost bell-like, ringing directly behind his eyes rather than anywhere in the cell itself.
[Runepage: Awakened.]
Tristan went very, very still.
The chains dug in. He barely noticed.
’...No way.’
A shimmering interface unfolding into his vision.
—●[RUNEPAGE]●—
[Name] → Tristan Verneuil
[Core] → Awakened (Low)
[Core Mastery] → Mastery 0%
[Unique Skill] → Reave
[Skill Rank] → Transcendant
[Skill Type] → Dominion
[Skill Description] → "What belongs to another may yet become yours."
—●[STATUS CLOSED]●—
He read the skill description again, slower this time.
What belongs to another may yet become yours.
Vague. Frustratingly, almost insultingly vague, the kind of wording that sounded profound right up until you tried to actually use it for anything.
Tristan barely got two words into chewing on that before his eyes snagged on something else entirely, something he’d skimmed straight past the first time without letting it register. A field he hadn’t even known belonged there. And sitting next to it, one single word.
Transcendent.
’...What?’
Tristan remembered vividly how exactly absurd that word was. When it came to unique skills Tristan could only remember a handful of people who had sovereign skills. When it came to transcendent? nobody currently alive held it. Not confirmed, not even rumored.
It was a rank people theorized about both in terms of core mastery and skill rank.
His hands, he realized distantly, had gone very still against the cold stone.
Tristan turned over and over in his head, chasing at the edges of it, and found himself falling back on the one advantage he has in this godforsaken miserable situation: his knowledge.
[Skill Type] → Dominion.
’...Huh.’
Dominion-type skills weren’t about damage, or defense, or any of the usual combat categories players obsessed over. They were rarer, stranger, and generally agreed to interact with something more fundamental, rules, identity, ownership.
Combine that with the other half of the puzzle, and the picture sharpened considerably.
Seven years of grinding a nearly unbeatable game gave a person a certain instinct for reading between the lines of vague system text. And Tristan had a very strong hunch about where this particular line was pointing.
Essence.
Essence isn’t only the power flowing through all awakened’s but also a fundamental law.
Flamecrest Legacy had never spelled it out directly, the game had a habit of burying its philosophy in flavor text and letting the player connect the dots, but it borrowed the old idea wholesale: that everything carried an essence, some core function that defined what it fundamentally was. A fire’s essence was to burn. A blade’s essence was to cut. A thing wasn’t just matter; it was matter doing something, and that doing was apparently the part that could be pried loose and handed to someone else.
’Reave doesn’t steal objects,’ he thought, testing the shape of the idea. ’It steals what they do.’
Which explained the wording. What belongs to another wasn’t talking about a sword or a coin purse. It meant the burn, the cut, the light, the function stripped from the form, however briefly, and handed over to him instead.
Although this all sounds amazing in theory, in practice Dominian type skills had a knack for being troublesome. Somewhere underneath the borrowed memory of a system he’d never actually lived through, one detail sat there clear and absolute: Reave didn’t work on things he didn’t understand.
It wasn’t so simple as understanding "fire is hot", but to know it down to the root, understand. The kind of grasp that let him hold a concept in his head clean enough to actually pull a piece of it loose.
At his current level, that likely meant only the basics. Light. Sharpness. The kind of essence simple enough that anyone with a working brain could grasp it on sight.
Anything more complicated than that, and the skill would just... fail. Which, fantastic. He’d transmigrated into a fantasy world with magic swords and monster cores, and his cheat power came with a reading comprehension requirement.
’Cool. Very cool. Love that for me.’
Even with all the restrictions, Tristan was extremely confident he could learn fast, and was certain ranking up would allow him to use his skill with more freedom.
He thought, bitterly, of the Northern Prince: Ivan, one of the playable characters and his unique skill the game had practically built a religion around. [Rupture]. True damage, no exceptions. It didn’t care how thick your armor was, how absurd your defenses were, whether your body was even fully physical to begin with. It found the thing underneath all of it and broke that instead. It didn’t care about regeneration, either; you couldn’t heal from a wound that skipped over the part of you capable of healing in the first place.
That was a cheat skill. That was the kind of thing a protagonist got handed on page one, engraved with a neon sign reading the main character.
’And what did I get? A skill that needs me to sit down and philosophically interrogate a candle before I’m allowed to borrow its flicker.’
Tristan let his head fall back against the stone, chains rattling their usual protest, and stared up at where the light had torn through the ceiling and vanished, leaving nothing behind but ordinary dark and the smell of scorched air.
Except.
The more he sat with it, the less certain he was that "worse" was actually the right word.
[Rupture] was a battlefield skill. Devastating, terrifying, an absolute monster of an ability, and completely, utterly useless anywhere that wasn’t a fight. You couldn’t Rupture your way out of a locked door. You couldn’t Rupture information out of a reluctant noble, or Rupture a lock, or Rupture your way through the thousand small, mundane obstacles that actually made up most of a person’s life in this world.
Reave could, at least in theory, do exactly that.
Flamecrest Legacy had never really been a game about boss fights, not underneath all the combat systems dressing it up. It was a game about interactions, a thousand tiny choices stacked on top of each other, who you talked to, what you noticed, which door you happened to walk through at the right moment. The players who’d made it furthest hadn’t been the ones with the flashiest damage numbers. They’d been the ones who found an angle nobody else thought to look for.
’Versatility over raw power,’ Tristan thought.
He glanced down at the shackles still biting into his ankles, and a small smile tugged at his face as he called, silent and deliberate, into his own mind:
’Reave.’