What Jessica learned from the painstaking process of John verbally describing all the hallucinatory menus was that the magic system was a lot more in-depth than she’d seen from the brief time she interacted with it.
In addition to the skill tree she had played around with there were also ‘Evolution Points,’ or EPs, which modified certain attributes like strength, alacrity, awareness, and so on. A certain amount of these were gained per level but most were gained by performing ‘feats’ which sounded a lot like video game achievements based on how John described it. These entailed doing things like dodging a certain number of attacks or tanking an especially powerful hit.
This explained how adventurers—even waifishly thin ones—could so easily dominate the denizens of Tushita. Jessica had gotten by on the assumption that she could outsmart them, which had proven mostly correct, but she had no idea until now how wide the physical gap actually was.
The other piece of the system besides skills and EPs were something called ‘bargains.’ These were one-time, irreversible changes consisting of both a boon and a drawback. There was no obligation to take any, but most seemed worth it if the adventurer was conscientious about avoiding scenarios involving the drawback.
One that stood out to her as being both incredibly useful and unlockable right from the get-go was a bargain called ‘Adventure Fixation.’ It reduced damage taken from other adventurers, their party members, or hostile monsters by 75% and the only drawback was that environmental damage (presumably from things like falling or being attacked by someone who wasn’t a monster) dealt 75% more.
“Unless I’m missing something that sounds insanely overpowered,” Jessica said when John was finished describing the wording of it.
“I s’pose you’re probably right if you’re fighting monsters all day,” John said.
There was a hesitation in his voice that made her ask what he thought about the drawback.
“Well… I guess all the things I gotta worry about in my life would be called environmental damage. I’m thinkin’ ‘bout gettin’ my hand crushed in a windmill or scaldin’ myself on boilin’ water back at the factory or some such. But if I don’t gotta worry ‘bout that it sounds swell.”
Something clicked for her.
When John described the EPs and how they made adventurers physically stronger and more resilient it made her scrappy win over Min-woo seem all the more ludicrous. After two centuries on Tushita there was no way one of the Original Eight wasn’t maxed out. Even if he was a glass cannon, the passive EP gain from levels should have made him a brick house.
Unless, that was, he took Adventure Fixation, in which case—
“My gas bomb was environmental damage…”
“Yer what now?” John asked.
“Nothing. Let’s put a pin in that bargain and keep looking,” she replied as she reflected on the fact that they were currently surrounded by a bunch of non-monsters with firearms.
The rest of the bargains also felt like things she didn’t want to touch until she had a better sense of what kind of peril she and John would be facing.
Since John had no EPs to assign at Level 1, the only real decision was which skill to take. It was possible to take every single one if you went all the way to Level 100, however you had the opportunity to choose a new, higher-tier job at Level 50, and since job levels started over the second you changed to a new job, everything past 50 was functionally wasted experience.
The question was how to specialize him up to Level 50.
The Sentinel skill tree had three branches unlike the Alchemist’s four. John was interested in the names and descriptions of the skills while Jessica was inclined to strip all the flavor and pizzazz to distill the bare mechanics. Out of this she ascertained the three branches boiled down to:
- Deal slightly more damage than nothing.
- Give allies free shit.
- Tank hits harder
They scanned ahead in the tree and found nothing worth pursuing on the first branch until the end where there were some ways to cause attacks to taunt enemies and have damage output scale with his Resilience attribute. However, the opportunity cost for getting there was the rest of the skill tree. Jessica ruled it out.
The second branch had a lot of passives that automatically gave party members boons, both offensive and defensive, and had a few active skills which created shields and even entire defensive structures like walls. John was the most excited for this one.
“I think that branch’d make the most sense, wouldn’t it?” John said.
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Jessica pursed her lips. “The trouble is I don’t know if I count as a party member. I don’t know how the Tapestry goes about assigning all that, but since Morkal severed my connection, I suspect I wouldn’t receive any benefits.”
“Oh…” John frowned. “Oh! But what about the wall! That oughta be useful, right? Or what about this one that lets you negate damage with a perfectly-timed block?”
“Let’s keep looking.”
The third and final branch was the most promising. There were a lot of passives, most of which just straight up added more EPs to stats John would want like resilience, alacrity, and awareness. Some had percentage chances to reduce or negate damage and others allowed him to perform actions like rolling or blocking faster.
The active skills were similarly centered around keeping John alive through temporary attribute boosts, reactive shields, and movement options. The capstone skill, called ‘Vajra Skin,’ looked to be achievable around Level 35 if he beelined for it and it provided him with a few seconds of complete invulnerability, albeit on a long cooldown.
“That’s the tree you should go down,” Jessica said the moment he read off Vajra Skin.
“Seems a little selfish though, don’t it? It’s all about protectin’ myself. I feel like my brain picked the class cuz I wanted to protect you. A-And other folks and stuff!”
“The best thing you can do is not give me anything to worry about. If you can snap your fingers and become invulnerable that would take a load off my mind.”
This didn’t satisfy him but he put on a smile and nodded and at her behest picked the first skill on that line, ‘Copper Skin,’ which instantly gave him 15 EPs in Resilience.
“Wanna try it out?” she asked.
“How’d’ya mean?”
She grinned and curled her hand in a fist.
“Wait, Jessica, I don’t wanna fight a gir—!”
Jessica pulled her fist away from his abs, wincing and waving the pain out of her hand. A shocked John looked down and rubbed his stomach.
“It— It didn’t hurt…”
“Sure hurt me,” Jessica said with a grimace. “They did a good job naming that skill.”
He was still looking at her in surprise when she broke out into a grin.
“You’re really an adventurer now, Johnny boy! Got the copper skin to prove it!”
Despite her efforts to hype him up, John looked bizarrely guilty about the whole thing, as though his job class and magic system were something he’d unfairly stolen and ought to return. It didn’t help that the next thing to do was sit and rot at the bottom of a prison pit. Her own enthusiasm dropped off not long after and she settled into a numb, timeless twilight.
Floating in and out of sleep, Jessica dreamed about her life back home. She dreamed about the things she didn’t allow into her conscious mind. Memories of watching her dad play RPGs and sneaking out of her room at night to play them herself.
Her dreams were filled with numbers. Two different progression systems blended into each other and she was harrowed by the anxiety of needing to optimize both. By the time she had one build correct, she’d forgotten something in the other system, and so on and so on until she realized she was fighting a boss she couldn’t beat.
Dying. Dying again. Dying over and over because her build wasn’t right. But it was too late. She’d picked incorrectly.
“Told you she was awake.”
The voice came out of the light of day streaming through the top of the tent. It was an annoying voice. Baritone and cocky. It sounded like it belonged to a theater kid who’d absorbed too many compliments. She hated it immediately.
Eyes blinking open, she found John awake and alert, gazing upward with a look of fierce defensiveness. She followed his gaze to a semi-circle of people looking down into the pit. Most of them she did not recognize but there was one she did.
“Morkal!? What are you doing here!?” Jessica said, bolting to her feet.
“In the long-term we are preserving the Tapestry. In the short-term, we are practicing our alchemical arts and advising those we deem promising for the furtherance of our aims. Harrow is among them,” Morkal said.
There was no question of who ‘Harrow’ was. Of the committee gathered around the prison pit only one wore a fancy-looking tricorn and a self-assured smirk.
“I think these two have suffered enough. Let’s get them out. I’m sure we can scrounge up some food and a shower too,” Harrow said as he motioned for one of his companions to unlock the hatch.
Once it was open he held out a black-gloved hand to Jessica, offering to hoist her up. She batted it out of the way and helped herself out before turning around and extending the same offer to John who accepted.
“I understand you’re sore about your accommodations and I apologize for that. I should have been clearer to my comrades when I gave my orders that you were to be treated as guests and not prisoners,” Harrow said.
“Oh yeah?” Jessica said, eyebrows raising. “So you didn’t tell them to do exactly what they did so you could swoop in and score good cop points when you delivered me and John from being stuck in a pit?”
He laughed and clapped her on the shoulder. “That’s exactly what I did. And the best part is, it still worked, didn’t it?”
“No, it didn’t,” Jessica lied as she tried to compel herself to disassociate him from the relief of having mental stimulation again.
Harrow was taller than her by about an inch which made him just shy of six feet. His hair was curly, oily, and black with thick black brows to match and his face had the same sharp, prow-shape as the front of his tricorn ending at the tip of an aquiline nose. He would have looked almost imposing except for a band of razor rash along his neck which lent him a boyish affect.
His outfit was very nearly the most ridiculous thing about him. To match the tricorn hat was a white vest and trousers, black boots, and a blue jacket that looked like it belonged to a revolutionary war reenactor. It would have been the most ridiculous thing, except that dangling from a sling at his side was a twine-wrapped double-barrel pistol that looked suspiciously like it could have been used to assassinate a real life prime minister.
Harrow followed her eyes and waited for her to finish her appraisal. When she looked back up, he smiled.
“I’ve been looking forward to this meeting for quite a while, so I am perfectly happy to wait a little bit longer. Why don’t you and John go grab a bath, have some hot food, and then we can start talking about some very important things.”