“I know it’s no big deal. In a way, I’ve always known that. I just couldn’t get over it for a long time.” he looked at her and said. “When I realized that I wasn’t cut out to be in a group of noisy kids, I felt different. Better? Maybe better is the wrong word, but I felt like everyone else should be better than they were. One day, one of the kids came up to me and started picking on me. He just kept talking crap and pushing me. Of course, it’s happened before, but this time he was persistent. He wouldn’t stop even though I was telling him to go away. When I had had enough, I looked at him like he was a pest and kicked him between the legs. I felt like I was doing the right thing. That I had to educate this little shit.”
Orion fell silent for a moment, remembering the consequences of his action, then continued.
“And let me say it again. I know kids fight and pick on each other even in play. This guy probably got kicked in the balls fifty other times before, and another fifty after. But it never mattered to me. When he got down on his knees, holding between his legs, I felt good, but that feeling quickly changed when he looked at me. That’s when I saw for the first time in my life the eyes of someone who was suffering because of me. The scale of the pain didn’t matter at all, but the fact that I caused it... did. When I got home, I couldn’t talk to anyone. The whole time, I saw the look on the face of the human I hurt. Even though a few hours earlier I had thought of myself as better than everyone else, at that moment I felt like the worst person in the world, and it went on for days. No matter how much they tried to talk to me, I couldn’t force myself to answer, remembering that hurt look. That’s when I started to question my judgment.”
Martha looked at him with arched eyebrows, not knowing what to think.
“Have you tried talking to anyone about this?” she asked.
“Nope, never. When asked, I didn’t answer. If I had to talk, I changed the subject or made something up. I was too ashamed of what I had done, so I didn’t want anyone to know, either. You’re the first person I’m telling.”
“I’d say it’s no big deal, but you beat me to it.”
“I knew then that I was taking it too hard. But that didn’t change the fact that I decided to take a different approach to life. I just had to distance myself from people, and at the same time, once there was some interaction, everything I did and said had to be thought through. I didn’t want to hurt anyone verbally or nonverbally. Now you understand where my breakdown came from when I snapped at you after you told me everything.”
“I’ve told you, like, a billion times…”
“That everything’s alright. I know. It doesn’t change the fact that when I close my eyes, I see your terrified face.”
Martha looked at him skeptically for a moment, then asked.
“What does it look like now? I mean, your attitude,” she asked, gently trying to redirect the conversation.
“I think mostly the same. Apart from the happy outbursts, of course, but I try to control them. Being more subdued, I had less interaction, but I was always comfortable with it. It was easier. Before I was kidnapped, I preferred solitude, and knowing that I could always call someone and talk or meet up was enough.”
“And in terms of causing harm?”
Orion hesitated before answering, but he had already decided to be honest with her. So he sighed and said.
“I think I can make a few exceptions to my nonviolence policy. Even if... it were to affect me.”
Martha gave him a gloomy look, but she made no comment. She felt that some people deserved to be punished, even if they seemed innocent to others. If she could catch those who kidnapped her, she wouldn’t feel bad about somehow carrying out vigilante justice.
The journey continued, and they returned to shallower topics. Thanks to the lively conversation, the unchanging trip was only the background. Although they could see the gaps between the rocks growing slightly, this was by no means a sudden change. They walked shoulder to shoulder, once arguing seriously, and once laughing at stupid jokes. Finally, one step, seemingly the same as all the others, triggered something entirely different. Although the characteristics of the environment had not changed in any way, at one point while walking, they both fell to their knees and coughed, trying to restrain themselves from vomiting.
“Buuuuueergh,” Orion blurted out. He felt as if someone had decided to twist all his guts. He was holding on to his face to help keep his stomach contents in place. After looking at Martha, he saw that she was writhing on the ground, holding her head and groaning.
It took a few minutes for them to feel the sudden attack on their insides subside. They still needed a longer moment to themselves to collect themselves.
“What the hell was that...?” Martha asked.
“I have no idea, but... Ugh. We should find a rock with a place to sit. We made quite a bit of noise. Me, mostly.”
“You sounded like a pregnant Brachiosaurus.”
“Sure, let’s go.”
Orion dismissed her joke, panicked that something could have heard them. He helped her up, and they rushed off to find a safe place. They didn’t dare return through that strange spot, so as they searched for a cover, they kept moving forward. After a few minutes, they found a rock with an outgrowth on which they could rest. Only after climbing did he feel safer. Although they had never seen anything alive in this place before, crossing this invisible obstacle reminded him that they were in a completely incomprehensible environment.
“So... Do you have any idea what that could be?” Martha asked.
“It’s just a theory. Although I think of it as an invisible barrier or a wall, we were walking pretty close together, so it could also be a single point. I think it’s worth checking out.”
“I’m not going back in there.”
“I’ll try, but first I suggest rest.”
“Ooh yes. After that weird… something, I forgot about being tired or even about being hungry.”
Before resting, Orion climbed to see if he could see any changes in the location of the ‘barrier’ and to reassess his position. He observed, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Looking in the direction they were heading, he noticed that the stone forest was thinning out more and more.
Orion stepped down onto a ledge, finding Martha looking around below. After a brief conversation, mostly speculating about recent events, they lay down close together and fell asleep.
***
She had already been in the tutorial for ten days. Anna found her place among people fairly quickly. Occasional arguments or panic attacks were quickly pacified by her. She offered support to anyone who wanted to talk and gained recognition for her willingness to listen and ability to draw conclusions. It was only when she acquired her first system skill that Anna felt how incomplete life had been before.
You never truly know if you’re good at something. Of course, sometimes there are measurable effects to evaluate competence, but without them, we only have opinions. These, on the other hand, do not necessarily reflect reality. They can be made with intent, or without sufficient knowledge.
You made someone a steak, and somebody didn’t like it? Maybe the idiot just doesn’t like meat. You showed your dad a drawing of a strange stain, and he said, ‘What’s a cute little dog’? That doesn’t mean you have the competence. Perhaps he didn’t want to upset you.
At this point, however, the system comes into play that presents your skills in a fully calculated way. From what Anna has learned from being here and talking to the automatons, it turns out that the system averages all the beings in the multiverse at a given level and then calculates your skill level based on that. At least that’s how it works for skills that are fairly common. The more rare, the more complicated the calculations and the more aspects that are brought into the equation.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
She also learned that, in addition to the skills it offers, the system can recognize and evaluate skills a person learns on their own, including non-magical ones. However, the skill would have to be sufficiently important to the person and given appropriate weight. The system wouldn’t assign something trivial, such as playing the piano, as a skill to someone who played it several times for fun. However, if an avid pianist had just finished playing the piano, it might turn out that he had just been given the opportunity to have such a skill in his status.
As for skill level, honestly, Anna drifted off when it came to the explanation of calculating potential usage over time plus optimal aspect control, multiplied by actual impact on reality, divided by percentage of commonality and suboptimal energy usage, and that was just a measure of rare skill level. It was easier for her to understand that a skill simply improves when you use it often and get better at it.
As for the rarity itself, from what she understood, the rarer skills were just that: rare. Only if a skill has a higher rarity, and more importantly, is actually useful, you can consider yourself lucky to have it. A rare sword skill would be better than its uncommon or common counterpart. On the other hand, it was explained to her that the skill of controlling the color of one’s forehead, for example, would also be considered a rare skill, given its actual occurrence and regardless of its ineffectiveness.
The rarity levels were as follows:
- Common [C],
- Uncommon [U],
- Rare [R],
- Epic [E],
- Legendary [L],
- Unique [X].
Unique rarity meant that there was only one such instance. If it were to happen that someone else acquires it, then the rarity of the skill, for example, would drop to legendary level. Although in the case of skills, how you use them and what they offer was much more important than their rarity, the way rarities were named translated into other aspects of the world. You also could assess the rarity of an item, class or subclass, and even individual achievements. At some point, Anna decided that she had had enough of learning about the new reality.
So she rested, being on a high tower and admiring the view. When she appeared in this place, she thought it looked like an ordinary city. However, when she reached this tower, she learned that she was wrong. This place was indeed a huge city, but where the city area ended, the abyss began. Being in the tower, she saw on the screens plans of the city, which turned out to be built on top of a giant jellyfish-like creature, except that its upper body was made of something resembling a shell. The city was built in the center, on the very top.
This levitating creature moved slowly across the globe, regardless of gravity or wind. Once inside, Anna saw the updated coordinates of their current location and many other data of varying importance. Asking the available automaton, she learned that in the multiverse, living on the backs of giant beasts is almost as common as on ordinary planets. These creatures, knowingly or unknowingly, provide the living conditions for the inhabitants, often forming mutualistic, symbiotic relationships with them. There are places where, as in the case of their tutorial, cities are set on a beast living on a larger planet, but there are also cases where freely traveling beasts through the voids of space are considered a world unto themselves.
After completing the first two quests, she was told to wait for a few other people to catch up with her before continuing the scenario. At that moment, she knew that her next task would not be as easy as the previous ones. Supposedly, another civilization would soon arrive in this city, one that had an entirely different culture than the native automatons. She was to provide support in diplomatic talks and plans, acquire another skill, and level up the one she had already acquired.
This brought her back to the thought of skills and led to another conclusion. While a high skill level might mean you were proficient at it, there was an immeasurable element; the ability to decide when to actually use that skill.
Looking at the sight before her, Anna thought that the system had left these elements unmeasured not because it couldn’t measure them, but for some reason it didn’t want to. Talking to the automatons, she learned that a temporary universe had been created so that she and a group of people could take this tutorial. The automatons were aware of their impermanence, but ignored it, behaving like normal people.
She thought for a moment about the future and what she had to do. With a sigh, she expanded a description of the skill she acquired.
[Skill: [U] Enhanced Psychosocial Analysis [Level 1 (28%)]
Description: Allows accelerated analysis of a target’s personality, motivations, problems, or intentions. Effectiveness increases with length of activation. Requires conversation.]
When she first used it, she felt as if the conversation had slowed down a little. It wasn’t the passage of time, but the way she perceived the words she heard and the gestures she saw. She had more time to interpret them, and ideas flowed more eagerly into her head. Although the person she was talking to complained about the tension among the people and the general difficulty of his situation, Anna felt from him a hidden need to approve of the efforts he made so far.
Anna decided to follow that hunch. She expressed her admiration for the man’s work, appreciating how he dealt with difficulties. After listening to him and having a short conversation, her skill level was noted with three percent progress. Although activating the skill for a longer period of time caused slight fatigue and consumed a lot of mana, its effects were noticeable. Soon the man thanked her and left satisfied.
Each time the skill progressed, she felt a very slight boost in the effect when she used it. It was minimal, but she could see the improvement. Thinking about how she could see the skill progress each time, Anna felt an intense surge of motivation. However, she knew that this feeling could be a double-edged sword. If she tried to help people, she would be rewarded with an increase in her skill. On the other hand, it was easy to become apathetic, focusing only on improving. She wouldn’t want to end up being a person who only deals with those who can help her develop, with their problems.
As she thought about this, she began to wonder if there was also a skill to keeping your priorities in order.
***
“Be careful, okay? If I see anything weird happening to you, I’ll pull you in.”
“Okay,” Orion replied, standing in the spot that had previously made them feel so miserable.
Although the rock they were resting on wasn’t very far away, they still had difficulty finding their current location. Luckily, during their last experiences, they had left faint traces on the gravel-like surface by rolling around on the ground.
Orion first walked a dozen or so meters to the side from the designated spot, then decided to carefully stick out his hand in the direction from which they had initially come. If this spot was just a single point that induced vomiting, then at this moment nothing strange should happen to his body. He prepared himself mentally, then stuck his limb out.
It wasn’t long before he began to feel a slight tingling. After a moment, his arm was numb all the way to the elbow, and a throbbing pain appeared in his palm. Orion withdrew his hand, but that didn’t take away the pain, only stopped it from growing.
“Ugh...” a pained sound escaped his mouth. His hand once again looked like it was about to dissolve, just like when he woke up here. This time, no amount of concentration or trying to move his fingers helped, and the blurring of his hand continued.
Thinking quickly, he turned to face the opposite direction, and jumped backwards, into the invisible barrier, while extending his hand. So now his entire body, except for his hand, was on the other side of the invisible wall. The feeling of his insides being twisted came again, albeit fainter than the first time. He even managed to warn Martha not to come any closer. He sighed in relief as the pain in his hand began to fade, turning back into a feeling of numbness. At this point, he tried to make his body spend the same amount of time on that side as his arm did, and then he jumped back to Martha’s side.
“What are you doing? What’s going on? Why did you sound so strange when you had your hand outstretched towards me?” she asked with a worried voice.
Orion, attacked by another gut-punch, lay on the ground, groaning. This time, the feeling of his intestines being twisted returned in full. He groaned and tried to stop vomiting. Martha went over to him, trying to help. It took him some time to recover. Luckily, during today’s experiments, he managed not to make any too loud sounds.
Laying down on the ground, he looked at his hand. The blurriness had gone, but he still felt a slight tingling sensation. He hoped it would stabilize over time.
“It looks like there’s some kind of wall here,” he said after a moment’s rest. “Of course, I can’t be certain, but I think I have an idea of ??what this might be about.”
He told her how it felt when he reached out and that simply pulling the hand back didn’t help. So he decided in his haste that he had to even out the exposure time of his whole body, so he jumped in and left just his hand on that side.
“If I am not mistaken, we were saved by the fact that we passed smoothly from one side to the other. If we had stopped, hmm… something like a detuning might’ve happened to us.”
“Hmm, you know, I won’t pretend to understand. Got anything else?”
“As strange as it may sound, I think that when we’re on this side, we’re in some other frequency? There’s an invisible wall in this place. I have no idea how long it is, or whether it cuts this place in half or loops around and just defines a section. I don’t think I want to check it out either.”
They talked for a while longer, trying to draw conclusions and understand the implications, but due to the lack of information, they finally decided to leave the place behind. They felt like they had wasted their time. Although they had been in no hurry before, the increasing feeling of hunger threatened them with a grim future.
“Nothing came of it this time, but we’ll find something. Don’t worry. We can treat this invisible wall as a transition of some kind. We just have to speed up a bit, okay?” he said.
“Mhm.” she replied. Honestly, Martha didn’t feel much hope, and with every moment of growing hunger, she felt worse. She wanted to give up. To climb to the top of some high rock and end it all quickly and painlessly. But looking at Orion and his stubborn drive forward, she felt that she could still hold out. She didn’t want to leave him alone, either. “If we ever get out of here...” she began, but was interrupted.
“When we get out of here.” he corrected her.
“Mhm. When we get back to our world... ugh.”
“Then I’ll find you.”
“Mhm.”
Orion felt a little awkward, but he grabbed her hand. They set off, quickening their pace.