Skill Orb assimilated.

Psionic Force (Tier 1 – Purple) [Spirit]

Active. Varying Flow cost, ongoing. The fundamentals of psionics have been engraved into the user’s mind. Grants knowledge of techniques for the telekinetic maneuvers of push, pull, and hold. Effects scale with Spirit and Flow used.

Tier 1 Skill Orb detected. Unique Augments locked until Tier 2.

Generating basic Skill Augments.

Available Augments:

Power Augment [FREE]

Passive. Increases the ratio of skill power to the amount of Flow used. Psionic Force travels faster, farther, and may be used to channel smaller, more condensed effects for a higher cost.

Utility Augment [FREE]

Passive. Reduces skill cost to Tiny, at the cost of minimizing efficacy. [Psionic Force] is changed to [Psionic Hand], which conjures a spectral hand for the user to control. Hand strength is limited, but may be increased by spending Flow.

Defensive Augment [FREE]

Active. Moderate Flow cost. The user may create a layer of dampening, pushing force over their skin to weaken incoming blows. Lasts a number of minutes equal to the user’s Spirit Attribute (4). This effect does not block; only a dampening effect is applied.

As soon as the notification unlocked, Sen only needed a glance to decide. He chose the Defensive Augment instantly—it was a familiar ability, and it wasn’t hard to remember how the essence vampire shrugged off his attacks like they were nothing. And while the Augment’s description announced itself to be a weakened version of that skill, it was invaluable to his survival.

After all, he’d already volunteered to be the frontline between him and Em. With this upgrade and his Bone Armor, Sen felt far safer in the idea of tangling with monsters up close. And if he combined this with Fiendish Physique’s defensive upgrade…

Sen ran his tongue over a dry lip.

He was beginning to see the appeal of RPGs.

Still, even with a shiny new Skill Orb to test out, he still had a limited amount of essence. Sen frowned at his status and debated over what to spend it all on. Adding another defensive layer to his skin with Demonic Resilience was tempting, but…

There was still one feature to the system he’d been ignoring.

Abilities.

Sen stared at the section under his name and tier. After his tier evolution, the cost had increased to five hundred Tier 1 essence—five times the cost of the skill before, back when he was still in Tier 0. And if he delayed it another evolution, it would no doubt increase its overall cost again.

He had enough to spend on it now, and while simpler options were far more appealing, Sen’s curiosity won out in the end.

His finger tapped at the option to unlock an Ability—

And then the world stilled.

Sen froze as he felt everything grind to a stop. He felt it in the frozen air and the paralyzed shadows; in the way that the lights stopped still; mid-flicker, caught in the millisecond of a millisecond, half-faded and half-flared. It was in his skin, in his blood and his stopped heart, dead in all ways except literal. Air sat in his lungs, caught in the crest of a breath, ceasing all movement just as the oxygen infused itself into his blood.

It was the moment. It was eternity and it was an instant. It was a motionless blink, frozen in time, as the world turned its attention to him.

Sen stared ahead, unable to move. Yet, he felt it.

A presence. A gaze. It was a blanket of piercing awareness, pressing against him in all directions, scanning every part of him. It was essence, running through every atom and inspecting every corner of him with scalpel-sharp precision. It wasn’t alive. It wasn’t conscious. It simply existed, and it knew.

It knew how to change him. How to make him more. It gathered every possibility his body was capable of, and Sen felt those futures flow out of him. He saw the images flash past his brain.

One was him, standing in a sea of corpses, a behemoth of bone and flesh and poison.

Another was a legion of clones, splitting and splitting, flooding over the corpse of Dubai. They surged through the buildings and the streets. A legion of him.

The next was a vision of him with obsidian skin and red eyes, two horns protruding from his forehead. He stood in a hell of green flames, a trident in his hand, as thousand fiends bowed to his shadow.

Countless futures. Countless hims.

They surged into a point in front of him, condensing into the shape of a coin. One with a million faces. Endless heads and tails, layered over each other in an infinite collage of possibility. In the coin, he saw his death. He saw his happiest endings and his darkest tragedies, all playing in an impression of shadows and glimpses, passing like fog in a cold night; the catch of a dream reflected in frosted glass.

And then that coin fell, and it landed on his palm, and all those futures vanished. They sat, waiting. Sen felt his hand move by itself, piloted by a force that wasn’t his.

Fwip.

The coin flipped. It rose into the air, spinning, and the afterimages trailing behind it solidified until the coin was a sphere of light—floating, shifting images, switching from future to future, waiting to fall on land on whatever the world willed him to become. It was a lottery. A chance.

It was going to choose for him, and Sen felt his fingers twitch. He was sluggish here. Slow. Every movement felt glacial.

And yet, even as the coin fell, Sen urged his Flow to flood forward.

It burst from his heart. His heartbeat returned.

The flow rushed into his lungs. His breath became his again. His arms filled with heat. Power. His body fought against the moment of stillness, and without thinking, Sen reached for the falling coin.

He caught his future in his hands.

“Yeah,” he said. “That isn’t for a stupid coin flip to decide.”

Sen gripped the coin tightly, then opened his palm to look. On his hand was a glowing, white orb. Pale as snow, dim as morning light. It was a blank slate—one with no ending in mind. Sen held it as notifications sprang across his vision.

Ability assessment scenario complete. Prime characteristic observed: control. Compatible Ability found.

Ability Unlocked: Mortal Commandment [Spirit] – Tier 1

The essence infusing his entire body sank into his skin. It melted into him, blending in with every inch of skin and flesh and bone, changing him down on a fundamental level. Sen felt it, then. The difference between Skill Orbs and abilities.

Skills were imitations. Copies of another being’s strength.

But this Ability was his.

The stillness in the world vanished. The shadows loomed, the air flowed, and glow from the red crystals hummed once more. Sen stood in front of a broken car window, and he felt himself smile as a new set of golden letters appeared in front of his eyes.

Ability: Mortal Commandment [Spirit] – Tier 1

Active. High Flow cost. The user exerts their will on the world to bring reality to its knees. In exchange for Flow, the user may inflict a five-word decree on any target they have touched in the last minute, so long as this law does not violate the ability’s innate limitations. This commandment applies to the target for ten seconds. Duration is reduced by two seconds per rank disparity between the user and their target's Spirit.

Tier 1 Effect: Up to three commandments may be applied to one target at once, or vice versa. This effect may be used only once every day.

Sen stared at it, blinking.

…Wasn’t this Ability extremely strong?

He felt the Ability’s intricacies flow into his mind, integrating into his mental memory with the same permanence of a learned skill. It was like learning how to ride a bike—once you knew how, you would never forget. And with the knowledge that filled him, Sen marveled at its potential.

It had limitations, of course. He couldn’t harm anything directly with it. And he couldn’t just command an object to transform into something else entirely, or create commandments so ridiculous that they broke reality. But…

Sen poked himself in the chest.

“Sen Salazar becomes faster.”

An exorbitant amount of Flow drained away. The world around him slowed. Sen moved his arms at a normal speed, but his perception of time decelerated; everything around him slowed down in comparison to himself. He met Em’s eyes in slow motion from across the parking lot and Sen jogged towards her, watching her eyes go wide as he suddenly zoomed across the distance.

He stopped in front of her just as the Ability’s duration expired, and the world returned to normal speed. Em stared at him, frozen mid-flinch.

“Sen,” she said. “What the hell was that?”

He ignored her shock as he grinned and met her eyes, excited. “How much essence do you have?”

“What?”

“Do you have enough essence to unlock your Ability?”

“I’ve been saving it, so, I have almost enough. I just need a hundred more. But I thought increasing my Tier would unlock a lot of new stuff? Shouldn’t I do that first?”

“I’ve changed my mind. You need to get your Ability now. Benji was—he had it figured out!”

Her face fell at the mention of Benji, and Sen froze. A sullen silence fell over them both, awkward and hesitant, as the memory of Benji’s pulped skull flashed across their minds. Sen’s excitement died instantly. He scratched the back of his head, wincing.

“Sorry,” he said, and Em grimaced.

“No, it’s… yeah,” she said. Em gave a weak smile as she leaned back against the car she was looting. She sighed. “Sorry. I just got caught off guard when you suddenly mentioned him.”

“Yeah. I forgot he was…”

Sen trailed off. Silence hung over them.

“…What were you saying about the abilities?”

He coughed and stepped back, awkward. If there was one way to dampen his excitement, it was stupidly reminding himself of a new friend that died on the same day they met. Sen released a weary sigh, then forced a smile in an attempt to shift the mood somewhere else.

“I decided to spend most of my essence on unlocking my Ability.”

Em nodded slowly. “…What did it do? Give you vomit powers?”

Sen crinkled his nose. “You really need to get over that.”

“You can’t say that to a traumatized person.”

“You don’t look traumatized to me.”

“I have Vietnam flashbacks about your vomit episode.”

“Alright, you’re being gross. Drop the bit before I decide to put you through exposure therapy.”

She stared at him. “You’re a monster,” she said. “A deviant. You’re a vomit monster who treats my biggest nightmare like a joke. Just when I was beginning to think you might be a little cool, you—”

Sen poked her in the forehead mid-rant. “Em is muted.”

His Ability activated, and her mouth continued moving, but no sound came out. She spoke, paused, then blinked. Sen watched her try to speak a few words to test it out, until the duration wore off.

“Huh,” she said. “That was actually pretty cool.”

“Right?”

“Do it again.”

“Are you some sort of masochist?”

“Sen Salazar, mute me right now or I will—”

He muted her again, and she let out a breath. Em spoke a few more words, before shouting soundlessly, screaming into an unseen void. She sighed as the Ability wore off, looking a little less tired compared to before. It seemed even she needed to scream every once and a while. Em nodded to him.

“So that’s your new power? You get to mute things at will?”

“Nope. I get to tell things what to do. Watch.”

Sen walked over to a random car, before resting his hand on the door. “This door will open.”

The door lock bounced up with a click, and the car door swung open. Em stared.

“Holy shit. How many times can you do that?”

Sen hesitated.

“If my Flow is full? About ten times, give or take. I'll probably trigger the Withering condition if I try to use it any more after that.”

“Oh," she said, her smile dropping. "Well, that sucks.”

“Yeah,” Sen said, feeling his Flow reserves drop to just a bit over half after four casts of Mortal Commandment. It was powerful, yes, but it was limited in many ways. He had an instinctive grasp of what he could do with it—a few things were still out of reach at his Ability’s current Tier.

For instance…

Sen placed a hand on the car in front of him.

“This car is weightless.”

He felt the Flow surge into the car, spreading across its body in a blink. A faint sheen of power glinted over it. And yet, when Sen moved down to lift it with both arms, he grunted, pulling up, lifting the side of the car only a few feet off the ground. It was light—far lighter than it should have been.

But it wasn't weightless.

Sen set the car down with a small huff before the duration wore off. Behind him, Em watched the whole process unfold with a silent thoughtfulness. “We can still do a lot with that,” she said. “You just have to be careful with how often you use it, unless you want to be as burnt up as when I found you.”

Sen winced, remembered the Scorched condition he was dealt after his Flow was overdrawn. That wasn’t something he wanted to experience again. Sen gave her a short nod, “Yeah. But at least now we know how powerful these Abilities are. You need to unlock yours as soon as possible.”

She nodded, her arms crossed. “We need to get me more essence, then.”

“Got any ideas?”

Em hesitated for a moment, her hand instinctively coming to her side, before her gaze steeled and she pursed her lips. “Yeah,” she said, turning away. Her eyes stared down the tunnel in the distance, infested with flesh and leading down, down; into the darkness and all that waited within. Em met his eyes. “You said you didn’t play a lot of games, right?”

Sen shook his head. “I’m not completely clueless about them, but pretend like I am, anyway.”

She nodded and pointed a finger down towards the only exit they had.

“Before we leave, I think we might be able to do some grinding.”

He gave her a look. “Monster hunting?”

“Yeah,” she said, before hesitating. “But let’s not do it yet. Not right now. It would be stupid to think that this is like a game, so let’s finish all our preparations first. Load all the loot into the bus and get ready to leave, just in case we trigger something we need to run from.”

“Right. I’d be a lot more comfortable going down there with both of us at Tier 1, but no point rushing things. We'll get you your Ability eventually.”

“We will. You just have to promise me one thing.”

Sen moved to the piles of bundled clothes, supplies, and filled-up bags she'd looted from all the cars. He scooped them up from the ground, gathering them in his arms. “What is it?”

"You have to promise, first."

"OK. I promise."

Em met his eyes with as she narrowed her own. “If I get a lame superpower like sticky hair or navel lasers..." she said, hesitating. "You aren’t allowed to laugh. Not even a snicker. Got it?”

Sen paused. He stared at her.

And then he laughed.