Yrella hadn’t been lying about Yund not giving days off. The next morning and day went just the same as any of the others Victor had experienced in the Wagon Wheel. Wake up, get breakfast, workout, and go back to your cage to be bored shitless until the next day. At least it seemed to be going that way until the Boss, himself, approached Victor’s little trio as they were working on his axe forms. “Runt! What level have you managed to get to?” he hollered as he got close.

“Uh, level three, Boss.”

“Huh, not terrible. Listen, I may be a right scoundrel, but I keep my promises, and I offered your group a gold reward if you won. I already gave the old Ghelli his prize, now it’s your turn, and I’m going to give you a choice.”

“Okaaay….” Victor didn’t know what to expect, so he looked from Yrella to Vullu, and they both maintained neutral expressions, so he just looked at Yund expectantly.

“Well, you came here at level zero, right?” Victor nodded, “Well, I doubt either of these two geniuses have helped you build a Core yet, eh?”

“No, I don’t have a Core. I’m also holding five attribute points if you could give me....”

“That’s not important right now; listen: I can either pay one of those book-brains from the academy a fee to come and help you make a good Core, or I can buy you a racial upgrade fruit. You’re at the lowest level for your race, right?”

“Uh, how do I see that?”

“On your status sheet. What the runny shits have you two been teaching this kid?” He glared at Yrella and Vullu.

“Only to keep himself alive in a lopsided pit fight, no big deal!” Yrella retorted.

“Huh. Look at your status sheet, kid, where it lists your race. What does it say after it?”

“Um, base one.”

“Right, that’s the lowest. I can get you a fruit to lift it to base two, or I can help you make a good Core. What’s it gonna be?” He stared pointedly at Victor, who had no idea what the correct answer was, so he looked at Yrella. She mouthed the word “Core” pretty clearly, so Victor shrugged and turned back to Yund.

“The Core, I guess.”

“Smart man. One racial upgrade probably won’t save your ass during the next Pit Night, but using Energy just might.”

“Hey, Boss,” Victor licked his lips nervously; he’d wanted to ask this question for days now.

“Yeah? I gotta go schedule this thing; what is it?”

“Well, I kinda got fucking kidnapped and forced to come here, and I have no idea how long you own me for. Is there any way I can get free?” He cringed back as the massive, red-skinned man frowned down at him.

“Huh, I’d call you ungrateful, but I guess you have a point. Listen, kid, most of the dregs I buy from those mages don’t last more than a fight or two. No point talking about freedom when that’s the case, right? Tell you what: you win five matches, and we’ll make a contract. Nobody ever better say I ain’t fair, right Vullu?” Vullu nodded his head, but he wasn’t smiling. “Right, well, I’ve got a business meeting, then I’ll see about getting you some help with your Core. Get back to work!” He turned and walked away, not glancing at Victor, let alone waiting to see if he was amenable to his terms.

“That could have gone worse,” Yrella said, slapping Victor on the shoulder. “Smart move asking him right after a big win.”

“I didn’t plan it that way, but yeah. I’m not really excited about having to fight four more times, but I guess it’s something to shoot for.” Victor looked around the big exercise room and, for the hundredth time, wondered if there was another way out of this predicament. What if he ran to the police or whatever and told them what had happened to him? It couldn’t be fucking legal just to summon innocent people and then sell them. Every time his mind went down that road, he remembered the warnings about getting ‘tagged.’ He knew Ponda, Urt, or one of the other lackeys was always watching the door. Then he thought about how it was his word against Yund’s and that no one, literally no one, in this entire world knew him or could vouch for him.

Shortly after that, they had to return to their cage, and Victor played around with Yrella’s dice while she and Vullu did their meditation thing. They had just finished and were getting ready to teach Victor a new dice game when Ponda slammed open the main door and walked over to their cage. “Kid, follow me. Boss got your reward.” He unlocked the metal gate and motioned for Victor to follow.

“See you later, Victor,” Vullu called. Yrella just waved and leaned back against the metal frame of the cage, letting her eyes close lazily. Victor nodded to Vullu and then followed Ponda. He didn’t know why, but it felt like he was going somewhere to be punished. He hoped he was just being paranoid.

“Boss has that wizard waiting for you in his office. He said I have to leave you alone in there, but I’ll be right outside the door. Don’t mess with any of Boss’s shit. Clear?”

“Yeah, I’m not going to mess with that dude’s shit. You think I’m interested in his old socks and diaries and shit?” Victor scowled at Ponda; the big furry guy was acting like his friend Mike’s dad, and it rubbed him the wrong way. Mike’s dad was always assuming he and Victor were up to no good, and, while it was true a lot of the time, it was shitty to assume the worst of people. Then again, Ponda was a hired guard for a bunch of criminals they were forcing to fight to the death. It was probably healthy for him to assume the worst.

They got to Yund’s office door, and Ponda opened it, giving Victor a little shove, then he pulled it closed. Victor looked around in the dim light, glad to see Yund wasn’t present. Instead, a man the size of his six-year-old cousin sat in Yund’s chair. The guy was wearing a shiny silver robe and had painted his entire bald head royal blue. There was a leaf painted in white on his blue left cheek. He cleared his throat and, in a surprisingly deep voice, said, “Ahh, Victor, I presume. Take a seat.” He gestured to the wooden chair in front of Lund’s desk.

Victor sat down, keeping his eyes on the strange man, and as he got closer, he saw that what he had at first taken for sparkly blue eyes were actually gemstones. The man had glittering little gems where his eyes should be! “Uh, hello,” he said as he sat down.

“Hello. I’ll cut to the chase, Victor. I was paid to perform a service, and I’m going to do it, then I’m going to get out of here. I’m not here to waste any time. Is all that clear?” His eyes stared at Victor, not blinking as normal eyes should, and it was unnerving as hell.

“Yeah, fine. What do we do?” He slouched in his chair, feeling like he was in front of an annoyed Dean of Students for the thirtieth time.

“I’m going to perform some diagnostics, and then I’ll help you, with the aid of some tools, to form your Core. First, how much Energy have you banked?” Victor looked at his status screen.

“Two-twenty,” he replied.

“That should be more than sufficient; I’ve helped Bogoli children form Cores with only forty-five.”

“Bogoli?”

“My race, now please don’t interrupt my process with questions.” He closed his eyes, twiddled his fingers around in the air in front of him, and then a blue, sparkly sphere appeared in his hand. He set it on the desk.

“How did you do that? I’ve seen a bunch of people pull shit outta nowhere in this world!”

“You don’t have dimensional containers where you come from? My ring - it's also a storage device.” He closed his eyes again and wiggled his fingers, frowning like he was trying to find something. Victor thought about his answer, and he would have been a bit more shocked, but the truth was, he expected something like that. He’d been fucking summoned by wizards to get here, after all. The blue-painted guy grinned, and a pair of thick, lavender glasses appeared in his hand. Victor caught himself thinking of him as ‘the blue-painted guy’ and remembered his foot-in-mouth conversation with Yrella after the Pit Night.

“Hey, what’s your name, mister?”

“You may call me Dolo. It is an honorific meant for teachers and elders among my people.”

“Er, okay. Thank you, Dolo.” The little blue man nodded, then pointed to the sparkly, blue crystal-looking sphere.

“Please pick that up and hold it between your hands.” Victor did as he instructed, picking up the heavy, cold ball and holding it in his two palms. It reminded him of a snowglobe, and, as he looked into the glassy surface, he saw that the little sparkles were moving around. He stared into it, growing ever more fascinated by how the tiny lights flickered and flashed. The closer he looked, the more he realized the sparkles were all different colors, and they seemed to follow a secret pattern. He felt like if he just watched it long enough, maybe the right little stars, he’d start to learn the design. He snapped to himself when he felt a long strand of drool run down his chin and fall onto the thigh of his jeans. He shook his head and looked at Dolo.

“The fuck is this thing?” he asked, swallowing all the spit that had accumulated while he’d sat there with his jaw hanging open. Dolo, for his part, seemed unaware of Victor or his embarrassing drooling incident. He had on his violet sunglasses with brass-colored frames, and he was staring at the ball in Victor’s hands. He didn’t respond to the question, and Victor wondered if he’d been dumbstruck too. “Dude, you there?” He waited for an answer for at least a full count to sixty, and then he started to wonder if he should shake the guy. He was just beginning to move to set down the ball when Dolo cleared his throat.

“Wait! Don’t set it down yet.” That cleared that up. He wasn’t dumbstruck; he was just an asshole that responded when he felt like it. Victor felt sorely tempted to set the ball down in spite of his request, but then he wondered if that would mess up the test or whatever he was doing, and then maybe he’d get pissed and leave Victor hanging with no Core. So, he swallowed his irritation and held onto the ball, waiting for Dolo to snap out of it. Eventually, he said, “You may set the ball down now. What an interesting alignment. It looks like spirit might be the way to go with your Core class. Just a moment while I sort the proper tool.”

“Why’s that interesting? Is it good? Bad?”

“Hmm, it could be either, but it’s interesting because it’s quite unusual for the civilized races of this world to have a spirit marker for their Core alignment.”

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I’ll take your word for it.” Victor drummed his fingers, watching the little guy mentally going through his things. After a moment, a flat black stone, as wide as Victor’s old school tablet, appeared in his hands, and he set it on the desk in front of Victor.

“This will sound rather obscene, but please put some spit on this slate.” Dolo looked down, almost like he was embarrassed.

“You want me to spit on it?”

“That’s right. Just a few drops, please, no need to gather any phlegm.” Victor sighed and leaned forward, squeezing some saliva out between his lips to let it drop onto the center of the slate.

“Excellent, thank you,” Dolo said, then he pressed his index finger against a corner of the slate and closed his eyes. A moment later, the little puddle of Victor’s saliva started to bubble, and then it flashed into a bright red cloud of steam. Dolo nodded, staring at the cloud through his glasses, then he said, “Quite interesting, indeed! A rage affinity!”

“A rage what?” Victor leaned forward, watching the red smoke dissipate.

“An affinity. Listen, I’ll need you to make a decision now.”

“Wait a second! Can you tell me what affinity even means? Like on my status sheet, I have an Energy affinity line, and I don’t even know what it is.”

“Oh, bother,” the little man sighed heavily. “I’m going to help you out here, Victor. Energy affinity is a touchy subject among the peoples of this world. Primarily because some people see races with low natural affinity as less-than. They believe that those born with a high affinity are chosen somehow and destined for greatness and dominance over those with lower affinity. Some creatures, like Yeksa, don’t have enough natural Energy affinity for the System even to recognize them, hence their lack of language integration.”

“Alright, so I shouldn’t talk about it? What’s a ‘high’ or ‘low’ affinity?”

“Well, for instance, races like the Yeksa have generally less than one affinity. We Bogoli are quite gifted, and many of us have affinities in the sixes or sevens, though the average is quite lower. Now, I can tell your affinity for rage-attuned Energy will be quite high, and that’s all you should ever tell anyone—that it’s high. Only people you trust, mind you. I wouldn’t ever mention that to someone in a position to do you harm.” He looked toward the door pointedly.

“Huh, I get it,” Victor said, looking again at his status sheet and his six-point-one Energy affinity.

“Now, are you ready to make a decision?”

“What kinda decision?” Victor frowned.

“You have a close alignment to spirit with a very strong rage affinity,” he said, then looked at Victor’s confused expression and said, more slowly, “You have a chance to have a powerful, specialized Core. It comes with some strings attached, though - such a strong rage affinity would mean that you’d struggle to channel unattuned Energy. Rage-attuned Energy is very potent, so that wouldn’t be such a bad thing; it’s just that the types of skills and spells that you can easily manage with such Energy are often violent and destructive. Hence the choice: create a specialized spirit Core or forget about your affinities and create a very neutral generalist Core. I think you could easily form a pearl class Core.”

“Why can I make a spirit Core?”

“You are strongly aligned with spirit, which allows….”

“No, I mean, why am I aligned like that? What is the spirit?”

“Spirit is where our emotions, our feelings dwell. It’s the part of us that isn’t physical. Surely you must at least have some sense of it?” Dolo looked at Victor, a blue painted eyebrow raised up in an arch. He wasn’t sure why, but unbidden memories came to his mind - memories of his Mom and how he’d spent so much time talking to her long after the car accident. He’d spoken to her while he lay in bed, unable to sleep in his new room at his grandparents’. He’d told her about how he was scared at school, about how he missed his dad. He’d raged at her for dying. The thing was, Victor swore, even now, years later, that she’d spoken back to him. He swore he’d heard her saying, “Everything will be alright. Everything’s going to get normal again.” Did he have a sense of his spirit? Yeah, he’d say he did. He knew what Dolo was talking about.

“So it’s because I’m close to my feelings?”

“Not necessarily close to them; maybe they influence you more than normal. Or maybe it has nothing to do with any of that, and the Ancestors have chosen to give you this alignment.”

“Ancestors? You mean like my genetics?” Dolo looked at him blankly. “Like it runs in my family?”

“Oh, perhaps. Members of the same family often have similar affinities and Core alignments.”

“When you say ‘ancestors,’ are you, like, praying? Do you all worship your ancestors?”

“Praying? No. We Bogoli know better than that.” He looked offended.

“Yeah, well, I don’t want some generic bullshit; let’s do that spirit Core.”

“Yes, that’s an interesting choice,” he paused and looked around the pitmaster’s office, then continued, “I think it will serve you well.” He concentrated on the air in front of his face for a moment, and then he started setting items down on the table. A little blue bag, a red candle, and a long golden chain and amulet. “Put this chain around your neck and lean back in your chair so the medallion rests on your navel.” Then he opened the little blue pouch and took out a red crystal lens. While he was positioning the candle, Victor looped the chain over his head and pulled it down so the round, glinting medallion rested on the center of his stomach.

“What the fuck are we doing, actually? This is looking a little weird.”

“Don’t balk now, Victor; this was the right choice. Mediocrity never writes history!” He stared at the candle for a moment, and it flared to life with a crackling red flame at the end of its wick. He held the red crystal out in front of the candle flame, and as the light from the candle hit the angles of the crystal lens, a beam of red light came out the other side. Dolo angled the lens so that the red beam hit the center of the amulet on Victor’s stomach. “Do you feel that warmth, Victor?”

“Ahh, yes! You’re burning the shit out of me, dude!”

“No, Victor, it’s Just the Energy I had stored in this candle; it’s fire attuned, which is the closest I had to rage. It will work, though. It should work. Victor! Concentrate on the heat, feel how it echoes into your body, feel that heat flowing through your flesh. Now pull it to that hot spot where the amulet is.”

Victor listened to Dolo, and not wanting to fuck up this procedure, he tried his hardest to do exactly as he said. He concentrated on the hot spot in the center of his belly, then he traced that burning feeling and felt the tiny echoes of it around his body, kind of flowing around through veins or something. He tried to imagine scooping up all those little hot spots and pulling them down to the center of his stomach.

“That’s it, Victor, good. Just keep pressing all that Energy in; feel where it passes through your body. The amulet will help you create your pathways, too, don’t worry - once we trigger it with enough Energy.” Just then, the amulet on Victor’s stomach lifted into the air, flared a brilliant crimson, and began to pulse with a red light over Victor’s stomach. Victor felt a hot, angry flare in his stomach with each pulse. The heat spread out, radiating into his body, limbs, and head. He was transfixed by the process, unable to contemplate moving, sort of outside his body, watching the red rivers of anger spread through himself.

Victor focused his attention on that central point of heat in his stomach, and after a few seconds, his surroundings seemed to fade away, and it felt like he was seeing inside himself. A hot, pulsing red star lay in the center of his being - his Core. He watched the red Energy from the candle rushing into him to meet with the more crimson Energy flowing through the channels in his body, collapsing into the hungry, pulsing star. Suddenly the star, his Core, seemed to collapse in on itself, shrinking to a tiny point of brilliant red light, and then it surged out, like a star exploding, only in slow motion. A wave of red Energy expanded from the center of his being, spreading through his entire body, through every cell. Victor went even more rigid with the slow cascade of Energy, and when the wave finally passed through his extremities, he collapsed back into the chair. A sheen of sweat instantly coated his body, and he panted like he’d just sprinted a mile after doing circuits.

***Congratulations! You’ve formed a Spirit Class Core - Base 1.***

“Well, that’s my job done. I appreciate you making this tedious bit of shady business at least a little interesting. Good luck with your endeavors.” Dolo scooped up his candle and other paraphernalia, then stood. All the while, Victor tried to get his breath back and take stock of his situation.

“It worked?” He finally croaked out as Dolo was walking around the desk, his little blue-painted head just a few inches higher than the top.

“Oh yes, I’d say you must have a powerful rage affinity after that display. I’d be careful using too many Energy abilities unless you want to lose yourself in it. I’m sure you’ll gain more and more control with practice and, hopefully, a class that helps you refine your talents.” Once again, he looked around the filthy office with a frown, then said, “Good luck,” and knocked on the door. Ponda opened the door immediately, and Dolo walked out. Victor stood shakily and started to leave as well. Ponda blocked his path at the doorway, though.

“Well, what did that little weirdo do for you?” He asked with a note of genuine curiosity in his voice.

“Helped me form my Core.”

“Ahh, you were that far behind, huh? I knew you were shit level, but I didn’t know you didn’t even have a Core. Well, back to your cage, runt. Two more days until the next Pit Night!” Victor nodded and walked toward the pens, calling up his status sheet as he moved:

Status

Name:

Victor Sandoval

Race:

Human - Base 1

Class:

–

Level:

3

Core:

Spirit Class - Base 1

Energy Affinity:

3.1, Rage 9.1

Energy:

93/93

Strength:

14

Vitality:

10

Dexterity:

9

Agility:

10

Intelligence:

8

Will:

8

Points Available:

5

Titles & Feats:

–

Skills:

System Language Integration - Not Upgradeable, Unarmed Combat - Basic, Knife Combat - Basic, Axe Mastery - Basic, Spear Mastery - Basic, Bludgeon Mastery - Basic, Grappling - Improved

That little guy hadn’t been lying about his rage affinity, whatever the hell that was. It looked like his normal Energy affinity had gone down. “Well, here’s hoping that guy didn’t fuck me over.”