“Ah! I keep on forgetting, how horrible of me. You there,” Thelmes looks at Fenrir, “do you ever feel the spirit of a beast within you?”

“Uhh, I… guess you could call it that. Like, sometimes when I’m fighting, I’ll feel this animalistic instinct want to take over. If I let it, then I fight better. I think,” Fenrir answers.

“Yeah, I can tell that he gives in to his Feral,” Cassiel adds onto his answer.

“Hmm, hmm. I see,” Thelmes leans over the desk to get a better look at Fenrir. “Open your mouth as wide as you can.”

Fenrir opens his mouth with an “ahhhh.”

“Alright, look down.”

Fenrir looks down, giving Thelmes a better look at his ears.

“I see. Stand up and let me look at your tail.”

Serra snerks. Fenrir stands up and turns around.

“Now, take off your boots,” Thelmes says, jumping out from his chair and walking over to Fenrir’s side of the table. He just has regular looking feet. His toenails may be a bit sharp and pointed, but that’s it. Thelmes also checks on his fingernails.

“Thank you, you may sit back down and put your boots back on,” Thelmes says, returning to his chair. He places a hand on Fenrir’s card to inscribe it. “2” pops up next to a word that reads “Feral.”

“What’s Feral?” Fenrir asks.

“Your Feral tier is how monstrous you are. If you start the game as a regular human, you will not advance your Feral tier unless you fight like an animal or monster. Behaving like them will increase it as well. For example, if you hunt an animal and then eat its raw flesh like a wolf or lion would, that would increase your Feral tier. The higher this tier becomes, the more monstrous in both appearance and combat style you will become. However, it is also affected by the player’s conscious desire to shape their character into a specific ideal. If you wanted to become an actual wolf, you would be growing hairier already.”

“You can become actual monsters and animals?” Fenrir asks.

“You can! But, only if your Feral tier gets high enough. You cannot start off as pure monsters and animals even though the character creator does let you experiment as them. If you tried, your virtual assistant would have stopped you and shown you the closest thing to your ideal that you could be. Furthermore, there are ten tiers. You started off a tier one since you chose to be a non-human, and somebody such as Indra is a tier ten.”

“Indra? The faction leader?”

“Correct! She is a splendid example of what it means to be Feral. She may have taken on the parts of various different monsters as her own, but she has done so in such a beautiful way that blends together perfectly.”

Fenrir has learned two things: one, one of the most important players in the game is basically a monster; and two, it’s possible to either collect or grow body parts from multiple species of animals and monsters at once.

The next test tests their Dexterity. Fenrir and Cassiel have to do side steps, sit-ups, rope climbs, and they have to dodge having wrenches thrown at them.

The reasoning for dodging wrenches being thrown at them by a cat-goblin is “if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge an arrow!” When asked about it, Fenrir learns that it is apparently a reference to some movie that came out during his grandparents’ generation.

Fenrir’s Dexterity is fifteen, Cassiel’s is thirteen, and Rock gets… three. Thelmes didn’t do the wrench throwing test with Rock because “I’d feel too bad if I hit her.”

“Finally, we come to the last attribute important enough to test: Fortitude,” Thelmes explains. “It is a measure of your ability to resist mental attacks and detrimental effects, as well as a measure of how well boons will affect you. The higher it is, the less effective negative effects are while the positive effects grow stronger. The lower it is, the more effective negative effects are while the less effective positive ones are. Of course, the caster’s ability affects the outcome as well.”

“How do you measure it?” Fenrir asks.

“Like this.” Thelmes places a hand on Fenrir’s forehead.

Searing pain courses throughout his head. His vision immediately becomes blurry, it sounds like something is screaming inside of his head – his head feels like it is going to split open at any second. Even with pain only set to fifty percent, it hurts more than anything else in this game has by far.

When it’s finally over, Fenrir has no idea how long Thelmes has been standing away from him. “How many fingers am I holding up?” the cat-goblin asks.

“Three,” Fenrir says.

“Wrong, four. How about now?”

“Seven.”

“Splendid! Given the time until full recovery, your Fortitude is only at six. I take it that you have not been subject to many spells yet?”

“Only healing…” Fenrir groans, rubbing his forehead with both of his hands.

“I strongly suggest you train your Fortitude. It will likely be up to nine now just from experiencing the test, but the increase will not count until you are tested again.

Cassiel looks obviously pained from the test as well, but she recovers much more quickly than Fenrir did. She gets a ten.

Serra is reluctant to hand Rock over to Thelmes for him to test her Fortitude. Even Rock is growling at the cat-goblin.

“Don’t worry. I wouldn’t throw a wrench at her, so I would never put her through what these two just felt,” Thelmes says.

“So wait, you have a way of testing Fortitude that doesn’t feel like literal mind rape?” Fenrir normally wouldn’t ever use “rape” to refer to anything, but it is the closest thing that he can think of to describe how it felt.

“Correct! It is the most accurate method, but we can also test via boons.”

Thelmes leads them back to the room with the slimy punching bag. After placing a boon on Rock, he has Rock bite into it ten times. “The increase in damage is negligible, so her Fortitude is only three.”

“You could have told us about this test instead,” Cassiel says. Fenrir nods.

“Ah, well, next time you can request it!”

Neither of them is looking forward to a next time.

“Congratulations! The attributes portion is done. Now, are there any skills you would like to have tested?”

“You said only combat stuff, right? So there’d be no way to test anything like fishing skills?” Fenrir asks.

“Sorry, we have no way of testing for fishing skills. It may be possible someday, but for now, you may only test for combat skills recognized by our faction.”

“I have no idea what to even try testing then. Feel free to go first, Cass Cass.”

“Alright. I have a few in mind,” Cassiel says.

Thelmes leads them to a large gymnasium-like room – the one they tested Dexterity in. In the section of the room that they never went over to, there are golems, all manners of weapons, and other useful objects that could be used for combat tests.

Cassiel takes an iron spear off of the wall to use in addition to her sword. “Activate that golem,” she points to one of the golems made of slime.

Thelmes walks over to it, places a hand on it, and activates it. The slime golem stands by waiting for something to react to.

Cassiel charges forward with the spear held in both of her hands. She thrusts it all the way through the slime golem’s torso and then uses it to spring her self upward! Midair, she draws her sword and stabs it down into the golem’s head as she falls.

It’s just like what she did to the leader of garlic men, but with the weapons’ roles reversed.

“Splendid! Is that the most advanced maneuver you can pull off?” Thelmes asks.

Cassiel looks pretty pleased with herself. “Yeah, I think so. I learned it during our last battle. Felt the skill unlocked and everything,” she explains, wiping some sweat off of her forehead.

“Splendid, splendid. I do believe that would count as Combat Acrobatics, and a maneuver such as that should place you at the second tier for it. We believe—keep in mind that this is all theory—that Combat Acrobatics increases your Dexterity by a set percentage for each tier of the skill as well as multiplies damage inflicted during acrobatic attacks. Would you like it as one of your top three listed skills?”

“Sure.”

“Splendid! Anything else?”

Cassiel replaces her own sword with one of the ones from the wall. “I want to test my skill with swords and then healing.”

“Wonderful, just let me measure the golem’s remaining Health first.”

After checking on the golem, Thelmes gives her the go to attack it ten times with the practice sword.

She has to use the practice sword to accurately measure her ability with swords to make sure that nothing related to her personal sword affects the damage and test.

Thelmes measures the new damage done to the golem. “Splendid! When calculating the damage done with your Strength and a sword that does not have any special modifiers… I believe that your Sword Proficiency is at tier three. Is that your weapon of choice?” Thelmes asks.

“Yeah, it is,” Cassiel answers. She sounds disappointed again. “Tch, damn reset. I used to be up to tier seven.”

“Ah, that’s a shame. I know it can take months of practice to reach such a high tier. Don’t worry, I am sure you will get there again with enough practice! Oh, and go ahead with healing the golem now. Use your strongest healing spell and heal it for five seconds.”

Cassiel does as Thelmes requests. He measures its new Health afterward.

“Impressive! Your Healing Magic skill should be tier three. You must be using it frequently!”

“You… could say that,” Cassiel says, not daring to look over in Fenrir’s direction.