I take a moment to address the myriad of notifications that had showed up.

[Congratulations! Skill levels gained: Hand to Hand Proficiency +1 (3)] [Congratulations! Your actions have led to the creation of a basic Secondary Skill: Natural Armor! Your willingness to take damage without any protection earns you extra effective Toughness when wearing cloth or lesser armor. Cost: 100. Learn? (Y/N)]

It’s hard to say no to bonus defence, but… I really want to save for the ‘Ascending’ thing. Eh, I’ll never get there if I die first, fuck it.

[Congratulations! You learned the Secondary Skill: Natural Armor (1)]

I brought Rav’s book with me as I traversed back towards the giant’s room. I hadn’t thought about it much before, but I don’t have anywhere to leave things that I want to keep for myself. That’s… annoying. Is it too much to ask to have a personal storage container? That had better be a possibility in this world. I hate inventory management. They didn’t even give us backpacks to start off. Do they expect us to just make them?! Ugh. Ranting aside, I have to keep the book close for now. I can’t even store it in a pocket because my pants are still wet from my swim, and as hilarious as Lauren’s face would have been, I elected to keep my pants on. Plus, after the shock wore off she would have been rather merciless about the sad reality of men combined with cold water. She has enough ammunition.

Although I’m incredibly tempted to just sit with the book and study its contents until my eyes blur, I should train with everyone else, partially because I think the others would rather have me there while meeting Zathis the first time, but also because that bout with Dean taught me how poor a swordsman I am. I held my own for a bit, but I would have been destroyed if I didn’t have a gimmick up my sleeve…

I probably would have done better if I had gotten the Greatsword Proficiency skill, but… I don’t want to. Not yet.

I’ve noticed something about this game system, and specifically skills: they help you, whether you ask for it or not. What I mean is, if I strike with my stick, I feel in the depths of my soul exactly how I should swing. The rocking of my weight from front to back, the perfect arc to strike along, the exact positioning of my shoulders and arching of my back to maximize force or precision… it’s all as natural as breathing. And that’s wrong. If I try to swing my sword like a blunt weapon, I suck at it. The skill only activates in certain circumstances. A rock in my hand is a blunt weapon, but I don’t inherently know how to engage in combat with a rock as a weapon. It’s just… normal? But, I bet if I tied the rock to a stick, I’d suddenly be swinging it like an old pro. This bothers me mostly because I’m clearly not learning how to do this stuff, but instead just doing it. For Energy, this is mostly fine, and the skills are vague enough that I can work within them to do anything I want, but for combat skills? It just… doesn’t feel like me.

I know, it’s dumb. Why should I care if the skills are specific? But that’s the thing- this game system seems to play off creativity. Energy has rewarded my experimentation time and time again, and alchemy is the same way, but I don’t have the same gains from combat. I think that’s precisely because I am too shit at combat to not rely on the skills, and because the skills don’t impart an understanding so much as an inherent capability, I can’t think of improvements or style differences. I’m willing to bet that if two people with Greatsword Proficiency fight, with the same levels and stats, that they would reach a stalemate. But, I’m equally certain that if I had that same proficiency now, after training a while without it, I’d beat someone like Dean. Probably just by a tiny margin, but… I don’t know. It’s a good thought, but I don’t have any real evidence to back it up. If I could get an active skill for the greatsword… then I’d know.

I cross the pit, only to find that Lynn and Lauren are waiting patiently outside the room.

-”You sure kept us waiting. Lead the way, princess.”

“Oh? You were waiting for me? How kind. I just assumed you all were afraid of Zathis, or something crazy like that. Please forgive my idle thoughts, they are meaningless.”

That earns me a smirk from Lauren, and a sideways look from Lynn. Crap, I forgot we haven’t really talked much, so that probably came off to her as an insult. Also… It’s only now, with Dean and Rav gone, that I realize how small the offence force is without them. Five isn’t a big number, but it’s much better than three.

I cough, awkwardly. “Alright, ah, follow me.”

Lauren follows right behind me, while Lynn hangs a bit further back, stopping part of the way through the doorway.

“Zathis! I’d like you to meet two of my friends, Lauren and Lynn. Lauren is quite adept at sneaking and fighting without getting hit, while Lynn is our best archer.”

~”Your only archer.” She states, matter of factly, as she slowly enters the room, eyes trained on the giant.

“My greetings to you all, and my thanks for defending this place. You are most welcome to continue seeking shelter here.”

Lynn looks more scared than relieved at Zathis’ rumbling words, and Lauren looks like she’s moments from drawing her dagger. Her eyes keep flicking to me, checking to see if I’m going to react.

“Alright, let’s start. Zathis, this might be asking a lot, but do you think you can spar with all of us at once?”

Zathis scratches his beard for a moment before grinning.

“With you lot? It should be... manageable. Draw!” He booms the last word, putting everyone on guard, but for wildly different reasons. Me, because I know what’s coming. Lauren and Lynn, because they don’t.

---

Zathis displays expert control over the stones he animates by not just sparring with all of us at once, but also giving feedback and providing different challenges for each person. He has me fighting two foes at once, which taxes my body to the limits and still results in uncountable bruises covering my body. For Lauren, he creates a small obstacle course, on which he forces her to simultaneously navigate, eliminate several ‘targets’, and dodge while he shoots projectiles at her. It’s almost enough for me to pity her, but I still laughed when she tried to stealth out of the room and was thrown back in by a wall of stone. She was livid, but started clearing ever more difficult obstacles with ease.

Lynn refuses to damage her arrows in practice, so Zathis generously provides a quiver of stone, with similar arrows. She fails quite spectacularly for a while, protesting the idiocy of the training, but keeps at it. By the end of the first hour, she’s almost capable of accurately hitting the moving targets around her while also avoiding melee strikes. Zathis’ training is entirely unfair, unreasonable, and impractical, but it’s like he knows the exact way to kick all of our asses. I knew what I was getting into, and I still thought I’d be better this time. While maybe that’s true, the difference in my skill doesn’t give the giant any pause at all, even while he’s simultaneously battling two others. He is truly a being of baffling skill. Meanwhile, Lynn and Lauren? They didn’t know what this was going to be, and while I don’t know whether Lynn’s pride outweighs an ox, I know Lauren’s does. Anger dances in her eyes, even as her sweat soaked hair gets in them. She seems to thrive in the adversity, with every blow Zathis throws at her to show the difference in their skill, she throws one back. She really is something else…

My momentary distraction at the sight of her acrobatically navigating her course earns me a powerful blow to the ribs. I feel something shift, and a small pop as I fly, and the landing hurts like hell. Idiot, it’s a spar, but you have to know better than to get distracted. I spit blood onto the floor, spending a moment to evaluate the damage. Punctured lung. Broken rib. Idiot.

I quickly heal the tear in my lung before too much air can escape into my chest cavity. Lung wounds are really dangerous for that exact reason. Without Energy, I’d probably be fucked, as every time I tried to exhale, a bit of air would escape through the hole and into the area around my lungs. Eventually, I’d build up so much pressure in there that I wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore, and I’d suffocate. Bad way to go. The shitty thing about having a stronger body is that when your body hurts itself, the strength doesn’t matter. My bones might be very dense, and my lungs like leather, but it means nothing when they scale roughly equally. Case and point: I’ll never reach the point where being stabbed with my own bone will be an ok thing.

-”Maybe if you weren’t staring at my ass so much you wouldn’t have gotten hit.” Fuck! I swear, she literally appears out of thin air.

I grumble something meaningless, focussed on repairing my rib enough to breathe without cringing. Lauren sighs and sits with her back leaning on a rock, breathing heavily. Her eyes are closed, and a ghost of a smile plays on her lips.

Why do I keep noticing this stuff. Stop.

Lynn limps over, drops her bow unceremoniously to the ground, and almost falls onto the ground in exhaustion.

~”Mad...ness… this is… madness.”

-”Yeah… but how many levels did you get?”

Lynn shrugs, looking away.

~”A… lot… but fuck… this.”

Now it’s Lauren’s turn to shrug. -”Better to learn it against a rock than against a pack of raving monsters. Plus, you looked pretty impressive out there. I didn’t know you could fight.”

Lynn grimaces, but she seems to have recovered her breath enough to speak normally.

~”I wanted to be an archer because I thought it would be fun to go hunting things. I wanted to tame a wild dog and chase deer across the plains. But this? It’s war. Holding positions, fortifying, planning how we’re going to… kill things… I don’t like it.”

Lauren cocks an eyebrow. -”So why are you on the offense team?”

Lynn glares at her. ~”Just because I don’t like the senseless killing doesn’t mean I don’t know why we need to. It just… sucks. I’d rather coexist with those ugly dog things, and the horrible shadows that try to kill us. Why do they want to kill us?”

“I wish I knew.”

-”Who cares? We kill them, we get a town, we win this game, and we go home. Anything that gets in our way?” Lauren flicks her knife into the air, keeping eye contact with Lynn. -”We destroy it.” She catches the knife perfectly.

Lynn just shakes her head. -”There has to be something better.”

I’m conflicted. I agree with both of them, but I don’t have a good way to pursue Lynn’s ideals. I… don’t like killing. In the heat of the moment, I can get angry, and I can will myself to do it… but it isn’t automatic. It’s an effort. And something twists in me every time I do it. The sick, pleasurable feeling of getting Power, combined with the knowledge that every kill brings me more skill levels and a higher chance of survival is a really hard thing to combat. If I let it, I’d easily find myself enjoying killing. Longing for it. Back home, we killed for a reason. If we felt threatened, or we wanted to protect someone or something, or even for a cause like a religion or a country. We killed humans, animals, whatever. And sometimes, people killed for other reasons. For pleasure. And those people were the monsters of our home. Our world made us not want to kill, if at all possible… but this one is the opposite. It emphasizes growth through killing. I don’t like it either.

Sometimes we have to kill, but… if we have to kill every one of the Carnine? Would that make us monsters? We would be doing it for a ‘quest’, but what does that mean? What justification is that? Because we need to go home? For all we know, there could not even be a home to go back to. We might be stuck, and this is the best we’re going to get. It’s possible that we, like the Dwarves, will be destroyed if we don’t keep pressing forward, but… maybe there’s a way to press forward without death.

I look at my hand. Energy. Will made substance. Mine isn’t strong enough for that kind of change… but maybe, some day, we can figure it out. I hope so. Otherwise, we’ll end up like the Dwarves: destructive, hateful shadows, doomed to serve as some alien’s pawn for eternity.

I sigh, exasperated. I’ll figure something out. I have to. Or… someone else always could. That would be great.

“So. Who’s up for carrying some supplies?” The groans are music to my ears.