“I, uh, never had a coin this… costly. How much is it worth?” Alex asked, two fingers holding up the silver halo.

After lunch—which, as Daven promised, had upped the bar when it came to bacon-making—Orson had led him to his room on the third floor of the inn, a boxy den with a cot tucked in one corner and a dresser with a washstand on the other. A small, unshuttered window faced the grove of willows by the river, tinging the room with a faintly bitter smell.

It was better than he’d hoped.

“Twelve to one gold mark,” the innkeeper said from behind him, standing by the door. “Same as copper pennies to copper marks, and copper marks to silver marks, and so on.”

Alex turned to thank him, only to get a small key and a handful of copper coins dumped on his hands. Six, by his count, though one was decidedly smaller than the rest.

“What’s this for?”

“It’s a silver mark for a whole week,” Orson said. “I put you down for three days, in case you planned to leave sooner.”

“Oh. Right.” Alex looked down at the coins, cleared a throat that didn’t need clearing. “I was a bit distracted with uh… with the festival and all.”

“Of course, lad.” Orson smiled, put a hand on his shoulder for a moment, and left.

The door clicked shut behind the innkeeper, and Alex could do nothing more than gather his little copper coins and carefully put them away in one of the dresser’s drawers. The key he held on for now, and though he thought of stashing the silver halo with the other coins, it was too valuable to keep anywhere else but deep inside his pocket.

If Orson was to be believed, the currency of this world worked on multiples of twelve. A simple enough system, he supposed, though knowing how that worked did nothing to inform him on the actual price of things. He certainly needed a coin purse of sorts—he doubted his wallet would be any good in holding this many coins, but then again he didn’t even know how much that was worth. All he had to go on was the price of a week’s stay and meals in a small village inn that for all he knew was in the middle of buttfuck-nowhere.

A traitorous part of his mind wondered if he’d done the right thing, trading the locket for a bed and a hot meal. His clothes and his wallet meant nothing to him, so that thing had been the last emotional tie to his world… and to them.

And when have bitter memories ever put food on the table? Alex shook his head. Never, though at times he had sorely hoped for it.

Straightening up, he strode down to the window and looked outside. The sun was a bit over halfway down the western sky, but not quite there yet. There was still enough sunlight to go about and too many things to figure out despite how tired Alex felt. The muscles of his back ached with some sort of phantom pain that the level ups were supposed to wash away, and it had been nighttime when he was torn away from his world.

I fall asleep now my sleep schedule is done and over with. Alex chortled at the thought. It sounded stupid even to himself, but the last thing he wanted was interdimensional jet lag. Besides, he needed to forget about the locket and put the whole thing behind him. It was over and done long ago, really. He had to focus on the here and now.

xx

There was another, narrower staircase at the back of the inn by his room, and Alex was able to slip away without running into anyone from the chaser crew. The courtyard behind the inn was mostly closed off by a barn and both a pigpen and a chicken coop, but he squeezed past them easily enough despite stepping on one too many piles of pig shit.

The western side of Riverbend was much like the eastern, all dirt streets and well-built houses, only smaller and a bit older in their construction if he were to guess. They had built themselves a good community here, at least at a first glance, and the westerners had not stinged out on their side’s decorations. Vines and flowers hung all over the streets; banners draping from open windows flapped in the late afternoon breeze. Alex even nicked a chewy, cheesy pastry from the front door of a one-storey house.

The main road led west away from the bridge into the village proper, only to wind back south before it went too deep into the forest, where it followed the course of the Dunnser, nearly paralleling the river.

After some snacking, Alex followed the river south too, skirting the main road so as not to attract too much attention. He wouldn’t find what he wanted when there were still houses dotting the forest sporadically.

So it was a full ten minutes of walking later, when he hadn’t even seen a woodsman shack for a bit, that Alex came to a stop. There were a few tracks nearby, large boot prints that were likely made by the loggers ranging a bit beyond their shacks, but even someone as inexperienced as Alex could tell they were at least a few days old.

They wouldn’t be bothering him now so late into the day. It wasn’t so much about secrecy as it was about privacy. He needed to train with his powers some more, and while he wouldn’t be doing anything crazy, he didn’t want too many questions being raised if he were to do something specially different by the world’s standards.

He found the perfect practice spot by a shallow gorge amongst the trees, a dried out streambed still covered in dead leaves, where a tall rockface jutted out from the ground. Creepers ran all the way down to the rock’s lower half where moss covered it like a giant fuzzy sock.

It would make for a good target.

[Status]

Name: Alex Hart

Level: 3

Class: Mage

HP: 60/60

MP: 80/80

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 8

Vitality: 6

Power: 10

Soul Affinity: 8

Free Points: 7

[Skill Points]: 0

Fire Proficiency - 3/5

Water Proficiency

Lightning Proficiency

Air Proficiency

Earth Proficiency

Arcane Proficiency

[Locked]

[Locked]

[Locked]

…

Putting all his chips in Fire Proficiency had been a mistake, even if Alex had done it thinking it would help him to better shape his use of the Power. Having only the one element at his disposal was not only limiting in the options he had in combat, but he had no idea if his experience with fire would translate to water and earth and all the other proficiencies.

But that was a bygone matter. The blunder had taught him something either way. No amount of point-dumping in his skills would help him overcome his actual ability in using them. But if he had a way to increase the power output, then surely there had to be a way to match his control over the thing, otherwise the whole thing made no sense.

Alex snorted. Because games are always balanced. In either case, that was the first thing on the list for things-to-figure-out, and at least he already had a couple of ideas.

He had noticed something during his latest fight. When he attempted to pull off the fire whip there had been some give in the process. He had visualized the whip in his mind as clear as day, and the thing had slowly taken shape in his hand before it just wouldn’t go any further no matter how hard he tried. But there was some stretching there, a good push beyond the starting point of the simple idea, to when the threads of fire started to twist into the form he wanted.

That told him a lot, and he’d come up with a theory during the long walk back from the dungeon. In his control of the power, there must be a soft barrier, and a hard one. The soft one he could bulldoze through like he did with the compressed fireball that took out both wild boars and sent him flying on his ass. It was difficult, yes, but it could be done with effort and some clever application of mana. But when he tried the fire whip there had been a point when he knew will power just wouldn’t be enough. There was a certainty to it that went beyond mere feeling.

And if that hard barrier couldn’t be overcome by either force of will or putting a third point in Fire Proficiency, then it had to be manageable by his other game-related stats.

With a thought, fire sparked in Alex’s hand. He tried to make the whip again, commanding the fire to do his bidding, only to immediately run into the barrier. The result, as expected as it was, frustrated him to no end. As new as the power was to Alex, there was a horrible familiarity to it when it flowed from his chest to the rest of his body, and failing to control it gave him a maddening sense of impotency.

He let go of the fire and tried to breathe out the irritation he felt. Centered… Always centered. Instead, with his inhales and exhales falling into a deep rhythm, he focused on the pathways within his body, and on that seemingly infinite pool of power beyond the gates that let it trickle out into his chest.

It was… immense, immeasurable. Warm and cold, calming and raging—and all the shades in between. What kind of energy was it? His life force, perhaps, or his soul? Or even… God? Or whatever passes for gods in a world of fucking video game powers.

It didn’t matter, really. His trace of choice, the fireball, came to his hand at the smallest whisper of want, and he made sure to note the path the power followed, the metaphysical arteries in his body that it rushed through. He let it dissipate, cutting off the flow of power, before summoning it again.

He did it another two times again in quick succession, just to make sure, and the results didn’t change. He nodded to himself. The same path, each time. In fact, the fireball came about all the quicker there in the end. It seemed that once he’d learned a trace, his body and its pathways grew accustomed to making it happen faster and faster the more he repeated it.

As an afterthought, Alex glanced at his status.

HP: 60/60

MP: 75.8/80

Trying the whip and pulling out four fireballs seemed to have cost a point each, though his mana regeneration had already kicked in. Not bad, but infinite training seemed to be off the picture.

Keeping that in mind, Alex began to form the whip again, only this time he focused inward. He searched for the barrier, from where it was formed to where it ended. Only to frown at his discovery.

There was no one barrier stopping him. As the power flowed through the hundreds and hundreds of arteries from his chest to the hand he imagined the fire whip coming to, dozens of them seemed clogged at different points of his body. Three stopped just an inch out of his chest, one just before his index finger tip, while the others were all along his arm and shoulders. But they weren’t just closed off by an invisible force. Rather, they were shrunk, underdeveloped, and no power could pass through.

Following his previous hunch, Alex pulled out his attributes again and spent one of the seven free points on Power.

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 8

Vitality: 6

Power: 11

Soul Affinity: 8

Free Points: 6

The instant he did it, two arteries on his arm and one of the three clogged ones near the source bloomed to life. Alex gasped, nearly faltering to the ground. A new surge of heat spread through his chest and arm as the power flowed freely in those new paths, and a joyful laugh soon followed the gasp. How had he forgotten about this? It felt like drinking a mug of hot chocolate on a cold winter night, with a generous pouring of liquid crack.

The fire in his hand gained the slightest strength and brightness too, a single ribbon of fire joining in the attempt of forming the whip. Hell, even the smell of the forest around him seemed sharper and more alive.

Alex’s immediate thought was to put the rest of his free points on Power and ride the high of it for as long as he could, but he’d seen the result of doing that far too many times back home. It wouldn’t have been a shitty government orphanage without an appropriately shitty drug problem.

So he shook the feeling off and centered himself again. Moving to the side, he decided to sit down on a fallen tree, just in case. It wouldn’t do to get accidentally high while face down on soggy leaves. When he was settled and ready, he turned to his attributes.

This time, instead of putting a point in Power, he went for Soul Affinity instead.

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 8

Vitality: 6

Power: 11

Soul Affinity: 9

Free Points: 5

The surge of power and ecstasy Alex expected didn’t come. The shrunken arteries remained as they were. However, that meant he was also sober enough to feel the fire in his hand taking shape, the handle of the whip coming to be exactly as he pictured until it was made somehow solid in his grip.

It stopped there, though, the thong of the whip extended no further than a few inches above the handle.

Still, Alex smiled as he looked down at the half-formed flaming whip. It was progress. Not only that, it was information. Valuable one at that. From what he gathered, Power would open up his pathways, granting him more raw power to work with, while also increasing a bit of his control. Soul Affinity, on the other hand, gave him no increase in output he could see—the fire didn’t grow in size or strength, but it did allow him to enhance his control of what he already had. Greatly at that.

Feeling motivated, Alex pushed himself to his feet and walked across the shallow gorge. The dead leaves beneath him crackled like the fire still active in his hand. He stopped once he stood some ten feet across the green-veined face of the jutting rock. Peering through the canopy, Alex noted the sun halfway down the horizon, so he still had a good few minutes to play around.

He lifted his empty left hand, thought, and the fire answered him.

xx

The sound of Alex’s tired laughter cut through the quiet among the trees. The forest had grown gloomy around him with the gathering dusk, the faint sunlight scarcely breaking through the foliage. But directly around him, the yellow light of the fire in both his hands easily chased the shadows away.

In front of him, the gray-green blend of rock and vine had turned black. The entirety of the rockface was fire-scorched, and the burnt moss at its foot gave off the smell of rotten compost. That still did nothing to change his flying mood.

He might have even gone a bit overboard.

[Attributes]

Strength: 6

Dexterity: 8

Vitality: 6

Power: 12

Soul Affinity: 13

Free Points: 0

Glancing at his stats, Alex smiled. His attributes and proficiency weren’t nearly high enough to melt stone, but he sure could kick the shit out of it.

He let go of the fire and rested his hands on his knees. “That’s what the fuck I’m talking about,” Alex murmured between panting breaths.

Life was a whole different beast when you knew the rules to the game.