Ellison made his choice. He’s an enemy now. Same as the rest.

I shook my head. That was wrong. Not only was Ellison young, he’d just been through one of the biggest societal upheavals in the last century. If not the biggest. Anyone would be confused. Reevaluating what you once held as fact and using that as foundation for challenging old thinking was a natural part of learning.

Even if that’s true, it doesn’t excuse what he did. You can say with relative confidence that he was the User at the Cathedral. Yet, no noteworthy contributions to the receptacle before you made your last drop, right before the buzzer. He had every intention of letting you all die.

There had to be a reason. Something I was overlooking. Considering how he was already halfway out the door before we’d talked, I’d avoided confronting Ellison on his User status directly, reasoning it would only push him further away. As it was, that was only a partial success. My brother had chosen to remain in the building, unready to strike out on his own yet.

Still, that was probably temporary.

Ellison ignored both nuance and context, and latched on to the most selfish, self-serving aspect of what you taught him and ran with it. Then he followed it to its logical conclusion, with no budgeting for wiggle room or gray areas. You’ve spent plenty of time ruminating on the far-reaching aspects of your philosophy. You know exactly where it leads.

“Shut up.” I hissed, laying back on the couch and placing a hand on my forehead. There was no one left to witness my frustration. It’d taken a large chunk of the morning and afternoon to get my family settled. As expected, Iris and Mom had opted to live together. I’d spoken to them separately to ensure that was what they both wanted. They were still taking up two apartments at the end of the hall—Iris was using the adjacent room for a future workshop. According to Kinsley, Ellison chose an apartment on the seventh floor, content with the tradeoff of reduced square footage in favor of distance.

The only place we were likely to run into each other now was the lobby.

Maybe that’s for the best. If you need to deal with him, it’ll be easier—

“Shut up!” I shouted at no one in particular, then immediately felt stupid. Sae was still in the guest room. Iris said their initial meeting was productive, giving her plenty of ideas for how to improve Sae’s situation, but I hadn’t seen Sae herself since yesterday.

could go fuck itself. Even if I wasn’t overlooking anything, and the reality was exactly as it appeared, there was no reality where I “dealt” with Ellison preemptively. Perhaps he wasn’t an ally anymore, but he was still my brother. The only way I’d ever consider that line of thought was if he posed a clear and direct threat to the rest of my family. As it was, he was just selfish.

And, frankly, not nearly as rational and pragmatic as he believed himself to be. There were plenty of holes in what he was putting forward. If he was truly that cold and calculating, what he’d done made little sense. Even if the situation was the worst case, and he was actively working against us. The smarter move would have been to ingratiate himself with both the Merchant’s and Adventurer’s guild. He was already positioned for it. Which made the justification to shut himself off from the resources of both over notions of philosophy, hypocrisy, and pride, a borderline idiotic call.

And whatever else he was, my brother wasn’t stupid. Either it was an emotional decision, or there was another a reason.

Tired of spinning my wheels and coming up empty, I glanced over to a pile of boxes next to the door. I’d been explicitly forbidden from helping with the moving process. Instead, Kinsley sent some of her mercenaries over to help Mom and Iris pack up the apartment, and they had stopped by afterwards to drop off most of the things from my room.

With a sigh, I started going through the boxes. One was mostly clothes. I didn’t have a lot of variety when it came to wardrobe. Generally jeans, unbranded t-shirts, and hoodies. As I unpacked, my mind began to wander in another direction.

King’s Ranger wasn’t exactly an ideal fit, even beyond the fact that it implied the King was a real User who would potentially hold sway over me. The immediate issue was one of stats. From the feats I’d reviewed, it prioritized Agility, Strength, and Intelligence, in that order. It would have been worse if Nychta’s “Ally” had assigned me a class with Strength as the primary focus, like a variant of Knight or Barbarian. But current circumstances still called for reevaluating my leveling strategy if I intended to use a bow at long distance. Heavy draw weight was crucial to both range and penetration. At my current strength, I could probably manage to draw and fire an average compound bow. But the bows I’d seen both in Kinsley’s store and in the wild were exclusively recurve. Even the training bow I bought took significantly more effort to draw than I expected.

It went without saying that the higher quality, harder hitting bows would likely have a strength prerequisite along with agility.

Which rankled. If Ordinator was better rounded, I would have no issue using King’s Ranger like I’d been using Page. Cherrypicking feats with no requirements that augmented and iterated on my current fighting style, and ignoring anything that was tertiary or unsuited. An additional pool to draw from when it suited me.

But if the Overseer was to be believed, the Ordinator Class wouldn’t reach its full potential until far later. Which made it necessary to lean on King’s Ranger in the interim.

Why couldn’t it be a mage class?

Anything with magic focus would have taken care of my range issue. I could have kept leveling Intelligence as my primary stat. Thanks to my experience in the Null. I was going to have to find a way to work around the conflicting goals of two classes that didn’t work particularly well together.

I opened another box and found it stacked to the top with test prep and study materials. Most of the notebooks were full of half-awake scribblings and bullet-points, only a few of them blank or partially filled. I kept the mostly blank notebooks and tossed the others, along with my prep-books. It felt strange discarding items I’d once valued so highly, but there was no point in keeping relics of a bygone era. They served no purpose now.

There was a high-pitched series of clinks, like marbles mashing together. I reached below the textbooks, searching for the source, and pulled out a brown drawstring bag. It was full of multi-sided dice, all the same variation of dark blue, black, and red.

My thoughts immediately went to Daphne. Our afternoons of Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons, that eventually came to a bitter end. If all went well with the suits, I’d be seeing her soon.

Strange to think about.

I withdrew a crimson twenty-sided die with silver lettering. Back when I’d played regularly, it was always the dice I used for overly difficult skill-checks or perilous combat situations. Daph called it the “Oh-Shit dice,” and made a point of calling it out every time I fished it out of the bag.

It wasn’t superstition, exactly. The reason the dice seemed to roll better than the rest was simple. The sample size of a few rolls per session was too small. If I rolled it enough, it’d roll the same as any other dice.

Still, after a few sessions, I’d subconsciously started to rely on it.

As I fiddled with the dice, rolling it around in my palm, something occurred to me.

increased the chances of a certain variable working in my favor. It was a reliable way of creating windows of opportunity and using the surrounding environment to get an edge, and creating unexpected obstacles for any opponent. Without fully realizing it, I’d been using the same way I learned to use its predecessor. Casting it once in hopes of achieving a specific result. The description was too vague. But the name itself—cascade in lieu of spiral—seemed to imply something more.

I held up the dice and studied it. I’d start with something simple to rule out what the skill was capable of.

Give me a twenty.

Taking a deep breath, I emptied my mind, and began to lower the dice towards my kitchen counter with the silver one facing up. This was the control test. If I didn’t drop it, and set it firmly on the counter, it shouldn’t be possible to achieve the goal I wanted. Better to rule out the impossible first, before I started testing in earnest.

“Whatcha doin, helpline?” Sae asked.

I jumped in my seat, sending the dice flying. Sae had crossed into the kitchen to talk to me. She’d spoken just before entering awareness’s range, and made absolutely no sound before that. The shower and night’s rest had gone a long way towards improving her bedraggled appearance, though the red compound eyes were still off-putting.

Sae reached up and caught the dice out of the air without turning her head. Then placed it back down on the table and slid it across the counter.

I caught it beneath my hand, my brow immediately furrowing at the timing.

No fucking way.

Slowly, I removed my hand and revealed a silver 20.

That shouldn’t have worked. Too many moving parts, and I had no idea Sae was there. The only time I ever tried something remotely similar, it nearly knocked me out, and all the arrow had to do was hit the target. Not land in a highly specific manner.

“Nice.” Sae raised an eyebrow. “Can we retroactively say I was rolling to talk you into raising the thermostat?”

I bit back a catty response on the table etiquette of calling out what you were rolling for before you actually rolled, and used the penthouse remote to bump the temperature five degrees higher. “Done.”

“No banter?” Sae’s face fell. “Please tell me you’re not abstaining from your usual assholery out of pity.”

I shook my head, “Nope. I’m abstaining from assholery because I want something.”

“Oh. Well… I did come out here to try to make myself useful, especially considering everything you’re doing for me. Iris is far too nice, by the way. Guess I’m game.” Sae shrugged, then her eyes narrowed. “As long as it’s not too weird.”

I thought about it. As an exception to my Remain Unidentified as an Ordinator clause, Kinsley would have been ideal. But she was busy, and I relied on her too much as it was. As the only standing member of my original group, Sae already knew my cover story of receiving User status after the transposition event was bullshit, and that in truth, I’d been a User long before that. And from the footage the Overseer had shown, Ordinators varied drastically. Even factoring for the possibility that more information came out, it was unlikely she’d be able to connect the dots. There were too many classes and abilities to make that logical jump. Still, I’d need to be careful.

“Matt?” Sae tried again.

I made a decision and stuck the dice bag in my pocket. “Come on. Grab a notepad and pen from the box.”