Chapter 2: Getting Skills
The notification came the way it always did — not sound exactly, but pressure behind his eyes, like the second before a sneeze that never arrives.
[Player Skills]
Beneath the header, three names unspooled one after another, and he read them slow, the way he’d read fine print on a lease he didn’t trust.
[Seed of Interaction. Player will receive the ability to peek into the current thoughts which flow through a person’s mind — a target of choosing. Target has to be within or below player rank.]
[Outbound Gaze. Upon making eye contact with a target and activating skill, player will have the ability to control the susceptibility of the person. Whoever locks eyes with player while he activates the skill, knowingly, will be unable to lie to him. Skill does not work on those above player’s rank.]
[Seed of Growth. Player will obtain the ability to send thoughts to targets of his choosing. Thoughts sent will only take effect if they relate to the target’s current thought, and only if the target’s rank falls below player’s own.]
He read through all three again, slower this time, not because he didn’t understand them but because he wanted to be sure he wasn’t missing something — some catch, some fine print detail buried under the polite phrasing that would make the whole thing worth it.
’Not bad,’ he thought, turning the words over like stones in his palm.
"But to be honest, these are kind of underwhelming," he said out loud to whatever was listening.
[These are F-rank skills. Skill quality is determined by player rank.]
The reply came flat, unbothered, the way it always did, and something about that flatness needled him more than an insult would have.
"And what rank am I?"
[Analyzing....1%...48%...100%... Analysis complete!]
[Player rank: F-rank.]
’Of course,’ he thought, and there wasn’t even bitterness in it anymore, just tired recognition, like checking a scale he already knew the number on.
"Show me my info."
[Player Info: David Myers.
Strength: 10.
Speed: 10.
Stamina: 10.
Mana: 5/???.
Skill: 10.]
He stared at the question marks longest, like they might rearrange themselves into something that made sense.
’Even the system doesn’t know what to do with me,’ he thought, and the thought sat in his chest without much weight to it — not surprise, not really.
He knew what his body was. He knew the sum total of his physical effort in the last year had been the time he’d sprinted four blocks after a bus that pulled away right as his hand touched the door, lungs burning, legs shaking for an hour afterward like they’d forgotten what they were for.
He pushed himself up off the floor, in an attempt to grab his intended soda from the fridge.
But then, his foot came down on something soft and it slid, and for half a second his arms pinwheeled out on instinct before he caught the armrest, heart lurching once, hard, in his chest.
’The hell? I was gonna die the stupid Mc death twice?’
He looked down — a shirt, balled up on the floor, the culprit — and bent to grab it, tossing it toward the chair in the corner with more force than the shirt deserved.
It missed. He didn’t go back for it. There was something almost satisfying in leaving it there, a small, petty rebellion against an evening that had already decided to make him feel small.
The fridge door opened with its familiar suction-pop, as the light inside spilled out pale revealing nothing but a single can of soda, alone on the middle rack like it had been waiting for him specifically.
He took it, feeling the cold bite into his palm, and shut the door with his hip as he made his way back to the couch.
On arrival, he clicked the TV off before he’d even sat down all the way, and the sudden quiet pressed in around him, thick and total, the kind of silence that didn’t feel empty so much as waiting.
He cracked the tab on the soda — a small, bright sound in all that stillness — and let it fizz against his lip as he brought it up to drink.
’F-rank,’ he thought, staring at nothing in particular.
’ And ten in all my stats... I wonder what kind of hunter that makes me.’
He almost laughed. Almost.
He picked up the drink and took a long sip in the quiet, and instantly he spat it back out, gagging, the taste curdled and sour on his tongue like something that had gone past rotten into evil.
"Pwueh! The fuck?!"
He barked out a curse, wiping his mouth against the back of his hand, and turned the can to check the label, squinting at the tiny print stamped along the rim. Expired. Not by a day or two, not some gray-area date he could argue his way around, but weeks gone, maybe longer.
"Are you kidding me... the ramen is already bad, now I can’t even have a decent drink?" he muttered, and dropped the can onto the table with more force than it deserved, the aluminum clattering hollow against the wood.
He threw himself back against the couch cushions, one hand dragging down his face, and for a moment he just sat there letting the sourness burn faint at the back of his throat, a fitting punctuation to the kind of night this had turned out to be.
He didn’t move for a while after that. He let the silence sit with him, let his eyes drift toward nothing in particular while his mind worked through the three names again, weighing them the way he might weigh coins in his palm to guess which was heavier.
’The ability to send thoughts. The ability to control deception. The ability to read ongoing thoughts.’
Every single one of them circled the same center, orbiting it like they couldn’t help themselves. ’Why does it all come back to deception?’
’Is that what this is shaping me into,’ he thought, the question settling as he ran a hand against his jaw.
’A deceptive hunter?’
He read through the three descriptions again, slower this time, turning each one over in his mind the way he might turn over something he wasn’t sure he wanted to touch.
Still, at the end of it, David knew which one mattered most based on use. He let the thought settle, let it become certainty, and only then did he speak.
"I pick-"
~~~
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