The text appears before my eyes again, just the same way it did during the night. It feels quiet, almost personal.
[You have gained access to your class through supremacy.]
[Additional details will be revealed. Brace.]
I set my teeth. A vice clamps around my head. It’s not… painful, at least not overly so, but there’s a pressure. I’m filled with vague impressions, knowledge, just tiny pieces of it. It’s like the system doesn’t want to waste time writing out a long explanation and is just pressing the intuition into my head.
First, I now know what my level means, why it’s only gone up by killing. Supremacy. That’s what the system calls it.
Any and all acts that show one’s dominance over another, that show that I am greater than some other lifeform is an act of supremacy, an act that proves I am worthy of advancement. And the simplest way to do just that is murder.
Plain and simple. Kill something to prove you can.
It’s a little disgusting, but I know more, too. Classes level separately from supremacy, though the two are intertwined.
If you advance your supremacy, you advance your class. If you advance your class, you advance your supremacy. Experience from the two feeds into one another. But classes add their own experience gain mechanics.
They’re still combat oriented, generally, but they also have some aspect of mastery or learning. Simply practicing can level a class. Upon maxxing it, you get to choose a new one, progressively stacking experience gain methods and multipliers. They also feed into stat growth, and can unlock new skills.
And that’s all. I don’t know what stats they feed, what progression mechanic any given class will have, what their max level is. Are there tiers? Rarity? Builds? What do jobs do? I wanna know. I really, really wanna know. What else is this system not telling me yet? What other milestones are there?
What’s the pattern? Steps of ten? Or maybe the next will be at 25? I’m so curious. I want to know.
“You’re smiling again,” Inu gently reminds me.
I nod, slowly. “Yeah. Killing the boss brought me to level ten. I get to pick a class.”
“Heeeeeh, jealous~” Opal trills with a smile. “Pick a good one.”
[Class Options:
No additional information. I am left with just the names.
First, I think that Analyst and Debuffer are very simple expressions of my two main skills and the way I’ve used them. I’m very sure they can be used for more, though. [Selection] and [Suppression] are rather vague in their names, after all.
I don’t wanna specialize too heavily either, though. They are what defines me in the eyes of the system, and it’s rather accurate, but that only makes me more apprehensive in letting it have a hand on where to take those skills and how to use them.
The next thing that sticks out is the sponsored options. I’ve drawn the eyes of the Master of Suffering and the Creeping Darkness, after all, so I strongly suspect those are linked to either of my… unsavory patrons.
Well, patrons is a strong word. They haven’t given me anything yet. Just an offer, clearly.
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
Neither sounds appealing.
No way am I selling myself to some eye in the sky. Are they gods? Constellations? Mythical heroes?
I don’t care.
Freedom is worth a million times more than power that comes with strings.
Sorcerer seems like it was inspired by me getting [Solidification]. It sounds more promising, like it might let me delve further into magic. But it also sounds… more limited. Rigid, in a way? Like I need to walk down the path someone else illustrated for me.
It’s not good enough. I pick
[Class gained:
[Stat bonuses: +1 Vessel per level]
[Experience modules: Deconstruction]
At this point, it settles in. Classes stack. Any new one I get adds experience modules and more stat gains, but the old ones remain. I keep my stat bonuses. I keep my experience modules. And finally, even after mastering a class, I get to keep the skill it gives me.
[Skill bestowed: Deconstruction lv. 0]
I swipe my hand through the box, and it falls apart into motes of light. There is a vague impression of the skill in my mind. It’s faint, but definitely there. Like a button to push, for now.
But I want more than that. I want to learn it, to understand it, to know what the skill is about. Almost holding my breath, I try to activate it for the first time, to press that button. It asks me for a target, and I decide to be ambitious.
[Deconstruction] triggers and tries to pick apart the pieces of the golden net of mana of the healing skill [Selection] showed me.
[Deconstruction 0 > 1]
[Deconstruction 1 > 2]
[Class up! Deconstructor 0 > 1]
Blood flows from my eyes and mouth again, and I grin. It’s so fucking wonderful.
Strings of mana unravel in front of my eyes. My new skill, [Deconstruction], is nuts. It’s made from lines of mana that spiral inwards, infinitely. Like a complex helix forming into a drill of lines. It is an entire toolbox of smaller and smaller bits and pieces, of scalpels and screwdrivers and things so tiny I cannot even hope to grasp them yet.
My first casting is brute force. It’s taking the helix drill, spinning it, and slamming it into the magic that makes up the healing I manage to remember. The shitty imitation that Inu and I managed to copy and replay, over and over.
It slams into it, tearing that shape apart, mangling it beyond belief. It shears off tiny pieces of mana, flooding my mind with hints, bits of meaning I’m not suited to grasp, thousands of little pieces that make my head ache.
But I hold onto them. I learn. I understand my new skill better, I understand the healing better. Bits that diagnose your body, that decide how the healing should go. Bits that decide what matter to produce when flooded with mana. Bits that transform that mana into new flesh, that matches your old one. Bits that reinforce bones, that reforge muscles, that make tendons stronger.
I can see how it lifts my limits, how it takes my body beyond where it should go, how the increase in heart strengthens and changes me. I catch the tiniest glimpse of an idea and it hurts. It sets my mind on fire.
And then I can’t take any more. My head is full of patterns and structures until I can hold no more and the rest is wasted like so much stardust. The spell gets deconstructed but falls apart before I can memorize it, my mind still reeling from everything I’m trying to hold onto.
My lips twist into a grin, my thoughts race. I can tell that it’s more than any human should be able to remember. The system said our limits had been lifted. Physical and mental. My mind didn’t have stats attached to it, but it was different, already. The exercises of memorization I’ve been doing have been changing me.
I don’t mind. I cling to all the bits and pieces of the healing spell I remember. It’s so distant, so impossibly vast, it feels like trying to scoop up the ocean with a glass, but I don’t mind. I do it anyway, learning, understanding.
[Class up! Deconstructor 1 > 2]
My class levels again, adding another point to my vessel. My mana grows. My capacity increases, and my blood rushes through my ears. And maybe out of them? My vision is blurry from the blood and pain, my senses feeling dull, so I can’t really tell.
I use my new mana, casting another healing spell, using my understanding to simplify and modify the absolute piece of trash I’d been using before. It works. Some of that blood clears. I breathe.
Air enters my lungs, and a laugh bubbles out of me. I can’t hold it back. I kneel on the floor, stained with blood and darkness, bleeding from my eyes, and I tilt my head back in laughter. “Hahahaha!”
Opal taps Inu with their elbow, looking just a little concerned. “Has Snow always been like that?” they ask.
The girl smirks in response. “Did you expect anything different?”
I can barely hear their words, dulled by the blood in my ears. It sounds like I’m underwater. I laugh anyway, listening to them talk.
“No,” Opal says. “No, I suppose I didn’t.”
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