Chapter 67 – Wador Truth

Tom stared at the description of his new Power Strike ability for a moment longer before looking up at April. He scratched his head.

“It’s tier-one.” He pointed out. “I thought what I was creating was supposed to be a trash tier-zero.”

 She shrugged. “That was the second ding. You got the trash version, then pushed it up immediately to a new level.”

“Was that because I’m brilliant?

“Maybe it was because your teacher was,” she grinned. “The credit’s definitely not yours. It’s all me. But in all honesty, it’s not that uncommon for reincarnators, and that includes ones that self-developed before my time, to get these types of jumps. You all have additional insights from the past lives you’re drawing on to create a point of difference. When I do these training courses, that extra knowledge appears to materially increase the likelihood of a secondary advancement. And of course, that cheat code you have with fate use brings more than a small benefit. I know the other species got bonuses, but your unrestricted fate application is broken.”

“Wait just a moment. What did you just say? Did you just say that the other species get bonuses?”

“Yes, everything is fair. Humans don’t have their fate ability restricted during the competition. The other species got similar benefits for the same period.”

“Do we know what they are?”

“Well, my information is out of date, and is more of an educated guess than a fact. I assume that humans have confirmed some of this in the meantime. But I can tell you what was known fifteen years ago.”

“What were their bonuses?”

“When it comes to the dragons, they’re not sure. They think it’s something like a doubling of the effectiveness of their attributes. Insects have an insane starting growth. They basically get gifted class levels to promote them to rank-thirty.”

“That’s significant.”

“That’s why they’re such a threat to native populations. They’re too weak to threaten native powerhouses.” She frowned. “But the general population is more exposed. They’re deadly now, but after the competition they’re going to be vulnerable, and everyone is going to hate them. I suspect they’ll be wiped out quickly once competition restrictions are relaxed. But that knowledge is cold comfort, I imagine, and doesn’t help you for the duration of the competition.”

“And the others?”

“The inventor’s gift is crafting-related. It probably increases the tier of what they’ve created; as for the chosen, we don’t know. The giants have a stealth ability. The reason why their GOD chose that is a mystery, but that’s what they’ve got.”

“I’ve seen that in use. The giant I’ve met was invisible when it wanted to be.”

“Yes, it’s extraordinarily potent. There is something terrifying about ten-plus meter-tall monsters appearing out of nowhere.”

“Yes, I can confirm that firsthand.” Tom said wryly, remembering the two times the giant had appeared in stealth. 

“And the wador can reset their build at will.”

“What?” Tom asked in shock. “What did you say?”

“That they can reset their build. Get a refund from their experience shop for all the skills, classes, levels, spells, and traits they’ve purchased, and then re-buy what they want.”

“That’s… I didn’t know.”

“It isn’t as broken as you might think it is. They can only do it so often. Our experts think it’s restricted to once every two or three years at most. Even then, it’s not like they become instantly proficient in their new setup. They still need to get used to their skills and rebuild the levels of their abilities. However, as a get out of shit trump card, it’s powerful. Also good for tweaking your build after getting a lucky loot drop. In the right circumstances, yeah, it’s almost as good as your fate abilities.”

Tom remembered that blind wador and what he had said. ‘Humans are not the only ones capable of planning, and the wador are infinitely adaptable.’ Tom had assumed that it was only sprouting pointless rhetoric like people he had heard who had claimed that ‘humans had heart, and so would never be defeated.’ That had been his assumption, but maybe there was truth in what the wador had said.   

‘The wador are infinitely adaptable.’

He had dismissed that statement and then been shocked when all of his abilities had been perfectly countered by the enemy. He hadn’t understood the warning the wador had sportingly given him. He hadn’t known – hell, the humans hadn’t known, and therefore, maybe, it hadn’t been his fault.

“Oh, fuck!” He exclaimed, thinking about all that time he had spent blaming himself. Humans, as a species, hadn’t known about that capability.

“What’s happening? Why are you looking so green? Oh, this is about the wador - the one that killed you?”

Tom massaged his forehead as the enormity of this revelation hit him fully. How could he possibly win against someone who could counter him perfectly? He had been living in this new life for over a year, and he had been blaming himself for his own death the whole time.

But how could he be responsible if the wador had changed their whole build to counter him? The answer was that he couldn’t be.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he said with an anguished voice.

“No, it wasn’t, but I thought you knew. When you told me the story and made a point of…”

“Did you really?” He snapped. April was more perceptive than that. “Did you really think I knew? From what I said? From what I confessed?”

“Um… No, but your emotions regarding the events felt stable.”

“I blamed myself. I thought I was responsible.”

“Really? Well, sure… I know you felt responsible, but only a little, right?”

“No! I felt like I had screwed up, that it was all my fault.”

“But why would you conclude that? People die in fights.”

“I felt my death was all my fault.”

“I didn’t realise.”

This time, he believed her. She looked uncertain and worried.

“What exactly do you mean by expressing it like that?”

“What the fucked-up type of question is that? I meant everything I said. All of it. It was all my fault.”

“But I know you. We’ve had hundreds of hours of conversation. Based on the story you told me, it doesn’t make sense that you blamed yourself to that extent.”

“It’s how I feel.” Tom slapped his chest hard. “In here. I knew I was responsible.”

“The missing memories,” April guessed finally. “The certainty has to have come from them.”

“Yes,” Tom agreed grimly. “But I can tell you I didn’t know about this ability of the wador, and now that I do, it changes everything.”

“Does it really?”

“Yes. I wasn’t at fault. This shame I felt was unnecessary.”

“But was your guilt really driving anything?”

He froze as he considered that question. She had a point. He was training as he was for those who were unable to save themselves. When he willingly took risks on the obstacle course, his thoughts weren’t about making amends – they were mainly about Emily and the others who were victims of this insane competition. Not just the people he knew, but the loved ones of those who had fought and had already made the ultimate sacrifice. Thor, Sven, and Michael, to name a few. He had to strive for those they loved as well. It was about more than him. It was about all that was good in the world.

“No; it changes nothing.” He admitted. “But, good lord, all that guilt, and ultimately there was nothing I could have done to change anything.”

“I feel for you.” April said her voice cracking slightly. “I do, and I’m glad this conversation can lift your undeserved guilt. I wish I had mentioned something earlier.” She sighed. “I didn’t realise how much the idea was eating at you. I’m sorry. I should have said something sooner. Please, forgive me.”

Tom shook his head. “No. There’s no need. I understand.” Then he glanced at his clipboard and back up at April. He didn’t want to think about what had just been revealed. A year of blaming himself had been proven in a moment to have been wasted effort. He waved the clipboard at her. “And is this version considered trash in comparison to other tier-one options?”

She snorted at his blatant attempt to change the subject. “No, it’s a good one. Not peak, but a normal level. You can’t see it in the description, but it’s not just magic shield-breaking that’s got a boost. It’s all round better than what you had last life through Spear mastery.”

“What would something like this need, to get it pushed to peak?”

“A physical boost as well.” She seemed uninterested in the conversation. “Don’t bother trying, though. I’m sure it’ll happen naturally. But, Tom, you can’t run from your feelings.”

“I’m not running. But they’re not relevant to right now, are they? It feels like a great weight has been lifted from me.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No. Absolutely not.”

She considered his reaction for a moment. “You’re impossible, you know that.” She waved her hand, and the text on the clipboard he still held rearranged itself to display the Instant Strike skill instead of his version of Power Strike. “Well, if you don’t want to talk, then there’s no time like the present to concentrate on advancing.”

He grimaced. “Great, so what does this skill training look like?”

“It’s not going to be any more pleasant than anything else you’ve done, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He frowned. “Let me guess. More randomly subjecting me to pain and claiming it’s the fastest way to teach me. Oh, my fluttering heart, be still.”

“Sarcasm duly noted. You do know you get mean when you’re emotionally upset, don’t you?”

“Fuck you, I don’t.”

She pretended to flinch backward, as though his outburst had scared her, and then cracked a smile. “Grumpy pants.”

He couldn’t help it, and laughed along with her. It was hard to keep an even keel after that kind of a revelation.

“But no, this won’t be painful. However, it’s probably going to be the worse yet.”

He raised an eyebrow at that. The processes of gaining both his Living Wood and his Precognition skills had been horrible. “Worse than what I’ve already done?”

“Maybe. This training manual involves complete sensory deprivation and having you practise thousands of quick strikes.”

It sounded very similar to what he had been forced to do for Power Strike. “That can’t be that bad.”

“I’m talking about total sensory removal. Over time, I’ll be disabling the nerves that give feedback from your arms, legs, back muscles, and, toward the end, all of you. You’ll continue doing the strikes, but it’ll be maddening,” she bit her lower lip. “There are effective torture techniques that do less. Your only job will be to keep the strikes up. Just like with Power Strike, eventually you’ll switch to using the skill for every blow. That’s when the torture aspect gets reduced.”

He wrinkled his nose as he attempted to imagine what she was describing. “And that works?”

“Most people can’t learn this way, not even with the aid of a dedicated trial like this one. I’m gambling on your being a unique case. Fate, which is a ridiculous cheat, will help, but the main reason I’m willing to try this is you. The speed with which you’re acquiring skills…” she shook her head. “If that was indicative of your species, it would have been terrifying for the whole of Existentia. Luckily, you’re a special cookie with lots of asterixis against your name. The biggest of them is your precognition affinity. That’s… Let’s just say it’s great that you’ve got that.”

“And if everyone else is doomed to fail, what’re my chances?”

“I can’t estimate it. The rest of the orphanage population, I might give them a ten percent chance.”

“And the cost of the attempt isn’t refundable, is it?”

“No, it’s not. But for most, I push them toward things that can be trained with more certainty. As for you, I think it’s as high as seventy percent. If you haven’t got it within three months, we’ll call it a loss and move on.”

“I’m not investing three months then giving up. That’s stupid.”

April shook her head. “Yes, you will. Your objection is just a sunk cost fallacy talking. After a month of training, the chance of getting the skill at any specific moment is at its maximum. After that, the likelihood declines steadily, until at the three-month point you’ve got so little chance you might as well give up and focus your energy elsewhere. On this, you’ll have to trust me. I’m in charge of your training, and I’m right. We’re not debating this anymore.” She gave him a fake grin. “Now, remember to practice your spear thrusts.”

Suddenly, he found himself unable to see or hear. He could feel the spear in his hands and a firm floor under him, but that was all.

“Relax and practice spear attacks,” April said, sounding like she was well clear of him. “And don’t just do straight thrusts - you need to do different angles, including a downwards one. You won’t hit the floor by accident.”

He immediately tested that claim, and, sure enough, his spear cut through air below his feet. In the pure blackness, it gave him a moment of pure vertigo. He stumbled, didn’t fall, and stabilised. Breathing heavily, he tapped the ground with the butt of his spear, and it was all there, solid and continuous.

Tom swallowed and then did an experiment. He tapped a spot, then thrust the spear down into the hard ground. The weapon touched nothing, and, when he checked again; the floor was still there. He tested it again and confirmed that it was only when he made a thrust that the ground vanished. It was exactly like April had told him, but that didn’t make it any less disconcerting.

The effect was weird, but, confident of his safety, he got to work, doing exactly what April had told him to do. It was perturbing, not being able to see anything, but he stabbed the spear in multiple directions and angles. There were no sensory inputs - not even a light breeze on his skin when he moved, or the swish of the weapon through the air.

The training felt as though he was in a dream, but he trusted in April’s methods and continued striking out, despite the lack of tactile feedback. Between the thrusts, he used his magic to address the buildup of lactic acid.

The trial session finished, and, in the real world, he kept up his usual routine. The trio had developed an obsession with the obstacle course. Briana continued to use the safety features, while he and Kang were recklessly indifferent to injury. All of them were way ahead of anyone else in their age groups in this aspect of physical development. They were getting times and completing courses that the kids two years older than them struggled with.

Briana, despite her more careful approach, was included in that out-performance. Her talent for gymnastics was as pronounced her knack for water magic. Kang, who didn’t have the benefit of the suppression ring, kept pace with her, occasionally getting ahead to spur her to greater heights, then slowing to let her beat him. Tom could clearly see that he was holding back.

Meanwhile, with the help with the ring, he himself went as fast as he could, but he couldn’t get close to matching their outputs. The electricity and gravity impairments were kept permanently active when training at twenty-five and thirty percent, respectively. It meant that his coordination was iffy, and his ability to leap reduced by about a third and those restrictions showed in his results. No matter how he pushed, he couldn’t match the other two.

After his latest run, the one that he had gotten ninety percent of the way through before falling, Tom sat on the ground, watching his friends. He was breathing hard and subtly manipulating his healing to ease some of the aches that had started to form.

As always, Kang was reckless in his approach. Briana was dainty when navigating the obstacles, while the reincarnator was more bull-like. The contrast was amusing. One succeeded through balance, the other by extracting every bit of power out of their body that they could get away with. And the script was flipped, if compared to the natural order of things. Kang, with his experience, should have been the one relying on accuracy. The fact he resorted to power showed the cost of bad habits that the tutorial and its isolation could have caused.

Kang was traversing some rings, kind of like monkey bars, but more difficult, because they were suspended from the ceiling on ropes. He was throwing caution to the wind the way he usually did, trying to skip each alternate ring and having to go airborne to do so. His fingers reached out, and the fingertips just brushed the ring he was aiming for.

Suddenly, he was plunging toward the ground.

Tom leapt to his feet with a curse. The monkey bars had been on the second-highest level, and there was equipment under where he was falling - wooden tilting boards, and these were far more dangerous to land on than the standard mats.

Kang was cartwheeling through the air, out of control, but somehow he twisted and somewhat stabilised himself. He hit a tilt board and curled to deflect the force. He rolled instead of sticking, then bounced and skipped across the floor like an irregularly-shaped ball. It did not look safe.

Tom was running over, hoping no damage had been done. He seemed to have successfully mitigated the irregular landing spot and redirected his momentum into a sideways motion, even if the subsequent rolling across the floor had been awkward. Based on what Tom had seen, he should have been safe, but you could never tell, and it had happened too fast for Tom’s perception to follow easily.  

His friend didn’t get up.

Unlike the usual, he was just lying there.

“Shit,” Tom cursed and leapt over the wooden tilt boards to reach him.

The fall had looked innocuous, but alarm ran through Tom at the lack of movement. Already, he was planning out what to do. He would use his various diagnosis spells, including the half-working brain ones, and then triage whatever was critical to buy time to get to the healing crystal. Briana was dropping down from her obstacle course, and, between the two of them, they should be able to move him to the crystal.

He slid in on his knees, his hands coming down to make physical contact in order to cast the spell, when he noticed the happy smile on the boy’s face. Annoyance flared through Tom. “Kang, don’t scare us like that.”

“Is he okay?” Briana yelled.

“I think so.” Tom forced himself to pause, his heartbeat racing, and examined Kang critically.

The other reincarnator lay there with a goofy grin and gave Tom a big thumbs up. “I can’t believe I took so long to follow your lead. That fall… That was epic. I think the judges would give that at least a two.” He chuckled weakly. “I knew GODs and trials could deliver notifications directly but I didn’t know the system could.”

That last comment told Tom that Kang had gotten an Earned Skill, and it had apparently displayed itself without needing the ritual screen. Possibly the deviation from normal was because the restrictions had to be communicated immediately. Reading between the lines. He had been awarded a tier-two falling skill and Tom wanted to whistle to express his admiration. That might even be better than the one he had gotten in his previous Existentia life. Probably not if it didn’t have the fate generation component, though, because Tom had shown what a modest base with the help of evolution potions could be turned into. Still, if it was a tier-two Earned Skill, then who knew what juicy bonuses it might have built into it.

“Collision mitigation,” Kang muttered like he was reading Tom’s mind. “Works with any collision. If I wanted to Tank...” He shook his head. “Damn, it would be amazing then. Still, it’s great even for a general use. I don’t have to worry as much about falls or incidental contact. If get I kicked or hit by a hammer, that’d be treated the same as falling. Does nothing for blades, though, but I guess you can’t have everything.”

Kang lay there; then, apparently realising what he had said, he flushed, getting a red tint to his cheeks. Refusing to make eye contact, he carefully pulled himself to his feet and stumbled over to get healed. Tom got the sense it was more for show and to avoid embarrassment than for anything else.

They went back to work.

Internally, Tom found himself cursing the vagaries of chance. It sucked that Kang had beaten him to an earned skill, given that he had put weeks of effort into it before the other man had joined in. Then again, he was going for a more complicated version than the one that just mitigated collision damage, even if Kang’s did sound awesome. Every time he fell, he carefully released a single point of fate, and it was rarely used to keep him safe. Occasionally, Tom directed it to reduce the impact of his fall, but usually it was aimed for a less defined outcome. Sometimes, it was sent to turn eyes away from him, other times to help him recover faster, or regain mana, to protect against a future unknown threat, or develop Instant Strike, and even to speed up his perfect casting of the Minor Earth Tremor spell. Basically, Tom selected whatever semi beneficial outcome he could think of while keeping it all random.

The Earned Skill he wanted was the one where movement equalled fate generation and, from his past life, he knew it was possible. During the day, whenever he made a significant movement, he spent his fate randomly. Usually, it happened when he did a big dodge or suffered a big fall, but he was consistent as he could be with his attempts. Then, just before he fell asleep, he invested any spare fate he had left that concept of an Earned Skill that he envisaged. Intellectually, he understood that he was gambling, but it was an educated bet, and, given the size of the deficit in ranking points that he had to close, it was a wager he felt compelled to accept.  

It was going to take time, but the potential reward was worth the risk.

At the end of the session, with all of them more than a little sore from their exertions despite the healing, they went to dinner.