We hide.
Like rats, we hide. Bile digs for us. Underneath the shed where Amelie keeps her minions, he digs. The fourth floor’s underground is full of bones, full of skeletons just wanting to claw themselves free, but we butcher them. I sit with him, I live down there with him. And I hide.
No one sees me. Not Kuro as my cloak, no healing abilities, and I keep my mana under a tight leash. I’ve seen the way it rolls off of other people, and I don’t want that, I don’t want anyone to know where I am, where I’m doing. So I suppress myself. Physically, magically, I train.
[Intuition 4 > 6]
My skill levels, feeding me an understanding of what normal mana looks like. I observe the people above me, as they walk along the streets - never touching their mana, just letting it brush up against my senses.
And I watch. I compare. I observe. I learn.
[Observation 13 > 14]
That’s the funny thing about being a rat. I notice a lot of what happens in the town above. But I keep my skills to myself. Even when others cast things, even when I feel the pulses of abilities, the glowing mana that comes from them, I stay quiet. I dig, I lay low, I eat in the underground bunker, I live in the underground bunker.
Bile buys books for me. Amelie earns money, staying on the walls to guard the town, and joining me in the bunker to experiment on her minions. There are so many bones buried down here, most of them undead, and we kill them by the dozen as Bile excavates.
[You have killed a lv. 32 Skeleton]
[You have killed a lv. 29 Skeleton]
[You have killed a lv. 35 Zombie]
Those are the usual candidates. It smells of bones and rotten flesh, but I wear my headphones. My battery is out, but I still wear them, hoping for the day Bay can come back and charge them. It’s miserable, but I use even more instances of [Suppression] and [Selection].
I keep the two skills running until my mind hurts, until the migraine builds behind my eyes, and I need to use restoration spells on myself.
[Suppression 23 > 24]
But I also grow. I can feel it, every day. The way my limits were removed. How my mind is more than just my brain. How I keep three instances of [Suppression] active while enchanting. One on my vessel, to keep my mana tame and calm, the attunement loop. One on my body, to train my physical stats, what I’ve dubbed the cruncher, because it squeezes all my bones. And one on the noise around me. On Bile’s digging and the incessant sounds from above. I block out everything that’s unimportant, focusing only on the mana and the space around me.
And so, we hide and we dig. The longer Bile sticks around, the more I want some kind of terrain-manipulation. It seems so useful. So, sometimes, when he’s out of mana, I lend him some of mine, which is usually overflowing, and deconstruct his digging skill until I have it perfectly recorded in my archive.
[Memorization 6 > 7]
And that, finally, leads to the biggest part of my work. I experiment. I work with my Archive. The tower fed me the abilities that the priest, Ezekiel, uses. How he heals, how he fights, how he breathes. The way he summons fire, the way he applies marks. It’s all outdated, but that’s fine. After all, I have nothing but time.
So I experiment. I cast his healing spell, and modify it, and see what happens. Again and again and again I cast his spell. Over and over and over. I test it on myself, on the stump of my arm, and it makes my skin itch. Sometimes it regrows. Sometimes a bit of it rots away. It hurts, but that’s just pain.
My eyes bleed. My brain hurts. My magic succeeds and fails, but I record it all. I build a profile. Of not just the skill he had but of what the skill could be. Its potential. I feel the guiding pull of [Intuition] and I listen. To the way the mana wants to be shaped, to how it might be most efficient.
Essence guides me, though I’m not proficient at healing. But I have so much source material. The spells the other priests of Lurelia used. Philia, the Darkbreaker, and her golden flames. They’re all sponsored by her. Ezekiel is, too.
That’s why she has so much agency over him. Their classes are sponsored by her. They use similar skills. And Lurelia, while being an Eye, a powerful thing so high above me in the tower, she still has patterns. Patterns that, bit by bit, I uncover.
I compare, in my dinky, dark, underground research hall. I hide away like a rat, working tirelessly, catching sleep only when I need it, until my mind teeters on the brink of exhaustion, and when I sleep, I dream of patterns. Of connections. I dream of the archive.
Obsessively, brutally, I work. My friends fights. Opal and Thatch grind their levels, Amelie thrives on the floor, Bile builds with me, Richard gathers info and allies in town, cooking meals. Norman feeds me details about the floor, and about mana figures, and steals books.
Books which I devour when my mind cools down from the works. Books on enchanting, on runes, on sigils and arrays. I’m a rat. A coward. I hide in the tunnels, and we dig and dig and dig.
But we’ll be ready for them.
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