Whatever the thing on the horizon was, it was moving. Fast, or at least fast for its size. It didn’t look big enough to be a car despite moving like one. Would a fantasy world have cars? Magic cars, maybe? Jay was beginning to suspect Kalras’s binder hadn’t had enough information in it. Why hadn’t he seen that earlier? Too late now, he supposed, but it had seemed so complete at the time.

  A drumming sound hit Jay’s ears, quiet but growing louder. Hoofbeats. It was a horse. With a rider on top, if what he could see of the silhouette was anything to go by.

  It was too much to hope the horseman’s arrival was a coincidence, though. If the Class Curse and the System messages hadn’t been proof enough of that by themselves, the monolith’s message would have been. Even if Jay didn’t understand the majority of the specifics, the emotions came through plenty clearly: distilled hatred of everything necromantic.

  He needed a way to hide his class from everyone else, plus a heaping helping of luck that the scout didn’t have a way to see it in the meantime.

  After all, if he could see them, there was minimal chance that they couldn’t see him. About as low as the chances that they were heading functionally directly toward him on pure coincidence. He just hoped they didn’t know about him already. If there was some necromancer-alarm, some Geiger counter for necromantic radiation, laying around wherever this guy had come from, he was screwed.

  But if that was the case there was nothing he could do about it anyway. It was time to act like it wasn’t true and hope for the best. But there was that nagging thought at the back of his head: what happened if he needed to fight? [Wither] probably wouldn’t be the best to use against anything smarter than the parasite had been. Jay needed a weapon. Any kind of weapon would do, honestly, but he only had one type available to him.

  It was time he figured out how to work the Crystalband. Ideally without letting the mysterious horseman figure out that he had a weapon, but his options on that front were limited. The only thing he could think to do was turn around and hope his body was enough of a shield to keep the rider from seeing most of it.

  Taking a cue from some of the other System elements he’d become rapidly acquainted with in the last day, he put a hand to the band itself. It was warmer than he expected it to be. Not the same level of warmth as a living body, but it was noticeably warmer than it would have been just from being in the sunlight. It didn’t seem like either of those two kinds of warmth either, though Jay couldn’t have said specifically why he got that impression.

  He didn’t let his focus shift from the band to trying to tell more about the warmth. He’d have time for that later. Intent, then speech. The same as casting a spell.

  “Sword,” Jay said, and the band responded. It flowed down his arm and into the hand that waited for it, seemingly made of more material than the Crystalband itself had been. Jay didn’t know where it had gotten the design for the sword it became, but it was definitely drawing from him in some way. The newly formed sword was impractically large, taller than he was but not by much, with a hilt that he felt like he could have put both of his hands on with with room to spare. The blade rippled out into what looked like wavy serrations just above the hilt and turned hook-like at the far end.

  It was a good sword, sure, but there was no way he could use that. He was barely holding it upright, since the weight seemed to be almost entirely toward the far end. Did he have to recall it back to being a band to reshape it or would it just – it was already flowing into another shape, a much more practical one this time.

  The blade melted back to a reasonable length, ending up at what was probably (to Jay’s eye) a foot and a half, thin near the hilt but widening out briefly in the middle and coming to a very sharp point at the end. The hilt halved in length and narrowed until it actually looked reasonable to hold, with no crossguard and what looked to be a snake head for a pommel. It was visibly single-edged, but that was probably for the best. He’d probably end up cutting himself if it was sharp on both edges.

  How far could he push it? What else could the Crystalband become? He ran through lists of weapons. “Spear” worked well enough, “shield” went flawlessly, “staff” would have been nearly impossible to mess up anyway, “axe” became a perfectly serviceable chopping implement, “whip” gave him what was functionally a plank of crystal, “scythe” worked but he didn’t have the cloak to pull it off, and anything complex enough to require two or more parts was a complete nonstarter that gave him one part at random.

  He glanced up every few transformations, watching in a mimicry of stop motion as the horseman came closer. Each time, he asked himself if running was the better option here. Each time, he talked himself out of it. He could already see the rider. If he could see them, they could see him. Running would look suspicious. So he kept experimenting, trying to figure out how to maximize the Band.

  Were there more Crystalbands he could get? Chain them together into a gun or something? He’d probably still have to feed it gunpowder even if he did manage something like that, but that could be something useful to look into. Jay turned the band back into the sword form that it had taken after the impractical one and turned back around to check where the horseman was.

  The only thing he saw was the horse’s saddlebags. He must have been distracted with the Crystalband’s shape-changing for longer than he thought. The horse was right there, right in front of him, one leather bag and a glossy black flank so close that Jay was surprised the rider hadn’t kicked him while dismounting. And he definitely was dismounted, since Jay could see him standing in front of the monolith, head bowed.

  Jay debated running for less than half a second before realizing just how colossally stupid that would be. The man had a horse and had already demonstrated willingness to get uncomfortably close to him with it. He had to be someone important, too, if the quality of his armor was anything to go by. It was too well-cared-for, too reflective to be some standard set of armor passed out to every soldier that went out scouting, and if those stripes of paint lining his shoulders were years of service – or, God forbid, kills – then Jay was even more out of his depth than he had thought he would be.

  There was no point in pissing the man off, though. Whatever respect he was paying to the towns that Rukai had destroyed, he deserved to have his moment. Jay could wait.

  Eventually, the armored man spoke, not bothering to look away from the monolith or raise his head. “Explain.”

  Not a promising start to a conversation. How to play this? What would keep him from giving away too much? Cop rules, Jay. Not an unnecessary word.

  “Explain what?” Jay asked.

  The man in armor twitched a single finger, the slight movement somehow conveying a depth of absolute displeasure with that response. It wasn’t even a movement to the side, just a twitch like he had considered curling the finger inward and it had reflexively moved.

  Jay repeated the question. “Explain what?” He did his best to put a little affront into the tone, as if he was insulted to even be having to ask for clarification.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  At that, the man’s head finally rose. Then it ground to the side, moving with an unhurried inevitability, until the visor – painted to look like a falcon’s face – was aimed directly at Jay.

  Just that movement and the gaze it carried made him uncomfortable. There was a weight to it that pressed in on him and an invasiveness that felt uncomfortably like the social equivalent of the macabre parasite. Jay did his best to meet the gaze, but since he couldn’t actually see the man’s eyes, just the painted falcon’s eyes set between where the man’s eyes should have been, he felt like he was going cross eyed doing it.

  It didn’t matter. He wasn’t saying it a third time. He’d play along with the staredown as long as the other man forced him to. Jay had time and if the other man actually did need some information from him, he’d only be inconveniencing himself. So he just kept staring.

  And staring…

  And staring…

  And still more staring…

  Until the man finally spoke, his voice just barely rough enough to imply that short responses and long silences weren’t unfamiliar to him. Every word hit with the same force his stare had carried. “Explain why you are here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jay said.

  The man moved towards Jay, each step seeming heavy but not actually leaving a deep print. For a second Jay thought the man was going to stop uncomfortably close, but instead he stopped in front of the saddlebags on the horse. Still closer than he preferred the other man be, but at least he wasn’t trying to intimidate him.

  The armored man – who really needed to introduce himself so Jay had a different way to think about him – pulled out a medallion of some kind. Jay couldn’t see what the design was, but he could see a lot of points that couldn’t be as sharp as they looked if the emblem was designed to be worn regularly. Still no intimidation, which was a good sign. Just another armor decoration to go along with the paint. The other man attached it just over his heart and then reached back into the saddlebag.

  He pulled out a sword – a sword that should not have been able to fit in the bag it came out of – and in a single smooth motion grounded it with the point between Jay’s feet. The hilt remained pointing back toward himself, easily grabbable if the other man needed it. Jay wished he was surprised. He’d expected intimidation, after all. It had only been a matter of time.

  “Let’s try this again,” the man said, and Jay saw his eyes twitch toward the skeleton of the macabre parasite wrapped around his arm. “Explain why you are here.”

  He knew. If he hadn’t known before, he knew now. And there was really only one thing he could do about that.

  Jay bolted.

  *

  Tybalt watched as the odd man fled into the Blight’s depths. He must have come out here specifically to commit suicide. Something about that idea felt wrong to him, though. The man had been twitchy and certainly distractible, but anyone coming to die painfully at the hands of the scattered remnants of a necromancer’s power shouldn’t have hesitated at the edge. At least not for long enough that he would have arrived.

  Unless. Unless the man had seen the same thing the scout had. Or somehow had been the thing the scout reported on. What had the phrasing been… “a sudden wall of wind” that had “rustled every tree in view,” if Tybalt was remembering right. Something about abnormal thunder had been mentioned too, but by the time that had been revealed, those around him had already been whispering enough to muddy the words.

  Not that Tybalt himself had been entirely focused by that point either. It had been a rumor for decades that Exalt Galter had injured this peninsula’s necromancer severely enough to keep her stuck in her own Blight but not severely enough to actually kill her. His words on the Blightstone had been very confident that he had killed her, but the imperial archives were full of tales of Cursed who should have died and didn’t. Including at least one that had been incinerated in his entirety without truly dying.

  Even still, no one knew whether that had been some artifact of the man’s powers or if he had just been abnormally good at faking his own death by other methods.

  The details of Rukai’s specialty as a necromancer were similarly unknown. She had been too reclusive for anyone to know even that little. There had been debate about how she was able to control so many undead in her time. Dozens of thousands where the next largest army of necromantic thralls had barely reached a hundred. Perhaps she had delved into the overlap with mental magic, a synergy that no one knew existed.

  After all, if she had already been slipping into the Class Curse’s grip, what was one more foray into a forbidden sphere of magic?

  Damn it all. Even the barest potential that she was in some way still alive, much less controlling a living being, was too much of a chance to let go. Tybalt was going to have to go after the odd man into the Blight. Had he been five years less experienced, he’d have had a viable excuse to summon a stronger [Knight]. Had he been five years more experienced, he’d never have been sent out for something like this in the first place.

  Now he just had to hope that the skeleton on the odd man’s arm hadn’t been some local custom he was unaware of. If the main justification he had for the man potentially being in the thrall of a necromancer turned out to be something he hadn’t needed to worry about, Tybalt didn’t know if he’d kill the other man or himself first. He definitely wouldn’t be able to justify that kind of time expenditure to the Order without being right.

  *

  Jay ran. And ran. And ran. He ran until a root caught his foot and sent him sliding in the watery muck of the swamp and had to stop himself from getting back up and running more.

  There was no point to all this running if all he was doing was exhausting himself. He didn’t even know if the armored man was following him. Jay had to know that much. Surely a man in full armor wouldn’t have been able to keep up with his frantic flight through the woods. Even if he could track the trail somehow, he wouldn’t be doing it quietly.

  Jay listened as he caught his breath. There was no crashing sound, no branches or roots breaking. If the man in armor was chasing, he was far enough behind that Jay didn’t feel the need to worry too much. He knew that wouldn’t last, though. Hopefully this swamp was thick enough that he could hide just by remaining moving. It would be annoying to try and find dry spots to sleep, but not nearly as annoying as waking up with a sword in his neck.

  That made twice he had gained a point in that category. Were single-digit values really that pathetic that two good runs raised that value? Or was it more of a statement on just how terrible he was at cardio?

  Jay decided he didn’t care all that much. This was exactly the kind of thing that he’d wanted out of a world with a System from the moment he’d read it in Kalras’s binder. What did it matter about the actual value of the stat increases as long as they went up? Up was the right direction, after all.

  That might be the only good thing about being back in the swamp. There weren’t any levels listed on his summary sheet, but there had to be some equivalent. He couldn’t be anything higher than a single level and he might even be sitting at a level zero, if that existed. He’d have plenty of chances to fix that in here.

  Even if he had to hunt down every macabre parasite and leech this place had floating around.

  That didn’t really make sense to Jay. Wasn’t Resilience supposed to be more of a physical thing? The increase to his health was nice, though, especially since the Curse seemed to have taken even more from him without him noticing. He should have been paying better attention. Not that there was anything he could do about that now. Instead of wasting even more time – and potentially health – worrying about it, Jay shifted his Crystalband to its more reasonably sized sword form.

  And went hunting.