The book hadn’t been worth going back for. The only one with any hard information on magical subclasses had been the first volume in an instruction manual for a hyperspecific class that was designed – apparently by a single family across dozens of generations – to be able to separate salt from water. Useful stuff, definitely, given that at least one ocean here was saltwater, but not really the kind of thing he was looking for.

  The others were incredibly general. “Act how you want your subclass to give you the power to act.” “Do what you want your subclass to be able to do.” What was the point of the subclass if you could find a way to learn a spell to do the subclass’s effects without actually needing the System’s recognition?

  At least he knew that it wasn’t another situation like the class itself where he’d get assigned one at random. He could shape it. Make choices to ensure whatever he got would be exactly what he needed.

  Once he knew what it was that he needed, at least. Maybe the ability selection he hadn’t made yet would help him narrow it down, but he’d already read through the descriptions. There wasn’t anything to tip the scales.

  He pulled them up again anyway. If he was about to get involved with a coup, he needed something to either take more hits or deal more out. And there were definitely options for that in the list.

  Jay hadn’t been interested in [Invoke Plague] in the first place, and there was no chance it would help with killing Cinri’s ducal target, so it was out from the start. [Lay at Peace] would be a good spell, and he hoped he’d see it again, but it wouldn’t do him any good in this situation either. [Rotlife] was confusing but sounded like it would keep him from dying at the cost of seemingly rotting his body out from under him, which knocked it out of the running pretty easily.

  [Touch of the Shroud] was good. He already had [Wither] that could do something similar, but he had to get in close to use that, so it would be useful to have something to do it at range. [Spike of Madness] sounded really good if Jay was being honest with himself, but the short disruption time – seemingly three seconds per point in Willpower – was a major downside.

  Realistically, with a constant drain on his health, doubling up on a health siphon would be a good idea. Especially with how long the effect lasted. Jay wished there was a specific number attached to the effect, but between minutes and seconds, one bonus had to win out.

  He took [Touch of the Shroud] and, to make sure it had been a good choice, dumped both the unallocated points into Power. The active time ticked up to ten minutes. That was an odd interval for that to be increasing by. Not two minutes. Not three. Two and a half.

  Jay left the books and headed back to the booth, suddenly feeling oddly heavy. Something to do with the new ability? Or the effect of the new points. Probably the second, but it was still disconcerting to go from walking normally to feeling like he was lumbering.

  He was used to it by the time he got back to the eatery.

  *

  “You said something about getting underground to get to your island,” Jay said, sliding into his side of the booth. “How are we getting down there?”

  She tapped one of her cloak charms. This one sat right next to her elementalist decoration but seemed to be two gemstones held together by a small metal brace along their long ends. The top was white and the bottom was black, though Jay had no idea what type of gemstones they were. “There are doors. This clears me to go down there on my own terms, whenever I want.”

  “What’s the guest policy? I definitely don’t have one of those.”

  “No guests. You either have to prove yourself to the satisfaction of the library’s judges or sneak in. Your choice,” Cinri said.

  “What standards are they using?” Jay asked.

  “You can either prove your level and relative power to them using some of the most sophisticated magical measuring devices ever invented or you can beat someone who’s already qualified in a duel.”

  “What if both of those are off the table?” Saying it felt like a confession to him, an acknowledgement that he was weaker than he should have been for someone involved in a revolution. Jay was certain she could hear the unspoken doubt underneath the words as clearly as if he’d just gone out and said it.

  “Then you’re sneaking in,” Cinri said. “Most of the known entrances are some combination of sealed, capped, and guarded. Finding a way in is on you if you don’t think you’re up to the library’s standards.”

  “And what if I think I am, but still want to sneak in?” Jay thought he might as well try to recover from some of the composure slip.

  “That’s still on you.” She tapped the table. “Anything other than the standard testing is on your own head.”

  Jay stood back up. “Then I guess I’ll meet you down there.” He started to walk away and was stopped as she grabbed his jacket sleeve.

  “Hold onto this. I’ll use it to find you.” She was holding out a half circle of yellow metal.

  He took it, holding it up to examine. There wasn’t anything distinct about it. “How?”

  “They’re linked. The right ability can help anyone find anything if they really want to, and these shortcut that process a little bit,” she replied.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  He nodded and left without her stopping him this time. He left the building entirely, tracing his way back out with only one stop to page through a book that looked interesting on the way out. It wasn’t as interesting as it looked, so he didn’t linger.

  Once back out, he took a second to reorient himself in the blinding late afternoon sunlight. Agensyx had found a way into the caverns below from the outside of the building. There was some cave somewhere that led into it and it couldn’t be guarded by the library staff since the serpentine spirit was able to get inside.

  Jay headed the direction his familiar had gone earlier, but once he’d turned the corner, it was all guesswork. His sense for where the spirit was wasn’t any good either since it only ever pointed in a straight line. “Down and backwards” was not an actionable direction for him to move along.

  No sense making the finding process harder than it had to be, though.

  Where was that entrance you used to get down into the caves? he asked.

  On the shoreline. An overhang undercut by the sea. There was strain on Agensyx’s mental voice, like someone trying to talk while straining to lift something heavy.

  Are you alright?

  Yes. Fighting many things. Outside my normality.

  I’ll stop distracting you then, Jay said.

  On the shore, huh? Jay headed down the gentle slope that the library’s building sat at the top of. The building that he was just noticing was too small to actually contain the volume of books, shelves, and rooms he’d just been in. Even accounting for the underground sections, there wasn’t nearly enough space.

  Magical wonders would never cease.

  He traced the rocky beach as best he could, but several places didn’t have anything dry to walk on. Somehow the water was even colder than the Blight’s had been. By the time he’d walked far enough to see the cave Agensyx had mentioned, the bottom of his legs and feet were thoroughly soaked.

  It didn’t look like there was room between the water and the top of the cave’s mouth for a body. Even someone stretching out to swim looked like they’d be crushed against the stone with every wave. Jay didn’t trust the interior of the cave to be any better. Maybe it was a tide thing.

  He still hadn’t seen a moon to know if there were tides, but he also hadn’t exactly been in a position to look for one while in his right mind. It didn’t seem like he’d be in one any time soon, either, and every second he stood here waiting would probably only let the water rise. Or at least the water line – where it was visible – was higher than the lip of the opening. Maybe it had peaked and was receding now.

  But Jay couldn’t gamble on that. It’d be too much wasted time. He had to risk it and hope that between luck, the effects of the stats, and a little boost from the waves that were coming in, he’d be able to make it.

  He squeezed his eyes shut and went for it, getting as close as he could before taking as deep a breath as possible and half-crawling, half-swimming into the cave. The waves battered him against the roof of the cave but it didn’t hurt. At all. He felt it, felt himself being flattened out against the ridges of the stone, and – from the way his head hit the stone and bounced – he should definitely have been concussed or unconscious instead of perfectly fine.

  Interesting.

  He pulled himself through the cave, waiting for his arms to start burning or his breath to run out, but both sensations were as absent as the pain. By the time he found the rim of stone at what seemed to be the back of the cave, he felt like he’d only been holding his breath for thirty seconds.

  Once water had stopped cascading down his forehead enough that he could reopen his eyes, Jay saw that rim was absolutely the right word for it. Beyond it was an unnaturally smooth slope heading downward, looking just wide enough for two people to be shoulder-to-shoulder. It looked like a slide, honestly, if a slide was carved into underground rock.

  Jay pulled himself up and over the rim, flopping over right into the bowl of the “slide,” and discovered it was also smooth enough to act like one.

  He picked up speed fast, whizzing down the slide as it curved in a gentle never-ending arc. At some point it had to be doubling back on itself, but since nearly the only way he could even tell he was moving was by passing the occasional patch of glowing lichen on the roof of the ceiling, Jay couldn’t tell when it was happening.

  He just. Kept. Sliding. Down and down, on and on, deeper and deeper. He did his best to avoid paying attention to the familiar bond’s directional sense, because the feeling of that spinning around started making him nauseous almost immediately after he started moving.

  *

  Eventually the slide ended, shooting Jay out into a pool of water barely deep enough to exist at all. He didn’t feel that any more than he had the cave’s roof and any attention he would have normally paid to the biting cold of the water was stolen away by the noises echoing around the cavern he was now in. They were harsh noises, a mix of scraping, snarling, and something that sounded like discordant screaming.

  It was coming from the same direction his familiar bond was pointing. His spirit was fighting something. Or maybe someone. Either way, Jay knew he’d be smart to help. He shook some of the water off as he stood up, then took off at a squelching run.

  If he had to guess, Jay would have said he ran for fifteen minutes before seeing them. He’d slowed down just a moist-socked jog by the end of it and was very thankful that he had when he hit the lip of a small ridge, beneath which was Agensyx and his opponent. Opponents, really, three that he could see actively attacking and the remnants of an army of the things scattered around, already dead.

  He had absolutely no idea what they were. They were somewhere between snakes and lizards, thickly scaled with twin horns and two back legs that they were using to launch themselves at the spirit. Every time one jumped, the others would chitter, and whichever one actually flew let out a disturbingly humanlike scream as it did.

  From the amount of corpses of the same type of creature around, Agensyx had plenty of knowledge on how to fight them. The launching attacks were batted aside without a blink and he occasionally struck back. The only movements Jay saw from his familiar were mild repositioning to stay where he could see them all and his return attacks.

  Jay lifted a hand, one finger pointing directly at the nearest creature. He had the perfect spell to test in mind for this: [Bolt of Decay]. He triggered the spell, focusing on the center of the lizard thing’s body. It didn’t cast like [Wither] had and it definitely didn’t cast like [Lesser Resurrection] had. This one forced him to speak.

  “Twist and warp.” The words tore themselves from his mouth, backed by the System’s resonance, and Omnilinguist clued him in that they were in a much different language to what he had been speaking. The incantation’s words were in a harsher language, more guttural.

  The bolt itself formed as he finished the final word, a needle of spiraling impossible colors shot through with a crackling plasmatic whiteness. It ripped through the air between Jay’s finger and the creature between blinks with a sound like the tiniest peal of thunder. Then it cored the creature, cutting a clean circle through it, the edges of which took on that same crawling whiteness. The guts of the creature had vanished as if scooped out by a melon baller.

  The creature began to convulse, curling in on itself and thrashing its legs in random disjointed spasms. Then the scales started to writhe and twist, some sliding over their neighbors and others seeming to retract into the body beneath. The pale threads of energy began to fade, leaving behind more of the sickly mess of impossible color, and the bands of exposed flesh began to bulge and distort.

  A System window unfurled into existence in front of him, this one not anything he’d seen before, a black background with white text.

  That was a terrifying message to see as a result of a simple spell. How many other people could trigger something like that? Was this the equivalent of a fire drill?

  Agensyx grabbed Jay in the few seconds he took to marvel at the severity of that message and ran. “You did that?” The spirit seemed to have killed the other two creatures while the spell had happened.

  “I think so.” Jay’s voice was shaky. The thing was still expanding, bubbling outwards far beyond its body size. “What the hell is that?” Another System window cut off his familiar’s response.

  Agensyx was still talking when Jay dismissed the notification. “I could not be more serious about this warning to you, Jay. Never do that again. If you ever get the chance to remove whatever ability gave it to you, do so.”

  Jay was still gaping at the cancerous lump that continued growing even as they fled.

  “Never again, Jay. I need you to say it.”

  “Okay. I won’t cast it again if I have another choice,” Jay promised.

  “If your choice is between using that ability and dying, die. It would be better than that result.”

  What the hell did that mean?