Asher and Samantha watched Moxy bask for a few moments in the aftermath of winning her fight before she turned and walked out of the arena. A young man hurriedly opened the cage door for her as she reached it, and Moxy nodded at him before vanishing into the crowd. Samantha opened her mouth to say something, but was cut off by a loud voice that boomed out over the crowd.

  “Well that was a battle to remember, folks! With the defeat of Grit, that brings our newcomer to a record of twelve wins and zero losses! Moxy has officially beaten every single one of our fighters willing to step into the ring with her, except for one! Come back tomorrow night to witness the fight of the century, the match of a lifetime, the battle you won’t be able to catch anywhere else! Moxy versus our reigning champion… Brutalizer!”

  The magical voice cut off after that, which was just as well. The crowd went utterly ballistic from the announcement of tomorrow’s prize fight, and Asher winced at the sudden wall of noise that slammed into them. He briefly felt for the poor soundmancer who had a hand held against her head as she worked to keep the noise contained.

  Samantha motioned for him to rejoin her right in the mouth of the noxious tunnel, and Asher breathed a very light sigh of relief as they passed the soundmancer’s invisible bubble and everything went quiet.

  “Well… she’s certainly a competent fighter, I could tell that much,” Samantha started, peering out of the tunnel entrance at the rowdy crowd preparing for the next fight. “Do you want to go try and catch her? Now that we know she’s here, I suppose we don’t actually have to wait for tomorrow.”

  “There wouldn’t be much of a point,” he admitted, chuckling at how that conversation would inevitably play out. “If I tried to recruit her before her big prize match, she’d probably laugh in my face. But from the sound of things, her battle against Brutalizer is the last big fight she’ll get for a while down here, which means she’ll probably be happy to join us when we mention all the stuff she’ll get to go up against.”

  “You know her best.” Samantha shrugged. “In that case, should we go back to the palace? I could use a shower after walking through that tunnel for so long.”

  Taking her hand and pulling her into his rift, Asher activated Recall and did just that, warping them a couple hundred miles back to the palace.

  Recall - Lvl 16

  Finally, he thought, pulling Samantha out of his rift once more and grinning as she made a beeline straight for the bathroom. That’s a pretty slow one to level up these days. I should probably devote some time to just warping back and forth across the kingdom to try and level it up more quickly. Otherwise it might be ages before it hits the tier 1 level cap.

  His other two skills that still needed to be evolved, Judgement and Permanence, had the added benefit of being passive. Leveling them up certainly wasn’t fast, but at least they slowly went up in time just from his ordinary actions every day. He didn’t need to worry about actively using them like Recall. Hilariously, through no additional effort on his part, he realized while checking his interface that all three of the skills were now tied once again at level 16.

  Name: Asher Holden

  Class: Assassin

  Unique classes available: Demon Slayer, Awakened Beast Hunter, Assassin, Librarian, Guardian

  Element: Spatial

  Ability: Astral Dip - Lvl 30

  Ability: Distortion - Lvl 31

  Ability: Personal Rift - Lvl 29

  Ability: Spatial Lock - Lvl 26

  Ability: Recall - Lvl 16

  Element: Knowledge

  Ability: Identify - Lvl 29

  Ability: Comprehend - Lvl 29

  Ability: Incorporate - Lvl 22

  Ability: Secret Seeker - Lvl 24

  Ability: Judgement - Lvl 16

  Element: Eternity

  Ability: Eternal Regeneration - Lvl 33

  Ability: Complete Resilience - Lvl 32

  Ability: Eternal Mark - Lvl 22

  Ability: Permanence - Lvl 16

  Ability: Sever the Thread - Lvl 21

  Resistance: Darkness - Tier 2, Truth - Tier 2, Scrying - Tier 2

  Shards: 301,987

  I need to remember to visit Bellod and use Incorporate on the lich’s library before the books actually go up for auction, he reminded himself, scratching his chin as he thought about his different skills. Incorporate was one he didn’t use all that often compared to the others, and it had been some time since it had last leveled up. Trying to think ahead about eventually getting all fifteen of his skills up to level 40 was more than a little jarring, but it was better to plan for it now than later.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Correction… All eighteen of my eventual skills.

  The fact that he’d randomly develop three entirely new skills sometime after hitting the Stage of Bleed was a fact he kept forgetting. Though every time he did, he grew excited all over again. It was always fun to brainstorm and try to guess what his new skills might inevitably end up being.

  “Hey, Brian, any new theories regarding…”

  Asher paused as he turned to Brian’s usual spot at the table where the twelve-year-old could be found fletching every evening, only to realize he was staring at an empty seat. He stared at the vacant chair and table free of wood shavings and tools for a moment, before his brain caught up with reality.

  Oh yeah. Brian’s off in the truthseeker program already.

  Asher wasn’t surprised by the pang in his heart as the realization hit him yet again. It was going to take him some time to get used to the rowdy ball of energy being absent from his everyday life, even if he knew they’d get to see and spend a full day with him once a week. He had to remind himself that this was for the best, not just for their sakes, but for Brian’s as well. Tucked away within the truthseeker program, he’d not only be safe from the demons and liches and who knew what else they’d be fighting in the near future, but he’d also get the chance to work toward his Bow element he wanted to develop as his origin. With how much he loved archery, he probably would have ended up developing Bow as his origin element all on his own, but with specialized trainers and so much dedicated practice time, it was all but guaranteed now.

  Focusing on the Eternal Mark he’d left on him, Asher confirmed he was still in perfect health. He briefly thought about using the tier 2 effect to scry him for a moment, before deciding against it. He still wasn’t a huge fan of the invasion of privacy, as without an evolved scrying resistance, the people he’d marked would never even know he was watching them. He still quite vividly recalled the shock and horror he’d felt upon realizing someone had been watching him right up until he’d purchased and evolved the resistance, and doing the same to those he cared about just didn’t sit well with him.

  Realizing he needed to take his mind off Brian’s absence or he’d just keep growing more and more depressed, Asher walked over toward the sound of running water and knocked on the door. “Hey, Samantha? Any chance you’ve got room for one more?”

  The sounds of movement in the shower paused, and he could practically hear Samantha’s smile at the question. “Of course! Though actual showering first, mister, I don’t want to smell like that tunnel any longer than we have to!”

  Seeing as they had a whole day to kill before the fight, Asher went ahead and followed through on his mental promise to himself the next morning, heading over to the Grand Auction and checking in with Bellod. The auction master was more than happy to give him an update on the appraisal process, promising him they’d be more than ready for the big auction in a week’s time. They’d already put out the announcement of the greater demon corpse through the appropriate channels, and waves were apparently already stirring across the kingdom.

  Happy to leave all that to the auction master, Asher focused his own attention on the vast library they’d taken, going from book to book and Incorporating all of them. Unsurprisingly, most of the books within the lich’s library were rather heavy-duty tomes, and Asher had to take frequent breaks after every couple of books to both give his brain a chance to rest, and his energy time to recover. One day he might actually take the time to use Comprehend and actually read through everything now stored in his brain, but that day was certainly not going to be today. Most of the books were either far beyond his understanding, written like graduate-level textbooks about fields he couldn’t even begin to fathom, but he did make a mental note of which titles sounded like they might be of actual use to him, such as a few different guides to some of the major and minor realms of existence.

  There were a strange number of actual novels mixed into the entire collection as well, which felt odd to him as he hadn’t exactly pegged the lich as a more casual reader. But he supposed when one lived for a few millennia, they probably had plenty of time to kill.

  Incorporating the entire collection took the entire morning and afternoon, and by the time he finally finished and Recalled back to Samantha at the palace, he was more tired than if he’d spent all that time engaged in actual combat.

  “You sure you’re up for this?” Samantha asked him, putting down her crochet materials and giving him a worried look. “You didn’t even look this bad after dying from Eight’s magadrine powder.”

  “My brain feels like it was put through a strainer, and then the strainer was set on fire, but it’ll fade,” he said, rubbing his temples as he tried to will his Eternal Regeneration to kick it up a notch. “The effort was definitely worth it, though.”

  Incorporate - Lvl 23

  Incorporate - Lvl 24

  Not only had he managed to level the skill, he’d managed to do it twice, which was massive for an already evolved skill. He was lucky that his Complete Resilience helped combat the mental strain to a certain degree, otherwise he was all but confident he would have given himself some sort of grand seizure attempting to absorb so much knowledge in such a short time.

  “You know, you should probably start practicing with the skill’s tier 2 effect if you want to keep leveling it without killing yourself,” Samantha pointed out, getting to her feet and preparing to head out. “Have you even used it at all yet beyond those random memories of metal wagons you showed me?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted, wincing at the effort of trying to remember exactly what he’d shown her. His brain was so sore, even just thinking was painful at the moment.

  Upon evolving the skill, he’d gained the ability to use Incorporate to share his own knowledge with other willing participants. That included not only things he himself had incorporated, but his own memories as well. After showing Samantha a few of his memories from back on Earth, mainly of him driving down the interstate, or playing a random video game, he’d shelved the skill. There was something about letting other people see his own memories that was both intimate and scary in a way he’d never experienced before, to the point where he’d been afraid to show even Samantha more than the few brief moments he already had.

  That said, with how much his brain was currently pounding, it was a hang up he was going to have to get over if he wanted to continue leveling up the skill with any real urgency.

  “Maybe we can make a habit of me showing you a few of my more mundane memories from back on Earth before bed every night,” he ventured, deciding that would be a good place to start.

  “I think that’s a great idea,” Samantha said, smiling at him as she placed a damp hand against his forehead. When her conjured water touched his skin, he sighed as Soothing Spring got to work, taking the edge off his pounding headache. “You know what I’d really appreciate, though? You sharing with me some of the memories you made with Brian over the last few months.”

  “Oh! I should have thought of that!” he said, blinking at his own lapse of judgement. If he was missing Brian this much already, Samantha had to be struggling ten times as badly, even if she was doing a good job of hiding it.

  “Thank you,” she said, giving him a tender kiss. “Now then, do you need a few more minutes to recover, or are you ready to go watch your old mentor beat the nine hells out of Brutalizer?”

  “Trust me, I am beyond ready,” he laughed, already imagining the look of triumph on Moxy’s face when she finally won. “Let’s just hope he gives her an actual challenge. Otherwise when I show my face, she might just launch herself at me rather than hear me out!”

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