Chapter Two
The Kingdom of Ebonvale (What's Left of It)
The field was longer than it looked.
Most things were, James was discovering, when you had to walk through them rather than observe them from a train window. The blue-green grass came up to his chest in places, and it had a texture to it — slightly waxy, with stiff edges that caught at his blazer sleeves like something mildly opinionated. The ground underneath was uneven. Twice he put his foot into a divot hidden beneath the grass and caught himself before going over, which he considered a personal victory given his Agility score of 11.
The drums had stopped.
That wasn’t better. The silence that replaced them had a particular quality — not peaceful, but emptied out, the way a room goes quiet after something breaks.
He walked slowly, not because he was being cautious, though he was, but because his brain was doing several things simultaneously and none of them wanted to be interrupted. The Status Screen was open again, floating in that comfortable thirty-centimetre window in front of him like a loyal dog. He’d dismissed it and recalled it twice already, just to confirm the infinity symbol was still there and not some transit error that would resolve itself into a disappointing integer.
It wasn’t.
║ MANA : ∞ [UNCLASSIFIED] ║Still infinite. Still unhelpfully silent on the subject of what he was supposed to do with it.
He tapped — metaphorically, since the interface seemed to respond to intention rather than physical contact — on the SKILLS field, which currently read None, and felt the system respond like a door opening inward.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ SKILL REGISTRY ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Innate Skills : 0 ║
║ Learned Skills : 0 ║
║ Passive Skills : 0 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ NOTE: Skills are acquired through ║
║ experience, instruction, System ║
║ recognition of repeated action, or ║
║ catalytic events. ║
║ ║
║ Mana integration requires at minimum ║
║ one [Spell] or [Skill] designation ║
║ to channel and utilise. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝He read the last two lines twice.
Mana integration requires at minimum one Spell or Skill designation to channel and utilise.
So. He had infinite fuel. He had no engine. He had, in practical terms, an unlimited supply of electricity and nothing to plug in.
James stopped walking.
“Right,” he said again, to the grass, which did not respond. “So I’m completely useless.”
The System did not confirm or deny this. It sat there, neutral as a calculator, displaying his zeroes with the quiet dignity of something that didn’t make editorial judgements.
He closed the Skill Registry and pulled up the LEVEL field instead.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ EXPERIENCE & LEVELLING ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Current Level : 1 ║
║ Experience : 0 / 100 ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ LEVEL SCALING [ARCANIA STANDARD] ║
║ ║
║ Lv. 1 → 2 : 100 XP ║
║ Lv. 2 → 3 : 300 XP ║
║ Lv. 3 → 4 : 700 XP ║
║ Lv. 4 → 5 : 1,500 XP ║
║ Lv. 5 → 10 : ~5,000 XP / level ║
║ Lv.10 → 20 : ~25,000 XP / level ║
║ Lv.20 → 30 : ~100,000 XP / level ║
║ ║
║ NOTE: Scaling is exponential. ║
║ Most inhabitants of Arcania do not ║
║ exceed Level 15 in a lifetime. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝He stared at the last two lines for a while.
Most inhabitants of Arcania do not exceed Level 15 in a lifetime.
The novels he’d read had made levelling sound like a steady escalator — laborious, perhaps, but essentially a matter of patience and sufficient narrative runtime. The protagonist grinds, the numbers go up, the plot obliges. James had never fully interrogated how that arithmetic worked from the inside.
Now he did.
Level 15 as a ceiling for most people. Not a ceiling they hit young and pushed past — a ceiling they spent entire lives working toward and many never reached. The XP curve wasn’t an escalator. It was a cliff face. The first few levels were the easy handholds near the bottom; after that it got sheer, cold, and indifferent to effort.
He thought about the armoured columns he’d seen near the town walls. He thought about whatever those soldiers were — what level they might be, what skills they’d spent years developing, what they could do with a mana pool that was actually connected to something usable.
Then he thought about himself: Level 1, zero skills, a 17 Intelligence and nothing to point it at.
I could think very intelligently about dying, he noted. Probably my best option right now.
He resumed walking, slower than before, the grass parting around him.
The System notification about skills had mentioned something useful, buried in the bureaucratic language: System recognition of repeated action. Not just instruction or catalytic events — repeated action. Which meant, presumably, that if he did something enough times, the System would eventually acknowledge it and formalise it into a skill. That was how passive development worked in most of the novels. The protagonist walks a thousand miles, gets [Traveller’s Endurance]. Gets hit repeatedly, gets [Pain Resistance]. Reads constantly, gets [Rapid Comprehension].
The question was what actions he had available to him right now that weren’t likely to get him killed before the System got around to noticing.
He was thinking through this — cataloguing his options with the careful, slightly grim thoroughness of a man who had a History degree and nowhere better to apply it — when he smelled it properly for the first time.
Not just smoke. He’d registered smoke already, processed it, filed it under concerning but distant. This was different. This was smoke with something underneath it, something organic and wet and wrong, the kind of smell that the human nose recognised before the conscious mind caught up and started making excuses.
James went very still.
He’d come far enough through the field that the grass thinned at the edge of what had once been a road — rutted earth packed hard by cart wheels and foot traffic, running parallel to the town wall. The wall itself was maybe two hundred metres to his left. Stone, mortar, perhaps eight metres tall at its intact sections. At one section, about fifty metres along, it was no longer intact.
The breach was roughly four metres wide. The stone at the edges was scorched black and pushed inward, which meant whatever had made the hole had come from outside. Through the gap, firelight moved in the unsteady way fire does when it’s found something large to eat. Black smoke rolled upward against the violet sky.
The road between him and the breach was not empty.
There were three of them — a woman and two children, James registered, before he registered anything else about the scene, because the brain categorises instinctively and the instinct here was unambiguous. The woman was on the ground, not moving in a way that suggested unconsciousness. Moving in a way that suggested she had stopped making decisions about movement. The older child — a boy, perhaps nine or ten, in a rough-spun tunic that was too big at the shoulders — was pressed against the road-side ditch, arms around the younger one, face turned away from the man standing over them.
The man was in armour. Not ornate — functional, dark iron with no insignia James could make out, the kind of gear that said professional rather than prestigious. He was saying something to the boy in a language that James did not speak and could not parse, a flat, unhurried tone that was somehow worse than shouting. He had a short blade out, held loose at his side in the hand of someone who didn’t need to grip hard to be threatening.
James stopped at the tree line’s shadow, eight metres back from the road.
His heart was doing something complicated. His jaw had tightened. There was a sensation across his shoulders, a kind of tightening, like a wire being wound.
He looked at his Status Screen.
║ Level : 1 ║
║ Strength : 9 ║
║ Agility : 11 ║
║ SKILLS : None ║
║ MANA : ∞ [UNCLASSIFIED] ║He looked at the armoured man, who had a blade and a level that was, conservatively, at least a decade of hard experience above 1.
He looked at his own hands. Unremarkable hands. A History undergraduate’s hands. Hands that had, in their twenty-two years, never been in a fight more serious than a sixth-form shoving match outside a Pret A Manger.
The internal negotiation lasted approximately four seconds.
You can’t help them, he thought, and the thought was clean and cold and thoroughly without self-congratulation. You walk out there, you get a blade through something important, you bleed out in a foreign field on your first evening in a new world and accomplish nothing for anyone. You have no skills, no spells, no combat ability, and a Strength score of nine. That man would fold you in half before you finished deciding what to say.
The boy made a sound — sharp, involuntary, the kind that gets pressed out of people rather than chosen.
James’s hands closed into fists at his sides.
He stayed where he was.
The armoured man crouched down to the boy’s level. Said something else, slower. Then stood, and in one practiced, businesslike motion, sheathed the blade and walked toward the breach in the wall. He didn’t run. He didn’t look back. He moved like a man finishing an errand and moving on to the next one.
Thirty seconds later he was through the gap and gone.
James waited another full minute before he moved. He wasn’t sure why — the man wasn’t coming back, the scene was over, standing in the shadow of the treeline wouldn’t change anything about what had just happened. But his legs seemed to require the minute before they would consent to carry him forward.
He stepped out onto the road.
The older boy looked up the moment James’s foot hit the packed earth — flinching backward so hard he nearly pulled the smaller child over with him. His eyes were dark, wide, processing James with the rapid threat-assessment of someone who had recently had very good reasons to develop that reflex. James stopped immediately, both hands slightly out, which he hoped read as non-threatening across whatever cultural gap existed between them.
“I’m not—” he started, and then stopped, because obviously he didn’t speak whatever language this was and the sentence was going nowhere useful.
The boy stared at him. The smaller child — a girl, James thought, four or five years old — had her face pressed into the boy’s shoulder and had not looked up.
James looked at the woman on the ground. He looked at her for long enough to confirm what he’d already understood from a distance. Then he looked away.
He crouched down, not because he had anything specific to offer, but because standing over two children on a road felt like the wrong geometry. The boy didn’t bolt, which James took as tentative progress.
Then the System chimed.
Not loudly — more like a pressure change, a subtle shift in the quality of the air directly in front of him.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ◈ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◈ ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Action recognised: Threat Assessment ║
║ under Duress (repeated, 3 instances) ║
║ ║
║ Passive Skill Acquired: ║
║ [DANGER SENSE] — Rank F ║
║ ║
║ Heightened instinctual awareness of ║
║ immediate threats within proximity. ║
║ Range scales with Rank. ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝James looked at it.
Three instances. The floating menu on the train, presumably. The arrival. And this.
He had his first skill. It was, in the grand catalogue of fantasy abilities, not the most impressive entry. He did not gain the power to throw fire, or conjure shields, or read minds. He gained the ability to notice danger, which he had arguably been doing anyway and had simply not had paperwork for.
He dismissed the notification.
The boy was still watching him. James held the boy’s gaze and then, carefully, pointed toward the breach in the wall — using the motion not as an instruction but as a question, letting it hang. That way? Is there anything that way worth going toward?
The boy looked at the wall. Looked back at James. Then, slowly, shook his head once.
James nodded. He looked at the town wall stretching in the other direction, eastward, where it presumably wrapped around to some kind of gate that hadn’t been destroyed in the last few hours.
He stood. The boy stood too, pulling the small girl upright, and for a moment the three of them were just people standing on a road in the violet dusk with a fire burning somewhere behind the wall and the double moons pulling higher above the tree line.
James started walking east, along the wall. He kept his pace unhurried.
After a moment, he heard two sets of small feet behind him.
He didn’t turn around. He didn’t say anything. He kept walking, and the [DANGER SENSE] skill sat at the back of his awareness like a newly installed smoke alarm — quiet for now, not promising to stay that way.
The gate, when they reached it, was open.
Not welcoming-open. Abandoned-open. The guards who had presumably stood at the two flanking posts were not there anymore, and the gate itself, heavy iron-banded wood, stood at an angle that suggested someone had left in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to close it on the way out. James stood at the threshold and looked in.
The town inside was not burning. Not entirely. Two structures near the western quarter were, but the fire was finding it slow going — stone buildings, mostly, and the wind was working against it rather than with it. The streets visible from the gate were empty in the specific way that meant people were inside with their doors barred rather than absent. The cobblestones were slick with something that caught the firelight in intervals, and James elected not to look closely at what that something was.
He turned back. The boy had stopped at the gate’s edge, arms around his sister, both of them framed by the darkening field behind.
James studied the boy for a moment. Eleven, perhaps twelve, upon closer inspection — old enough to have a face that was trying to be harder than it was. His shoes were leather but cheap, gone soft at the toes, and there was a cut across his left cheekbone he was pretending wasn’t there.
James didn’t have food or water or money or any language in common with this child. He had a phone with 43% battery, a secondhand blazer, and one Rank F passive skill that let him feel threatened marginally faster than before.
He pointed into the town. Made what he hoped was an enquiring expression.
The boy considered the town for a long moment. Something moved behind his face, something James didn’t try to name.
Then he walked past James through the gate, pulling his sister carefully over the threshold, and turned right down a narrow side street without looking back.
James watched them go.
He stood at the gate for a few more seconds, listening. The fire crackled somewhere to the west. A shutter banged in the wind. Somewhere further into the town, a dog was barking with the mechanical persistence of an animal that had been barking for a while and had forgotten why it started.
His Status Screen opened at the edge of his vision, unprompted.
╔══════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ ◈ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◈ ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Action Recognised: Sustained ║
║ Observation of Environment (passive) ║
║ ║
║ Passive Skill Acquired: ║
║ [KEEN EYE] — Rank F ║
║ ║
║ Enhanced visual processing of ║
║ environmental detail and anomaly. ║
║ Range and acuity scale with Rank. ║
╠══════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ Experience Gained: +12 XP ║
║ [Survived first encounter in Arcania] ║
║ ║
║ Current XP: 12 / 100 ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════════╝Twelve experience points.
For surviving his first evening. Not for fighting. Not for doing anything particularly heroic or decisive. For walking through a field, holding still when he should hold still, and following two traumatised children to a gate.
He thought about the scaling table.
Level 10 to 20: approximately 25,000 experience per level.
Twelve points.
“Brilliant,” he said, to the empty gate, and walked into what remained of Ebonvale.