She knows my name.
My first instinct is to Bloodstep away immediately, but I contain myself. That would give the game away entirely.
I do, however, use a skill.
Name: Sapphire Clearwater
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: Half-Elf
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
That is completely and totally unhelpful. Thanks, Appraise.
“That’s a useful skill, demon,” Sapphire says, her nails digging into my shoulder. She hasn’t stopped smiling. “Or would you prefer Evelyn?”
“Evelyn is fine, thank you,” I say. The term demon in reference to myself makes me viscerally uncomfortable on a level I can’t quite explain—another thing I’m going to have to ask the researchers when I find them.
Assuming I make it out of here, of course. The woman sitting next to me is dangerous, though she doesn’t look it.
“I knew my senses were right,” the white-haired half-elf says. Her grip on my shoulder tightens to the point where I’m surprised she hasn’t drawn blood yet. “Quite interesting indeed. Not even a month from creation, and you have this maturity already?”
Does she have Appraise? How does she know that? And she’s been following me?
I stop drawing on Acting, letting the feigned confusion drop from my face. Clearly, it’s not working against her, and she’s almost certainly got some skill that’s hiding us from the view of others somehow, since nobody has taken notice of us despite her voice getting louder.
“You’ve been following me,” I say. “How long?”
“Since the Outpost,” she replies. Apparently confident that I’m not going to run immediately, she loosens her grip.
“Outpost 10? We’ve barely left.”
“Seventeen,” she says. “It was unrelated business that brought me there, but when I saw someone like you…”
Sapphire places two fingers under my chin, her sharp nails digging into my flesh, and she tilts my head upwards to meet her eyes. I let her. The longer she spends sitting next to me, the more danger she exudes, and given that I can’t Appraise her level, I don’t think it’s safe for me to try running.
Piercing blue eyes the shade of Sapphire’s namesake stare back at me, her gaze intense as mine was when I saw my flaming red pupils in a reflection.
“…far more interesting,” she says, her gaze unwavering.
I stare back at her.
She was following me at Outpost 17? I didn’t see her then, and she has a very distinctive figure.
“You aren’t the only one who can disguise herself, Evelyn,” she says as if she can read my thoughts, tilting her head to one side. The skin on her face ripples, her hair shifting with it, and a moment later I find myself staring at an exact copy of the face I’ve adopted. Sapphire tilts her head back, and she returns to white hair and blue eyes.
Pieces fall into place. When I was escaping Outpost 17, I heard the guards talk about two of them being missing. I was responsible for one of them, of course, but the other…
“You killed a guard,” I surmise.
“I may have,” she replies. “A minor cost in the grand scheme of things.”
“You detected me,” I say. “How?”
And what even is a demon? The word fills me with a sense of dread, which means that the memories that I was implanted with don’t like the concept, but while I can easily recite the racial traits and tendencies of elves and the skyfolk and however many other races, there’s a hole where I should have information about demons. There’s just… dread.
“You need not fear others,” Sapphire says. This time, her smile somehow feels softer, less unnerving. “I have what many do not.”
“Why did you seek me out?” I ask. She didn’t give me a proper answer to her question, but I doubt I’ll be getting any straight answers out of her today.
“Demonic influence has not touched this minor nation in decades,” she says. “And I’d like to see what someone like you can do, given the opportunity.”
The statement that burns at my core rings through my mind once more.
No matter the cost, I will advance.
I have, and I will. Even now, the issues at the forefront of my mind are that of how I can gain more power.
Does this woman know that?
“You gain something from this,” I state. It’s not a question.
“I do,” she says, letting go of my chin. She spreads her hands, which would probably be more impressive if we were anywhere other than next to each other on a train. When she speaks, though, she conveys complete seriousness. “Entertainment.”
The way she says the word sends a chill up my spine, the same sense of imminent dread that the word demon invoked returning full-force.
She takes my right hands with both of hers. “Should you choose, I can enhance you. I can draw your potential from within.”
I eye her suspiciously. At this moment, I trust her about as far as I can throw her, and given how powerful she must be, that can’t be very far.
“Of course you don’t trust me,” Sapphire says, her smile showing her two vestigial fangs. “If you choose to learn, choose to advance, you’ll see me in a backwater city in this backwater nation.”
The train darkens, and I glance outside to see that we’ve entered a tunnel. Not anything out of the ordinary, but the lights within start flickering. That gets other people murmuring.
The half-elf woman raises my hand to her lips, warmth pressing against the back of my hand. I’m so surprised by the kiss that I fail to react when she drags her sharpened fangs across my flesh, drawing blood as she does.
Sapphire lets go of me. “Find me in Ravendale.”
The lights flicker off. Someone screams, but I don’t think it’s a sound of pain. I’ve become intimately familiar with those, and this is fear.
When they abruptly turn back on again, we’re out of the tunnel and Sapphire is gone.
Objective: Find Sapphire in Ravendale
Arrive in Ravendale free and alive.
Distance to target: 47 miles
Reward: Bronze-tier skill
The new objective startles me, as does the disappearance of the half-elf, but I take it in stride.
The lights flicker back on just as we make it out of the tunnel, the tracks winding around the side of a mountain, and I immediately start looking to see if she’s disguised herself.
Before I can scan more than a couple people, however, I catch a glimpse of myself in the half-strength reflection of the mirror.
A woman with red eyes, black hair, and a green shift dress looks back at me.
Shit. Before I can take the time to fully process what Sapphire’s done, I hear shouting.
The two guards still on this train car shove other passengers out of their way before I can attempt to restore my Disguise Self, which apparently Sapphire can take away without me even noticing.
My right hand is curled into a fist now, I notice. I open it, and I realize that Sapphire’s left me a note. I didn’t feel the paper before she disappeared, but I’m less surprised about that than I should be.
With my enhanced Mind (Speed), I have enough time to read the note before the first guard manages to muscle past the panicked passengers who’ve spilled into the aisle.
Adversity sculpts excellence.
Find me if you can, demon girl.
Good luck.
~ Saph
I want to sigh, but there’s no time to be wasted. Both of the guards are approaching me now, and screaming passengers are filtering out of the train car.
Since I haven’t used any of my level-up stat points yet, I take the liberty of expending one, placing it into Body (Strength) as I draw my knife. The guards haven’t gotten within range of me yet, but they’ll be here soon.
Briefly, I consider trying to threaten the other passengers here, but they’re already mostly out, and I don’t know how effective taking hostages will be against security for what I figure to be either classified or illicit operations.
I don’t want to be in a closed space against two guards who are definitely higher levels than I am, so I attack the window.
With the added power of Knifefighting, the first strike creates a spiderweb of cracks splintering out through the window. When I throw myself into it, the weakened glass shatters. It doesn’t break cleanly, though, and as I clamber out through it, lines of sharp pain igniting where the window digs into my flesh. I use Shape Blood to keep my blood from sticking to any of the surfaces.
The wind buffets me as soon as I’m out the window, the deafening whistle of air drowning out the guards yelling at me to stop—as if I’ll actually listen to them—but I keep going. The train is moving fast enough that I nearly lose my grip on the broken glass in the windowframe, but I dig my hands in harder, ignoring the spikes of pain as more cuts open. Cuts are useful for me, anyway—I use Shape Blood, sending the results of my injuries flying towards the two guards.
They aren’t staying put for me, though. The man flinches backwards, but the woman’s on top of things. With one hand, she gestures at the air, speaking to people I can’t see. The other guards, I presume.
With the other, she holds the same model of half-size gun that I have in my pack.
The sharp report of the gun is even louder than the wind, and I hear the thunderous crack rip forth from its barrel once, twice, thrice, coinciding with more panicked screams from the errant couple passengers still in the process of running away from the car.
Another source of blood opens up in my gut, and it takes me a moment to process that I’ve been shot. The sensation of impact follows after, a breath-stealing punch to my abdomen, and I immediately Shape Blood in an effort to knock the weapon out of her hand.
I don’t stick around to see whether it works. If it did, that’s good. If it didn’t, I'm not sticking around to get shot again. Instead, I drag myself out of the window, wincing as glass shards scrape against every inch of my body, finding their way into every tear of the shift. I whisper a silent apology to Alder for ruining his spare clothes.
The wind generated by the raw speed of the train blows me from my precarious position, threatening to send me flying off and away from the train, but I react quickly, catching myself on the edge of the window frame with both hands. Broken glass breaks further beneath my grip, and almost lose my grip.
My legs dangling underneath me into thin air, I look around me.
With my Mind (Speed) stat, I'm able to speed up my perception and take in the landscape around me. Now that we're out of the tunnels, the train glides over rails built on the winding outline of a sparsely vegetated mountain with a sheer slope.
Losing my grip will mean plummeting a hundred feet. I’ve survived that before, but I don’t think I’ll be able to pull it off again as easily when my enemies are already organized to take me down.
The roof isn’t far from where I am, though, and there are handholds on the exterior of the train—presumably for maintenance work—so I haul myself up, avoiding the window I shattered.
Another window breaks with a crack of thunder, but the bullet misses. Her aim really isn’t up to par. Then again, I don’t really have room to judge—the last time I tried to fire a gun, it practically jumped out of my hands.
Even with a dozen wounds slowing me, I make it to the top of the train pretty easily. It’s flatter than I thought it would be, a long rectangle of cold metal dotted with nuts and bolts. A single hatch leads up from the opposite side of the roof I stand on. Behind and ahead of me are identical train cars, each of them with similar one-hatch setups.
Three hatches begin to open at the same time—mine, the one eighty feet in front of me, and the one on the car right behind me.
Nobody emerges just yet, which gives me enough time to unzip my bag and withdraw the mostly-unused firearm within.
If Sapphire—Saph, whatever she wants to call herself—wants to throw me into danger, I’ll drag myself right out.
This time, with my human body, the gun fits snugly in my grip.
I’m making it out of here, and I’ll do anything to grow my power in the process.
As the first hand appears out of the hatch in front of me, I squeeze the trigger.
Objective: Find Sapphire in Ravendale
Arrive in Ravendale free and alive.
Distance to target: 47 -> 45 miles
Reward: Bronze-tier skill
Slifer274 Please let me know your thoughts on the chapter! Who or what do you think Saph is?
She knows my name.
My first instinct is to Bloodstep away immediately, but I contain myself. That would give the game away entirely.
I do, however, use a skill.
Name: Sapphire Clearwater
Age: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Race: Half-Elf
Class: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Level: [APPRAISE FAILED]
Last Used Skill: [APPRAISE FAILED]
That is completely and totally unhelpful. Thanks, Appraise.
“That’s a useful skill, demon,” Sapphire says, her nails digging into my shoulder. She hasn’t stopped smiling. “Or would you prefer Evelyn?”
“Evelyn is fine, thank you,” I say. The term demon in reference to myself makes me viscerally uncomfortable on a level I can’t quite explain—another thing I’m going to have to ask the researchers when I find them.
Assuming I make it out of here, of course. The woman sitting next to me is dangerous, though she doesn’t look it.
“I knew my senses were right,” the white-haired half-elf says. Her grip on my shoulder tightens to the point where I’m surprised she hasn’t drawn blood yet. “Quite interesting indeed. Not even a month from creation, and you have this maturity already?”
Does she have Appraise? How does she know that? And she’s been following me?
I stop drawing on Acting, letting the feigned confusion drop from my face. Clearly, it’s not working against her, and she’s almost certainly got some skill that’s hiding us from the view of others somehow, since nobody has taken notice of us despite her voice getting louder.
“You’ve been following me,” I say. “How long?”
“Since the Outpost,” she replies. Apparently confident that I’m not going to run immediately, she loosens her grip.
“Outpost 10? We’ve barely left.”
“Seventeen,” she says. “It was unrelated business that brought me there, but when I saw someone like you…”
Sapphire places two fingers under my chin, her sharp nails digging into my flesh, and she tilts my head upwards to meet her eyes. I let her. The longer she spends sitting next to me, the more danger she exudes, and given that I can’t Appraise her level, I don’t think it’s safe for me to try running.
Piercing blue eyes the shade of Sapphire’s namesake stare back at me, her gaze intense as mine was when I saw my flaming red pupils in a reflection.
“…far more interesting,” she says, her gaze unwavering.
I stare back at her.
She was following me at Outpost 17? I didn’t see her then, and she has a very distinctive figure.
“You aren’t the only one who can disguise herself, Evelyn,” she says as if she can read my thoughts, tilting her head to one side. The skin on her face ripples, her hair shifting with it, and a moment later I find myself staring at an exact copy of the face I’ve adopted. Sapphire tilts her head back, and she returns to white hair and blue eyes.
Pieces fall into place. When I was escaping Outpost 17, I heard the guards talk about two of them being missing. I was responsible for one of them, of course, but the other…
“You killed a guard,” I surmise.
“I may have,” she replies. “A minor cost in the grand scheme of things.”
“You detected me,” I say. “How?”
And what even is a demon? The word fills me with a sense of dread, which means that the memories that I was implanted with don’t like the concept, but while I can easily recite the racial traits and tendencies of elves and the skyfolk and however many other races, there’s a hole where I should have information about demons. There’s just… dread.
“You need not fear others,” Sapphire says. This time, her smile somehow feels softer, less unnerving. “I have what many do not.”
“Why did you seek me out?” I ask. She didn’t give me a proper answer to her question, but I doubt I’ll be getting any straight answers out of her today.
“Demonic influence has not touched this minor nation in decades,” she says. “And I’d like to see what someone like you can do, given the opportunity.”
The statement that burns at my core rings through my mind once more.
No matter the cost, I will advance.
I have, and I will. Even now, the issues at the forefront of my mind are that of how I can gain more power.
Does this woman know that?
“You gain something from this,” I state. It’s not a question.
“I do,” she says, letting go of my chin. She spreads her hands, which would probably be more impressive if we were anywhere other than next to each other on a train. When she speaks, though, she conveys complete seriousness. “Entertainment.”
The way she says the word sends a chill up my spine, the same sense of imminent dread that the word demon invoked returning full-force.
She takes my right hands with both of hers. “Should you choose, I can enhance you. I can draw your potential from within.”
I eye her suspiciously. At this moment, I trust her about as far as I can throw her, and given how powerful she must be, that can’t be very far.
“Of course you don’t trust me,” Sapphire says, her smile showing her two vestigial fangs. “If you choose to learn, choose to advance, you’ll see me in a backwater city in this backwater nation.”
The train darkens, and I glance outside to see that we’ve entered a tunnel. Not anything out of the ordinary, but the lights within start flickering. That gets other people murmuring.
The half-elf woman raises my hand to her lips, warmth pressing against the back of my hand. I’m so surprised by the kiss that I fail to react when she drags her sharpened fangs across my flesh, drawing blood as she does.
Sapphire lets go of me. “Find me in Ravendale.”
The lights flicker off. Someone screams, but I don’t think it’s a sound of pain. I’ve become intimately familiar with those, and this is fear.
When they abruptly turn back on again, we’re out of the tunnel and Sapphire is gone.
Objective: Find Sapphire in Ravendale
Arrive in Ravendale free and alive.
Distance to target: 47 miles
Reward: Bronze-tier skill
The new objective startles me, as does the disappearance of the half-elf, but I take it in stride.
The lights flicker back on just as we make it out of the tunnel, the tracks winding around the side of a mountain, and I immediately start looking to see if she’s disguised herself.
Before I can scan more than a couple people, however, I catch a glimpse of myself in the half-strength reflection of the mirror.
A woman with red eyes, black hair, and a green shift dress looks back at me.
Shit. Before I can take the time to fully process what Sapphire’s done, I hear shouting.
The two guards still on this train car shove other passengers out of their way before I can attempt to restore my Disguise Self, which apparently Sapphire can take away without me even noticing.
My right hand is curled into a fist now, I notice. I open it, and I realize that Sapphire’s left me a note. I didn’t feel the paper before she disappeared, but I’m less surprised about that than I should be.
With my enhanced Mind (Speed), I have enough time to read the note before the first guard manages to muscle past the panicked passengers who’ve spilled into the aisle.
Adversity sculpts excellence.
Find me if you can, demon girl.
Good luck.
~ Saph
I want to sigh, but there’s no time to be wasted. Both of the guards are approaching me now, and screaming passengers are filtering out of the train car.
Since I haven’t used any of my level-up stat points yet, I take the liberty of expending one, placing it into Body (Strength) as I draw my knife. The guards haven’t gotten within range of me yet, but they’ll be here soon.
Briefly, I consider trying to threaten the other passengers here, but they’re already mostly out, and I don’t know how effective taking hostages will be against security for what I figure to be either classified or illicit operations.
I don’t want to be in a closed space against two guards who are definitely higher levels than I am, so I attack the window.
With the added power of Knifefighting, the first strike creates a spiderweb of cracks splintering out through the window. When I throw myself into it, the weakened glass shatters. It doesn’t break cleanly, though, and as I clamber out through it, lines of sharp pain igniting where the window digs into my flesh. I use Shape Blood to keep my blood from sticking to any of the surfaces.
The wind buffets me as soon as I’m out the window, the deafening whistle of air drowning out the guards yelling at me to stop—as if I’ll actually listen to them—but I keep going. The train is moving fast enough that I nearly lose my grip on the broken glass in the windowframe, but I dig my hands in harder, ignoring the spikes of pain as more cuts open. Cuts are useful for me, anyway—I use Shape Blood, sending the results of my injuries flying towards the two guards.
They aren’t staying put for me, though. The man flinches backwards, but the woman’s on top of things. With one hand, she gestures at the air, speaking to people I can’t see. The other guards, I presume.
With the other, she holds the same model of half-size gun that I have in my pack.
The sharp report of the gun is even louder than the wind, and I hear the thunderous crack rip forth from its barrel once, twice, thrice, coinciding with more panicked screams from the errant couple passengers still in the process of running away from the car.
Another source of blood opens up in my gut, and it takes me a moment to process that I’ve been shot. The sensation of impact follows after, a breath-stealing punch to my abdomen, and I immediately Shape Blood in an effort to knock the weapon out of her hand.
I don’t stick around to see whether it works. If it did, that’s good. If it didn’t, I'm not sticking around to get shot again. Instead, I drag myself out of the window, wincing as glass shards scrape against every inch of my body, finding their way into every tear of the shift. I whisper a silent apology to Alder for ruining his spare clothes.
The wind generated by the raw speed of the train blows me from my precarious position, threatening to send me flying off and away from the train, but I react quickly, catching myself on the edge of the window frame with both hands. Broken glass breaks further beneath my grip, and almost lose my grip.
My legs dangling underneath me into thin air, I look around me.
With my Mind (Speed) stat, I'm able to speed up my perception and take in the landscape around me. Now that we're out of the tunnels, the train glides over rails built on the winding outline of a sparsely vegetated mountain with a sheer slope.
Losing my grip will mean plummeting a hundred feet. I’ve survived that before, but I don’t think I’ll be able to pull it off again as easily when my enemies are already organized to take me down.
The roof isn’t far from where I am, though, and there are handholds on the exterior of the train—presumably for maintenance work—so I haul myself up, avoiding the window I shattered.
Another window breaks with a crack of thunder, but the bullet misses. Her aim really isn’t up to par. Then again, I don’t really have room to judge—the last time I tried to fire a gun, it practically jumped out of my hands.
Even with a dozen wounds slowing me, I make it to the top of the train pretty easily. It’s flatter than I thought it would be, a long rectangle of cold metal dotted with nuts and bolts. A single hatch leads up from the opposite side of the roof I stand on. Behind and ahead of me are identical train cars, each of them with similar one-hatch setups.
Three hatches begin to open at the same time—mine, the one eighty feet in front of me, and the one on the car right behind me.
Nobody emerges just yet, which gives me enough time to unzip my bag and withdraw the mostly-unused firearm within.
If Sapphire—Saph, whatever she wants to call herself—wants to throw me into danger, I’ll drag myself right out.
This time, with my human body, the gun fits snugly in my grip.
I’m making it out of here, and I’ll do anything to grow my power in the process.
As the first hand appears out of the hatch in front of me, I squeeze the trigger.
Objective: Find Sapphire in Ravendale
Arrive in Ravendale free and alive.
Distance to target: 47 -> 45 miles
Reward: Bronze-tier skill
Slifer274 Please let me know your thoughts on the chapter! Who or what do you think Saph is?
