“Y-You know, my roommate is visiting her family for a few weeks right now … Do you … Do you want to come over later?” Fae asked, the color all over her body completely stilled, as if the girl was holding her breath in anticipation of an answer. Silvia couldn’t help but smirk a bit at that as she nodded.

  “I would love that,” the elf replied, and Fae’s color immediately started moving again, all rushing toward her face as if to hide the expression she was making right now. Anxiously, Fae looked around the table to change the topic, clearly being too nervous to just let things linger there, and soon noticed Silvia’s glass.

  “Do you want another drink? I’m also almost done.” Fae quickly looked around for the waiter, as Silvia’s smile lingered. She felt happy. Really, really happy. As she looked at Fae, something caught her eye behind the changeling, though. A pair of branch-like antlers, decorated with glass flowers and leaves, steadily approaching the pair in a straight line.

  Almost taken aback, Silvia straightened her back as a young woman came into view. Messily curly brown hair covered her head and stretched down to her thighs. She was walking around completely barefoot, in the middle of a city, and was wearing a plain summer dress, with a white so pristine that it made the cuts and rough edges on the fabric stand out even more.

  The girl, clearly around Silvia and Fae’s age, came to a halt right in front of the two. With an angry glare, as if she despised what she was looking at, the girl gnashed and bared her teeth.

  “This is wrong, this … This is all far too wrong!”

  Wisps of red and threads of green moved out of Ryan’s hand together, forming the bodies of the two spirits Maximus and Gaia. The moment they fully appeared, the group of people huddling around Ryan moved in closer.

  “Oh, wow! Look at that one; it’s so cute and tiny …” one of the people said, as Ryan squatted down to pick Maximus up from the ground.

  “His name is Maximus. And let me tell you, despite his size, he packs quite the punch. Physically, he’s stronger than me,” Ryan pointed out, trying not to reveal that Maximus had a class, levels, and stats. Revealing the two spirits like this was one thing, since Ryan didn’t want them to live in hiding when they didn’t have to, but it was another to go too deep into certain aspects of their existence. Ryan had decided to not keep his class too much of a secret; it was too late for that now, anyway. But that didn’t mean he should just reveal every little part of it to others.

  “What about the other one?”

  “Her name is Gaia. She’s a spirit that’s quite close to nature,” Ryan explained, as people moved in to take closer looks. It was very likely that none of them had ever seen spirits before. They were quite rare beings and usually didn’t choose to interact with others. There were those who lived in specific places, like spirits who were born from temples or castles, old places with lots of history. They tended to be a bit more open to interacting with people, but even then, it was quite rare to get a good look at one. Summoner-type classes weren’t particularly common either.

  While Gaia seemed a little nervous, being stared at by everyone, Maximus seemed to enjoy the attention and was practically posing on Ryan’s hands to show off his good side to everyone.

  Soon, someone looked back at Ryan and curiously asked, “So, what kind of spirits are they? What kind of abilities do they have?”

  “Well, Gaia’s abilities are focused around caring for plants,” Ryan explained. “Meanwhile, Maximus’s abilities are focused around weapon-based combat.”

  “That’s a pretty big difference … What area will you go into? Botany? Or an Awakened field, like Heroics?” someone wondered, and Ryan laughed a little awkwardly.

  “I don’t know yet; I only awakened like two weeks ago, and pretty suddenly as well,” Ryan admitted, and the crowd grew a bit confused. They glanced over at Alicia, who was watching the whole thing quietly.

  “You already got to level 10 in just two weeks? But that …”

  Ryan quickly looked over at Alicia, still annoyed that she had just blurted something out about his new skill, so he tried to come up with a good explanation that didn’t involve telling people about Tiar. “Nope, I’m still just level 4! The new skill Ali—Miss Boreard mentioned is like a … You know about talent-unlocked skills, right? I tried out a few different things since I awakened and managed to find a new talent … or something like that.”

  Ryan tried to scramble together some kind of explanation. Unlocking skills through sheer talent was certainly possible, but it was probably even rarer than awakening in the first place and usually required a ton of training. But in some rare cases, people got lucky and unlocked a new skill pretty soon after awakening. Usually, it would be one that could have possibly been one of your starter skills.

  “Aw, man, lucky,” Michael muttered quietly to himself next to Ryan. “So … what kind of skill is it?”

  Ryan thought about it for a moment and then looked over at Alicia, who was still just waiting, also anxiously wanting to see Ryan’s skill in action. With a slight groan, he rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Alright, I can show it to you guys, but I’m going to need some scrap metal.”

  “Scrap metal?”

  “Yeah, like, a good amount of it,” Ryan replied. “It could be any metal, but it’s not going to be usable anymore after I use the skill, so I would rather not ruin anything.”

  Hearing what Ryan was saying, Aurora seemed to spring into action. Being in charge of Ryan, she was obviously more than curious about seeing what kind of new skill he had unlocked. After all, you didn’t see a unique class this often. “I think we should have some materials you can use … We have a wide variety of things to let people test their skills.”

  Ryan sighed lightly. It seemed like he wouldn’t be able to avoid showing the skill now, though he felt a little awkward about it. Aurora left the room for a short while and not even ten minutes later returned with some other employees who were wheeling in a cart with metal sheets. They were on the new side, so not scrap metal, but if they were meant for testing skills, then Ryan figured it was fine.

  He took off his jacket and folded it up, hanging it over the handles of the cart. So that his right sleeve wouldn’t get caught in anything, he quickly folded it up and pushed it up to his elbow. That part of the armor was pretty bulky, so there was a fair amount of space, but the wrist was a bit tighter, so Ryan didn’t want to risk anything.

  He glanced down at Tiar resting on his left arm. They were aware of what Ryan was trying to do and were clearly doing their best not to move while this was going on, but Ryan didn’t want to risk it, so he pushed his hand into his pocket so that Tiar could concentrate on the skill execution. Since Ryan’s left sleeve was still pulled down, Tiar was now completely hidden.

  After taking a deep breath, Ryan pressed his palm onto the metal sheets, activating the Spirit Armament skill. Ryan could feel Tiar move over his body, stretching out onto his right arm. Slithering out from under his rolled-up sleeve, the red tendrils promptly reached out to the metal, tearing it apart like paper. Piece by piece, a bulky piece of armor was built around Ryan’s right arm. It wasn’t a perfect copy of Maximus’s Crusader armor, but it was already a lot closer than the last few times that Ryan and Tiar had tested the skill out.

  Ryan moved the arm around, almost as easily as he would his normal arm. While he didn’t feel any stronger than normal, just being able to move this hefty metal around with relative ease was already a game-changer. Plus, any damage to this arm didn’t translate to the actual Crusader-armor piece. It wasn’t repaired while the skill was active, but if the same pieces were reused again afterward, though the integrity of the armor was a bit worse than before and it got damaged more easily, the prior damage was mostly repaired.

  One of the other newly awakened, who seemed to have a hand-to-hand-combat-based physical class, let out a groan of envy. “You can just do that as long as you have some metal? What is it, are you basically copying the body of one of your spirits?”

  “There are a few conditions to it, but yeah, that’s kind of it,” Ryan replied, looking over toward Aurora with an awkward smile. “This would have come in pretty handy when I was in the dungeon, huh?”

  “Certainly … How is the structural integrity? Can you take it off?” Aurora wondered.

  “It’s pretty solid while on there, and no, I can’t take it off. It’s basically stuck to my arm like this. The skill is only active for ten minutes anyway, and it has a one-day cooldown right now, so … It’s more like a trump card to protect myself, I guess,” Ryan explained, holding his hand forward to let people take a closer look. Particularly those with expertise classes, of which there were a surprising amount there today, were quite interested in the workmanship of the arm. But of course, there were also quite a few people who were surprised Ryan had already gone to a dungeon at his level, though it did happen every once in a while that people went to dungeons right after registering and passing the Dungeoneering test.

  The conversation continued for a little longer, though it didn’t take long for the next person to get their turn to show their skills. Alicia did come up and take a closer look, though she didn’t seem as interested once the skill was actually active, as Ryan had thought. As if she weren’t curious about the skill itself but how Ryan would react when pushed like this.

  But … as Ryan was standing there, watching everyone use their skills, and even when the Spirit Armament skill was deactivated and the metal fell apart into its individual pieces again, something felt … weird.

  Ryan couldn’t put his finger on it, but something was wrong. Really wrong. He didn’t know where this feeling came from, exactly, but it was visceral and distinct. Something Ryan couldn’t just ignore, but at the same time, he didn’t know what it actually was. Like a random bout of anxiety emanating from all around him.

  And throughout the whole rest of the evening, that feeling continued to bother Ryan. That feeling of complete wrongness.

  Chapter Five

  Sudden

  Most of the shows of everyone’s skills were coming to an end. Those who were interested in showing off their abilities, or had ones that could be shown off in the first place, had already done so. The atmosphere was much different from what you’d expect from this kind of event. Ryan had thought it would be some boring get-together that felt like work, but instead, it felt more like a party where everyone just happened to be wearing suits and dresses.

  People were showing off magic like “party tricks,” and people were laughing and telling stories and just having a good time. It seemed like this was very different from what Aurora knew these events to be, but it was clearly a lot better at getting people to build links than what the intention for this place was.

  Of course, there was still an underlying feeling of people wanting to get ahead of others by showing off their skills, like they were hoping they could prove they were superior or that they could get some kind of opportunity out of it, but that was something that Ryan knew would have been there either way.

  And throughout all that, Ryan felt that something was wrong. He was trying his best to figure out what exactly that wrongness was, but he wasn’t able to pinpoint it exactly. It was different from the other hunches that he’d been having recently. There, he had had something guiding him along; he had had some kind of idea of what he was supposed to be doing. But right now, Ryan didn’t feel like that at all. He had no idea what to do, or rather, he felt like there was nothing he could do, nor that he really needed to do anything in the first place. He just felt that something was wrong.

  Maybe it was some kind of weird form of anxiety that he had, feeling like he didn’t belong there. But that also didn’t seem to be the case, because he was, surprisingly, actually enjoying himself while talking to all these new people. But for now, since this feeling wasn’t something he could do anything about, Ryan just pushed it to the back of his mind, trying not to focus on it too much.

  However, there was one other person who was clearly going through a lot of emotions right now: Michael. He had been practically glued to Ryan all evening, and though it felt a little awkward, Ryan figured he didn’t mind. At the start of the night, Michael had felt like just another douche, but clearly, he just really struggled with how to show his emotions. With that server at the start of the night, Michael was trying his best not to cry and “ruin” his shirt even more, and that made his frustrations well up in a way that he started yelling unintentionally.

  But Ryan had already gone with him to apologize to that server, and they seemed to appreciate that a lot, especially after Michael explained the situation a bit more. And after that, though being a bit on the quieter side, Michael had been trying to join conversations as much as he could, but now that the end of the skill showcases came closer, he was clearly growing more and more anxious.

  “You ready? It looks like it’s going to be your turn soon,” Ryan pointed out as he looked over at the young man next to him, and Michael, almost startled, looked over at him.

  “Huh? Really? Do you think so?” Michael asked, and Ryan nodded as he looked toward Alicia.

  “Yeah; I mean, she looks like she’s preparing something right now. Plus, it looks like most other people are done, so it would make sense, right?”

  “R-Right …” Michael nodded nervously, anxiously scratching his neck. And just as Ryan had thought, after about ten more minutes, Alicia came up to Michael with a smile. Ryan had stepped to the side to grab himself something more to eat, so he didn’t hear what they were saying, but it looked like Alicia had been preparing her barrier for a little while now.

  As Michael started preparing himself to show off his magic, Ryan took the opportunity when everyone’s attention was drawn toward the Hydromancer to turn to Maximus and Gaia. The two were still outside of their domains, having people huddle around them the whole time. Someone even wanted to pick up Maximus at some point, and after Ryan made it clear that he was not a toy, maybe a bit too aggressively, people gave them all a bit more space.

  Squatting down in front of Gaia, with Maximus seated on the Golem’s hunchback, Ryan looked around to make sure nobody was nearby. “You two, do you also feel this … weird thing right now? Maximus, you felt some kind of vibe off the dungeon, right? Even through a video, you knew that one of Gaia’s fragments was there … Do you feel something similar to that right now?”

  Tilting his head to the side, Maximus tried to think about it for a moment but soon shook his head. Similarly, Gaia clearly didn’t feel anything, but to Ryan, it was starting to be almost overpowering.

  “Are you sure? This is really uncomfortable,” Ryan pointed out, looking down at the back of his hand. He was hiding Tiar’s pattern with his other hand. “What about you? Do you feel anything?”

  Tiar slowly relaxed, forming a small X on the back of his hand before that pattern promptly turned into a question mark. It seemed like Tiar was getting a few more options to express themself.

  “I don’t know what it is; it’s just … wrong. Like something isn’t right. Like … No, maybe wrong isn’t the right word either; it’s just … off. Like something just happened that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not like … this.”

  Ryan wasn’t sure if he was expressing himself well enough, but that was the closest that he could get to properly vocalizing how he felt.

  “Okay, everyone! Take a step back for this, please!” Alicia’s voice sounded through the hall, and Ryan’s attention was instantly drawn toward her. A large crowd had, of course, formed around Michael, and the air around him was shimmering in a slight rainbow hue; that was the barrier that Alicia had deployed in order to contain his magic, as it was clearly easy for it to go out of control.

  Curious, Ryan stood up, figuring that he should just talk to Runar about this later. Maybe this was some weird “secret society” stuff that he shouldn’t need to worry about at all.

  He walked up to the crowd, trying to find a spot where he could see Michael properly. He was clearly very anxious, especially with everyone staring at him like that, but he was trying whatever he could to prepare himself.

  Michael seemed to be looking around the crowd, soon spotting Ryan, who just waved at him. Seeming a lot more ready to get started all of a sudden, Michael closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “U-Uhm … I’m a Hydromancer, and I awakened a month ago. I have a lot of mana, but my spirituality stat is really low, so I struggle with using it properly … But there’s one spell that I have been practicing a lot recently,” Michael explained, holding his hands together.

  Carefully, he pulled them apart, and a small ball of water formed between his palms. As he moved his hands farther away from each other, the ball grew in size. It was a very standard spell, a baseline one that most Hydromancers used for practice. The Water Ball spell was commonly used to show a Hydromancer’s level. As it was so basic, it was easy to let a lot of mana flow into it, and they could also play around with it quite a lot if their control was good enough. Ryan figured that Michael was planning on showing off how much mana he had by making a particularly large water ball, and that was exactly what happened.

  The ball grew and grew and didn’t seem to want to stop. Rather, it grew far larger than Ryan was expecting, even considering Michael’s mana. At some point, it was large enough to fully submerge Ryan even while he was standing up straight, and even then didn’t seem to want to stop.

  Every other mage in the room seemed confused; Ryan only had a surface-level understanding of how impressive this was, but those who were actually spellcasters themselves seemed almost taken aback. Even Alicia was showing a level of surprise that Ryan couldn’t really put a finger on.

  The water ball didn’t stop growing, continuing on and on, until suddenly, it started to become deformed. The water ball was pressing against the edges of the cylindrical barrier that Alicia had placed to contain the water. A shadow was cast onto the concentrating Michael as he stopped letting the water ball expand.