Either way, Ryan approached Silvia, giving her a quick hug. The elf pulled him in closer and the two stood there for a moment.

  “Thanks for coming so fast,” Silvia said as she finally let go, waving at Yamada as she pulled back out onto the road.

  “Of course, you came sprinting for me when I awakened. Plus … something else happened, right?”

  “… Right.” Silvia nodded. Seeing both her and Fae’s expressions, Ryan didn’t really know what to expect, but it didn’t seem great.

  Fae, wanting to break the nervous air, slowly looked at Ryan. “Were you able to reach Modak?”

  He shook his head. “Nope, but I’m still trying. He might be busy preparing for work stuff?”

  Silvia slowly nodded. “Right, yeah … that’s fine, he’s busy, don’t worry.”

  The three made their way up the stairs to the front door, and Silvia unlocked it. There was music playing upstairs, so it sounded like Yanna was home.

  “Let’s go to my room; it’s in the attic. I’ll go grab Yanna on the way,” Silvia suggested, and neither Ryan nor Fae had a reason to decline. Once they got to the floor where Yanna’s room was, Ryan promptly swerved to the side.

  “I’ll go take a leak first,” Ryan quickly said, but Silvia just scrunched her nose up.

  “Ew, don’t say it like that—”

  “Oh, sorry, I didn’t know you were so high-class now that you awakened, m’lady.” Ryan scoffed as the elf girl sighed and knocked on the door to her sister’s room, soon pushing it open afterward as she always did.

  At the same time, Ryan pushed open the bathroom door, but before he could, the door opened in front of him. And who stood there was Yanna, wearing a bathrobe after taking a shower. But instead of greeting him, she looked across the hall and stared into her bedroom nervously.

  “G-Guys, I can explain, I—” she stuttered out, as Ryan turned around, confused. He saw Silvia sheepishly grinning from ear to ear while Fae was trying to hide her embarrassment.

  What, or rather who, could be seen inside of Yanna’s bedroom was a half-naked Modak, trying to cover up with Yanna’s blanket.

  “Uh … hi? You’re back early …”

  Chapter Seven

  Soulspark Artist

  The group of five was sitting spread out in Silvia’s bedroom.

  “Sooo …” Silvia said with a smirk on her face, as if whatever anxieties she was feeling earlier had been completely washed away, at least for a few moments. “What were we interrupting?”

  Yanna and Modak looked at each other nervously as the minotaur scratched her cheek. “Well … I was going to be home alone, so I asked Modak if he wanted to hang out … and then one thing led to another and … you know …”

  Modak’s face had turned an embarrassed, dark green. “Just … don’t make a big deal out of it, okay?”

  “Alright, alright, we get it,” Ryan replied, grinning just as much as, if not more than, Silvia. “But you’ve got to answer at least one question. Are you two, like, a thing now?”

  The two glanced at each other again, both hesitating to answer the question. But finally, Modak broke the silence. “I-I mean … are we?”

  “If … if you want us to be …” Yanna responded, trying to hide her anxious expression. And in response, Modak hurriedly nodded.

  “Yeah, in that case, I guess we are.”

  Yanna was unable to hide the massive smile that formed on her face, and Modak did the same, his teeth shining through his flushed face. After a few moments, though, Modak turned toward his friends.

  “A-Anyway, what are you guys doing here? Especially together,” he asked, as Silvia seemed to remember the events of that night, which she had briefly forgotten about after that surprise reveal.

  Seeing that Silvia was pulling back, Ryan patted the elf’s back and answered for her, “Well, if either of you had looked at your phone, you’d know. But Silvia awakened earlier.”

  Taken aback, as this was probably the last thing that either Yanna or Modak were expecting, they both stared at her.

  “What? How— That— That’s amazing!” Yanna exclaimed immediately, “What’s your class?”

  “It’s called … ‘Soulspark Artist.’ I’ve never heard of it, but …” Silvia started, looking over at Ryan, who was already deep in thought. Though, after a few moments, he realized that the others, with the exception of Fae, were intently looking at him.

  “What’s with those looks?” Ryan asked with a raised eyebrow, almost defensively. “Just because I know a thing or two about Awakened doesn’t mean that I know every single class!”

  While Modak, Silvia, and Yanna just kept staring at him, Fae seemed a bit confused. After a few moments, Ryan gave in and let out a loud groan.

  “Okay, fine, I remember a bit about this one ’cause I actually thought it suited Silvia really well … But it’s a really rare class. Like … if I remember right, the last time it popped up was sometime in the last century, that type of rare.” Ryan sighed. “That’s why I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of info out there about it in the first place. Oh, but at the very least, it should follow the artist baseline, so if the word art is used in any of your skills, it basically means whatever you personally acknowledge as art. And it has something to do with knowing and understanding others and stuff.”

  “That does sound like Silvia,” Modak agreed, but Fae looked at Ryan, a bit startled.

  “You just knew that off the top of your head?”

  “… Don’t judge me, it’s a hobby.” Embarrassed, Ryan turned his head away.

  “Is it just me or do rare classes feel a little … common?” Yanna, someone who Awakened into the rare Mountain Archer class asked, looking at the one with the unique Spirit Keeper class.

  “… Not usually, no.” Ryan looked at Silvia with a light frown. “What exactly happened earlier? It wasn’t just that you awakened, right?”

  Silvia hesitated and nodded. “This girl came up to me and kind of … I don’t know, she acted really weird and was yelling at me that something was ‘wrong’ …”

  “We thought she was just being homophobic at first, but that didn’t seem to be it. I think maybe she was having some kind of episode,” Fae added, and Yanna looked at Silvia nervously, reaching out to hold her sister’s hand.

  “I’m so sorry; are you okay?”

  Silvia quickly nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine … She did grab my wrist, though, and that kind of hurt.” She showed her arm, which now had a deep purple-and-blue bruise right where she had been grabbed, and you could see the outlines of the girl’s fingers through it. Immediately, Yanna jumped up.

  “Holy— Hold on; I’ll go grab something. I think we should have some healing salve around here,” she exclaimed, rushing out of the room.

  While she was gone, Modak cupped his chin in his hand. “I think I heard that sometimes, awakening can be triggered by high-stress situations … Is that maybe what happened there?”

  “I don’t know … maybe?” Silvia responded, and the two slowly looked at Ryan, whose face had gone completely pale. “Ryan? Are you okay?”

  “Hm? Oh, yeah … and that stress thing is a myth, by the way; there’s no data to back that up as a general guideline … especially not with an artist-type class,” he pointed out, before slowly looking over at Fae. “Hey, sorry, would you mind maybe helping Yanna try and find that healing salve?”

  Confused and a bit taken aback, Fae looked away from Ryan and toward Silvia, who didn’t really know what was going on either. But Silvia carefully rubbed the other girl’s arm. “It would be great if you could … Just for a couple of minutes, okay?”

  Fae hesitantly nodded. “If you say so …”

  The changeling slowly got up and made her way out of Silvia’s room, walking down the stairs to where Yanna was rummaging around. She looked back hesitantly as she closed the door behind her, realizing that there was something that those three had to talk about privately.

  “What’s going on?” Modak asked. “Do you know something about this?”

  Ryan didn’t know how to respond to that directly, but he had to try his best. “I … Not really, I guess? But Silvia, that girl really said that things were ‘wrong’?”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Okay, this sounds weird, but I’ve been feeling that something was ‘wrong’ all evening. Like, I don’t know if that’s what it was, especially since I guess that feeling popped up before all this happened, but it feels like too much of a coincidence,” Ryan pointed out. “Especially toward the end, it felt like something wasn’t going quite the way it should … What did that girl do? Was there anything besides the yelling and pulling your arm?”

  “Yes! Yes, there was, and I felt really weird after that. She put her arm above my head and I think kind of pulled on something, and I felt nauseous like you wouldn’t believe, but she was interrupted and got pulled away before she could continue,” Silvia explained. “How did you know this?”

  Ryan hesitated, since he knew how weird this sounded. The intuition stat wasn’t usually supposed to do this kind of thing; it mostly described how well someone was able to sense mana and boost certain types of instinct, but what Ryan was dealing with felt way different. But in the end, he just had to admit it. “I just kind of … felt it? And … Okay, and this is going to sound insane, but my gut feeling is telling me this. It’s stupid and doesn’t really make any sense. Maybe it’s because Runar mentioned something about this before, and it’s just stuck in my head, so really, just don’t mind me if it sounds stupid—”

  “Gods, just say it!” Modak let out, staring at his friend intently, as Ryan explained what his intuition told him.

  “… I think maybe I helped you awaken? Or like, something was in the process of being done, and then that girl did something to trigger it before it was supposed to happen,” Ryan said, and both Silvia and Modak silently looked at him as he continued to try and justify his thoughts. “Like, Runar said before that it’s possible that the Spirit Keeper class awakens the spirits and gives them classes, right? And that was the reason why the White Shadow Society wants my class, because they believe that they can use it to make others awaken or something.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense; you weren’t even there!” Silvia pointed out, and Ryan shrugged.

  “I know! But isn’t this too much of a coincidence otherwise? Like, come on, this doesn’t seem weird to you?”

  “Of course it’s weird, but … you making me awaken? Does that even make sense?”

  “I don’t know? I guess not? I’ll have to ask Runar about it; he definitely knows more about all of this than any of us do.” With a long groan, Ryan leaned more into the chair he was sitting on, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Either way, there’s something weird about this girl. What did she look like?”

  Silvia thought about it for a moment. “At first, I thought she was a faun, but she didn’t have any fur at all. She looked like a human with antlers … though cis faun women don’t even have antlers in the first place, right? And she looked really young, too, like, younger than all of us. Oh, and also, she had all these glass flowers all over her antlers.”

  The moment Silvia explained this, Ryan noticed both Maximus and Gaia perk up, and he recognized the way they acted. It was the same as when Maximus had recognized that Gaia was in that dungeon. Ryan looked inwardly at the two of them.

  “Are you two alright? Do you know anything about her?” he asked, but they both seemed hesitant somehow. But in the end, Maximus shook his head.

  “So, you don’t know anything? Or … you don’t remember any details?” Ryan said, and Maximus raised his hand with two fingers sticking out. So, that meant that while they felt like they recognized that description, they couldn’t recall anything about that girl. Like a vague sense of recognition without any details.

  Modak looked at Silvia with a concerned expression. “More importantly, are you okay? You seem really shaken up about it.”

  Silvia nodded. “I’m fine. I think. The past week or so has been pretty rough. Lots of ups and downs.” She laughed awkwardly. “It was kind of scary, and awakening is really, really confusing, because I never expected it. Like, it’s cool, obviously, and I did think about what would happen if I awakened back when Yanna, and then again when you did, but that’s different from actually awakening. It’s so much … pressure.”

  “Yeah, but just think about it, the kind of art you’ll be able to create if you properly hone your new abilities,” Ryan pointed out. “You should have dexterity, right? You’ve got no idea how big of a difference just a few decimal points already make.”

  Slowly, Silvia’s nervous expression turned into a light grin. “I guess that is pretty exciting.”

  Just then, Yanna and Fae came back into the room. Fae was a bit hesitant at first, but seeing that Silvia was waving her over with a smile made her relax pretty soon.

  Yanna opened the small tube of healing salve and put it onto gauze, carefully pressing it onto her sister’s bruise. “Gods, why would some rando come around and do this to you?”

  “Who knows?” Silvia said. “It looks like she was an Awakened, so maybe she saw something that we couldn’t?”

  “An Awakened attacked you? Seriously? That … Should we report that?” Yanna nervously looked at the others. In normal situations, it would probably not be a bad idea to do that, but considering everything that had been happening recently, Ryan, Silvia, and Modak all silently agreed that it was better not to.

  “Honestly, I don’t know if I want to bother … It’s not like we even know anything about her, and she could have just been a random, surprisingly strong girl,” Silvia responded, but Fae didn’t seem so sure about that. She looked at the elf next to her, who slowly took her hand. With a light smile, Silvia told everyone, “I’m fine now; don’t worry.”

  “Alright, in that case …” Ryan started, figuring that it was best to move the conversation on from that mysterious girl to the thing that was to be celebrated. He had taken out his phone and pulled up the class information on the AWKND wiki. “There’s not a ton of info here, but there are a few basic skill descriptions … What skills do you have?”

  Silvia nodded, her eyes focusing on something invisible in front of her. “I’ve got three: Artist’s Creation, Artist’s Gallery, and Artist’s Insight. The first one says I can imbue art with magic; the second one is, like, a storage skill where I can store my art? But the third one is weird; it says I can ‘see a target’s soul.’”

  “Right.” Ryan looked down at his phone. “Okay, so. A Soulspark Artist, like, interacts with the emotions and traits and habits of the world around them, the ‘soul’ of everything, whether it’s people or plants or whatever. And the Insight skill lets you actually see that more tangibly? It looks like how much you can see and how clearly you can see it scales with your intuition and sociability stats. And then, if you use what you see as a basis for your Creation skill, you can get some unique effects.”

  “What kind of unique effects?” Modak wondered curiously, leaning over toward Ryan to take a look at what the wiki said.

  “Hm … there is an example here,” Ryan muttered, carefully reading through the text. “Okay, so, there was this pretty famous person that apparently had this class in the Middle Ages. And he painted a powerful knight that specialized in defense. After that, the painting could create something like a barrier around itself. So … things like that.”

  “Whoa.” Silvia’s grin was now stretching from ear to ear, and she couldn’t help herself. “Let me try it out, then! Just the insight skill, on … Yanna, would you be fine if I tried it on you?”

  Immediately, the minotaur jumped up and stood in front of her sister. “Of course! Give it a try!”

  Silvia smiled, and her eyes lit up. Swirls of blue and pink and red appeared in her eyes as her skill was activated. She looked her sister up and down, not sure what exactly she was seeing.

  Of course she saw her sister, but she also saw something beyond that. Something else that was blurrily overlaying her, and when Silvia focused on it, that blurry something became clearer while Yanna herself faded into the background. And then, what was left was another version of Yanna, anxiously looking at her sister with that deep look of concern she wore whenever Silvia got hurt as a kid.

  But then, that version faded away, replaced by a version of Yanna that was brimming with excitement and curiosity. And then, once again, that version was replaced by one that was glancing over at Modak with a broad smile on her face. But that version didn’t stick around for long either, as all the facets of the emotions that Yanna was feeling right now were shown to her. Some of these emotions appeared more vividly, and most of them were different in how much they deviated from the actual Yanna.

  Without hesitation, Silvia jumped up from her bed and walked over to her desk, scrabbling to grab her sketchbook and a pencil. Immediately, she started to sketch down as many of the versions of her sister as she could.

  Chapter Eight

  Intuition

  Graphite scratched over paper, and the sound filled the room. Everyone was intensely staring at Silvia as she sketched out what she had seen using her new Artist’s Insight skill.

  Peeking over her shoulder, Ryan saw sketches of Yanna in a number of different poses with varying expressions. Seeing how intensely Silvia was working, he thought he should wait until she was done to speak to her. In the meantime, he figured he should finally take off this damn jacket. It seemed like that cooling vest that Runar had given to him had run out of mana, and he was feeling extremely hot all of a sudden. He had been told this would last a week, so why the hell were things getting worse over time?