Chapter 41: What She Left Behind
Chapter 41: What She Left Behind
The house was too big.
It had not been an hour earlier. An hour earlier, it had been cramped and busy and full of a woman telling me I was carrying the water pot wrong. Now the hallway looked longer, the ceiling looked higher, and every room contained a great deal of nothing.
The worst part was not the silence. It was the absence of a second set of ears.
For three days, I had not needed to listen to the whole world at once because somebody else had been doing it, and doing it better. Now every board and beam was mine to interpret. I stood in the kitchen doorway for a full minute before deciding the tick above me was a cooling joist and not a footstep.
She’s home. She’s standing in her training yard with a healed thigh, and no time has passed for her. She remembers everything.
Good. That is how it is supposed to work. Get on with your day.
I got on with my day because the alternative was standing in a doorway until something came up the track.
The interface still showed what Liora’s departure had started.
[Blind Call Charges: 0/1]
[Natural Recovery Remaining: approximately 71:03:00]
Three days before I could Call again. Long enough for the house to become a problem if I let it.
The first thing I did properly was test what she had left in me. The four seconds of excited hopping around the hearth before she vanished had proven nothing except that I was capable of making Liora laugh at me during an emotional farewell.
I went out to the flat ground behind the house and worked through the fundamentals the way she had drilled them.
Foot placement first. Outside edge down, roll inward, transfer my weight only after the ground had agreed to hold it. I crossed the yard until it stopped feeling like something I was performing, then tried the boards inside, the loose stone near the stream, and the leaf litter under the trees.
Leaves turned out to be malicious.
Balance recovery came next. Short step, turn, drop from the back step, land. Then the same with my eyes closed. Then from the low wall, which was roughly my own height.
Feline Grace helped. My feet arrived beneath me together, my knees bent, and I did not pitch face-first into the brambles.
That qualified as a major success by my standards.
I drew the knife without crossing my body, keeping the blade back along my forearm and my stance side-on. Ten times. Twenty. Fifty. Then the rifle: raise it smoothly, stock into my shoulder, cheek down, without letting the muzzle pull my entire upper body forward.
Before every exercise, I checked the exits.
Liora had nearly let me die in a stairwell to teach me that lesson. Forgetting it now would have been rude.
None of the work was easy.
Feline Grace made the correct movement easier to find. It did not make the movement effortless. Frail Body, Weak Constitution, and Poor Coordination still sat beneath everything like a low ceiling. By the fortieth knife draw, my shoulder shook. By the sixtieth, I fumbled the grip. Balance drills left me winded enough that I had to sit on the step twice with my head down and sweat running into my eyes.
The skill was an aid. It was not expertise, and it was not a better body.
But it was hers, and that was the part I had not been ready for.
Whenever my foot rolled onto its outer edge without being told, some part of me heard Liora crouching on broken tarmac and telling me to be frightened correctly. When I recovered from a bad step, I did it in her rhythm.
I spent an hour practising with the echo of a woman who was not dead, merely impossibly far away. I could not decide whether that made it better.
Around midday, I cooked.
Four portions of good meat remained, and they had perhaps a day and a half before edibility became a matter of personal courage. I uncovered the ember I had kept alive since the apartment, fed it splinters and dry chair slats, and had a working fire inside four minutes with almost no smoke.
Four minutes.
Six days ago, fire had taken me four hours, the skin off both palms, and most of my remaining dignity. Now it was simply something I did before eating.
I sat by the hearth with a hot meal and allowed myself to be quietly, stupidly proud for about ninety seconds.
Afterward, I opened my status.
Level 9. The experience bar was a little over a third full, which meant several small kills might finish it. The number after nine had been sitting in the back of my mind since I woke in this body.
Level 10 was a threshold. I remembered that much from before the Merge—not from playing, because I had played Eternal Ascension for exactly twenty-seven minutes and spent most of them in menus, but from the reading I did beforehand. Every class gained something at ten. A feature, an enhancement, a mechanic that had not existed at nine.
What my class would gain, I had no idea.
I read forums for a week about making friends in a game and never once opened a class guide.
If the internet still existed, I could have found the answer in forty seconds. There would have been a wiki table and eleven arguments under it about whether the unlock was worth building around. There would have been a Dimensional Summoner discussion with nine hundred replies, every one written by somebody who understood my class better than I did.
There was no wiki now. No database. Nobody safe to ask, either, because Excuse me, what does an EX-ranked class receive at Level 10? was a sentence that ended with a collar and a locked room.
So I filed it under good things that might happen and refused to turn it into a reason for doing something stupid.
The plan remained simple. Practise. Do not ruin the only body I had been issued. Eat. Survive the three days until Blind Call recovered.
That meant hunting, because my food was spoiling on a schedule that did not care about my preferences.
I spent the afternoon preparing. The ready pack stayed by the door, but I lightened a second bag for the hunt. Rifle loaded and slung. Both knives. Water. Cloth for whatever meat I could carry without slowing myself.
At the top of the slope, I studied the grey district below and chose my ground the way Liora had taught me.
Not east. East was Eastbridge, and I never intended to go that way again.
Not north of the stream, where Liora had shown me a trail of flattened undergrowth two feet wide and explained that anything making a trail that clean could keep it.
I chose the collapsed outbuildings west of the house, past the stream’s second bend. Open ground. No large tracks. Three separate ways out.
Small. Alone. Slow. Nothing brave.
Then I went down the slope by myself, with no active summon and nobody watching my back.