Chapter 63: He Put on That De...
There, Dion’s brows furrowed, his expression genuinely clueless. "A class? I don’t have one."
Dion glanced briefly to the varying shock on the expressions of everyone in the car, and really, even in his shamelessness, he felt a little strange this time.
’It isn’t called a class for me. But that isn’t something they need to hear right now. It’ll bring way too many questions I don’t have all the answers to when I don’t even know how a class compares to an ascent in the first place.’
"Fucking seriously...?" he heard Irving mutter beside him.
"Is there a specific thing I need to have done to get one? Do you all have one already?" Dion then asked.
"Most people don’t yet," Anton said, his voice oozing with surprise. "Your chronicle needs to reach level twenty before it offers you one. Apparently, you get few options to choose from when it does, and even then you’ve got to meet whatever conditions it sets before you get the Class properly."
"Irvin’s the... only one of us with a Class," Madeline said. "He said he chose Assassin."
Irvin sat against the window with his arms folded, seemingly about to respond, but he swallowed his words back down and brought his eyes back out of the window as Anton crashed through a pair of zombies, hurtling them away, watching the buildings pass.
"What level are you, Anton?" Dion asked while looking at the man through the mirror.
"I’m eighteen, fifty-six percent. Madeline’s level is eleven, with seventy-one percent, and—"
"Don’t tell him my numbers," Irvin said. "I don’t trust him yet."
Anton didn’t respond to that, only giving a slightly wry, but somewhat understanding look.
Dion himself didn’t press for anything more than that. He understood that he was overstepping when, in the first place, he was giving them so little, but that had not been his immediate concern.
’Percentage completion? As in for them to reach the next level?’ Having initially assumed that it was only the zombies and gnolls, by evidence, that had produced this... to hear that people that had awakened normally had them as well, it filled him with exasperation.
Just how different was the chronicle he was working with from those of the others?
’Not just mine... Even Anastasia’s chronicle didn’t have levels or percentages.’
Dion had been about to spin something plausible about a random level and percentage, then ask them to clarify whether they had the same kind of Orders because at this point clearly he had to clear far more bases on this than he would have thought that he needed to.
In the first damned place, he didn’t think that there would be any bases to be cleared for understanding between how Chronicles worked!
’I should have guessed Authorities weren’t going to be the only difference in how our Chronicles worked...’ He sighed internally.
Right before he had spoken, though, Basil, who had remained quiet through the whole thing, spoke:
"That’s a bit harsh on someone who’s new, don’t you think?" Basil said, glancing back from the passenger seat.
"It’s the apocalypse," Irvin said coldly. "We can’t be so easily trusting of someone that kill-steals a gnoll and then asks to come along like he’s doing us a favour. Nobody drops onto a gnoll out of the kindness of their heart. For all we know, he could be some kind of blood-lusting killer."
’...’
No one said anything to that, but Dion did feel a bit of wry satisfaction to hear that it had been, at least in part, the kill-stealing that had the guy irritated with him.
He then finally asked, "Just to be clear, we are all in the Destitute Order, right? Or does that also change when you get a class? Because I’m level 19 on eleven percent right now."
Dion had spoken so inclusively this time because they all seemed to be working on a system largely relative to the one that the zombies and gnolls did.
"Yes... we all are." Madeline was the one who had graced him with an answer.
There, he sighed a little to himself. At the very least, there were some things that weren’t different.
"And about the Abilities," Dion then began again, bringing his hands ahead of himself and adjusting a little to ease the discomfort of his tight clothes, "there are differences in the ones we all got, aren’t there? Because I don’t have mana burst or berserk impact—the two other abilities that I know exist. I only have enhancement right now."
"That..." Madeline had begun.
Suddenly, Anton shouted to them:
"Corpses on the road, brace!"
The car jerked harshly as they ran over a couple of corpses that had been lying down the majority of the road.
Dion had been thrown up, and his head hit the ceiling just as the other guys had. But Madeline, the shortest of them, had ben jolted up higher, and the impact had thrown her against Dion’s side, where he managed to catch her around the shoulders as he landed.
"Are you alright?" he had immediately asked.
She hurriedly slithered herself back to her space, the words spilling from her mouth, "Yes—I’m so sorry!"
Dion faintly smiled at her flushed expression as she did anything but look at him as she tidied herself.
Anton gave way to a nervous laugh as Dion faintly sighed to himself, doing his best to ignore the glare that he felt from his side.
’Don’t look at me like that, man. I’m not doing this on purpose...’
"Actually, about those," Anton cleared his throat, "even we don’t have the full answer for that yet. Because from what we can tell, there are, first of all, different abilities depending on which Dimension a person specialises in. And second of all, even if you do get the same ability, they can be expressed in different ways through different people."
Dion’s brows furrowed as his attention focused back ahead as he watched Anton take them around a corner.
"Like Marcus, for example, who I mentioned reinforces the barriers for us; he has Enhancement, but it only works on external objects, and for you, I’m guessing it would work on your body’s strength."
’Putting it like that might mean... there would be people that enhancement works specifically for their other dimensions only as well, rather than a holistic enhancement.’
Dion faintly nodded at that, and he went silent. Asking anything more could lead him into having to spin more lies to try to keep up, and really, he had already spat on more than enough of their goodwill with his charlatanry.
In the silence that lingered thereafter, Basil reached for the centre console and scrolled through the car’s display until he found something.
The sound of a piano playing filled the car, and when the strings joined it Madeline closed her eyes and let her head rest against the window, her breathing and heart rate finally gradually easing.
Dion looked up from where they had fallen to his clasped hands that were playing amongst each other, and he muttered, "That’s Debussy, isn’t it?"