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44 - Magical Skills are Stress-Based, Which Encourages Risky Life Decisions

  The next few weeks were filled with preparations.

  The first order of business was the redistribution of labor. They had made a mistake by setting the wage for Dungeon guarding too high, at a value that he felt was fair but that ultimately outstripped what anyone else could pay. The short-term solution was to redirect them as an engineer/odd-jobs corps, assigning them to work the harvest and whatever tasks craftsmen might have, at least for this season. There was less complaining than he’d expected but slower work than he’d thought. Overall, not an unsalvageable error.

  He allocated Weaponsmaster Garth Alavant five Gemstone rapiers to distribute to the strongest and most loyal of those that remained, but he held most of them in reserve. Garth would choose those loyal to Granavale to be given the power of the Gems once they were prepared. There was no guarantee they would be loyal to him, Archmund Granavale.

  That was the next matter.

  He had plenty of Gemgear in reserve.

  He knew from experience that anyone who practiced a martial or magical art with a dedicated Gem progressed far faster than anyone who didn’t.

  The sooner he started training people on Gemgear, the sooner he would have a potent fighting force.

  Yet there was an obvious potential side effect, one that he’d experienced viscerally himself.

  “It’s a dangerous, dangerous power,” Garth had said on that day that they’d sparred. “It’s awfully easy to become wielded by the blade, rather than wielded by it.”

  Gems were pure, unshaped by the ghostly intentions of the Monstrous dead, and so they didn’t unduly influence the thoughts of their wielders. They were harder to master, but ultimately safer and more controlled. But Gemgear shaped its wielders far more strongly, shaping them. Specializing them.

  In his memory, there had been a push away from a generalized “liberal arts” education towards “vocational” training. The general study of the arts and sciences had given way to training for practical tasks, like plumbing or electrical work or information technology, which would be much more lucrative in the near term.

  This was the immediate and blatant analogy that struck him. It was probably mostly inapplicable. And yet he couldn’t deny that Gems were a marker of status and mere possession of one elevated one’s social class, yet for the resourceful they unlocked sweeping magical power, while Gemgear made you really, really good at highly specific tasks that could get you an immediate boost in social station. But unless you were immensely lucky and managed to bootstrap your way to heroism by conquering Dungeons on your own, you’d always be working for your lord.

  Well, there was no use thinking of irrelevant things from another world.

  “How can I stop this from happening?” Archmund asked.

  Garth stroked his beard. “Your way of fighting, lad — looks to me like you don’t have much fine control. Gemgear wants all your power, and you gave it. Moderate that, and you’ll be safe.”

  “I’ll learn slower.”

  “You’ll still be yourself.”

  He pointed at him. “When you’re in town, give me two hours of your time a day. That’s far too few for a normal person to learn, but I wouldn’t be teaching you. I’d be helping you channel your power without killing someone.”

  How could he possibly refuse that offer?

  He spoke plenty with Mary and Raehel over this time. But there were two conversations of great note.

  “You learned a Skill,” he said to Mary approvingly.

  She smiled. “I can’t even say the word ‘begone’ without holding that fan anymore, it makes too much wind. I didn’t expect that to happen.”

  Archmund chuckled. Then he grew serious.

  “How do you feel?” he asked, watching her carefully.

  Mary shrugged. “Like myself?”

  “No strange fits or senses of being possessed?”

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  She shook her head.

  He believed her. She’d always been sarcastic but also a decent maid. If she hadn’t befriended him, she wouldn’t have stood out, but now that he thought about it there was almost no one else for him to befriend. The nobility had all but stopped traveling to see each other after period of the Crylaxan Plague, and he supposed it wouldn’t hurt to extend an invitation to his noble neighbors for the Harvest Festival celebration. But all the commoners of the town, like Catherine and Xander, had to live their own lives, helping out in their households while he got to study and play.

  Anyways. Mary had always been his friend, she’d always been sarcastic, and she’d always had a weaker sense for being cowed by nobles and their airs. If she changed, he would know.

  Maybe the Gemstone fans just held less killing intent than a sword.

  “We never did have that lesson on Skills,” he’d said to Raehel. “How to develop and evolve them.”

  Raehel cringed. “I hoped we’d never have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s… it’s so, so unscientific,” she said. “Skills — capital S — develop when you need them.”

  “Back up a bit,” Mary said. “What is a Skill, and how does it differ from just having skills?”

  The explanation Raehel gave was similar in form to the Skills Archmund remembered from the video games in his past life, but it was interesting to hear them explained through the scientific consensus of the day. Essentially, Skills were discretizations of the vague and nebulous spectrum of abilities that one could unlock through using Gems and Gemgear. Human potential was fully continuous, but the crystallized ghosts of the dead were static, immutable, discrete. After study and practice, one could refine one’s mastery of a specific technique until it was consistent and repeatable at reflex, like second nature. Once you’d got that, you could name it as a Skill.

  “This isn’t how I unlocked my Skills,” Archmund said.

  “Unlocked. That’s another debate,” Raehel said. “There’s a big standing question in the magic community whether Skills inherently exist in the structure of the universe and the development of new Skills is discovery, or whether they’re wholly societally constructed and the existence of a “skill canon” is entirely the doing of society.”

  “It was one word. Can you address my actual question, please?”

  Raehel sighed. “I don’t want to. It’s so much trouble and very confusing.”

  “And why’s that?”

  Raehel twirled a strand of orange hair around her finger. “Because so many people unlock Skills they haven’t ‘studied’ or ‘trained’ for in the heat of battle.”

  It turned out that in suitably dramatic or deadly moments, people generally tended to unlock the exact Skill they needed to survive instead of dying, regardless of the prior experience of ability. A noble lady thrown from a cliff gained the ability to bounce like rubber. A traitor sentenced to beheading gained hardened skin at the moment of their death and became a bandit leader. Mary, when faced with the terror of a pony, learned to make things go away.

  Of course, this only applied to people who'd dumped a large amount of their personal magical power into Gems. Plenty of commoners fell from cliffs and got decapitated and just died. But once you touched Gem, Skills might awaken at the most convenient times.

  “Wait, that could be survivorship bias,” Archmund said. “The people who don’t learn Skills in time of crisis just die so you don’t hear about them.”

  Raehel gave him a look. “You see why it’s so unsatisfying. That’s the obvious and clean answer, but everyone else is speculating about whether the Gems are sentient, or whether they contain the memories of the dead and don’t want to die again. It’s infuriating.”

  “Why can’t that be true?”

  “I’ve never felt my Gems talk to me. How could they want anything?”

  He remembered the bloodlust rushing through his veins that drove his blade towards Garth’s neck. That had certainly felt like instinct or desire.

  “So in order to learn Skills…”

  “The fastest and easiest way is to put yourself in genuinely dangerous situations that you think there’s a real chance of getting out of.”

  This reminded him of the Flow State.

  On Earth, scientists had spent a disgusting amount of time studying productivity, what made some people able to do more work than others. They’d chanced upon the “Flow State” — a mental transformation in which a person would be able to work for hours on end effortlessly doing something normally viewed as tedious or difficult.

  One of the components of entering the Flow State was if the work wasn’t too easy or too hard, but just right — hard enough to provide novelty and a challenge, but easy enough that they believed they could do it. Work that engendered a Flow State, and thus the greatest productivity and greatest learning, was just beyond the edge of a person’s current abilities.

  Unfortunately, that was more suitable for repetitive work like start-ups or writing or gambling. Dungeon diving and magic were matters of mortal peril. If you threw yourself into danger wantonly because you thought that would accelerate your growth, you’d either be right or dead.

  Which meant that if you wanted to try learning Skills through danger, it helped if you prepared beforehand by practicing and Attuning and Awakening your Gems.

  “So the others way of learning Skills…”

  “Are slow and barely noticeable. Once you Awaken your Gems at one level, Skills become inevitable. Awaken higher and higher tiers of your Gems, and you’ll get more and more Skills.”

  That statement was as loaded as hell with implications he hadn’t even considered, and he heavily suspected it would take years to fully unravel so instead he decided to focus in the immediate tasks at hand.

  He was only one man. One boy, really. He had one Gem that could defect energy attacks. But as it stood, if someone stabbed him, he would die. If someone poisoned him, he would die. If someone legally arranged for his execution, he would die. He would probably take down a few in the process, but he would inevitably fall against the whole might of the Empire.

  The plan was simple, really. Train a personal army/honor guard, loyal to him and him alone, chosen through merit and valor, and shape them into deadly weapons empowered by the Gems of the dead.

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