Chapter Thirteen: The Lesser Evil

  I confirmed one more level and paused. My attributes were:

  Level 16

  Physical

  Strength: 5 (+10%) = 6

  Agility: 5 (+10%) = 6

  Endurance: 5 (+10%) = 6

  Mental

  Intelligence: 5 (+10%) = 6

  Perception: 34 (+10%) = 38

  Resilience: 22 (+10%) = 24

  X-Factor

  Presence: 3 (+10%) = 3

  Serendipity: 10 (+10%) = 11

  Will: 32 (+10%) = 35

  Free: 15

  Fifteen free points.

  It was probably time to do something useful with them.

  “How should I use my attributes?” I asked Chelsea.

  “There are no bad choices,” she told me. She seemed distracted, her head tipped to one side, her gaze on Zelda.

  Zelda was looking back at her, eyes alert. It wasn’t her “Treat, please?” look or her “Outside, now?” look, but I felt like some wordless form of communication was taking place. In dogs, an extremely direct stare can be a threat, a way of asserting power, but Zelda wasn’t that kind of dog. Her direct stare was unusual for her.

  Still, she didn’t seem upset, and she definitely wasn’t being aggressive, so I let it go. I had enough to worry about without trying to eavesdrop on my dog’s conversations with the System.

  At past levels, I'd gotten traits when I reached ten and twenty points in an attribute, but my Perception and Will stats were well past thirty points now, and I hadn’t gotten any new ones.

  Were the traits done? Maybe they appeared when the totals doubled, so I’d get another one at forty. I could find out by adding two more points to Perception, my highest stat.

  But Perception, Will, and, to a lesser degree, Resilience, were going to keep growing much faster than my other stats. I probably ought to use my free points for the attributes that wouldn’t increase on their own.

  Will was lovely, of course—it was nice to know that I really was as stubborn as people had always told me I was—but if I’d been choosing my attributes, I’d have picked Agility over Perception. Or maybe Intelligence.

  I know, I know, it was my own fault for letting the System make all the decisions. I should have read my messages. Too late now, though.

  That said, the System seemed to have made really great choices for me, far better than I could have done myself. Left to my own devices, I’d be a dead mage by now.

  Ironic, really, that given all the systems I’d been trapped within in my life—the educational system, the medical system, the judicial system—only the one run by actual aliens insisted I make my own choices, while also making better choices for me than I could make for myself.

  Was it irony if it wasn’t actually funny?

  I took a sip of the dregs of my (by now very cold) tea and grimaced at the bitter taste, then went back to contemplating my options.

  Should I specialize or try to be well-rounded? I could dump all my free points into one of the first four stats—Strength, Agility, Endurance or Intelligence—raising it to 20, which would become 22 with the bonus. Or I could save those last two points and put them in something else.

  I could put 8 points in Serendipity to raise it to 20, and then 7 points in something else. Strength, maybe? Or Intelligence?

  Or I could spread it out even more—trying to raise all the stats to 10, for the sake of the traits I’d get.

  No bad choices, Chelsea had said. Did I believe her?

  Did I have a choice?

  I wavered for a minute longer, stuck in decision paralysis. This wasn’t like choosing what toppings I wanted on my pizza. The choices I made were about who I wanted to be, who I wanted to become.

  No pressure now.

  With a deep inhale, I took the plunge, adding four points to Strength, three points to Agility and four each to Endurance and Intelligence.

  And then I gasped and nearly fell out of my seat. I’d gotten used to the rush of well-being with each level, that sense of my body perfecting itself, healing all damage, restoring my energy, but after six levels in a row, the sixth had been pretty trivial. My body had been as restored as it was gonna get.

  This was different. This was muscles changing, bones shifting, my internal organs reshaping, all with a sensation that wasn’t exactly pain.

  Well, it wasn’t pain if pain was measured on a standard that started with broken bones and went up to critical injuries. But it felt much worse than leveling as muscles pulled and bones moved, lungs expanded and skin tightened, and then, to top it off, for a fleeting moment it felt like a jolt of power ran through every nerve in my body.

  All of them.

  I’m not quite sure how I stopped myself from shrieking, but maybe it was just that I couldn’t quite catch my breath. I didn’t have the oxygen to give the kind of scream that was warranted and by the time I did, it was over, and I was gasping.

  “Quite a kick, eh?” Chelsea said.

  I glared at her, but still didn’t have the air in my lungs to complain with any real vehemence. Deserved vehemence, but now that it was over, I was feeling… well, kind of amazing.

  I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but the very first thing I did was reach up behind my back and unhook my bra. The band was cutting into my ribcage like a nineteenth-century corset. Had Endurance made my lungs bigger? Or did increasing Strength increase my size, like She-Hulk at work? Either way, I was gonna need to go underwear shopping.

  In the apocalypse.

  Great. That was sure to be fun.

  I lifted one arm in the classic bodybuilder biceps pose. I had muscles. Not immense muscles, not fifty pounds of muscles, but definable biceps. I yanked my shirt up, looked at my stomach, and then tugged my shirt down just as fast, flushing.

  Abs, too. Not a classic six-pack—I was still female, with female body parts, including a uterus and the healthy amount of essential body fat required for a functioning reproductive system—but my core muscles hadn’t been that defined since I was… okay, never. My core muscles had never been that defined.

  “This is so weird,” I muttered. I stood and bounced on my toes. Yep, leg muscles, too. I felt springy, like running a mile would be trivial. Even like I could jump higher and kick harder.

  I dropped back into my chair, wondering how serious fitness folks were going to feel about the System. Imagine slaving away in the gym for hours every day, trying to get the perfect body, and suddenly people around you have the abs you’ve always wanted without doing a thing. Well, without doing a thing except kill a ton of monsters. Maybe staying alive counted for something.

  The notifications dot was flashing in the corner of my eye, which meant—after my careful tweaking of the settings—that I was getting a new notification, one I hadn’t seen before, not just the typical XP here or there. I opened it up with a thought.

  Mental Synergy Trait Triggered!

  The sum of the whole is greater than the parts. Your Intelligence, Perception, and Resilience attributes have each reached ten points, and Shake It Off, Eyes Wide Open, and Quick Study have merged into:

  Mind Over Matter — Your intelligence, perception, and inner strength harmonize into a mind that cannot be easily shaken.

  You automatically resist effects from opponents whose level is less than your Mental Total ÷ 5. When affected by stronger effects, their duration is shortened by (Mental Total – attacker’s level) × 1%, and illusions, compulsions, and deceptions falter with the same chance.

  Each time you resist or recover from a status effect, your mind adapts: resistance against that effect type increases by Mental Total × 1% for the next twenty-four hours.

  I hadn’t even seen [Quick Study] before it was gone. But [Mind Over Matter] looked as if it would be useful if I encountered monsters who used mental attacks.

  I gave a little involuntary shiver at the thought. ‘If’ should probably be ‘when.’ The System wouldn’t be giving me so many tools to defend myself against mental attacks if it didn’t think those attacks were inevitable. They were probably the System equivalent of getting roofied in a bar, and just as creepy a prospect. Another reason to keep leveling as quickly as possible. I’d like my Mental Total to be a lot higher than that of my enemies.

  Given the synergy trait, I didn’t even bother to look at the new traits I should have for Strength and Endurance. Instead, I confirmed my next level and promptly dropped another point into Agility. Then I finished off my leveling by giving that last lone free point to Presence. It felt like a waste, but if I gave it every free point for the next three levels, I'd get the synergy trait for X-Factor.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  By then I should know which of my optional attributes I should prioritize. Strength, maybe, if I intended to keep hitting monsters with a shovel, or Intelligence if my new [Mana Absorption] ability meant casting spells.

  My new attributes were:

  Level 17

  Physical

  Strength: 9 (+10%) = 10

  Agility: 9 (+10%) = 10

  Endurance: 9 (+10%) = 10

  Mental

  Intelligence: 9 (+10%) = 10

  Perception: 36 (+10%) = 40

  Resilience: 23 (+10%) = 25

  X-Factor

  Presence: 4 (+10%) = 4

  Serendipity: 10 (+10%) = 11

  Will: 34 (+10%) = 37

  Free: 0

  Decisions made, I looked at the notification I’d just gotten.

  Physical Synergy Trait Triggered!

  The sum of the whole is greater than the parts. Your Strength, Agility and Endurance attributes have each reached ten points, and Pack Mule, Grace Under Pressure, and Unbreakable have merged into:

  Body in Balance—Your strength, agility, and endurance harmonize into a body that cannot be easily broken.

  You automatically shrug off physical effects from opponents whose level is less than your Physical Total ÷ 5. When struck by stronger forces, damage and fatigue are reduced by (Physical Total – attacker’s level) × 1%, and knockdowns, grapples, and restraints falter with the same chance.

  Each time you withstand or recover from a physical effect, your body adapts: resistance against that effect type increases by Physical Total × 1% for the next twenty-four hours.

  Even with my title bonus, I only had 30 points in Physical stats, so this trait looked like a bit of a bust. Woo-hoo, Level 6 creatures couldn’t hurt me. I would have been more surprised if they could: at Level 17, I wouldn’t get a single point of XP for defeating a Level 6 monster.

  That said, if I got caught in a swarm of them, like the bugs in the rift, it would be comforting to know they couldn’t damage me at all. No deaths by a thousand paper cuts in my future. Or, worse, a thousand monster mosquito bites.

  Wait, would this mean I was invulnerable to mosquitoes?

  All mosquitoes, not just the mana-crazed kind?

  Ooh, and fire ants, too.

  [Body in Balance] no longer looked like a bust. It might not be great against monsters, but for quality of life, you couldn’t really beat being invulnerable to bug bites in Florida.

  I glanced at my traits pane to see what it looked like now. The old 10-point traits were gone, but I had one new 40 point trait.

  Level 17 Traits

  Physical (10+)—Body in Balance

  Mental (10+)—Mind Over Matter

  Perception (20+)—Uncanny Insight

  Perception (40+)—Senses Beyond Sight

  Resilience (20+)—Return to Sender

  Serendipity (10+)—Lucky Break

  Will (10+)—No Means No

  Will (20+)—Rooted Self

  I hovered over the Perception trait until the tooltip appeared.

  Senses Beyond Sight (40+)—Sight is only the start. Your hearing, smell, and touch refine into sharper tools, catching subtleties most people never notice. Passive detection of nearby movement, shifts in air, faint sounds, and unusual scents is now part of your baseline awareness.

  A better sense of smell in the apocalypse didn’t actually sound like a win. People weren’t going to have working showers for much longer. Toilets would be latrine-style. Dead things would abound. Did I really want to smell all that?

  Not that I had a choice in the matter. The System hadn’t consulted me.

  By now, I felt like I’d been sitting in the cafe reading System notifications and making decisions for hours. It was very different from the last time I’d been deciding what to do with my attribute points, when I was still in the challenge scenario with Jack and Emma.

  How were they doing? Had Jack found his sister? Were they safe in enclaves?

  Would I ever know or were they lost to me now, random strangers who’d been important for a moment, but who I’d never see again?

  And just like that, my brain started to spiral. I could feel it, the depression creeping up on me, the bleak thoughts bubbling to the surface of my mind. The so-called ‘negativity bias’ sprinkling its poison on random memories and future dreams.

  If depression was a status effect, could I resist my own brain’s attacks? Shouldn’t [Mind Over Matter] be strong enough to keep me in balance?

  I snorted at the thought, and shoved away from the table, standing up. Long experience had taught me that sitting still was the worst possible thing to do when the dark pit began to open. It was time to take a walk.

  Except… it was the middle of the night.

  I glanced at my watch. I’d been sitting here for hours of real time, with Bear and Riley and the General home alone.

  I hoped they were okay. I stopped the spiral of depression-based catastrophizing before it could show me more than a single visual of Bear tearing apart the house as she chased the cat, and said, “I should go.”

  “You have one more decision to make,” Chelsea said. She and Zelda appeared to have ended their staring contest while I was engrossed with my points and she was back behind the counter.

  She gestured at the overhead chalkboard with a wide sweep of her arm. “By fully harvesting the Thorn’s Edge rift, you’ve stabilized and claimed it, which means you get to choose another rift to explore.”

  The entry for Thorn’s Edge on the chalkboard had changed. It now read,

  Thorn’s Edge—Stable at Tier One. Claimed by Olivia Thorne.

  All the other text on the board was still indecipherable, however.

  “How does that work?” I asked.

  “A rift keeper who completes a full harvest of a rift automatically claims it. At your level, the System should make some basic controls available to you via your HUD now. Just the simple stuff. But you also get to choose a second access point.”

  I took a quick glance at my display and realized that I now had a Rift tab right next to the Companions tab.

  Chelsea leaned on the counter. “On planets where all the rifts are controlled, there’s usually a waiting list. It can take years for a wild rift to become available. But Earth right now has hundreds of thousands of unclaimed rifts, and only a handful of rift keepers, most of whom are currently in the ocean working on evacuating other sapient lifeforms to their sanctuary planets. You might be able to claim quite a few before you start getting any serious competition for them, although you don’t want to over-commit. You are responsible for keeping them cleared if you claim them.”

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  Chelsea shrugged. “Bad stuff? You get in trouble? You lose your claim, of course, but you’re also responsible for any damage the overflow does. That could get quite costly.”

  “Got it.” I stared at the chalkboard. I was waiting for the text to clear, for some of the lines to become legible, but nothing happened. “So how do I choose?”

  Chelsea glanced at the chalkboard, looking puzzled. “It’s your RMI. It’ll follow your mental model.” She scanned the room, then pointed behind me. “Over there, maybe?”

  I looked.

  In my opinion, the wall behind me shouldn’t exist. Every time I entered the coffee shop, I appeared in the same place, facing the same direction, with the counter in front of me, the bookshelves to my right, the door and window to my left. Behind me ought to be either the shimmering mist of the access point leading to my yard, or maybe the void.

  Instead, it looked like a faux distressed brick wall, with scattered artwork hung in random spots. If this was the type of coffee shop it felt like, the artwork would be by local artists, ever-changing, with discreet price tag stickers in the corners.

  Chelsea, however, was pointing at a framed map of the world.

  I stepped closer to take a look. The map was covered with push pins, most of them white, as if visitors from around the world had stopped by this little coffee shop and been invited to leave a marker showing where they came from. Some of the pins were in shades of yellow, and a sprinkling of various blues, ranging from light to dark, dotted the white that filled the oceans.

  But it wasn’t really a map at all.

  It was an interactive display. Just like with my HUD, when my eyes rested on a spot for a moment, the map reacted. First it zoomed in, the map narrowing from the world, to the Americas, to the Caribbean, to Florida, to Ocala. I noticed the one-and-only green push pin immediately, and when my gaze hovered over it, a listing for Thorn’s Edge popped up like a tooltip.

  Each one of the pins must represent a rift.

  Honestly, the System was so weird.

  Chelsea snorted. “Adaptive, remember? The familiar is comfortable, and because it’s comfortable, it’s easier to use. Most people won’t get this level of customization, but you’re the first Earth-born Rift Keeper, and you’re at work at least a decade ahead of the average integration schedule. The System has plenty of resources available to fully develop your interpretive schemas.”

  Great. So the System was ransacking my brain for ideas about interface design. Not a career I’d ever imagined for myself, but it did beat Squirrel Slaughterer.

  And, to be fair, the map did seem pretty straightforward.

  “Do I just pick one of these pins?” I asked Chelsea. “How am I supposed to choose?”

  I zoomed in close enough that only the five nearest pins were visible: the green pin for Thorn’s Edge, three white pins, and a faintly pastel yellow pin. The three white pins were all deeper into the forest, one of them next to a small pond. Another was by a forest road, so easy enough to reach, but the third was in a heavily wooded area that was probably close to inaccessible. The yellow pin was closer to people, in an area by an RV park with a small convenience store, as well as a few roads with houses.

  I hovered and let the tooltip open on the pin near the pond. It read, “N5W12S#482.”

  Wow. How useful.

  The next pin over read, “N5W12S#484,” but the yellow pin’s tooltip was more interesting. It had the same sort of label—specifically, “N5W12S#486”—but underneath the code, it read, “Environment: brackish swamp. Denizens: slime. Instances: 3. No further data available.”

  “Three instances?” I turned to Chelsea. “Does that mean three people have separately entered the rift?”

  “Three beings, yes.”

  I scowled at it. “So yellow pins are for rifts where the System has more information available, because someone’s entered the rift? Or is yellow a warning, that the rift is tougher?”

  There were no red rifts, but maybe red was reserved for rifts on the verge of overflowing. And maybe blue meant underwater?

  “Maps usually have keys,” Chelsea said.

  My gaze automatically skipped up to the top right corner, and there it was, exactly where I would expect it to be.

  On some level, I found it profoundly disturbing that the System was just ransacking my brain for interface ideas, pulling out my expectations and assumptions like they were items on some online shopping wishlist.

  But then I remembered that crystal in the rift and its overwhelming flood of information. Creatures, landscapes, histories, all of it pouring in, drowning me with knowledge I couldn't process quickly enough, an entire library being forcibly implanted into my brain until my head felt like it would explode.

  The System quietly borrowing my ideas about how maps and coffee shops should look was definitely the lesser of two evils. I'd take an overly accommodating interface designed to my own ridiculously random specifications over having my skull cracked open and stuffed with alien encyclopedias any day of the week.

  Back to the key: I’d guessed right. White meant unexplored; yellow meant exploration in progress; green meant claimed; red meant overflow conditions.

  Blue, though, was much cooler than simply underwater. It meant “Transport Gate.”

  “Transport Gate—” I started.

  “Means exactly what you think it does,” Chelsea finished for me. “The rift contains an access point to an integrated world. Those rifts are not available to claim.”

  Dang. Not that I wanted an underwater rift, and it might be a little odd to try to take my three dogs—and one cat!—to another world with me. I wondered what kind of Customs they had? But getting to be one of the first humans to explore another livable planet was incredibly tempting.

  Maybe later.

  For now, I looked back at my zoomed-in pins. A brackish swamp with slimes was not exactly appealing, but maybe I could test my new invulnerability to mosquitoes.

  And maybe whoever was inside those three instances needed a hand.

  With a tap of my finger and a sigh, I selected Rift N5W12S#486.