Chương 10: Class Day

He didn't move for a long time. He lay in the rocks with the grey light coming up and the name the dead woman had said going around and around in his head, and he waited for it to start sounding like a dream and stop sounding like a fact. It didn't.

"You're awake," Sable said.

"Good. You were making noises I'd rather not describe."

"She said my name." He said it to the sky.

"In the dream. The woman from the shard. She turned around and she said my name. My actual name. The one my mother gave me. Not Architect, not any of this. Mine."

"It was a dream," Sable said.

"You'd just learned you understand a dead language. Your head took that and built a haunted house out of it overnight. That's all a dream is."

"You don't believe that." A pause.

"No," she said.

"I don't. But it's morning, and believing it lets you stand up, so let's both pretend for an hour. On your feet. We've a long way to go and a thing to do before you're any use to anyone, yourself included." The thing to do was Level 10.

"You're seven," Sable said as he walked.

"Three more, and the System has to offer you a class. The day it files you under something ordinary is the day it mostly stops looking at you sideways. So we get you the three levels, and we get them on the road to somewhere you can vanish."

"Which is where?"

"Solara. The City of Ascendants. Biggest adventurer town in the world. Ten thousand armed idiots all trying to be the chosen one. The best place on the map to be a nobody, because nobody there has a spare second to look twice at one more tired man with a low class." A beat.

"It's three hundred kilometers of bad road. Most of it ahead of you. Start walking." He started walking. He spent one of his four silver at a crossroads post on a knife with a real edge, which felt absurdly good, the first thing he'd ever bought in this world. He thought about Pell's old bread knife, lost under a hundred feet of his own ceiling, and how the baker had said bring it back, and he pushed that down and kept moving. The road taught him the rest.

There was no shortage of things on it that wanted a man traveling alone — lean grey dogs gone wrong, a thing built like a boar with too many legs, a nest of biters in a wet culvert — and he killed them, not well, not cleanly, but he killed them the way Sable hammered into him, which was to never once fight fair.

"You are not strong and you are not fast," she said, over and over, while he bled and learned.

"Strong and fast get you buried. You are the man who sees the answer nobody else looks for. Use the ground. Use the slope. Use the thing they're standing next to. You did it to the wolves. You did it to your own dungeon. Do it again, and again, until it's the only way you know how to fight." [Level 8.] [Level 9.] He stopped reading past the number. His new knife got its notches. The burns down his side scabbed and pulled and itched.

He slept in ditches and ate badly and put one foot in front of the other, and on the second morning out a lean grey thing came at him out of the long grass, and he put the knife through its eye on a guess, and it dropped, and a box came up brighter than the rest. [Level 10.] And the world stopped to ask him a question. The box that opened was bigger than any he'd seen. It hung in the road in front of him in his own clean font, and it was waiting. [You have reached Level 10. Choose your class.] And under it, five doors. [Warrior.] [Mage.] [Scout.] [Merchant.] [Scholar.] He knew them. Of course he knew them. He'd written that exact list at a whiteboard with the design team, five starting archetypes, argued a whole week about whether Scout and Scholar were too close together, lost the argument, and shipped it anyway. Seeing the five of them hang in the air over a dirt road, real now, waiting for him to climb into one of them for the rest of his life, made his stomach turn over.

"There it is," Sable said, and for the first time all morning she sounded almost easy.

"Pick the dullest one. Scholar, Merchant, doesn't matter. Pick the thing that makes a guard's eyes slide right off you, and let's —" If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. A sixth door opened under the fifth. He didn't read it. He didn't get the chance. It was there for less than a heartbeat, a sixth option blooming into being under [Scholar], and before one letter of it could resolve a wash of red went across it, hard, and it was gone.

Scrubbed out. Like it had never been there. The list snapped back to five.

"... Sable. There were six."

"I saw it." All the ease was gone out of her.

"I have never once seen the System hide a class from a person. It doesn't hide them. It's never had to. Kaito, what did the sixth one —""I don't know. It took it back before I could read it." And then his hands came up. He didn't tell them to. He was staring at the empty place where the sixth door had been, and his hands lifted in front of the box and his fingers started to move, fast, in the air, the way they'd moved ten thousand times at a console he didn't have anymore, in a life that didn't exist anymore.

He was typing. Commands. Pure old reflex, querying a screen that had just hidden something from him. Show me. List all. Show me what you took. He hadn't decided to do any of it. There was no keyboard under his hands, nothing but cold morning air, and it didn't matter at all. His fingers knew the shape of commands he'd typed for six years, and they were trying them on the System the way they'd try them on any screen in the world that was keeping something back. The box stuttered.

It stuttered like a thing asked a question it has no permission to answer. The five doors flickered. The letters jumped. For a second the whole box thinned out and went half see-through, and underneath it he caught a glimpse of something vast and moving, the machinery of the world turning over in a place he was never meant to see. Then one line cut flat across all of it, cold, in the voice he knew. The voice that had named the anomaly in the dirt by the tower. [Architect.] His hands stopped.

The box went solid again. [Class assignment overridden. Designation: placeholder.] [Class assigned: Wanderer.] The five doors were gone. So was whatever he'd been reaching for. There was just the one word now, sitting in the road in his own font. [Wanderer.]"Wanderer," Kaito said out loud.

"That wasn't on the list. None of those five was Wanderer. It didn't let me choose. It just —" He laughed, and it came out wrong.

"It filed me under miscellaneous. The god of the world looked me over and dropped me in the junk drawer." Sable didn't laugh.

"Kaito. Listen to me, because you're about to feel insulted, and being insulted is going to get in the way." She waited until he was quiet.

"Do you know why a placeholder is the most dangerous thing in that whole System?"

"It just told me it thinks I'm nothing."

"Every class has a ceiling," she said.

"A Warrior caps. A Mage caps. Every one of those five doors was a road with a wall built across the end of it, a level you reach and never pass, because the System laid the wall the day it laid the class. That's how it keeps everyone exactly where it wants them." A breath.

"A placeholder has no wall. It was never finished. The System didn't write you a ceiling, because it never meant for you to keep this class long enough to find one. Wanderer is the only class in ten thousand years with no top to it. It can't tell you how high you can go, because it doesn't know. Nobody knows. That has never happened, not once, in the entire history of the world." He stood in the road and looked at the one grey word and understood, slowly, exactly what she was handing him.

"So I can just keep going," he said.

"Up. With no limit."

"As far as you can survive," Sable said.

"Which, knowing you, is the part that's going to be the problem." He should have been more afraid than he was. The fear was there. But under it was something he hadn't felt since before the rack came down on him — the old, mean little thrill of being handed a system with the safety rails torn off. He'd spent his whole working life building walls into worlds so other people would feel safe inside them.

The world had just handed him one with no walls at all, and he wanted, against every ounce of sense he had left, to find out how far up it went. He was still looking at the word Wanderer when another box opened beside it. This one wasn't blue. It wasn't his font. It had a thin bright border the color of old silver, and it had come up without a sound, and it was nothing the System had ever shown him.

"Sable," he said slowly.

"There's another box. Silver. Right beside the first one." A pause.

"There's no box, Kaito." Careful again.

"There's Wanderer, and there's the road. That's everything in front of you."

"You can't see it."

"I can't see something that isn't there." But it was there. He could read it the same way he'd read the broken bridge, the same way he'd understood the dead woman, the way he kept knowing things he had no business knowing. Three lines of silver, waiting, and meant for him alone. [Good. They gave you the empty class. Empty means it's yours to fill.] [Go to Solara. Keep walking until you reach the City of Ascendants.] [Someone there has been waiting a very long time for you.] The silver light held a moment, steady and patient and meant for no one else in the world. Then it faded, and the road was just a road again, and Kaito stood in the middle of it with a class that had no ceiling, a god that had just shut him in the dark, a voice in his head that couldn't see what he could see — and somebody at the far end of three hundred kilometers who already knew he was on his way.