Chapter 63: Patience

Will was alone in his room, twirling the Axolotl arm in his hand. it was a shrivelled limb about the size of his forearm. It appeared to have once been somewhat transparent, but the preserving process had made it into an opaque chunk of flesh with the consistency of a piece of smoky quartz.

He’d wanted to be alone when he Sacrificed the arm.

Something about this felt personal. Private. A moment between Will, himself, and no one else.

Mostly because he wasn’t sure if he would cry or not.

He held it up, offering it to The Tower.

Do you wish to Sacrifice Axolotl to Aspect of the Immortal serpent?

Yes.

Will’s body shuddered as his Ability was rewritten.

Aspect of the Immortal Serpent has been upgraded. Review the description for changes.

Aspect of the Immortal Serpent:

A collection of passives that focus on mobility and hardiness. The bearer of this Ability becomes more resistant to exposure and altitude. Their digestive systems become able to process food unfit for human consumption, and their hands and feet always find safe purchase on even the most hostile terrain. User will heal more completely. Scars and damage, both external and internal will fade away over time. Not even a complete removal of a limb or organ will prevent this healing, provided the user is not dead. Scales with Resistance.

Will glanced over at his stump.

It…tingled a bit? Maybe?

Will took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

Patience. It said it heals at normal speed. It’s not gonna violently burst out of my wrist in an explosion of gore…

Will peered down at his wrist, half-hoping that might be the case.

When nothing happened, he let out the breath that he’d been holding.

“I don’t know what I was expecting,” Will muttered to himself.

He leaned back and studied his arm.

Why did I have the option of ‘immortal serpent’ anyway? Will thought, thinking back to Loth’s reading of the church’s missives telling of ‘deceivers in human skin’.

The rules of the ‘qualitative upgrade’ as told to him by the merchant said that when someone had low-quality sacrifices, they could upgrade their skills with a better sample from one of the three original sacrifices.

The System thought he’d Sacrificed a sample of Immortal serpent. It had been his hand.

The idea that one or both of his parents might’ve gotten busy with a giant snake monster, or simply been one…was not too surprising, actually.

You don’t get to be legendary Climbers without a secret or two.

Where does that leave me?

Will had seen all kinds of races since he’d started Climbing, and even more in Akul just walking down the street. So what if he wasn’t entirely human? He was just another face in the crowd.

Aside from the church of Granesh seeming to have a grudge against him specifically.

I wonder why Gertrude never caught on…

No, she probably caught on, but didn’t believe in dogmatic child-murder. More likely.

Thoughts of the wizened crone, her quick hand and sharp tongue made him a bit misty-eyed.

That’s what gets me? Really?

“Will?” Loth’s voice emanated from his door. “It’s time.”

Will leaned over to grab his mask from the nearby shelf with the intention of hiding his tears and recoiled as it shifted under his fingers, becoming something altogether…scalier.

Will picked it up and saw the spitting image of an Uru drake looking back at him, the dragonoid’s mouth half-open in a snarl.

I wonder why it changed to an uru drake instead of an immortal serpent? Will thought.

The only explanation could conjure was that after upgrading Aspect of the Goat, the Mask of Manifestation registered him as a new wearer and randomly re-rolled its form based on his sacrifices, without assigning more weight to any given Sacrifice.

Aw, I kinda liked the goat, Will mused as he put the mask over his face.

Mask of Manifestation:

+2 Acuity

Manifests an Ability based on one of the Wearer’s Sacrifices.

Malleable Space: 1 charge

Stretch or compress the space between two points of the user’s choice. Duration and potency Scales with Acuity and inversely with distance.

Cancelable.

Secondary, at will: encodes speech such that only other Mask wearers may understand.

The Abyss does ‘stretch or compress space’ mean? Will thought as Loth ducked her head into the room.

“New mask?” She asked with a frown.

“Nope.” Will said, tapping the external features. “Let’s do some Phantom Thieving.”

The party that Bee had challenged them to steal from was happening tomorrow night, but rather than do rational things like case the location and draw up plans, they were going to use tracking insects to follow Bee back to her lair and get what they actually wanted:

My gods-damned Tomahawk!

Sure it didn’t have any stat boosts, but the psychic attack, the passive debuff and the Contract Ability made it a very valuable weapon, which Will wasn’t willing to give up on.

Plus selling a dozen rich people their art back seemed like a great way to refill the war chest.

Will stood and marched out the door, heading downstairs before going out the back of the inn and jumping up on the rooftops, his body fading slightly to match the dim lighting as the Wand of the Trespasser made him ever-so-slightly transparent.

It wasn’t his territory.

Loth followed from up high, her insects carrying her up in the darkened sky, high enough that no one could see or hear her among the featureless black expanse that loomed above the city.

Will could’ve hitched a ride with Loth, but he was badly in need of practice with his new loadout, so he peered up and gave Loth a salute.

Huh. I can’t see the stars.

Will had gotten used to The Tower’s strange shifting stars, but strangely he couldn’t see them above the city.

That was fine, because it made it harder to spot Loth.

In front of Will, a single insect began flying, and he followed.

As he swept across the rooftops like a quiet breeze, the scenery gradually changed around him, from residential neighborhoods for the wealthy guests of the likes of the Oiltons, to merchants buildings, middle class residential neighborhoods, slums with roofs creaking from years of neglect, dozens of people sandwiched below, praying that it didn’t rain…and finally the buildings began to spread out as he hit the industrial area.

Warehouses, tanners, canners, paper mills, and any other business that either required loads of bulk goods that might choke a narrow city street, or simply produced obnoxious odors.

The buildings had dozens to hundreds of feet between each of them, causing Will to have to scamper down before leaping over high fences designed to keep level 25 trespassers out.

Everyone in the city was at least level 20, the only thing that gave Will an edge was his class was built for just this sort of behavior.

Damn, it would’ve been easier to just fly over these, though, Will thought sourly as the realization dawned on him that he might never fly again.

To that I say…

Will jumped up, grabbed his Phantom Hand and launched himself further up the fence, silently surmounting it to land in a puff of dust on the other side.

Who needs flight?

He leapt up onto the cannery and muscled past the smell of fish, scampering silently past it, always following the bug that was tracing the marking scent he’d long since scoured away from his own hand.

When he came to the next gap between buildings, Will froze and ducked down, spotting half a dozen workers loading a wagon full of cans of fish, preparing them for distribution around the city.

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It was always amusing to note that the common laborers he saw below were, outside The Tower, functionally demigods. Any Climber who made it to the fifth floor was level 20 at least, and most rational people had at least 2 growth in strength, so these men and women were somewhere around triple the strength of a normal person, and the massive crates of jars they hauled around confirmed that.

On the other hand, Acuity was often neglected by common climbers who only had so many points to spend and felt that better Acuity did not save one’s life with the same frequency of say…high Resistance and Strength.

Which was generally true, although, it could be argued that a high acuity stat helped avoid trouble entirely, but if one didn’t have the strength to outrun it…it didn’t really matter.

In any case, odds were many of them had Acuity and focus as dump stats.

Still, Will didn’t think he could jump down, sneak past, then climb back up without alerting anyone. There was still a good chance that one of them had put a few points into Acuity.

Will was tempted to pick himself up and throw himself across with the Phantom Hand, but he ruled that out.

It wasn’t that the Ability lacked the power: It was surprisingly strong, actually, able to rag-doll him fairly well. The problem was a lack of fine control. He didn’t have any convenient places to grab himself and little-to-no practice at it either.

Meaning that while he could theoretically fling himself over, he would be flailing the entire way and there was no guarantee he would hit the spot he wanted rather than going through a window.

What about the mask? Will thought, glancing at the distant roof.

Hmmm.

Will was suddenly tempted to solve the issue of an untested Ability by replacing it with another untested ability…

So he compromised.

Will ignored the insect urging him to go straight though the laborers to the next building over and instead took a sharp left turn, finding a side of the building no one could see.

Malleable Space

40/41 Charge remaining.

Will selected the edge of the roof his foot was resting on, and the edge of the other roof.

His eyes hurt as they told him that somehow, the two points got closer, the world outside distorting around a man-sized tunnel of space.

From Will’s perspective, the distance between the two had shrunk to only about six feet.

A little hop, and Will was on the other roof.

He turned and looked back, seeing the same distortion lingering behind him. When he dismissed the Ability, space seemed to snap back to the way it was supposed to be, the distance between the two returning to it’s previous state with only a slight ripple.

That is wild. Will thought to himself before crouching down and scampering to the next roof over.

Okay, next Ability.

Will switched the Phantom Hand slot from the ring of accuracy, to the wand, feeling his body suddenly become sluggish as he shed nineteen Strength.

Undead Retainer

40->35 Charges remaining.

There was a wail more felt than heard (but definitely heard) as a pinhole in reality opened up and a spirit was shot out like it’d been under pressure.

Damnit, Will thought, crouching down low and praying that the nearby laborers didn’t come investigate.

He needn’t have bothered, because they were rational adults that definitely weren’t getting paid to investigate spooky noises happening in someone else’s warehouse.

The afterlife must be standing room only, Will thought as the blast of ectoplasm formed a semi-solid, resolving into a shape upon hitting reality like raw egg dropped into boiling water.

The spirit resolved into a well-dressed, aged butler with no legs, who gave a genteel bow.

“Good evening, young necromancer, how can I-“

“Get down,” Will whispered, motioning for the spirit to duck before someone saw him.

“How can I serve you?” the spirit asked, crouching down to join Will. “Are we under attack?”

“No, I’m trespassing.” Will said.