Chapter 7 - Outside (Patreon)

The next day and a half passed uneventfully, and Tom sat down at lunch once more, his plate filled with plain, bland and tasteless food.

Happily misleading any hidden observers, he munched on something resembling a sausage. Today was an even day, so only healthy food was served. From what he could understand, everything provided had been designed to be nutritionally balanced. The labels all had an asterisk to denote that status. On normal days, only about a third of the dishes had that categorisation, and the children were always supposed to source half their food from those dishes. However, the lack of adult supervision still had its consequences. This was not the first time they had done this. They knew how a bunch of pre-teens would react, so the orphanage had the even day rule.  

Bir next to him was pretending to gag as she ate the same sausage he had. It was all there was today for so-called food, and it was effectively tasteless.

He forced himself to giggle at her antics, and then he saw what was happening on the table across from him.

He froze.

A girl was eating with no hands, using magic. Her arms were pointedly at her side, and the fork hovered in front of her.

It dipped down, scooped up some vegetable mash and then rose again.

“Ta.” Bir elbowed him in the side. “Don’t ignore me.”

He shook his head to buy time to process what he was observing. There was nothing remarkable about the girl. She was eight or nine, slightly chubby, with dark brown hair, but she was clearly responsible for the telekinesis he was observing as her eyes were fixed on the utensil.

She had a spell or skill…

No, you’re better than that, he reminded himself. There was no need to guess, so he concentrated on observing if any mana was in play. There was nothing, not even a ritual, which meant what he was seeing had to be a skill – which was far more impressive than a spell would have been.

“Look,” he grabbed Bir’s finger than that been poking him and pointed at the girl.

They watched another two successful scoops.

“Me want,” Bir agreed.

Tom realised his group wasn’t the only ones reacting. There was slack jawed amazement on all the surrounding tables. The girl was obviously showing off the ability for the first time, because multiple people were pointing at her.

And no mana, Tom thought to himself in amazement. How could you pick up a skill like that?

He could see a pathway to develop an ability like that with magic, yes, but how did you do it with a skill? The fork dipped down and grabbed another mouthful, its user completely oblivious to the wonder she was causing in all the watching eyes.

There was a flash of energy some of which struck the fork, which destabilised it and caused it to tip forward and dump the collected mush down the front of the girl.

She jumped to her feet, glanced down at the smear running down her uniform, and her face went beet red. “Corrine! Why would you?”

Tom’s eyes snapped over to the girl who had cast the spell to disrupt the skill. He recognised the back of her head even though from this angle he couldn’t see the white streak that originated from just above her temple.

“Because it was funny. And because you were showing off.” She spun and glanced significantly at their table and met Tom’s eyes. For a moment, it was like she was talking to him. “You’re not the only one to have gained skills and magic.”

The chubby girl stamped her feet. “I know. But.” She gestured at the food on her clothes. “This is your fault.”

“By the dragon! You’re upset about a little mess. For goodness sakes, the cleaning loop is right there.” Corrine pointed.

“You didn’t have to.”

“Fiona, what you did is inspiring.” Once more, she looked in their direction. This time their eyes did not meet, but it was like she was addressing the younger children. “It’s a very good utility skill, but it’s hardly the most impressive one around. You can’t even kill with it, and it’s not even the best in your age cohort. Sukarno’s camouflage skill is tier two.”

“So is my telekinesis.”

“Yes, but he got his last year.”

 “Stop talking her down, Corrine.” An older boy snapped. “Getting a tier two skill as a child is super impressive.”

She glanced at the boy who had interceded:

“Here, at this academy, it’s barely middling. Not having anything stronger than that at fourteen is downright pathetic.”

The boy flushed in anger:

“I have multiple tier two hammer skills.”

“Sorry,” Corrine said quickly, raising her hands. “That’s not what I meant to say. I meant to say your lack of further progress is unlucky. I’ve seen how hard you train.”

“Of course I train hard. My parents tell me all the stories. I understand what we’re here for.”

“What are you implying? That I don’t have parents, so I don’t train hard?” she asked dangerously.

“Not everything is about you, Corrine.” The boy finished. There was an awkward pause and Tom wasn’t sure if the jab had been deliberate or merely poor wording. Then the boy smiled cruelly. “My parents also taught me not to be a bully.”

Deliberate, Tom concluded. He was trying to put her in her place, but Corrine didn’t react to the latest attack. Quietly, she just sat down and started eating.

“You need to talk to the psychologists.” The older boy continued, unperturbed. “The way you play out when the adults aren’t around can’t be healthy.”

“Mind your own business.” Corrine was glaring at the boy. “Unless you want to fight?”

“Just because you’re going to be a powerhouse doesn’t mean you can treat people this way.”

“Is that a challenge?”

“Corrine, not everything is about fighting.”

“Dragon, eat you. It very much is! And your defective attitude is why you’re so weak.”

The boy sighed and turned back to his food. Next to him Bir had picked up a fork and was clearly trying to make it levitate off her finger. Other children were doing the same. The confrontation between the boy and Corrine had been unpleasant, but seeing one of their members having gained the telekinesis skill inspired everyone to try to do the same.

“Skills seem easy to get,” Pa muttered to himself. He, too, was balancing a fork on his finger, but he did not appear as invested in the activity as all the other younger kids around the place were.

Tom stared at the other child in surprise. Those five words caused him to reevaluate the conversation through a new lens. What it implied was far more relevant to his situation than what had been explicitly stated. Apparently, most of the children developed multiple skills while they were still very young. That by itself was not so surprising, as Tom knew that natives would train their young and make sure they would earn a handful of lower tier abilities before maturity, but what was happening here seemed to be much more than that.

An expectation that the majority would gain a tier two skill or spell by age nine seemed ridiculously ambitious. Then A tier three or above by fourteen? That was just as preposterous. Several tier two skills with a single weapon being seen as normal? That was well outside his internal benchmarks. Tom was sure he was observing the impact that fate had on ability acquisition.

Tomorrow afternoon, he would be forced to go into one of the isolation rooms and then he would find out. He couldn’t wait. 

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. Before falling asleep, he made the same cuts as every other night, spent his fate, and marvelled at how much faster the exercise was becoming - even if there had been no noticeable improvement in efficacy.  

When he woke, there was a buzz in the dormitory. Finally, they were going to be allowed to play outside. With Bir and Pa beside him, they lined up for breakfast ten minutes before the seven a.m. opening time. A massive line grew as everyone gathered behind them, excited to be allowed out of the orphanage. The anticipation had them all wiggling on the spot as they stood waiting.

Tom, of course, was looking forward to the opportunity to answer some of his societal questions. He wanted to understand the nature and size of the towns.

They ate breakfast in record time and then hurried out. Despite their efforts, including being up the front of the queue, a substantial number of the older children escaped to the outside earlier, as they had taken their food to go instead of sitting down to eat.

Standing at the exit was Dimitri. Little Ta recognised him. If any of the volunteers could be called their primary carer, it was him. He was a giant of a man – over seven feet tall, a thick body with no fat, and a prominent nose. He chattered happily with the older children ahead of them, but as the trio approached, he made a point of not looking at any of them.

“Have a good day?” He said in a gruff voice with a thick Russian accent. “Normal routines start after lunch. If you don’t present, automations will be activated.”

His attitude toward them was at odds with how everyone else was treated. Tom understood why he was doing it, but Bir didn’t. She looked troubled, but that expression vanished the moment they got outside and the bright but weak early morning sunlight greeted them.

Tom blinked rapidly to try and acclimatise his eyes faster, and when his vision recovered, he glanced around. It was underwhelming. They had exited out of the gymnasium door like most kids, which put them on the side of the building, and they ended up standing on a small strip of grass. Thirty metres away from them there was a wall made from dark stone, and the sun was poking over the top of. It looked giant, but was probably only three metres high, which was way too much for them to get over - but something any semi-competent adult would have no problems with. Tom hoped there was magic built into the structure to prevent people casually jumping over the top, otherwise what was the point of it existing?

There was a stream of mostly teenagers heading towards a small gate and with the three of them holding hands with Bir in the middle they ran toward it. An older child passed them without difficulty, but they stayed ahead of everyone else and only slowed down when they reached the exit to true freedom.

Tom’s eyes examined everything that he could see as they moved. What they walked through was a garden, and it had been planted to have lots of green. He had been expecting orange tones, but either this area of Existentia was different to where he had first lived, or the green was an environment deliberately tailored to the city.

They reached the gap in the wall and spilled out into the town proper.

Tom this time stopped to stare. The view was unexpected.

The orphanage was surrounded by a significant cleared grassy area. The closest building was over a hundred metres away and it was more like three in the other two directions. Tom stared around in amazement. There were no trees here, only trimmed green grass, with the view broken up by massive constructions that he recognised instinctively as war machines. They were each the size of a double story house, and he could see the glint of lenses, metal etched runes and moveable parts in the massive weapons.

It didn’t take a lot of education to recognise that what he was looking at was the magical equivalent of anti-aircraft guns or maybe missile launchers. By the way they were formed, it was clear that they could be rotated to strike in every direction. He could only see a dozen of them, but they were all subtly different. One was like a classic cartoon laser with concentric crystal rings that got smaller and smaller, stretching up over five stories into the sky. He could imagine the energy travelling from layer to layer getting stronger and stronger with each step until it was powerful enough to punch through the scales, hide, or magical defences of terrible monsters.

Bir didn’t care and dragged him forward, and he discovered the amount of grass was significantly less than he assumed. Spaced between them were paths inlaid with complicated metal swirls that formed geometric patterns; these seemed to create a funnel toward the nearest siege weapon. All the supposedly open space, Tom realised, had in fact been purposed to accumulate energy and support the defences. It was a breathtakingly complex construction effort, and each weapon must have taken years of dedicated effort to create - even with the help of magic.

As he crossed the field, he attempted to act like a four-year-old, but suspected he was failing.

Even though he had no interest in crafting, he knew enough to understand the workmanship whose results he was running across. It was impressive, and he wanted to examine everything.

Embarrassed, he took a step back and let Little Ta control things, and was glad to see that his behaviour barely changed. His acting had been passably good, apparently. The freed-up mental focus allowed him to register another oddity. There were no adults in sight. For an event such as this, he would have expected ‘not parents’ to be lining up to see their kids. After all, they had been subjected to a forced separation for a week. However, there was not a single older person present, and these defences looked like they were supposed to be manned, which told Tom that this was another of the special arrangements that they enforced around the ritual. 

All the children seemed to be flowing toward the same spot and soon Tom found himself on a road and lining up behind others to get into a store.

“Magic sweets,” Bir said excitedly.

Her words enabled his memories to fill in the blanks. As far as Little Ta was concerned, there was no such thing as money. Adults would just give children things, and this was the best shop for that. There was an old woman who loved to sneak them special sweets and chocolates.  

Tom allowed the mass of kids to carry him through and, very quickly, they ended up in the shop.

“Don’t dawdle, keep moving, one bag each.” An exasperated-sounding attendant ordered. She was the only adult present, and the old lady who was usually here was missing.

The store, however, was the same as always, and Tom absorbed all of it with wide eyes.

They were in a rations store that sold ready-made meal bars and also more substantial cooked alternatives. Each had an advertised buff associated with them.

Three non-magical ration bars cost a single credit. Tom didn’t have to ask to know that the currency here was auction credits. It was too convenient to not use them, as all adults had access to them and, if necessary, they could create them directly from experience at a one-to-one ratio. Providing you were doing anything, even minor tasks like low levelled crafting, exterminating vermin, or cleaning you would generate significantly more than one experience point per day, so everyone could at least afford to eat.

Then there were the options with actual buffs and escalating prices to match. The better meals, the ones locked behind glass windows, were being sold for substantially more. One had a price of a hundred and fifty, and was advertised as coming with a ten percent buff to all attributes which would last for an hour. Given that in the final trial they had been earning about a hundred thousand credits and four times that in experience per day, if you were an active adventurer, the best food in the shop might as well have been free. Then again, that trial had been an exceptional opportunity. But even if he had been hunting in the wild, that sort of cost would definitely have been affordable.

When they reached the front of the line, they were allowed to take a single bag which contained eight lollies in it. They were a variety of colours, but unmarked beyond that.

“See wall? Outside?” He asked. He would have preferred to push for them to explore more thoroughly, but knew it would be out of character and something the other two wouldn’t be interested in.

Bir groaned next to him:

“Me want to play,” she pointed back the way they had come from and waved her bag of lollies. “Two floaties.”

“I want to see outside.” Tom repeated stubbornly. “Climb wall, look out.”

She shook her head adamantly. 

“A little explore won’t hurt,” Pa said, finally swinging the vote in his favour. Rather than returning to the lawn surrounding the orphanage, they continued on down the road. It dipped down, and they passed a variety of shops. Most of them were shut. Both he and Pa seemed to have the same idea, so they left the main street and entered a residential one that sloped up.

When they reached the top, the three of them paused. Although the hill was the highest part of the town, it was not much higher than elsewhere. However, it was elevated, and, in most areas on Earth, it would have been the location of a couple of giant mansions which the rich and the powerful would have bought for the view.

Here that was not the case.

It was another park with five more of the magical artillery laid into it.

The closest one was a jumble of metal that looked very climbable. Bir squealed and ran toward it.

There was a blur, and a woman appeared in front of them. She held her hand up firmly in the very standard gesture to tell them to stop. “Sorry, kids, this is off limits.”

She was not anyone that Little Ta recognised, but he could appreciate the way she commanded her own body, the crisp firm movements and the uniform. A high ranked adventurer or soldier, competent and dangerous. She was also the first adult Tom had glimpsed that had a full fate pool.

The three of them looked at each other. None of them knew how to react.

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Chapter 8

Chapter 6 ------- Chapter 6 (AUDIO)