“System? Level up? The fuck?”

  The stranger shrugged. “That’s the way mages get stronger. Get enough experience, you level up, and you get a boost from the System. The interface for the system is agents, one of whom I am. Call me Shadow. Think of it like a video game. You look like a bit of a loser, so you surely know how they work.”

  I eyed the man again. A young face, probably like twenty years old, blonde but much clearer than mine, a ridiculously handsome face, piercing blue eyes, clean shave, a white shirt, a black tie, and an expensive-looking black suit with matching shoes.

  “Yeah, so I don’t have all day,” he continued. “You’re now level two. Every level, you get five stat points you can assign to attributes, which do exactly what they are called.”

  A floating screen appeared next to him, like a character screen in a game, showing strength, dexterity, endurance, intelligence, wisdom, charisma, and speed, all with a current value of ten. I also had ten points, to allocate.

  “And then you have one skill point, which you can put into a skill from a class, or further its specialization. This is the skill tree.”

  Another floating screen appeared next to him, this one with an absurdly massive, sprawling skill tree. The whole thing had thirty-seven starting points, so those were the classes, but then they split into at least three specializations each.

  “Information overload?” he asked rhetorically. “Asking questions usually helps.”

  My mind raced like crazy, but I tried to focus on the thoughts. I’ve played games, many games, so I had a rough idea of how this was supposed to work. Except that this was very much the reality. “Does every mage level up through the system?”

  “Yeah, but people experience it differently. The System manifests agents to fit individual mages, so whoever’s religious sees it as a vision of their god or its messenger, or an apparition of their dead mentor, or just a set of virtual screens.”

  “Why do I see you then? I don’t recognize you at all.”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. I’m effectively the help menu, like Clippy, if you know who that is. Or was. I know nothing about you, and I couldn’t care less, anyway.”

  Okay, all right, shit. “Can I change class later?”

  “No. There’re no refunds or respecs. You can multiclass, but the good stuff is deep in the skill tree. Stats are largely independent of the classes, too.”

  I frowned. That wasn’t how games usually worked. “How do the stats function, precisely?”

  “They raise your ability in the given area. Strength makes you stronger, dexterity more agile, endurance makes you last longer, intelligence makes you smarter, willpower makes your mind and shields more resilient, charisma makes you better at influencing others, and speed is action and reaction speed.”

  “I meant if there were any extra mechanics to them.”

  A smile flashed over his face. “Correct question. All stats are a multiplier to your actual base. Using stats gets you perks, and the higher the number of points in a stat, the better the perks you can get from it. There’s one thing that’s unintuitive, which is that stats increase your capacity, not your immediate ability. You still need to train them. Same for skills, they give you the ability to learn that skill, and perform it at a basic level, but mastering them is a whole other story. People whine about that all the time.”

  In other words, any stat was useless if I didn’t both train and actively use it. That made strength look really good, because nothing was more straightforward than going to the gym every day. I could even help myself with supplements or steroids. Then again, all the other stats were surely somehow trainable. But another thing he said caught my attention. “People? Have you guided other mages?”

  “Still do. Agents get whole pools they work with.”

  Okay, that gave me options. It made no sense to argue against the whole system thing, so instead, I decided to leave metaphysical questions like how it all works for another time.

  Now, I had to figure out how to handle this… level up.

  I focused on the screen with stats, and as I mentally zoomed in on each stat, it showed a separate perk tree with possible perks obtainable from them. The perks had a stat requirement, and the largest requirement I saw was at three thousand.

  A hard cap suggested the levels didn’t go to an infinite number either, so I had to preplan this.

  I switched my attention to the skill tree and moved to the absolute edge. The skills had no listed requirement other than level, plus having the preceding skills.

  The highest required level I saw was seventy-five. I counted skills in one specialization, and counted seventy-five. From the skills, some were spells, others were modifiers, and many were bonuses to stats. They also split up into branches and then remerged.

  Thirty-seven classes, times three specializations, that’s a hundred and seventeen skills. Times seventy-five, and the whole tree had approximately way too many nodes.

  I glanced at Shadow, and he stood next to me, waiting. Nothing around us moved, not even the blood from the monster or from my arm, so we were in some sort of time stop.

  Actually, I didn't move either, rather I saw my body in its position while my consciousness floated around.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  All right, I had time. “Is there a level cap?”

  “Don’t count on more than about ninety levels.”

  Oh, so the cap had to be about a hundred.

  That meant I had to pick one specialization and just go with it all the way to the end. One out of over a hundred. “I can’t decide on the specialization now. I’ll need weeks to think it over since I can’t change my mind later.”

  He rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to allocate any skill points at level up. Nor the stats, so you can leave it for later. Just say Shadow when you decide on something.” He turned to leave.

  “Wait,” I interrupted him. I needed way more information to even be able to think this through. “Is there like a recommended strategy for the stats or something? What are the other mages taking, usually?”

  “I can’t share specifics of how others interact with the System. But I’ve found the perfect specialization for you. It’s at the bottom, the indecisive loser. You should spec into that.”

  A blush passed my face. That stung a bit. “You don’t have to be an asshole about it. It’s literally my first time learning about all this.”

  “Or you could pick the Karen class, the play victim skill would fit you perfectly.”

  I snorted, much against my wishes. “You said you can’t tell me what others are picking, but you can give me some advice, right? What would you pick in my situation?”

  He sat down on the stairs next to me and sighed theatrically. Yeah, this was going to take a while. “For classes, most of them are kind of shit, so you’ll pick the wrong one anyway. They don’t matter nearly as much as the stats do, though.

  “From stats, endurance is how much punishment your body can take, and willpower translates into how much magical shielding you can deploy and maintain. Pick one and ignore the other. You don’t get enough points to spend on both, and you really want the high-level perks from one of them.

  “Dexterity is for losers and girls, so I would ignore that. Strength is replaceable with weapons, up to a point; it’s one of the two key high-level offense stats. The second one is intelligence, which affects spell power. Again, pick one, ignore the other. Charisma is an all-or-nothing stat, and speed is mandatory up to like a hundred, which gets you the zero delay reaction speed. That one's a must-have.”

  A closer look at the speed perks confirmed his words. “Can I allocate my stats later?”

  “Yeah, technically speaking, though picking nothing at your first level up would be literally the least exciting choice possible.”

  But also the best one for picking a build. I had to think this through, and in great detail, too.

  This was the decision of how to build myself as a mage for the rest of my life, with no rollbacks or refunds possible. The most important decision I was ever going to make, especially since I really wanted to get to the end of a specialization to get all the endgame skills from the given branch.

  Although if my action effectiveness was decided mostly by the stats, it didn’t really matter if I, say, picked fire magic, and got the last skill, Tower of Hell, if a fireball could achieve the same result while costing fifty fewer skill points.

  I rubbed my face with my palm. This required so much thought and planning. At the very least, I had to read all the skills, all the stat perks, and then somehow figure out how stats interacted with skills.

  “So?” Shadow asked.

  “So, I’m postponing everything. I will make my decisions later. Can I summon you at any time?”

  “You can try, but I might not come. I’ll show up for level-ups, though.”

  That had to suffice. “You may leave.”

  Shadow vanished, and the time unfroze, my consciousness returning into my body.

  Pain exploded through me, as the time-freeze apparently also froze my bodily functions. I collapsed on the floor, whimpering with pain.

  My arm burned like crazy and bled profusely. The whip marks burned even worse, and I felt blood gluing my clothes to my skin.

  Damn it, why couldn’t the level-up heal me?

  It did that in most games, and I could have really used it right now.

  Or couldn’t it at least stop my bleeding?

  I grunted with pain and started crawling out from under the dead monster.

  Finally, I looked around. What I could only describe as a portal gate loomed across the basement, filled with dark orange light, humming.

  Portals didn’t exist. Teleportation or any similar related magic didn’t exist.

  Every mage knew that.

  Then what in God’s name was I looking at?

  Shadow?

  The world around me froze, and Shadow appeared, this time without all the black and white theatrics. “Picked your class yet?” he asked.

  With a shaking hand, I pointed at the portal. “What is that?”

  He shrugged. “How do you expect me to know? I’m a leveling assistant, not the well of infinite knowledge.”

  “Do portals exist?”

  “No, officially.”

  “And unofficially? You don’t move around physically, so you must teleport in some way. If teleportation exists, then portals exist.”

  He flashed a smile. “Then why are you asking me?” He vanished, and time unfroze.

  Okay, I found an active portal.

  God damn it.

  I pulled out my phone, took a picture of the demon, another one of the portal, attached them to an email, and sent them to IMDC, with added text, What am I supposed to do about those?

  The answer came within a second. ‘Nothing. Leave, tell no one, and await further instructions.’

  I glared at the email. So, it did read my messages and it could reply. It just never wanted to until now.

  Well, the instructions made sense, I supposed.

  Grunting with pain, I staggered to my feet, using the wall for support. I had to get out of here.

  My wounded arm hurt like hell, so I used it as little as possible. After I collected my gun from the monster’s mouth, I limped toward the exit.

  Every step felt like I was dragging a mountain. My shirt was wet, sticking to my skin, and I wondered how much time I had before I was going to pass out.

  I made it to the door, breath ragged, vision blurring at the edges. Something rattled in my chest like a loose screw. Maybe it was my whole plan. Couldn’t find my father here. Couldn’t find him in a morgue either. Couldn’t afford a morgue anyway.

  “Shit,” I muttered, barely making a sound, more of a defeated whisper as I fought the outside lock and pushed myself into daylight.

  The pale afternoon sky hovered like an old fluorescent bulb, doing its best to stay lit. My feet dragged across the lot, over gravel.

  I stopped at the car, leaning hard, smearing red on the blue-gray hood, breathing heavy, almost out. My life, my dumb, stupid life.

  Just had to drive to a hospital, a rational part of me knew. What’s the worst they could do?

  Well, they could bandage my arm and bill me ten grand for it, the cheapskate part of me immediately realized. Maybe I could stitch it myself.

  I did actually have a needle and a string, though I used them to fix holes in my clothes. Worth a try, especially since it had the marginal cost of zero dollars.

  I fumbled with the car door, collapsed inside, my shoulder pounding as it hit the seat. It still had life in it, this old rust bucket, and I gritted my teeth, hands shaking, got it into gear, and drove out.

  The only thing more pathetic than bleeding to death alone was bleeding to death surrounded by white coats, zeros piling up on debt my mother would have to pay.

  The highway unspooled like a bad rerun. Nobody on it but me, like they knew this road was going nowhere and got off before it was too late. An exit sign loomed, promising a bite to eat, cold drinks, and fuel. I wondered what gas stations sold sutures, if any, since my sewing kit was usable, but not optimal.

  Had no answer though.

  So, I stopped at the first gas station that I saw. A rundown shit hole, perfectly fitting for my situation.

  Before I got out of the car, I realized they would call the police or worse, an ambulance, once they saw me bloodied up, and I couldn’t have that.

  I drove home instead.

  The sewing kit had to do.

  TG