The next few days were somewhat aimless, if I were to be honest.
Don't get me wrong, I was productive. I trained in the Sharah with intense fervour, and I flexed my Soul-Seeker-esque capabilities literally whenever I could, to maximise the gains in my Mind stat. I managed to gain four more Mind stat, usually from convincing people of things. Turns out that there are a lot of people dying around town, and Gram wants all of the bodies he can get.
I succeed around eighty percent of the time, and usually the reason for failure is more the family's wishes rather than the person who is actually dying.
On the other side of things, I still wasn't seeing any rewards for the Sharah. I was relatively proficient now, Mayer had even gone so far as to tell me so, but I still didn't gain anything. I knew that I gained a lot of control over my body, and a solid foundation for building strength, but the total lack of reward had me somewhat worried.
I was gaining too much from practicing the Sharah to stop, even allowing me mediocre control of the hammer in certain situations. I pushed the thoughts from my mind and continued my routine of practice.
It went from morning to afternoon to evening, then suddenly it was midnight. Resigned as I was to my total lack of need for sleep, I continued my training in the dead of night. The Sharah pseudo kata that I was performing was many times more elaborate than the first iteration that I had once created, and because of my seemingly endless stamina, I was able to increase the length and the physical strain required of my body to perform it.
But still, no rewards.
In a way, I knew I was being ridiculous. All this time—easily hundreds of hours worth of training—could have been spent on increasing my Strength or Agility, or even Mind stat through simpler training. But the Sharah sucked me in like nothing else did. I couldn't help but truly think that there was more to the movements than simply moving your body proficiently and efficiently. If that were it, then this probably would have been a total waste of opportunity and time.
So, like the idiot I am, I doubled down. Training so hard that I could feel the burn in my muscles and my joints and bones creaking from the massive amount of strain—quite a feat in a very hardy body. All the while doing this, I was continuously training my ability to summon and unsummon my hammer, as well as doing basic tasks, such as picking it up, putting it down, switching it to the other hand.
I was so wholly absorbed that when a blade came slicing down upon me, it was almost instinct. My mind didn't even have time to panic or think of anything else, except for moving. It was like my brain hit overdrive, and I was suddenly acutely aware of my surroundings, and the person that stood in front of me.
The blade that had attacked me was of extremely poor quality, not that I profess to be an expert in anything bladelike, but it looked like it had been dunked in water and left there for a few years. Pock-marked and rusted, the blade was even fairly crooked, but there was enough shine in the metal for the remnants of light bending around Orisis to glint and reflect onto the wielder—illuminating him.
I hadn't ever seen this man. Or maybe boy would be a more accurate description. He was older than Rethi, maybe by three or so years, making him maybe seventeen.I was about to open my mouth when the boy yelled some jumble of words all mushed into one sound, and he charged at me again, poorly stabbing at me with the sword. However, a sword in the hands of someone truly untrained could be dangerous, and I wasn't willing to risk doing a ballsy move like trying to catch the blade or even disarm him.
I might be stronger than him and have a little bit of training in the Sharah, but I was far from a combat genius. I could theoretically run away from the encounter, but that seemed like a stupid idea. This was obviously someone from the town, and I needed to understand why they were attacking me.
The boy was now wildly slashing at me while yelling obscenities, as I simply just backpedalled away, out of his reach. His face grew increasingly red with rage as he raced after me. But you can't really beat someone with effectively infinite stamina this way.
Weirdly, though, I was still scared of the boy. Maybe I was more scared of the weapon that was being swung around. Even so, I couldn't quite find a way to stop the boy without either hurting me, or braining him with my hammer—neither of those things were what I particularly wanted.
So I played the long game and continued to run from the confrontation, hoping the boy would lose his steam and calm down to a degree. That turned out to be the wrong decision, when something caught the boy's eye and an even deeper rage burned across his face.
"I'll fuckin' kill you, you damn beggar!" The boy raced passed me before I could look and see what it was that the boy went after. When I saw who it was, it became painfully obvious who the boy with the sword was.
One of the Jothian boys. I had never actually seen them myself, but when the boy went after Rethi, screaming about beggars in a fit of fury, it was made obvious for mey.
Unfortunately, this just makes this situation even more complicated. The Jothian boy raced after Rethi, and Rethi ran from the boy, wide-eyed in terror. My immediate instinct was to go bash the kid's head in while he was going after Rethi, but I wouldn't be able to catch up with the boy before he grabbed a hold of Rethi and possibly did some serious damage. I was fast, but I couldn't cover enough ground before the boy's blade reached Rethi's flesh.
I felt helpless. No matter if I ran as fast as I could, the boy would reach Rethi before I reached him.
My eyes soaked in the situation as I futilely ran with all my might, the boy wasn't that far ahead of me, but he was much closer to Rethi now, and it was all flat ground—there was no escape route for Rethi to find.
The bigger boy's feet pushed against the ground, launching himself into a lousy dive, with his rusted sword outstretched, slicing towards Rethi's skin.
Then it was as if time had stopped.
I could see the minute detail of Rethi's terror filled face as the blade threatened his life, and the rage of the boy who wielded it. The sword was held poorly, almost as likely to fall out of his hands than it was to actually cut Rethi.
It would only take the tiniest bit of force to snatch that sword right from the hands of the Jothian boy.
A strange instinct took over me as I planted my feet and moved ever so slightly, following a pattern of the Sharah. It pulled on something within me, and my legs and arms strained unnaturally hard for the simplicity of the movement.
As the movement continued, the pull increased, as well as the strain on my body. As soon as my foot hit the ground once again, there was a snapping sensation inside, and a force ripped out of me. The boy's sword flew out of his hand, landing a few meters away, allowing me to continue running and quickly grab the sword before anyone else moved.
Then I simply stood, staring at the two boys. Rethi quickly scrambled to his feet and ran to my side, his pants and hands dirty from being pushed down into a muddy patch of grass. He didn't quite stand behind me, but it was close. The other boy, however, didn't move at all. In fact, he stood, staring at me with comically wide eyes. They were filled with terror.
He knew.
I had 'shifted'. I don't know how, and I don't even know what it was that made the connection in my brain not seconds before. But now the floodgate was open, and I could tell there was a bit of ether connected with my every movement.
I looked down at the boy with a poker face, not letting him see the mix of surprise and exhilaration, along with a sprinkle of apprehension that coloured my thoughts.
"Do I need to bother to ask why you attacked my employee, or is it as stupid a reason as I think?" I said, my voice flat, imitating Mayer to a degree.
The boy's face faltered, shame and terror washed over it, before a weak but smouldering look of rage smeared itself across his mug.
"No one will trade with Pa, we're gonna starve and it's all that damn beggar's fuckin' fault." He drawled out, words thick with an accent similar to Rethi's own light one, but far more unrefined.
"And so, your bright idea was to try to kill me, then to try kill Rethi?" I looked at him, disgust was written on my face, and I knew it.
The words the boy was formulating died on his lips, and the shame returned. The boy looked down at the muddy grass he was lying in, averting his eyes. It was then that I found it prudent to look into the boy's emotions. Something I was beginning to get a true grasp of.
It was turmoil supreme. There was fear, but far more than I had elicited with my meagre showing of shifting, no there was fear far larger than that. I couldn't tell exactly where it originated from, or from what idea, but I had some theories.
It was fear from possibly becoming something he had scorned, like a beggar. Or it was a fear of his father or mother, maybe even one of his brothers.
Either way, it would be stupid make a big scene of this. It sounds like the Jothians are pretty screwed anyways, and exposing this would probably get this kid killed and the rest of his family cast into exile or something just as drastic.
So I decided to play around that consequence.
"You know what you did, and you know the cost it would incur, yes?"
Fear washed over the boy even further, flaring like a beacon in my mind. I waited a moment, letting the fear stew to give the most impact.
"Killing people or having them killed is not something I especially aspire to. So I will give you a deal. You go back to your home, and you get ready to go find work somewhere. I don't care what that work is, whether it be serving drinks at the pub, or cleaning out stables, but you will find it. If you aren't doing something in a week, then I will release another note detailing what happened today." Confusion washed over the face of the boy who had probably expected to be killed or be dragged into town and be chucked in a pit somewhere, as they do with criminals out here—but instead he was given an odd request.
There wasn't much reasoning behind doing this. Just that I knew that he would go out and do something other than terrorise and injure with a sword. Plus, it would probably do well for him to be away from his home. Something tells me that home isn't a particularly kind or warm place.
The boy nodded vigorously, and after a moment he got to his feet, and scrambled away—only giving a backwards glance to the sword I was now holding. I watched him quickly move out of sight, in the direction of the town, taking the long way around so as to not pass by Mayer's home.
I turned to the boy next to me, who was staring intently at me, his blue eyes piercing.
"What? You're being very quiet." I asked, jokingly mocking. Rethi's face remained serious.
"You shifted." He stated plainly. I nodded after a moment, a demure confirmation.
"I think so, yeah." I paused for a moment before adding, "What's wrong?" The boy's face contorted, becoming a look of disbelief.
"Are you serious? Nothing is wrong! You just shifted for the first time, this is huge!" The boy grew excited, completely forgetting he had just been mortally threatened by a blade. I raised an eyebrow questioningly, the boy had a talent for flitting through emotions like a hummingbird between flowers.
"Mayer shifts all the time, is this that big a deal?" Rethi's eyes grew confused, then became clear again, and he began laughing.
"Sometimes I forget you're from another world. Mayer being able to shift is a big deal, but he's Mayer, y'know?" I laughed at the description and nodded before speaking again.
"So how common is shifting really? Mayer makes it seem really common."
"I don't know where Mayer is from, but I think I have only ever seen one other shifter in my life. They were in a caravan of a hundred or so people passing through, or the ones that survived the trip from the south. I don't think they were strong though, or they would be part of an army. I was told that they were the only shifter anyone living in this town had ever seen."
Well, it made sense that Mayer would know a lot of shifters, seeing for strong he was, at least physically. Before I could speak again, Rethi butted in excitedly.
"What did it feel like?" I thought on the question for a moment before spitting out an answer.
"Odd. It felt as if I were moving through mud, then there was this strong pulling sensation in my body and then a snap, like a rope breaking and it was done." I said, I was devoid of constructive ways that I could explain the sensation.
Rethi's eyebrows furrowed in thought. Before his eyes lit up again. I checked his emotions and felt an overwhelming sense of wonder and excitement.
Looks like I'll be answering questions for a while.
I laughed while the boy peppered me with questions when an overwhelming amount of information hit my brain.
[A New Sensation: Somewhere inside you lurked a power you didn't know existed. To tap into it caused a whole new world to open itself up to you. Where will you go, now that you've found it? +5 Mind]
[The Blasphemer of Prophecy: Unlocking a secret long kept by the Sharah'hin, you have stumbled your way into a prophecy that has been forgotten by naught but a few of the Sharah'hin themselves. +5 Mind]
[Wielder of the Sharah: The truth of the Sharah has presented itself to you, and you are now at the start of the journey along its path. Once you learn more of its secrets, and travel further along its path, you may perhaps become a True Wielder. +10 Might, +10 Mind, +10 Agility]
I was dumbstruck.
I turned to Rethi with a flabbergasted look on my face.
"I need to talk to Mayer."