Robert Vlaho
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[DEVILICH] Chapter 16 - Sense of Scale
🕑 Added 2024-04-04 12:28:54 +0000 UTCIt was disconcerting how long it took me to realize I was still standing almost entirely naked, nothing but cloth boxers covering my privates. It seemed that shame was something I had well and truly left in the past, and that thought was quite troubling.
I focused on my inventory and tried summoning my clothes back to my body. While it was rather easy to take them off by storing them in the inventory, using the same strategy to put them back on just wasn’t possible. Anything I summoned automatically appeared outside my outstretched palm, and if anything—such as my body—was in the way, I just couldn’t extract the object.
Sighing, I put my clothes back on the old-fashioned way.
Once finished, I stared back down the valley leading up to the fortress. The town itself was absurdly massive. It looked positively medieval, with titanic stone walls surrounding the entire settlement, but the scale took a few moments to sink in.
The walls themselves were hundreds of meters tall, and their surface was polished smooth, showing no seams or faults. This construction would be either absurdly expensive or perhaps even entirely impossible back on earth.
My full-body paralysis kicked in when I was 20 years old, and I had had cancer for a few years already at that point, so I was technically a high-school dropout. But I had kept studying, hoping for a future where I would one day get to follow my dreams. I had wanted to become an architect once. Based on my little loose knowledge of the field, this wall must have been made with magic.
But even past that, the scale of everything in this world seemed absurd. I was standing on what appeared to be a mere hill because the landscape shifted smoothly, with nothing but grass stretching down the length of the empty fields between me and the settlement on the other side.
But the more I looked, the more it sank in that I was standing on more of a mountain than a hill. As that realization settled, my perception of the “town” I was facing slowly shifted into that of a sprawling city, possibly with millions of residents, but I had no idea—the walls were too tall to see over them and into the settlement, with the only thing visible past them being the wall all the way on the other side.
It was pretty scary. It made me feel thoroughly insignificant.
As I gazed across the valley, I spotted numerous paths that snaked through the grasslands to reach the city. From my vantage point, the entrances were barely more than tiny dots, and there were many of them.
The road I was standing on seemed quite lonely, but the others had much traffic crossing them, with what appeared to be convoys and carriages scurrying down their length like ants.
Well then. What was I to do next?
Running up to this metropolis and sneaking in suddenly felt like an idiotic idea. Such a city had to be guarded quite heavily. My understanding and knowledge of this world were way too shallow to risk encountering someone with a skill or tool that could suss out my true nature.
A bona fide goddess had sent me here, true, but did that mean I could trust her?
Why would she lie to me? a part of me wondered, but—Why wouldn’t she? another part argued.
Perhaps something was limiting her power, or maybe I was being lured into a trap, with clerics or priests waiting to trap me and use me for experimentation or as a tool.
I was too ignorant to risk something like that happening.
So I turned around and ran back the way I came from.
I decided to find a smaller settlement, maybe a village or small town. There, I could at least hope that my power would be enough to protect me from immediate danger.
I used leap after leap, getting back into a stride as the road vanished beneath my feet, and the thick canopy of a forest appeared above me once again.
Skill [Leap: F-rank] upgrades to [Leap: D-rank]
[Leap: D-rank]
Empower your legs, increasing the distance of your leap. Distance increase: 100%
The sudden increase in power caught me off-guard, and I nearly tripped as my body suddenly barreled forward. As I regained my stride, I was running way, way faster. While my memories of what it was like to drive in a car were vague, I knew that I was going fast enough to comfortably run along a highway.
I remembered that my [Beginner Brawler] class was completed, so I decided to check what other choices I had available.
Classes available: [Amateur Brawler] [Rookie Survivalist] [Rookie Tinkerer] [Mage Apprentice] [Summoner Neophyte] [Fire Elementalist Neophyte]
Raising an eyebrow, I checked the new brawler upgrade.
Class: [Amateur Brawler]
Level 1: Completed
Level 2: Upgrade skill: [Brace Body: F-rank] to [Brace Body: D-rank]
Level 3: Completed
Class Completion Reward: Upgrade Skill: [Tough Skin] to [Stone Skin]
My eyebrows shot up as I spotted the “completed” levels. Was it because I had already finished those upgrades? That got me curious.
I braced my body and jumped into a nearby tree. The impact did no damage to me, and it only slightly shook the tree from my impact. I repeated this against several other nearby trees, and eventually—
Skill [Brace Body: F-rank] upgrades to [Brace Body: D-rank]
Brace your body against an incoming blow. Damage reduction: 20%
Then, I picked the [Amateur Brawler] class.
Skill [Tough Skin] upgrades to [Stone Skin]
Class [Amateur Brawler] completed!
New classes available!
Huh. So I could finish a class without even picking it? That was quite interesting. My thoughts rushed as excitement bubbled in my chest, and I rechecked my available classes.
Classes available: [Rookie Survivalist] [Rookie Tinkerer] [Mage Apprentice] [Summoner Neophyte] [Fire Elementalist Neophyte]
I froze. Mentally, I double-checked the list, but—
I can’t upgrade the class again…?
Why not? I thought about it for a bit, and… well… the only conclusion I could make was that I simply didn’t qualify for an upgrade.
I had passed as an “amateur” brawler, so I could presume that a “professional” tier would come next. While I certainly had the power to beat the shit out of someone, that couldn’t be the only requirement to become a professional at something.
I mentally scanned the other classes, but most of them seemed like passing them could be tricky or at least time-consuming.
While more power would undoubtedly be handy, orienting myself was a priority. So, without further ado, I put my mind off classes for the time being and focused on running.
***
The forest I was running through seemed quite desolate. The red creature I had stumbled upon had led me to believe that the whole wilderness would be crawling with monstrosities, but that wasn’t the case.
No people were passing this road, either, but there were clear signs of carriages having come through here. Rain would have washed the tracks out entirely if they were too old, so these must have been at least somewhat recent.
Eventually, after maybe half an hour of running, I reached another clearing and climbed up another hill. As I reached the zenith, I half-expected to see another massive settlement on the other side—but this time, it seemed that luck was on my side.
What could only be described as a miniature, clearly inferior version of the sprawling city I had seen before appeared in the center of a much smaller valley, a river flowing through its middle. There were walls surrounding this one, too, but they were maybe 5 meters tall at most, and I could easily see cracks and signs of weathering along the surface.
This time, it was the size of a regular town; perhaps only a few thousand people lived there.
Four roads headed in what seemed to be four cardinal directions, although perhaps they weren’t heading precisely north, east, south, and west, if this world even had cardinal directions to begin with. From where I stood, I spotted a single guard lazily standing beside a wide-open gate, chatting to someone out of view.
The entrance was a few hundred meters away, so rather than sprinting there, I opted to walk.
The closer I came, the faster my heart was beating.
I gulped.
What would I feel when talking to a person? How would I behave? What would I want?
My thoughts churned, and I felt a pit widen in my stomach. It felt so different in this body. It was close to an ordinary human sensation, but not entirely; it felt more like a pale shadow of an honest physical response to stress, only playing the purpose of helping me fit in better.
But my steps didn’t slow. I didn’t want to seem suspicious to the guard who had already spotted me.
My steps swallowed the distance between me and my target, and before I knew it, I was standing right before the armored man.
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