I returned to my companions with a boisterous spirit after my successful hunt, but things quickly took a turn I wasn't expecting.

"Hail, lad. How went the hunt?" Jorge called as I jogged around a corner, large pine trees having shielded me from sight before then.

I hefted a massive horn in response, startlingly white with blue veins of pulsing light spiralling around it. At my proud look, he laughed and clapped me on the back when I met them. Nathlan was next to him and gave a cheery wave, examining the horn with interest over the shorter man's shoulder.

Vera was bringing up the rear, somewhere out of sight. It was always good practice to make sure you weren't followed, and Vera had wanted time alone more frequently of late. Clearly having a goal in mind – the reclamation of her homeland and vengeance on her arch enemy – was prompting more introspection than normal. Understandable, in my opinion.

"Glacial Rhinoceros, aye? Jorge asked with a raised eyebrow. He didn't quite whistle, but it was a close thing. "That's impressive, lad. How the hells did you bring it down?"

"Faultline helped – would have been helpless without it," I replied, inordinately pleased with the way my new Skill was shaping up.

"Perhaps it's more powerful than I was giving it credit for then. This thing was at least mid-2nd tier, right?"

"Level 78," I confirmed, grinning like a cat presenting their owner a sardine. He did whistle then, and I realised he might be giving me more credit than I really deserved. "I had help though," I added.

"Oh?"

"Yeah, I met this Rakshasa while chasing the rhino – thought it was after me, at first! But thankfully, it seemed to be chasing the same prey. We herded it to the end of a ravine together, and then took the creature out with a handy bit of teamwork."

Jorge eyes had gone wide as I mentioned my temporary companion, and I winced as he drew in a breath to give me the mother of all rebukes.

"No, no, just wait! It was a juvenile, and clearly was just passing through," I defended.

Jorge gaped at me like a fish for a few moments. His eyes bugled, his mouth moved, and I wondered if I was about to witness his old age catch up to him, despite his appearance as just a stout man in his fifties. Eventually, he closed his eyes and sighed. The exasperation in that noise was evident, and I struggled not to smile. I caught Nathlan grinning from behind him, raising an eyebrow at me as if to say, 'Looks like someone's in trouuuble.' He would have sung it too, the bastard.

"Lamb, I don't even know where to start," Jorge said with a tired shake of his head. "A Rakshasa? Really? I know you don't have a death wish but sometimes I really struggle to believe it. At least it's not hungry anymore, I suppose. Did you say how many tails it had?"

"Two."

"Juvenile then. Right, that's good. We'll wait for Vera to catch us up and I'll let her know, but shouldn't be a problem." He sighed once more. "Gods, Lamb! Can you just once do something the simple way?" he asked, somewhat rhetorically.

I decided to answer anyway, because I was still in a good mood, and thought it might be fun to wind the old man up. "Nope!" I declared cheerfully. "I do have more news though."

He looked up sharply, and I raised my hands in a placating gesture. "Peace, Jorge, Peace! This is actually good news. I got a second late Skill."

He did perk up at that, and we spent the next ten minutes discussing the possible Skill and what I should do moving forwards. After describing the Skill, we decided it would be a good addition to my arsenal, the only question being what it would replace.

Vera arrived just as we came to the end of the conversation, and after catching her up, they agreed to move forward as a group. Given my somewhat friendly relation with the Rakshasa, it was determined that I would be best placed on rearguard duty this time. That was fortuitous though, because Jorge insisted I needed to be alone to really examine my Skills, and figure out which one could be sacrificed. It was not something he could do for me, apparently, and as an intensely personal choice with no right answers, I would need to be alone when I made it.

So it was that I found myself springing from mossy rock to verdant log through the dingy forest, alone once more. Sunlight struggled to pierce the canopy, not because the trees were tightly grouped, but because their branches were covered in mosses and lichens that colonised the entirety of the upper reaches of the pines. It lent an almost gloomy atmosphere to the forest, but the sun was strong enough that when it broke through, it would splash from the ground to scatter its golden light all around, contrasting with the perpetual twilight.

It felt peaceful, the quiet tranquillity a strong contrast to my earlier hunt. With the adrenaline long since faded, and the day nearing afternoon, I felt drowsiness settling on me. Not enough to make me genuinely sleepy, but enough that I let my mind wander, an introspective cast to my thoughts.

I felt close to nature here, as if I was absorbing some minute aspect of the wisdom that these trees had inherited over centuries. I turned my gaze inwards, stopping my movement to take a seat nearby against the bough of a tall tree, and examined my soul-space.

It had been a while since I had last viewed it in detail, and I was struck at how interconnected my Skills had become. My core was full, constantly replenishing and overflowing with the mana that seeped from every inch of the world. Around it hovered my shroud of Skills, dim and peaceful in their un-awakened state. Seven complex constellations, gently cocooned by a larger Skill above – my path-bound aura Skill.

Whereas before they had been mostly independent of one another, with the occasional strand of starlight mana questing from one to the other, now my soul-space resembled a spiderweb. Each Skill was still recognisable as its own, but dozens of strings of starlight connected it to others, forming a lattice of mana, constantly sharing and nourishing one another.

I was reminded, perhaps because of the fecundity of the place where I currently dwelt, of a mycelial network linking and supporting a forest. A single organism of many parts.

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There were two Skills that seemed notably out of place, however. Where the others were woven together by strings of starlight, these two hung alone, a few feeble strands linking them to the rest of the tapestry.

Faultline was a relatively new arrival, and I couldn't fault it for its aloofness given that fact. Even so, it hovered closer to Mountain-Born than I had expected, slightly out of alignment with the others, such was the growing bond between the two Skills. They resonated with one another, and I could sense in their pairing a possible future coherence into a single Skill, or perhaps just a thematic alignment that could pave the way for my true path.

In any case, Faultline was not the problem. No, it was Wilderness Endurance Hunter that seemed to be the issue.

It held strong links to half of my Skills; Guerrilla Warfare, Mountain-Born, Heart of the Hills and Indomitable Prey. The Skills I had gained early in the mountains while trying desperately to survive. The Skills that had grown to be a part of me, had made me into somebody that could protect themselves from a harsh environment where weakness meant death.

It had almost no connection to the other half of my Skills. The Forgotten Spear, Check-Step and Faultline were left to hang opposite with almost no linking strands of mana between them and Wilderness Endurance Hunter. I spent a while thinking on it, under that great tree with the sunlight splashing off a clear stone nearby, crowned in gold and green.

My thoughts wandered as I examined what it was within the Skill that made it incompatible and came to the conclusion that it was simply a matter of intent. The purpose of that Skill was to help me survive in the wild. To be self-sufficient and self-reliant.

The three others that hovered across from it were based around fighting. Faultline had some potential as a non-combat Skill, but I had so far used it almost exclusively to gain advantage in battle. And to annoy my friends, but that wasn't important at the moment.

The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that of all my Skills, Wilderness Endurance Hunter was the odd one out. It adapted me to life in the wilderness but conferred no advantage when it came to fighting. Each of my other Skills did both. I could survive, and hunt, and forage, and climb and live and everything in between… and fight as well.

The struggle to survive was intimately tied to the struggle to slay my foes, and Wilderness Endurance Hunter did not help me slay my foes.

It was a depressing thought to be honest. I didn't set out in this world to become a killer. I had wanted to survive first of all, and then when that was taken care of, I had wanted to explore. To travel freely and move with speed and confidence. The loss of that innocent dream was in some ways a sad thing, and I took the time to mourn in my private forest, surrounded by silence.

It was the way of things in this new world though. To progress, for somebody like me at least, was to struggle and fight. How many could I save with the power killing brought me? How much freedom could I acquire when laws no longer bound me?

That wasn't right. It was simultaneously more encompassing and less grand than that, no matter how contradictory it may have sounded. I wanted to be. To excel and improve and to see a thing and then do it. To become such that I could achieve a challenge previously beyond me.

And to get there I would need to fight.

It always came back to that in the end. Only one of my current Skills wasn't suited to that life and so I took the time to grieve. For the life I could have had were things different. For the person I could have become had circumstances not been as they were. That's the thing about circumstances though; they are as they are.

And then I began to prune. I marshalled my intent into metaphysical shears and began to sever the links between my various Skills and Wilderness Endurance Hunter. I cut mercilessly through the spiritual embodiment of my progress and wrenched the Skill from my soul-space with a judicious application of will.

Skill Wilderness Endurance Hunter has been removed.

Open Skill Slot remaining.

The System chimed its acknowledgement of the deed, although I did not need its confirmation. The empty hole in my soul-space was evidence enough. I still retained much of the knowledge of food preparation, stalking, foraging and everything else that I'd gained over the last half year, but there was a difference between knowing a thing, and doing it. That was what I had just lost.

Rousing myself from my introspection, if only to avoid looking at that empty gap in my soul-space, I returned to a world of emerald and orange. The sun had moved only slightly in the sky, softening and casting light onto the base of the boughs around me rather than the stones that littered the ground, drowned as most were by a soft carpet of moss.

I took a breath, and then grinned, acknowledging the system's prompt to accept my newest class Skill now that there was space in my soul for it.

Skill gained – Tilt. Open Skill slots available, Skill integrated.

Tilt: As one familiar with the high places, you have felt the disconcerting pull of the sky. You know the feeling of the world tilting on its axis, of the peaks rushing towards you even as you stand unmoving. Deliver that same confusion unto your enemies and leave them unbalanced as you become the focal point around which their world spins. Further levels increase the magnitude of this effect.

When I rejoined Jorge, I had let him, and the others, know of my choice. Surprinsgly, it was Nathlan who seemed to understand best why the choice for me was easy, but bittersweet. Vera had committed herself to war a long time ago, and Jorge had seen so much of life already that I suspected it all blended together sometimes. But Nathlan had made a similar choice to my own, albeit greater in scale – he'd given up an entire class built for a non-combat purpose and then retooled himself for violence. It was a difficult choice to make, and it was nice to have somebody to talk to about it that truly understood.

I'd also then asked Jorge about my concerns when it came to levelling the Skill.

"I imagine I won't have that much time to level it before I hit my 2nd tier, assuming all goes well."

We'd established through experimentation that it did have a mild effect of unbalancing the person I used it against, but Jorge and Vera were significantly more powerful than me, so the effect was limited. I managed to slightly wobble Nathlan with it but given that it was a Skill still in its infancy and I didn't yet quite understand how to control it, and the effect was marginal.

"I don't think that's too much of a concern," Jorge said. "The system seems to account for the time that you have access to them, and how you've levelled them within that time. For obvious reasons, the late Skills are often far lower levelled than the initial class Skills you gain when first classing up, but it doesn't seem to unbalance things when you break through a tier."

It was a relief to hear, as I'd been concerned that to get the most out of this class I would have to spend a long time stuck at the peak of 1st tier, desperately trying to level up my late Skills. Tilt did seem to have very obvious combat potential, at least, so the process might not be too onerous. Still, I was keen to break through now that I was close.

I was on the cusp of the 2nd tier, a few more levels and I'd be there. Power enough to find myself no longer helpless in most of the world. Sure, I'd not be near the strongest, but people like Francis D'Sware wouldn't be so far out of my reach by then. The helplessness and humiliation of my imprisonment still chafed, much as I was loath to admit it.

Still, I had a new Skill to work on in the meantime, and now that I had eight Skills settled within my soul, all offering at least some combat potential, I wasn't as helpless as I had been only a month ago.

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