The System Seas

The waters were clear all the way to Gulf Isle, which Marco found wasn't saying much at all. When he had first sailed around these waters, he was in a ship in name only, a craft that was a bit smaller than the magical accessory boat his current ship stored for landings. Now, he was cutting across hours of his old pace in minutes, unimpeded by anything at all.

It was almost nostalgic when he felt the ship come under attack by Bladefish helplessly pelting against the side of the ship, trying to cut wood that could not be cut by conventional blades anymore. Even Marco's own skin was beyond their capabilities now.

Even taking Elisa's patrol route rather than the most direct path, they were there well before dusk. Marco's heart hitched in his chest as he saw Gulf Isle appear over the horizon, green and familiar. He had rarely seen it from this perspective, but it was still easy to pick out the identity of every building, every hill, and even most of the trees. He knew every inch of the place, and the sight of it had taken his breath away in a way he thought he would have been immune to.

It only got worse as he pulled up to the dock.

"It's gone," Elisa said. "Marco, Tatric's shack is gone."

Marco nodded, dry-mouthed. It hadn't been much of a house when it was built, he guessed, and by the time Marco and Tatric had lived there together, the shack was a thing of drafts held together by misplaced hopes. Seeing it gone now was still a shock. It hadn't fallen down, which Marco knew because there was no wreckage. It hadn't burned, or there would be ash. He hopped to the shoreline, hoping to find any clue of what had happened. Just as quickly as he was able to walk over to the space his home had once occupied, he heard a harsh voice.

"Marco," the man said. "Don't you know you are wanted?"

Marco glanced at the guard who had found him. On Riv's island, he wasn't really known. Whatever trouble should have found him there in terms of the law, he suspected Riv's parents had suppressed. He wasn't surprised to be finding some of that trouble here and now, but to his thinking, he was entirely too busy for it. Almost unseeing, he took in the man's face. He didn't really know him. He had known his face once, but they had never been friends. And now the man was moving towards him aggressively.

"Hey," Marco said. "I'm having a hard moment. I feel like punching you, but I feel like if I do, you might die. Do you think you could give me some space?"

The words felt cold coming out of his mouth, which might have been why they did the trick to freeze the guard. Once the man was stopped in place trying to figure out how seriously he should take Marco's threat, Marco was able to move forward to the spot where his house had been. Grass didn't grow well on packed earth, and he could see the outline of where the building had sat, if not any indications of where it had gone.

His friends gathered around him as he stared down at the ground, trying to make sense of things. It was comforting, in a way. It was also good as a warning, in a way.

"Hey, Marco," Riv said. "There's starting to be a lot of guards around. Do you want me to do something about them?"

"Sure. Thanks." Marco nodded. "Don't hurt them. Just round them up, if you can. I have some questions."

Marco heard the tussle after that. Riv wasn't built for speed, but with all the levels he had, it didn't matter. A few minutes later, he and Elisa had all the guards sitting in a group on the ground, looking various intensities of bruised, sprained, and lightning-burned. None of them were dead or dying, though, which Marco considered sufficient.

"Elisa, heal them for me."

A sheet of green healing passed over the group, then over them again, then a third time. By the end of it, any visible signs of injury were gone. The mental injuries were beyond Elisa's power, as they were entirely appropriate. The guards looked up in muted terror as Marco walked over, patting the handle of his sword and considering how to phrase his question. In the end, he settled on three simple words.

"Where is Tatric?" he said.

The guards glanced among themselves. Marco got the sense someone somewhere had told them not to tell him the answer to that question. He waited, suspecting that none of these small-town guards were really all that brave once their sheer numbers failed them. Sure enough, one of the eight or nine guards that had responded to the first guard's call broke.

"The system priest had visitors after you left. Months after," the man said. "Other people from the capital. They talked to Tatric. The word back then was he wouldn't help them find you. When they left, they took him with them. They didn't tell us much besides that, just to catch you if you ever came back to find Tatric. I don't think they thought you'd come back like… well, like this."

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"Huh," Marco said. "Do you all understand that I'm having a hard day now? What that means?"

Enough of the guards nodded that he was able to decide they had the right idea about what would happen if they bothered him again. He started down the road towards town, hardly looking at the familiar sites he might otherwise enjoy seeing again.

"Marco? Where are you headed?" Riv asked.

"I have an appointment. I think."

"With who, Marco?" Elisa asked. "Tatric isn't here."

"No, he isn't. But it's been a long time since I've thought about something he told me once, about my class, and about what happened to people with classes like it. Back then, I could only think of one person on the island who probably knew what was going on with that. Who really knew."

Marco took a deep breath and kept walking.

"I think it's about time I had a long conversation with the man who awakened my class."

—

The reaction of people in the town was giving Marco the impression that the guards had some advance warning he was on his way that the general populace wasn’t given. Most people were giving them a very wide berth, glancing at the powerful looking newcomers before turning away to their own business. Marco was able to understand once he realized what they must have looked like to the inhabitants of his home town.

The finest finery of the inhabitants of the island was pretty good as leisurewear or workwear went. It was sturdy stuff, made by skilled artisans who used the best materials available to them on a day to day basis. The clothes lasted, resisted tearing,and tended to be up to the challenge of getting through most days and the troubles they brought with them. To Marco’s eyes, though, they now looked cheap, almost flimsy. He was smart enough to know that those weren’t the right descriptors for them, and that he was spoiled by the bounty of the outer seas seeping into his and his team's gear at every opportunity. Riv’s hammer alone gleamed like it had eaten a thousand magical armories, and it it probably had, so much so that it had no interest in the lesser pretty-good but not good enough armaments they had picked up from various pirates and attackers over the last several months. Marco’s own clothes and weapons were far better than even that, the beneficiary of a consumption skill that gorged itself on the power of every captain he took down.

To the townspeople, they must have gleamed like the sun. Given how the world was, it wasn’t hard to figure out their reluctance to accidentally piss off the shiny, clearly strong visitors gracing their town, even to the point where they didn’t look at Marco and Elisa long enough to recognize them.

“I’m glad my dad isn’t out and about. He wouldn’t be at this time of day. I refuse to believe he wouldn’t recognize me, and then we’d never get rid of him,” Elisa said. “He’ll never give up.”

“You don’t want to see him?” Riv said. “I didn’t things were that bad between you.”

“I didn’t say that, exactly. They were never bad. It’s just that he wants a very particular set of things for me, and he never checked with me about whether or not I wanted those things. At all. In his mind, I’m sure he’s just been waiting for me to realize how big of a mistake I made, come back, and spend the rest of my life indoors at a desk.”

“Sounds like an exaggeration,” Riv said. “No offense, it’s just hard for me to imagine.”

“She’s not exaggerating,” Marco said. “He’d probably put her in a jar if he could.”

They managed to make it through the town without much incident, although Marco was pretty sure a few people finally did recognize him and Elisa. Those were the few that bustled off the quickest, heading into alleys and through houses to, presumably, warn guards about his presence. He tried his hardest not to care about that as he moved forward towards his goal.

Most system events like the system-granting ceremony took place out-of-doors, and there was even a system church of sorts Marco had been forced to visit not long before he left Gulf Isle the first time around. That, however, would not be where the system priest was. Marco knew where the system priest spent his less official, less visible hours, and it wasn’t in a stone church or a field.

Back when Marco had been training for his class, progress had eventually become hard to come by in most of his pre-classing achievements. He had to run faster and farther, fight with tougher opponents, carry heavier things, and so on to advance at anything like an acceptable rate. Some of that had been easy to do out of the way of people, but other aspects of his efforts having to do with jobs were harder to hide. People were constantly going to the system priest to complain about things he had accidentally broken, roofs he had run across, or other disturbances he had managed to make as he bull-rushed around town trying to make whatever progress he could.

When it came down to something like “where is the system priest,” he was the guy to ask, and it wasn’t most of the places people would think. Instead, the priest conducted most of his business in a small building a bit away from where he performed his official business, a nondescript building tucked between warehouses and workshops at the edge of town. Marco took a cue from the villagers and ducked his team through some alleys himself, pushing them towards the lean, more spread-out part of town.

Gulf Isle was, he realized, not that big of a place to begin with. When he was a child, he gauged it as large, mostly judging it by how long it took to cross from one civilized point to another. Now, he could see that it was a place with a lot of space, big empty areas dotted between the actual built-up parts. There was a good-sized walk between the docks and the town, for instance, and just as big of one between the town and the more industrial district near the back of it. It took them a while to cover that distance, not just because of the actual distance but also out of a conscious, unspoken desire not to freak the town out any more than it seemed like it already was.