Reborn As The Villain In A Game-Like World

Roselyn’s first controlled use of the death spirit lasted approximately four seconds and destroyed a load-bearing wall.

This was, by Thar’s account, significant progress. The previous attempts had destroyed two tables, a very unfortunate spider habitat, and the better part of Roselyn’s own dignity. A wall was at least structural.

"The problem," Thar said, crouching beside the rubble with his magnifying glass deployed, "is directionality. She’s releasing the mana correctly but the death attribute destabilises matter without discrimination. Stone, air, her own hair — it doesn’t distinguish." He looked up at Roselyn with the expression of a man who found genuine scientific interest in most situations, including this one. "Have you tried visualising a target before you release?"

Roselyn sat on a piece of the destroyed wall and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes. The rose on her head had shed two petals during the morning’s session. They lay on the dungeon floor like small red accusations. The black vines of her hair were still now, coiled around her shoulders in a passive tangle that she’d learned meant the spirit was dormant rather than active. The difference in sensation, she’d told Thar, was like the difference between a hand resting on your shoulder and a hand gripping it.

"I was visualising a target," she said, voice muffled by her hands. "The wall was not the target."

"What was?"

She lowered her hands and pointed at a rock sitting on a wooden crate across the dungeon. The rock was, notably, completely undamaged.

Thar looked at the rock. He looked at the wall. He made a note. "Ranged precision before force control. We’ve been approaching this backwards." He stood and dusted his knees. "Master handled my Rune Engraving the same way — showed me the full thing first, then worked backward to its components. We should try something smaller." He picked up a pebble and set it on the crate beside the rock. "This one."

"Thar," Roselyn said. "I turned a man into a skeleton’s puppet last week."

"I know."

"And now I can’t hit a pebble."

"That was the spirit doing it through you. This is you doing it through the spirit." He sat down on the rubble beside her with a casualness that belonged on a much smaller piece of furniture and looked at the pebble with calm expectation. "Completely different direction of control."

Roselyn stared at the pebble for a long moment. The spirit whispered, as it always whispered — a voice without words, suggestions without content, like a current trying to redirect a river. She had learned to feel it without following it. Mostly.

She extended one hand, palm forward. Focused.

The pebble shivered. Then, with a sound like a coin dropped on stone, it cracked neatly down the middle.

Thar’s magnifying glass swivelled to the crate. A long silence.

"That was controlled," he said.

"That was barely anything."

"And the wall was too much. Barely anything is better." He made another note. "We do this a hundred times today. Same pebble-size target. Then we try two. Then we try distance."

Roselyn looked at her hand. The faint dark channels running beneath her skin — the vine-shaped mana circuits — had pulsed once when the pebble cracked, like a second heartbeat.

"Does it bother you?" she asked. "What I am now."

Thar considered the question with the seriousness he gave most things. "I have runes tattooed into my skin that were designed to slowly replace my capacity for emotional response with structural analysis." He held up his arm. The blue runic lines pulsed faintly. "In thirty years, according to the literature, I will feel very little. I have decided this is a reasonable price." He looked back at the crate. "What you are is what you chose to become. That seems fine to me."

Roselyn was quiet for a moment. Then she picked up another pebble herself, set it on the crate, and raised her hand.

The crack was cleaner this time.

They worked until the dungeon’s resident pink spiders started drifting in to watch, which was how Roselyn knew it had been a while. Julius had taken to sitting at the front of these impromptu audiences with his iron sword propped beside him like a tiny knight attending a performance. She had stopped finding this unsettling several days ago. In the grand taxonomy of things she was adjusting to, a spider with aesthetic sensibilities ranked fairly low.

By the time Jack arrived in the afternoon, there were eleven cracked pebbles on the crate and one intact one.

"Progress," he observed from the dungeon entrance.

"We’re calling it that," Roselyn said.

He walked over and looked at the pebbles. Then he looked at her. He had the quality, she’d noticed, of assessments that felt less like judgment and more like measurement — as if he were noting a data point rather than forming an opinion. She wasn’t sure which she preferred.

"When you’re ready," he said, "try it on something living." He glanced at Julius. "Not the spiders."

Julius hummed with what Roselyn had come to recognise as indignation.

"There are dungeon creatures in the lower tunnels," Jack continued. "Night Crawlers that have regrouped since the culling. That’s your next target range." He turned to Thar. "Don’t let her fight alone."

"Obviously," Thar said, with the mild tone of someone who had not been planning to do otherwise.

Jack left. Roselyn looked at the last intact pebble.

She cracked it. Then she stood, rolled her neck, and said to Thar, "Show me the lower tunnels."

Julius picked up his sword and followed. The other spiders followed Julius. Thar followed the spiders, because the alternative was leaving them unsupervised, which had produced interesting results in the past.

The dungeon went deeper than anyone had initially mapped.

They discovered this because the Night Crawlers were no longer where they had been. They had migrated. Downward.

Roselyn stood at the edge of the lower gallery, listening to the darkness below. The spirit’s whisper was louder here — something about the mana density in the deeper rock, she thought, or possibly the proximity of old death. Dungeons had long memories.

"How far down?" she asked.

Thar held his magnifying glass toward the dark. "Far enough that the air quality changes." He sniffed. "Three chambers, maybe four. The mana’s different below. Older."

Roselyn looked at her hand. The vine-shaped channels pulsed very slowly, like the dungeon had a pulse of its own and hers had begun to sync with it.

"Something’s down there," she said. "Not just spiders."

Thar straightened. Then he pulled out his notebook and made a note.

"We should tell Master," he said.

Roselyn was still looking at the dark. "Yes," she agreed. "We should."