Loop Six

  The Cost of Knowledge

  Ten seconds.

  That was all he allowed himself now — ten seconds flat on his back on the platform, eyes open, feeling whatever the last death had left in him before he packed it away and started thinking. He'd started at thirty. He didn't remember deciding to reduce it. He'd just noticed one morning that thirty felt like too long, like standing in a doorway when there was a room on the other side.

  The tenth second ended.

  He sat up.

  The sky was the colour of old pewter — early, maybe an hour before full light, the camp still half-asleep. Aldric was at his usual post below. Josh had stopped being surprised by him. Aldric was a fixed point in the same way the hawk was a fixed point, and Josh had started to find a kind of comfort in it, which he recognised as probably not a healthy sign.

  "The Baron—" Aldric began.

  "I know," Josh said.

  He climbed down from the platform and undid his own chain — Aldric had started leaving it loose at the wrist, a small accommodation that neither of them had discussed. He rolled his shoulders, took inventory of his body. Level 4. Iron Skin, Level 1. Mind Resistance, Level 2. A handful of smaller skills accumulated in the two loops he hadn't dramatised — the ones where he'd gone into the village and died learning things he couldn't unlearn. The skill slots felt like pockets — he knew what was in them without looking, their weight and shape.

  He went to the Baron, said what he needed to say, and came back with a week.

  A week before the march to the village.

  He went to the training ground and picked up a sword and spent two hours with it, not because two hours would make him a swordsman but because two hours told his body that the sword was an extension of his hand and not a foreign object he was trying to reason with. Vorse watched him from across the ground with the expression of a man watching an animal learn a trick that is more complicated than the animal should be capable of.

  At the end of the two hours Josh set the sword down, drank water, and walked into the forest.

  — ? —

  He had a system.

  The forest was enormous — old growth, the kind of forest that had been growing for centuries without human interference, where the canopy was sixty feet up and the ground was layered with generations of dead needles compressed into something halfway between earth and carpet. It swallowed sound. It swallowed light. It had its own internal logic, its own rules about where things moved and where things didn't, and he'd spent three loops learning enough of them to navigate without constantly announcing himself.

  He moved in the quadrant northeast of camp — far enough from the skull's altar that he could feel his mind operating normally, the slight pressure he'd learned to recognise as its outer edge staying manageable, held back by his resistance skill the way a dam holds a river. He was aware of it. He did not think about it.

  The demonic rabbits were the easiest. Feral things, corrupted by whatever the blood moon's influence was doing to the wildlife, they'd lost the ordinary rabbit's absolute commitment to flight and replaced it with something unpredictable — they would flee and then circle back and attack, seemingly unable to decide which instinct to obey. He'd been surprised by them in Loop 4. He was not surprised by them anymore.

  He found the first one at the base of a fallen oak, hunched over something — a dead bird, he thought, though there wasn't much left. He took three steps and killed it before it had fully processed that he was there.

  It was fast. Efficient. His hands did a thing and the thing was done.

  He stood over it and waited for the notification. It didn't come — too low-level now, the System apparently deciding that rabbits no longer merited his attention. He filed this and moved.

  — ? —

  He found the birds in the upper canopy, which was where they'd been in the loops before — territorial things, large as ravens but structured wrong, the feathers along their leading edges hardened into something closer to chitin than keratin. They dove. He'd learned to count the interval between the dive's beginning and its end, to take a single lateral step and slash upward on the way past.

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  The first one took him three attempts.

  The second took one.

  By the fourth he had stopped thinking about it. His body had filed it under reflex — the count, the step, the slash — and his mind had floated up slightly above the action, watching it happen. There was a detachment to this that he noticed without quite feeling. He was doing a thing. The thing produced a result. He moved to the next thing.

  ◆ Level 4 → Level 5 ◆

  Skill slot available.

  Would you like to learn [Keen Eye]?

  He accepted the skill without stopping walking.

  The forest went slightly sharper. Edges crisped. A track in the pine needles he'd walked past twice became legible — something medium-sized, moving northeast, the impressions recent enough to still have definition. He followed it for ten minutes and found a wolf that was not quite a wolf, its coat the wrong texture and its eyes lit from somewhere inside, hunched at the edge of a stream running shallow over grey stones.

  He killed it, and this one took a while, and left him with a shallow cut across his left forearm that sealed itself within minutes courtesy of Iron Skin, the wound going from open to a red line to a faint seam to nothing with a biological efficiency that still struck him as genuinely strange, no matter how many times he'd watched it happen.

  He stood by the stream and looked at where the cut had been and thought: I did not wince just now.

  Then he thought: I used to wince.

  Then he moved.

  — ? —

  He ate at midday from the provisions he'd pocketed at breakfast — dried meat and hard bread that were both better than they deserved to be given what the camp's cook was working with. He sat on a fallen trunk at the edge of the stream and ate and listened to the water and tried to think about something other than the next thing to kill.

  He thought about his apartment. The one he'd had in his second year, above the laundromat that ran all night — the smell of warm lint that had come up through the floorboards, which he'd hated at the time and would have given a great deal to smell right now. He thought about his roommate, whose name was Derek, who had been catastrophically disorganised and had once left a banana in the couch cushions for three weeks and been genuinely baffled by the consequences. He thought about Derek with a vividness that surprised him, that felt like pressing a bruise.

  He had not thought about home in two loops.

  He wasn't sure when he'd stopped.

  He sat with that for a moment — not the ten-second rule, which was for deaths, but just sitting with it, the way you sit with something that you're not sure yet is a loss. He had been so focused on the problem in front of him that home had slipped below the threshold of useful thought and he hadn't noticed it going.

  A bird called somewhere in the canopy. Ordinary bird. One of the ordinary ones.

  He looked at his hands. They were Kaelen's hands — the calluses were Kaelen's calluses, in Kaelen's places, thickened from years of stable work. But they moved the way Josh moved them now. They had started to become his.

  He wasn't sure how he felt about that.

  He ate the last of the bread, stood, and went back to work.

  — ? —

  By late afternoon he had reached Level 6 and his skill slots were full.

  He stood at the base of a pine and read through them with the deliberateness of a man taking stock in an unfamiliar warehouse: Iron Skin, Mind Resistance, Keen Eye, a tracking skill he'd picked up from the wolf kill that the System had called [Forest Sense], and something that had come from the birds — [Reflex Step] — which had the odd quality of making him aware of where his feet were going slightly before he went there, as if the skill had inserted a very small gap between intention and action and filled it with certainty.

  Five skills. He needed to reach Level 10 to unlock skill merging — the ability to fuse two skills into something stronger. For now the slots were just slots.

  He thought about the bear.

  The bear was northeast — he'd crossed its territory twice without pressing into it, giving it a wide berth each time, because in Loop 4 the bear had killed him in approximately eight seconds and he had come away from that particular experience with a respect for the relationship between preparedness and ambition. It was Level 10. It had the solid, untroubled confidence of a thing at the top of its particular food chain. It had looked at him, the one time he'd gotten close enough for it to look at him, with an expression that was not aggression but was the thing aggression looks like when it doesn't need to announce itself.

  He had died eight times. He was not yet ready to stop dying to things he'd already died to.

  He turned south and found a boar instead.

  — ? —

  The boar was not Level 10. The boar was Level 7, corrupted like the others, its tusks grown past the ordinary geometry of tusks into something architectural, curving back toward its own skull in a way that should have been limiting but somehow wasn't. It was rooting at the base of a dead tree when he found it.

  He killed it with an approach he'd developed over the afternoon — Reflex Step to read the angles, Forest Sense to know where not to be, Iron Skin to absorb what he couldn't avoid. The boar was fast and extremely committed to what it was doing and he took a tusk across the shin that would have been a fracture two loops ago and registered now as a bright percussion of pain that faded to pressure that faded to nothing. He killed it and stood over it and breathed hard.

  ◆ Level 6 → Level 7 ◆