Part 13 - The Operatyf Organization

  Liz received instruction in a two-fold manner.

  The first day, she was informed that she would receive morning training with the members of Team Iota.

  That training would begin with a variety of physical exercises, then be followed by one-on-one sparring and mock combat sessions focused on teamwork.

  The facility had a long tunnel that Liz had assumed to be an escape passageway based on the density of the stone and the level of reinforcement, but she’d been wrong. The tunnel led to a cavernous area the size of a sports field, built to serve as a training field. There, they would use their full capabilities to keep their skills—and Skills—honed to perfection.

  Aegis hadn’t even bothered with introductions, and Liz barely noticed given her habitual reluctance to give anyone her name. It probably played well with how she wasn’t supposed to use her real name anymore. Rather, she was being forced to abandon the nickname she’d chosen for herself. Lizha was a random choice by Jayce on the spot, and it wouldn’t last long either, once she had her ‘codename’ for future operations. She just hoped she would get something simple and likeable. There were many awful monikers she could be stuck with. If she got to pick her own, she’d pick something like Justice or Judgement, from the Major Arcana.

  As their exercises finally began, Liz was placed at the start line of a track that lined the perimeter of the training grounds.

  “Alright, Lizha, time to get started showing us how much we’ll have to make up for your low levels. Even if you do have a divine class, it’s only one class, and high stats won’t mean much if your actual Skills are shoddy. Run a lap, and we’ll judge it by eye. None of us have a slot to waste on timekeeping skills for teaching recruits.” Aegis gave her the most frustrating dose of condescension she’d received on Pallos to date.

  “Right… Any limitations? Rules on what I can or can’t do to cover the distance?” Liz eyed the material of the track with a keen eye. It was made of stone, a perfect chance for her to make him eat crow.

  “Are you stupid? Just run a damn lap.”

  That was all the instruction she got.

  She just happened to have had a physical training coach in her past life, so her form was scientifically honed to be as aerodynamic as she could be, and she’d finally gotten her hands on one of the Operatyf-style tight-fitting outfits like what Aegis had been wearing. Skills even made it form-fit to her body shape.

  She got down onto her hands and entered the form a sprinter would use in the olympics.

  “The hell kinda pose is that?” One of the members of Team Iota—holding a bow with a quiver on his back—muttered loudly with a scoff.

  The crazy thing about having high Vitality, Speed and Dexterity was that they each compensated for one another. Speed allowed for superhuman performance, while Dexterity allowed your feet to remain firm and deft upon the ground, rather than tripping over yourself. Vitality came in afterwards and modified perception to compensate for the incredible feats of the other two until it would feel like time was matching with your speed to keep a person from crashing into obstacles.

  Liz was, effectively, using her magic stats to amplify everything else with explosive bursts of power as her feet hit the stone.

  She was beyond shocked when [Earth Shattering Arts] jumped into play like it had always been part of her. Her initial kick off the ground left a small crater in the reinforced stone of the training grounds, and she began tearing down the track with a grin on her face.

  The room wasn’t quite rectangular in shape, as the corners were slightly rounded, but the issue was that she wasn’t a traditional speedster. She didn’t have normal skills made for amplifying her speed while running, but she did have the element on her side, and it all worked together to make her a force of nature that risked ruining the grounds if she didn’t try to find some way to navigate the corners without hitting the wall or reducing her speed.

  She barely even thought about it. She used her momentum to run on the wall as she approached the corner, using all her Skills—now second nature to her—to keep her footing secure as she did so.

  After the initial crater, she’d started making sure to reinforce the stone beneath her steps to sustain the impact, counteracting [Earth Shattering Arts] as she went. If only her skills hadn’t capped, she was sure she’d be hearing the dings softly intoning her gains with each carefully explosive footfall.

  She even ended her lap with a spinning flip that diverted her momentum into the floor and had her sink waist deep into the stone before she fished herself back out of her earlier crater and fixed the whole area with [Earth Manipulation].

  Apparently her class enjoyed her finishing stunt.

  [*ding* Congratulations! Your class [Acrobatic Templar of Seira] has leveled up from level 80 to level 81!]

  [*ding* You have gained the following stats per level! +30 Free Stats, +60 Dexterity, +50 Vitality, +60 Speed, +30 Mana, +80 Mana Regeneration, +50 Magic Power, +50 Magic Control from your class! +4 Free Stats for being Partially Human, +2 Vitality for being Partially Stone Golem! +1 Vitality from your element!]

  “Level eighty with that much Speed and Strength? And the Vitality and Dexterity to match?” Elina, the only female member of Team Iota, sounded impressed.

  “Enough stats to leave behind a mess you have to clean up.” Aegis groused as the rest of the team all stared at her in abject confusion.

  “Strength is actually my dump stat. I don’t tell people my specific details, but my ability in combat is all a side effect of the stone that makes up a good portion of my body. If we’re talking mass alone, I’m probably more than sixty percent made of stone.” Liz’s unique circumstances made her almost too well suited to tests of physical power, all thanks to applications of her magical strength.

  She decided not to mention that her actual stats were most heavily invested into her Mana Regeneration. If anyone actually saw her stats, they’d likely be deeply confused. It was fun being built like a [Mage] but having the style of a physical combattant.

  She drank in the reactions to her performance, though Aegis still seemed to be probing her for flaws. She had them, of course. She just wasn’t about to offer up any of them unless they were secretly ones she could navigate around. Her low Strength barely mattered, since she could just use magic skills instead.

  “How low is your strength stat?” Aegis took the bait.

  “Only two hundred twenty-three right now.” Liz gave the exact number. No reason for her to lie about it.

  “You’re a fool. If you killed anything strong enough to gain a dozen or so levels at once, you’d be reduced to almost nothing in an instant.”

  “I’ve been investing my Free Stats to shore it up as I go.” She had a ton of them, and she hadn’t felt like she needed them yet. She’d gotten close to needing them to keep up with the leader of the mercenaries that had abducted her, but [Combat Awareness] had felt like an extremely valuable skill to have at the time, and it had allowed her to punch—or rather, defend—up in a ridiculous way.

  “So the crater you made was from a skill?” Elina slid into her personal space without a moment of hesitation and began poking and prodding her all over. The Decay [Priestess] didn’t give Liz the bad vibes anymore, and she was cute enough, but Liz really didn’t like allowing anyone to be that physically close to her. The only being to ever get so close and not make her skin feel like it was crawling was Seira, who just felt right to her. The children didn’t count—she’d been coerced into most of those interactions with puppy-dog eyes.

  Liz stepped away from the invasive girl and held up a hand to stop her.

  “I’ll show you. You’ll need to know this much at least. Anyone up for being my punching bag?”

  The entirety of Team Iota looked at her, then at where the crater had been, and failed to volunteer.

  Aegis shook his head. “We don’t go full contact with unknowns in training. Here, I’ll make a barrier.”

  A glittering barrier appeared in the air in front of her, between where she stood and the team watched.

  Elina seemed to be about to protest for some reason, but Liz nodded and took up a stance before a word could be uttered.

  Liz felt [Earth Shattering Arts] come over her again like she was made for it and it was made for her. The martial forms she had no training with and no real battle experience to use all felt like a flawless piece of her soul as she performed a straight punch at the shimmering wall. Her left foot—with its sole coated in a layer of stone—kicked down into the ground as her body shifted forward, all muscles from her leg, up her back and into her arm focusing the power into her left fist as it met the sheet of Brilliance.

  The world around her exploded, completely enveloping her sight in blinding, burning light.

  Her senses that merged with the earth around her told her she’d successfully struck the barrier, and that it had definitely shattered on contact.

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  None of that feedback explained why she’d been sent flying and her body had been blasted with white-hot light.

  When her vision recovered slightly, she could see Elina over her prone body, using ice magic to soothe what must’ve been quite painful burns. Liz had reflexively dialed up her pain skill to ignore the sensations while she’d been in the air, so she didn’t feel it at all anymore.

  She willed herself to stand with her puppet-like magic skills and looked down at herself. The exercise outfit had been seared to nothingness in record time, and she immediately protected her modesty by moving the stone nearby to cover anything scandalous. The action did leave rather gruesome holes behind in the areas the stone had left, which drew a grimace from Elina at the sight.

  The training area was a mess, however. From the spot the barrier had been, there was now a cone of scorched stone across the floor covering a good fifty feet, and she’d landed some hundred feet away.

  Elina stopped trying to keep her from getting up and turned furiously on Aegis.

  “You know better than to use [Retributive Barrier] on a newbie who has no idea what will happen! What if she’d died?” The other [Priestess] seemed genuinely angry, and Liz had to admit she felt a bit pleased that someone would stand up for her.

  “What even was that?” Liz cut in before Aegis could come up with his excuses.

  Elina obliged her. “Aegis isn’t just a shielder, he hides Radiance inside his Brilliance barrier skills, and when they get broken, they explode in the direction of the attacker, using the energy applied to the barrier as part of the mana that triggers the skill. High damage single attacks get the worst of it.”

  Liz tapped a finger to her chin in thought.

  “She needed a dose of reality. Her overconfidence will get her killed. She should know enough to be careful. Fighting someone who lives for battle isn’t something for a low level rookie.” Aegis finally got out his excuse with a glare at Elina, likely for spilling secrets about his Skills.

  Liz chuckled, drawing all eyes to herself.

  “My mistake was not having used a defensive skill, I suppose. That said, no pain, despite the burns.” She dumped a chunk of mana into [Chainmail] to create a skin-tight mesh of metal chains over her body composed of rhodium-plated gold that glittered under the light of the crystals dotting the ceiling.

  She kept the stone she’d moved from her body in place around the areas that the chain armor would often pinch, then shrugged.

  Elina gave her a look that could’ve been exasperation or resignation, then strode towards the tunnel. “I’ll go get a healer and a new set of clothes.”

  “Thanks.” Liz turned towards Aegis. “You’re taking things a bit too far, don’t you think? Your boss sent you out with a child of fourteen on a dangerous mission, yet you’re itching for ways to reject my involvement? Why?”

  “[Priestesses] are always self-important and quick to let their power go to their heads. It gets them killed. I see it in you. You’re strong, I’ll grant you that, but you’re bound to stumble on a bad match in a fight one day and end up dead because of it. The kid made his choice and signed up for this life with a full acceptance of his place in the hierarchy of the world. People with a lot of power at a low level tend to think they’re invincible and lose their heads. Like I said, a dose of reality.” Aegis made a lot more sense than Liz wanted to admit.

  “That’s what training is for. One way or another, I’ll have a divine mission one day and when that time comes, I’ll be putting my life at risk no matter how prepared I am. You think I’ll die? I’m sure I already should’ve. Ever had your entire body feel like it was unmade one atom at a time and then stitched back together? I am well aware of my own mortality, but I have goals to accomplish in my life and promises made before the goddess to keep. I won’t reach those achievements without taking risks when I have to.” Liz met Aegis’ eyes with a look of cold determination.

  He simply nodded. “Fine. If you’re going to work with us, you’ll need to learn how we operate and you’ll need to know your own weaknesses.”

  [*ding* You’ve unlocked the passive class skill [Templar’s Conviction]!]

  Hell ensued after that, and Liz was run through dozens of exercises meant to train her to function like the organization would. Even without acting skills, her talents continued to shine through and trip up the team’s best spy. She could lie flawlessly without any of the common tells that various skills for conning people would ingrain on a person. In effect, her ability to infiltrate a group or community might be one of the best the organization had ever seen, all without a Skill.

  She was, of course, both proud and extremely smug about that fact. That led to Aegis putting her into an intense physical training loop of navigating his barriers at their weaker setting, in which bumping into them would detonate them with blinding flashes of light. She would have to carefully navigate the maze of walls, occasionally interspersed with tinier discs of Brilliance that weren’t touching the ground, and therefore didn’t turn up in the sensing area of [Earth Shattering Arts].

  The first time she’d tried, she hadn’t made it more than a few steps in. Her continued attempts had her pirouetting and ducking obstacles until she was too dizzy to maintain her focus. She was starting to see why fighting Aegis might be a nightmare for anyone who had to get close. There was even a skilled Mirage user in the team that would make the man invisible to hide his position.

  On the topic of the team, Elina was back to terrifying Liz to her core. The girl used disgusting strips of decaying and diseased flesh encased in ice to slash at her enemies from a range, with some of the tiny fragments so small they could be inhaled. They spread a flesh eating plague that infected those she cut. She could slip into an enemy location, discreetly infect a group with inhaled ice fragments and slip away, allowing anywhere without access to healers to simply wither away.

  Her childhood was surely even more gruesome, not that she shared details on it, but Liz could tell there was a lot to unpack there. Her two classes were so close to one another in level, sometimes she’d appear as a [Priestess] with dark, swirling eyes, and other times she’d show up as an [Artisan] with snowflakes falling in her irises. The disturbing part to Liz was that she didn’t have any class or skills for handling diseases. She needed a source of diseased flesh to work with at the start, then could repurpose her victims as ammunition.

  The girl was a macabre piece of work, but her personality was sunny and radiant. It made Elizabeth shudder at the thought.

  The rest of the team, still not introduced, were very normal by Pallos standards.

  The teams were composed of eight members, and formed into regional strike teams to handle a variety of problems that could crop up in the country. The teams were intended to handle political instability, monster attacks, corruption, drug trafficking, and extensive threats due to their own skills. Elina, in particular, warranted a [Healer] being on the team to contain the spread of her rather nasty skillset, but the organization simply didn’t have the manpower to spare for that assignment. Ironically, Iota had a dedicated pair to assassinate [Healers] to prevent Elina’s skills being countered.

  In all, the members seemed to be two assassins—one physical and one magical—one physical classer dedicated to a defensive set of skills, one speedster aimed at long range sniping with skill-empowered arrows, and two support specialists that could repair and craft new gear for the team, each with their own specialty of engraving runes and weaving, respectively.

  The whole team screamed to Liz of the story of the assassination attempt in Khazad. Every member had a special value to the team as a whole, whether it was runes on arrows, fresh woven camouflaged clothing, or the defensive frontliner’s skills at repairing his own armor. Any member of the team with a non-combat skill kept that class as high level as they could, making more than half the team read as [Artisan] instead of something that would put townspeople on edge.

  She realized by that point that the vampire had been more than a little responsible for the way things had panned out, and all of it seemed very intentional. She felt a burning anger over how Sylvestre had been killed, and for the extra manipulation if the little monster was responsible for the way the children had been treated as well.

  And yet, she couldn’t do anything about it. Faythe was a slippery opponent with skills aimed at being hard to effectively kill. Liz would have to bide her time if she ever wished to avenge the old man for the schemes of that monster in elvenoid skin.

  Training with Team Iota had lasted until lunch time that day, making up a solid six hours of exhausting drills. Liz had literally been subjected to every skill the team had except for Elina’s diseases, all to probe for weaknesses to her skills.

  Fire had been the first major hurdle, and regardless of her defensive skills, she was very susceptible to being cooked in her skin. It wouldn’t stop her from charging straight through to eliminate the attacker with prejudice, but she wouldn’t manage so well afterwards without someone on standby to heal her back up.

  Drowning hadn’t been an issue, since she was hard to restrict, and too heavy to suspend in the air with water, not that she got to show that off, since the team had no Water or Ocean users. On the subject, even Arlyen’s companion Kun-Peng hadn’t been able to suspend Liz in a ball of water for long enough to drown her. Liz wasn’t willing to jump in a lake and find out how hard it would be to swim out, even if her magic stats allowed for it. She was never a fan of going into deep bodies of water to begin with. Massive fear of horror movies involving sharks.

  Flighty, fast-moving archers were a bit of a problem. It had come down to a contest of stats. Expensively rune-engraved arrows could likely cause all sorts of problems, but the team wasn’t willing to waste resources testing them out before the mission. She could feel the arrows coming as they displaced air and the air sent a ripple over the stone beneath her feet. She just couldn’t pin the speedster down, either. A very annoying fight.

  Elina’s skills required a long time to do their work, but otherwise she was a nasty guerilla combattant with high stats and ice projectiles. She wasn’t fast enough to be a threat to Liz without the decay aspect running.

  The two assassins had reminded her of Faythe’s ability to use Mirages to hide themselves, but they didn’t quite have the vampire’s skills to hide from [Identify] and they didn’t expect her to have the sensing range of [Earth Shattering Arts] to sense incoming movement across the ground. The pair of assassins were no threat to her at all, and she wondered if they’d have better luck if she were asleep, but she’d become a very light sleeper since getting her new combat skill, and that meant every oddity around her could—and would—disturb her sleep.

  Aegis had given her an assessment at the end of the session of beating her up.

  “You’re fast, and tough. But that’s all. You’re weak to the same things everyone usually is, especially the efficient killer elements like Radiance, Lightning or Void. Void is probably the least effective of the bunch, though. Your Vitality would make it hard to erase you, and you fight with your actual body, so you don’t have to worry about losing your weapons.”

  “Unless someone cuts off my limbs, right?” Liz gave him a deadpan stare.

  She wasn’t an idiot. Lighting strikes were terrifying. His Radiance bursts were really bad for her skin. She had zero interest in fighting any of the more potent disease or poison based elements, which meant Spore, Miasma, and Poison. She didn’t see Acid going well either.

  The more she thought about it, the more she realized she wasn’t especially well equipped to handle any of the especially dangerous combat elements. She’d have to begin devising ways to solve those problems with some real effort from [Imaginative].

  She had to admit, the whole session was a great eye-opener for her, even if Aegis was a total jerk.

  “On the plus side, your senses don’t seem to be fooled by anyone. You’re nearly immune to things like Mist, Mirage and probably Mirror. I’ll find someone off-duty to try out Steam and Sand in the future.”

  Liz let out a rare curse at that.

  Her sleep schedule was devastated in quick fashion as she was dragged off by Faythe the moment she was caught alone that evening. One would think there should be some privacy in the restroom, but alas, she should’ve expected the vampire to keep a nocturnal sleep pattern, meaning she’d be getting the other half of her training during the night.

  That was how dance lessons began, much to Liz’s despair.