I blushed, got up, and sat back at the laptop. One day, I’d prove to her that letting me live was the right choice. But for now, I had images to go through.

  I finished them a little after noon. “I’m done,” I announced proudly.

  Isabella looked back at me and moved her headset aside. “So, where is it?”

  I showed her three images that looked like the ruined city behind the portal. “These locations. I think the first one is the most likely.”

  “New York, New York, and San Francisco… you picked America three times. Are you sure you didn’t just recognize them from watching too many movies and TV shows?”

  I hesitated. Maybe. No. I wouldn’t make a mistake like that. “I’m sure. The city behind the portal is one of these.”

  “We’ll see. I’ll write to the overseas branches to see if they’ve noticed anything. If they have, they won’t tell us. But if there’s nothing going on, they’ll write back saying I’m seeing ghosts. They like saying that.” She banged away at her laptop’s keyboard, closed her laptop a few seconds later, and stood up. “Let’s go. This portal is the only active one we know of, and my team will be here the day after tomorrow. You’ve got two days to get ready for the next portal dive.”

  I packed my laptop and left with her. My stomach growled. I hadn’t eaten anything today. “Can we grab lunch somewhere?”

  “Where exactly?” Isabella snapped, and we headed to the elevator. “I tried to get lunch yesterday. Apparently, the traditional dish here is the cheesesteak, but they brought me a sandwich. Sandwich is food for dogs, so they don’t notice they’re eating rotten meat and ground-up bones. Then they suggested a pork roll, but the waitress couldn’t explain to me why I’d eat pork when beef exists.”

  We took the elevator down to the garage, and I felt sorry for the waitress. Meeting Isabella apparently wasn’t a unique experience just for me.

  “Then they said they had great tacos, but I’m originally from Venezuela, and I have not come to the states to eat the garbage I ate in that shit hole. Finally, they tried to sell me gefilte fish, but that’s a meal I wouldn’t give to a stray cat, and they didn’t have any for-humans fish, like salmon or tuna.”

  We got in her car and started driving out of the garage.

  “Then I went next door, and they pretended to be making pizza, but didn’t have a wood-fired oven. So, I went to one more restaurant, and they thought sushi made from non-wild salmon was food.”

  When we stopped at a red light, she looked at me. “Can you cook?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? Because if you could cook, you could give your life value by dressing in a Japanese maid outfit and cooking for me in it.”

  “I’m sure. I really can’t cook.” And honestly, I was relieved. For once, incompetence had come in handy.

  We arrived at her garage, and she took me to the training room. Just thinking about her last visit made all my bruises ache, and I had plenty of them.

  Isabella motioned over the room. “Now, this is the part where I should teach you how to fight. The problem is that I fight using skills you don’t have, and weapons you can’t use. You’re on the System, right?”

  I nodded. “Is every mage on it?”

  “Sort of. It’s complicated and completely above your clearance level. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I haven’t the faintest idea how to fight without my powers, so I can’t teach you how to fight.”

  “How can you not have the experience? Didn’t you start at level one as well?”

  “I did.” She smirked. “But things worked differently when I was young. The System is only about twelve years old, created by a certain incident that you don’t have clearance level for. I learned magic the old way, with no agents or skill trees or guardrails. But in the System’s terms, I hit level fifty before I was fourteen. And that was over thirty years ago. But anyway, my point is that I cannot even begin to imagine what it’s like to not have talent.”

  Level fifty, at fourteen? My jaw dropped. What level was she? Four hundred? Shadow told me to not count with more than ninety levels, but that didn’t mean others couldn’t level up higher. “What level are you?”

  She frowned. “How do you not know that? The level scanner is like a level five skill, and just breathing the air around me should have leveled you to about level ten by now.”

  “I’m level six,” I admitted, blushing. Levels put a completely different meaning to having no talent. Shadow.

  The world around me froze, and Shadow appeared, a bored expression plastered over his handsome face, wearing the usual black suit with a white shirt and black tie. “Picked your build already?” he glanced at Isabella. “Going for the maid specialization?”

  “Just needed the time stop. Wait for a moment.” I focused on the skill tree and looked for skills that didn’t follow a specialization.

  In a few seconds, I noticed the branch I had missed. Straight from the start, a short skill branch snaked out, called System skills.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  And in there, I found:

  Skill name: Levelscanner

  Required level: One

  Description: Activate the skill by focusing on another mage, and find their level and basic personal information. The target knows it’s being scanned.

  Usage: Once per day.

  Learning: Automatic

  I should have noticed this earlier. Okay, time to use my first skill point. I allocated a point into it.

  The node on the skill tree lit up, and so did the connection to the next skill. I read that one as well:

  Skill name: Manifest agent (personal)

  Required level: Five

  Description: Activate the skill to manifest your agent into reality. The agent will become physical for the user and up to three friendly targets. The agent cannot interact with anyone other than the user in a non-combat way.

  Usage: Once per day, maximum duration four hours.

  I put my point into this skill too. With a raised eyebrow, I glanced at Shadow. “You know how to fight, right?”

  “You could say that.”

  I nodded. “Unfreeze time.”

  Isabella shifted her weight, tapping her shoe on the floor. “Anyways, I learned how to fight by myself, and so will you. But I will motivate you. Right now, I will leave, and I will have dinner arranged in about two hours from now. I will come pick you up for it, and when I do, you will either have leveled up a bit, or I will whip you unconscious, and hang you from the window for the night.”

  She had to be kidding me. “Wow, I feel so motivated.”

  Her hair stretched out, swished through the air, and lashed me over the back so hard I yelped. “Come to think of it, you should get some experience from getting whipped, so I suppose we could move straight to that.”

  “That’s fine. That’s fine.” I groaned, the burn spreading through my back. “I will figure it out.”

  “You do that.” Isabella spun and returned to the elevator. As she walked towards the elevator, I focused and activated the level scanner. The world froze for a split second, and a text floated in front of my gaze, reading:

  Name: Isabella Maria di Castilla

  Age: 47

  Level: 93

  Wait, forty-seven? I thought she was in her late twenties. Sure, others implied she was older, but forty-seven?

  She left through the elevator.

  The air suddenly became breathable, most of the tension gone. For a moment, I stared at the elevator, trying to make sense of her age. If someone told me she was twenty, I would believe it more. She was more than double my age, almost as old as Mom.

  Also, level ninety-three looked like a lot.

  My idea to save some skill points to then specialize into a mageslayer to fight her seemed absurd in light of that. I would pretty much have to finish my life's build to be able to challenge her.

  Anyways, time to give Shadow a try. The second skill I learned literally looked like it was made for training, so I activated the agent manifestation.

  Shadow solidified, without any sound or a flash of light. He was just there. My intuition screamed danger, everything else felt darker, as if the world itself lost a part of all its light.

  Looking at him, I realized how perfectly Shadow matched Isabella. They wore the same style of clothing, same colors to the detail of having a black tie over a white shirt, and stood in almost the same posture. In a way, Isabella looked like a small, insufferable, female version of Shadow.

  I nodded at Shadow. “Can you teach me how to fight?”

  “I can.”

  “And can you explain a few things to me first?”

  “Sure.”

  I should have thought of this earlier. Since he came through the System, I only thought of him in relation to it. But he seemed to have his own mind and thus knowledge. “How is Isabella that old while looking that young?”

  “What? Getting wood when the mistress looks your way?”

  I rolled my eyes. Couldn’t he be more official, since he literally represented the system to me? I still blushed a bit. “No. I’ve never even thought of her in that context.”

  “Tell her that when you feel like getting whipped unconscious. Why ask me then?”

  “Because if there’s a way to lengthen one’s life, I want to get in on that.” And get some of that for my Mom and brother, too.

  He shrugged. “The System does nothing for that. So, check her bathroom. Although she will probably kill you if she catches you doing that.”

  “She wouldn’t go that far.”

  “Big words for someone who might as well have died three times in the past two days.”

  I froze. What did he mean by that? Come to think of it, she has almost killed me at least three times already. First, I almost suffocated in the car, then she tossed me into the portal gate, behind which could have been anything, and then she almost stabbed me to death in the steel bathtub. “Would she really kill me?”

  “If she catches you touching her toys, yep, she will.”

  I frowned. “What toys?”

  He laughed. “Can’t tell. Anyways, what do you know about fighting?”

  “Nothing. I have some basic training in boxing and Muay Thai, but only a tiny bit of sparring practice.”

  “Then you will learn through practice. Land a hit on me.”

  I took off my blazer, unbuttoned my shirt’s sleeves, and stepped towards him.

  Before I even got in range, out of nowhere, I took a punch to the face. Harder than stone, but light in force. It was only after stumbling back that I realized what had happened.

  A direct strike from his left hand, delivered without stance or preparation, from an angle in which I hadn’t even noticed the punch until it hit me.

  I tried again and got tagged again.

  I got the point. Figure out a way to get past the jab.

  This went on for about two hours.

  Shadow kept landing shots with his left hand, and I kept trying to get past it using every bit of my enhancement magic and whatever I’d learned from martial arts.

  Nothing worked on Shadow. He saw through every attack or feint instantly, punished every improvisation with perfect precision, and when he attacked, all I got was pain.

  It was more one-sided than playing tennis against a wall, because the wall didn’t punch back on top of returning the shots.

  I ended up collapsed from exhaustion on the floor, and Shadow vanished.

  Ding, a level up.

  Battered like a field after a hailstorm, I climbed up to my feet and limped to the elevator. But honestly, the ever-present pain didn’t bother me.

  My mind swirled with ideas and plans on how I’d hit Shadow tomorrow.

  On the eighth floor, I turned left and reached my room. My things were still packed by the wall, and Isabella was sitting at my desk.

  She leaned back against the wall, doing something on her phone, her legs dangling off the edge of the table. On the floor beneath them lay a dog bowl with the name Peter etched into it. Inside the bowl awaited a plastic container, clearly from a restaurant.

  Isabella smirked, but didn’t lift her eyes from the phone.

  "Eat, wash up, and rest. Tomorrow’s schedule is the same as today’s."

  I walked up to her, bent down, and took the container from the bowl. I sat at the desk and opened it. Steak with grilled vegetables. Finally, some real food.

  I dug in eagerly.

  And honestly, I was kind of glad Isabella was there. I usually ate alone. Having company was a nice change. Even this company.

  Isabella’s hair whipped me across the back in a lash so hard I yelped in pain.

  "Don’t smack your lips," she snapped, still staring at her phone.

  I shook my head and kept eating.

  Maybe not that nice a change.