"If we're going to step onto a stage, we need actors."
"They already think I'm stronger than I am—four wolves that 'couldn't' be dropped, and no clean story how. Let them keep the illusion. Perception spends like power. If Roland is half the captain he pretends to be, he's already decided I'm the one man here who can solve a problem that doesn't exist yet. Good. I'll rent that belief long enough to make it true."
Nameless let the thought settle, then went to find Roland.
"The hunters," he said, without preface. "Send them now. Hooks, sacks. The carcasses won't wait."
Roland's gaze sharpened. "Already moving."
"Good." Nameless didn't waste the beat. "Then I'll ask for payment in two parts—one now, one later—for handling a problem you'd rather not admit you have."
Roland's jaw shifted. "Name the first."
"A bag," Nameless said. "Big as you own. Pockets if you have them. I carry what the day gives me."
Roland glanced toward the storehouse, then back. "That we can do. And the second?"
"Later," Nameless said, even. "Nothing extravagant. Nothing the village needs to live. I prefer not to be the man who only takes charity from the poor. I know the limits of the hands around me."
Roland studied him a heartbeat. "And the problem?"
"The Razorback wasn't a pilgrimage," Nameless said. "It was bait on legs. Your wayward man's out of parlor tricks now that his rabbit died on your fence. He'll need a new act. I'll end the show before he finds one."
Roland's voice cooled. "Plan?"
"Nothing that drags your wall into it," Nameless said. "This time you stay out of sight. I'll bring his head back myself. If anyone here loved him, make peace with that quickly. I won't."
He took the bag when it came from the storehouse, buckled the strap across his chest, and let the overlay blink.
[Hunter's Medium Satchel — Leather — 30 Slots]
"Useful. Enough room to carry plans."
He crossed the yard to the chapel. Father Aldric looked up from a basin, water gone pink around his wrists.
"I need a garment," Nameless said. "A habit. Hooded if you have it. Dark as you can spare."
One of Aldric's eyebrows climbed. A small, honest laugh escaped him. "Even beggars usually wait longer before asking for a man's clothes."
"I'm hunting something that prefers not to see me coming."
That sobered the priest. He set the towel down, turned without argument, and vanished into the sacristy. Hangers clicked. Linen whispered. When he returned, he carried a working habit from some older season of his life—patched, heavy, the black worn so far toward midnight it had turned a deep, tired blue.
"For scrubbing floors and walking rain," Aldric said, holding it out. "No one mistakes it for a saint's."
"Good," Nameless said. He pulled it on, settled the cowl, and felt the garment erase edges he didn't need tonight.
[Work Habit — Poor Cloth — L1]
He left without ceremony. The yard swallowed him; the white day flattened and let him pass. By then Roland's hunters were already a string of figures on the north slope—hooks on shoulders, sacks at their hips—headed for the scree to collect what he'd promised was there.
Hedge to stone. Stone to scrub. Scrub to the bend, then up onto the mound that had learned his name. He slid into the pit the way a secret returns to the mouth that keeps it.
The cowl smelled of soap and old rain. The earth smelled of root and breath. He set his satchel where his fingers could find it without looking.
"Penumbra," he said to the dirt, barely more than breath. "Of course."
Long enough since we killed his rabbit. Long enough to try another trick. Either he'll bait another boar or he'll come for Aldric and Roland quiet—fire in the seams, a knife for the bell rope. If he's clever, he'll sell the blaze as fate.
He ran a palm across the pit floor. Crumbs, ground flat. Not wolf. Bread. And shoe-edges where paws should be.
"So he knows this place. Not just me."
"Good. That saves me time."
"I don't have to hunt him. I only have to make sure he doesn't leave."
He crouched in the pit and called up the pane. The inventory rose like a dull window over the world—grids and little ghosts of cloth.
Clothes tab: the bare minimum so the system wouldn't leave a man naked—starter rags, all poor cloth, all Level 1. A thin vest, tired trousers, boots that were mostly habit.
He dragged the vest's icon off his frame and into the new bag.
[Unequipped: Poor Vest — Cloth — L1]
[Stored: Hunter's Medium Satchel — Leather — 30→29 Slots]
Then he slotted the cowl and habit where they belonged. Fabric settled. Edges vanished.
[Equipped: Work Habit — Poor Cloth — L1]
"Now I need a sinister face," he told the dirt, dry as chalk beneath the hood. "Curtain up."
He waited out the white hours until the ridge found its drama again—boots skidding, brush tearing, breath in ragged strips. A man, fast because fear teaches. Behind him, a heavier rhythm: hooves and fury. The runner flung a bloody haunch back into the trees; the Razorback took the bribe and vanished into bristle and noise, chewing satisfaction a dozen paces below.
The man clawed up the slope, palms mud-bright, found the crown by luck, and spilled into the hollow.
"Really," Nameless thought, watching him fold and pant, "a farmhand playing occultist. Baiting a boar with beef. I used a stone, at least. Those hands belong to hoes, not tomes."
"Finally," the man muttered between gulps. "Got it. That thing nearly took me. The last one was tamer than this—"
"—and these idiots will see," he added, breath evening, a private triumph already rehearsing its audience.
The hollow answered him with a voice that wasn't his.
"Mathis, my good initiate."
The words came low and amused from the dark. Laughter followed—high and cutting at first, then dropping into something older, iron-rich and unkind.
Mathis jolted so hard he almost backed out of the pit. A hand caught his wrist and turned panic into gravity; Nameless guided him down, not gently, setting him on his knees like a fact.
"Culum didn't tell you we still had a message for you?" Nameless let the smile cut, then flatten. "No matter. Tests have many doors."
Mathis stayed down. He didn't manage composure; he managed silence. One hand crept toward a knife that had no business pretending to be a secret.
Nameless didn't bother to look at it. "A passage, then," he went on, voice calm as a ledger. "A secret you earn by failing in public and improving in private. You were… promising, even with last night's botched gift. So we accelerate you. One more piece. The piece that lets you finish."
The man flinched at that and shifted backward, edging toward the lip—more distance, more air, more choices. Suspicion did the thinking his pride wouldn't.
Nameless let the mask gain a new weight. He opened the Perfect Sight.
For the first time, a witness to the effects of the skill: a thin, spectral bloom beneath his irises, blue caught in glass—soft enough to hide in daylight, sharp enough to be undeniable at arm's length. The hollow lit that echo like a wick.
Mathis saw it and forgot the knife. "You… have it too—"
The pane wrote what mattered.
Mathis — Level 5.
"Damn," Nameless told the quiet of his skull. "I've never seen one this soft. The sacred must be on clearance." The corner of his mouth tipped with a private malice he didn't bother to hide.
The look did the rest. Under the hood, with that faint blue in his eyes and that sideways contempt, he wasn't a stranger anymore—he was an older brother from the same rot, a man with rank enough to hate inefficiency.
Mathis folded properly this time. "Forgive me, my lord! Forgive me for not seeing you."
Nameless raised his left hand—palm out, a quiet command. "No theater. Troubles belong at the start, not at the end. Your slowness doesn't surprise me." He let the pause weigh him. "Don't make me revise our judgment."
"Brother Mathis would never forgive himself," the man blurted. "Don't cast me out—please. Tell me. Tell me what I still lack."
He let the silence hold just long enough to own it, then cut through.
"Before I teach," Nameless said, quick and flat, "we climb the smaller rungs. The highest includes the lowest, but the base still holds the weight."
"Stand."
The word came almost guttural. Shame did the lifting. Mathis got to his feet.
"Now," Nameless said, precise, "give me the first of our secrets. You recite the first; I'll grant the last. I need your retention before your ambition."
Surprise twitched across the man's face—fear to schoolroom in a blink—but he rallied, scraping dignity together.
"Doubt," he said. "The foundation of all. Dissolution before coagulation. The meter and medium. Beginning and end. All must pass through it. The Great Doubt."
"Demonstrate," Nameless said.
Mathis pointed to the inner wall of the hollow. He breathed once, focused, and spoke the word like a key.
"Doubt."
The air went thin where he looked. A patch of packed earth stopped being sure of itself. Grain by grain, a circle unstitched—soil turned to dust, dust to nothing—leaving a small oval absence in the wall, a hole inside the hole.
The prompt rang cold in the back of Nameless's skull.
[Mathis offers to teach you: Doubt.]
[Cost: 3 Skill Points. Accept?]
"Yes," he told the quiet place where choices live.
The world slid off its hooks.
He hung—not in dream-slow, but in a cleaner acceleration, the kind he'd tasted at the first login screen—suspended in a space that felt like a thought without a body. He reached backward through the trick, engineering it by negation.
Affirmation is heavy; Doubt moves by subtraction.
He peeled at assumptions like bark: thickness of cloud—uncertain; color itself—uncertain; blue, red, blue, red; 01, 10, 11, 00—states that only hold while watched. Substance is a promise the world keeps out of habit. Break the habit and the promise forgets itself.
He set a frame around the absence: scope, duration, edge integrity. Doubt isn't chaos; it's directed refusal. You don't explode; you erase. You don't deny the world; you give it permission not to insist.
When the frame held, the speed let him fall back into the body that had asked for the lesson.
The hollow returned in a single clean breath.
[Skill Learned: Doubt (Level I)]
[Skill Points: 3 → 0]
Mathis was staring, suspicion cresting. Nameless cut it before it broke.
"You know what it is to step onto another plane," he said, voice low and certain. "I had to go up a floor and check your formula against the seal."
The man breathed a sound that didn't know how to be praise or fear. "Another… plane…"
Nameless took the softness and turned it into a rung.
"Good," he said. "You're ready for the last secret."
Before the excitement could run wild enough to trip him, he set the ritual hook.
"I'll give you a story," he said, hieratic and practiced. "Then you repeat the last words under your breath."
"Close your eyes."
Mathis obeyed too fast, mouth wet with anticipation. "Will I—" he almost whispered, "—will I go up as well?"
"You're closer than you know," Nameless thought, and let the lie sit where it would do the most work.
He began.
"There was a man who tried to go too high," Nameless said. "He meant to climb Olympus itself, to push into the last of the heavens on a winged horse, with the presumption of great men."
"Wear his presumption," he coaxed. "Gather every enemy in your chest. Everyone who barred your way. Let it all speak."
The man's face tightened under the lids—irritation, then heat, then the slick smile of a victory rehearsed.
"One day," Nameless went on, "with the sun at his back and the sky for a destination, he took off. He rose. He began his great ascent."
Mathis's expression softened into hunger.
"Keep seeing it," Nameless said, voice easing like a hand on a shoulder. "The stronger the image, the cleaner the key. Your podium waits."
Mathis sank deeper, breath going shallow in the way men do when they think divinity is listening.
"Until the heavens shuttered," Nameless said, the words turning softer, slower, nearer, "as if they had been warned of him, and then—"
The short sword slid into his left hand, scabbard whispering once. The blade came free without ceremony.
"—the thunder, the dark, received him—"
"Thank you, ambiguity," he thought. "He won't know the ending."
He stepped through the last inch of air between them and spent his Breath in a single coin—hips, shoulder, wrist, all in one clean line. The point took the throat and wrote upward, a quick, quiet sentence to the crown.
Steel met skull and finished the thought.
Nameless leaned close enough for the last words to be only for Mathis.
"—and he fell into the storm of his own arrogance," he murmured, "rejected by skies that would not have him."
[XP Gained: Kill — Mathis (L5)]
[XP +87]
[Level Up]
Emperor - Level 5.
[Short Sword Proficiency +3]
[Short Sword Proficiency 10/10,000]