Sev woke up gagging.

[Smelling Salts]. He recognized the smell of them; it wasn't the first time they'd been used to force him to consciousness, although he really hoped it would be the last.

"Enough," he said, waving them away; he saw his team staring at him cautiously, worried, and he blinked away the last of the [Sleep]. "I'm okay. Don't worry about me. You made the right call cutting that off when you did, Vex."

The lizardkin in question relaxed a little, looking relieved. Sev managed a small smile. He looked around the room — they were in the same room, it looked like, though some of the furniture had been destroyed in the fight. He hadn't even noticed. Lendel was standing off to the side, far enough away to not seem like a threat.

...The sight of the man made a smoldering anger slowly rise within Sev; he closed his eyes and took a breath, letting it cool again.

That anger wasn't his own.

It faded after a moment, back to a burning that was far in the back of his mind. He could remember being angry; that memory was nearly at the forefront. When he'd begun healing Lendel, the divine magic had transformed the nature of Lendel's injuries into memory, as it always did — and where those injuries had affected Lendel's mind, Sev had taken them on, feeling the same anger Lendel did. The fact that Misa had to hold him back...

Sev wasn't sure how he felt about it. Ashamed, maybe; the thought came to him that he should have dealt with that anger better. What would he have done, if he'd been able to pull himself free?

On the other side of it... He understood how Lendel had felt now, perhaps better than even Derivan could with Physical Empathy. The anger he'd felt was... unnatural, a soul-injury; an overwhelming sense of violation directed at the person that had caused it — and that knowledge had been instant and explicit.

Sev felt an echo of that, though thankfully undirected and loose. It would have been more difficult for him if he'd gained that anger whole, focused unilaterally on Derivan and those associated with him.

Thankfully, that wasn't the case.

"Give me a moment," he said to the others, and tried to settle himself.

He was used to this. It had been a long time since he'd done it, for something that was this significant; it was on the bare edge of what he could do, now. Sev grimaced a little bit, hoped his friends hadn't seen it, and brought up his status.

Sev, Level 49

Class: [Traces of the Lost]

Health: 980/980

Mana: 370/370

Stats:

Strength: 16

Intelligence: 37

Wisdom: 55

Agility: 21

Status Effects:

[Memory Loss] [Malus]

Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Your maximum memory capacity is limited, and you must sacrifice memories to remember more. Current capacity: 501/500

[Fatebroken] [Malus]

Applied by [Sacrifice to the Lost]. Modified by . Details of this malus are obfuscated. You are not your own.

[#######] [Malus]

Applied by . Details of this malus are obfuscated. You have chosen your path.

Skill List:

Base Class Skills (Cleric): [Light Blast], [Triage], [Diagnose], [Heal], [Greater Heal], [Greater Buff]

Divine Class Skills: [Divine Barrier], [Divine Inhalation]

Class Specific Skills: [Sacrifice to the Lost], [Traces]

Sev hated looking at his status. He hated the reminder of all the debuffs he had that he didn't know anything about — there was so little he knew about himself, about what had happened to him when he'd first arrived on... Velus? Hestia?

What the fuck was the name of the world?

A terrible fear gripped him for a second, like he'd lost something else that was precious; yet another thing taken from him, despite all the measures he took to control his class and the maluses applied by his skills; [Memory Loss] was an obvious counter to the effects of [Divine Inhalation], which could convert status effects into memory, but...

There was usually still something lost in that process. It wasn't a perfect workaround. He could control what [Memory Loss] took, to an extent. It was a small mercy granted to him. But it wasn't enough; memories were associative, and every time the malus kicked in to steal pieces of his memory, small things were taken along with it.

Sev let out a breath.

It was fine. It was nothing he hadn't dealt with before.

[Memory Loss] said his memory was overextended; the number would tick down, and he would direct it to strip away the anger he now remembered. He tried not to look at the rest of his status, the parts that threw him off the most — the small messages built into his other two maluses.

You are not your own.

You have chosen your path.

The system didn't lie, generally, but he felt like he was his own person... what did it mean that he wasn't? What did it mean that he'd chosen his path? He didn't remember choosing anything.

Worst of all, he still couldn't tell his friends about those aspects of his status. He'd tried. There was a moment coming soon when he would be able to; [Fatebroken] ate at him every time he tried to tell them before it was the right moment, which told him a lot about what that effect probably was...

Derivan might be able to do something about it, he thought. As long as he noticed. The Patch stat gave him a better opportunity than ever to break free from the constraints he'd apparently put upon himself, though once more he was forced to confront the idea that he might not want to.

If he'd chosen this path, then surely he'd had a reason.

Something to think about later.

"I'm ready," he said, his voice sounding a little more distant to his own ears than he had wanted. [Memory Loss] was operating full time. It never entirely stripped away the memory of the pain, like the system didn't want him abusing that combination in quite that manner, but it was good enough. "How is Lendel doing?"

"I'm fine," the adventurer grunted. "Not sure exactly what you did, but it reversed... everything. Left me with a hell of a headache. But... thank you."

"You should be more careful when you're leveling a building next time." Sev tried for a joke, and cracked a slight smirk when Misa groaned.

"Oh by the gods," she muttered. "I was fuckin' worried about you, but nope. You're fine. He's fine, everyone. He's making puns."

"You have to be careful when you're leveling a building!" Sev objected. "I'm not wrong!"

Vex snickered a bit, and Derivan gave him a light, if still slightly worried smile, conveyed the way he always did — with a tilt of his head, a slight dimming in the lights of his eyes in his helmet. They all still kept an eye on him, though, each of them still a little worried.

Not enough of a facade. He almost smiled. They were all too clever by half.

"We need to talk about what we were doing here," Rekka said, pulling the topic back on track. He stared at Lendel, then at his two companions, both of whom were now awake and silent. "What exactly happened to us? You said it doesn't make us believe anything we don't already believe."

Lendel was silent for a moment. Then he sighed, and began to explain.

"It took me a bit to connect the dots," he said. "But I think I get it. Sort of. This project began in secret several years ago, when some nobles came by and dropped off a large donation — enough to renovate the entire Guild, if we felt like it."

"And you didn't report that to the Guildmaster?" Sev asked, incredulous.

"The donation was conditional on me not doing that," Lendel said, grimacing slightly. "They had ways to know. And I didn't... I figured I could do things to benefit the Guild, even without the Guildmaster knowing. It's part of being Gold — you make some decisions on your own. There is implicit trust."

"A system that failed here, clearly," Misa said, a little harshly. Lendel winced, but didn't protest.

"I figured they were up to something. I didn't think they were maneuvering me into my own corner," he said. "I had a project I was already working on, along with Tibeus and Lorella there." He nodded to the wizard and healer he was working with; they nodded at him and shifted, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"A while back, we thought about how mana crystals are used to maintain a connection to the system," Lendel said. "And we thought — we wondered if we could take that process and apply it to something else. Create weapons and shelters that could level alongside us.

"Back then, Tibeus had a [Create Familiar] skill. It's a skill that requires the sacrifice of a grade 1 mana crystal, and it creates a small, low-level creature that bonds to you. We thought maybe the mechanism there was similar; it had the same cost as maintaining a connection to the system, and it created a new creature that was connected to the system.

"But [Create Familiar] doesn't work on objects, obviously. It creates something new, it doesn't try to attach the system to an existing object. For that we had to do research, and for that research we needed gold."

"How exactly would you even begin to do research on that?" Vex asked, frowning. "How would gold help you?"

"By letting us pay people to reveal their skill details to us." Lendel's lip curled slightly in distaste. "People don't like sharing the particulars of their skills, so we needed to find people with uncommon or rarer classes, with a skill that allowed us to retarget an existing skill. That took a lot of people to get through. Can you believe that we eventually found it in a series of common classes? It was a bunch of old, niche skills no one talked about, too."

"Yes," Misa said, her tone as dry as a desert. Sev almost smiled at that; he remembered the image of her village fighting off a swarm of meteor. [Common] skills were easy to get, but they weren't weak. They just needed to be used in combination with one another.

It was stranger that it had taken so long for people to figure that out. But then so much of their history was missing, or just gone entirely...

...maybe people had figured out similar things before. Maybe there was a reason it was hard for rare classes to gather.

Sev shook his head to dismiss the thought.

"I'll spare you the details, but you can look it up, if you want. We kept all the research logs. We had to experiment with a few different variants — sometimes skills didn't work out quite the way we expected them to — but we eventually got it to work. And Tibeus was able to apply the skill to a candle." Lendel glanced up at his wizard friend, who took it as his cue to step forward and continue the explanation.

"It caused the skill to change," Tibeus said. "I presume we fulfilled some previously hidden prerequisite, but [Create Familiar] became [Bond Familiar]. Red rarity. We're unsure what that means as yet."

Sev exchanged glances with Vex and the others. They'd seen red before; it rarely meant anything good. There were still a few red-coded items and skills they had yet to try...

Error related, perhaps. Or... admin interference. Or maybe just interference in general.

"And [Bond Familiar] could be used on objects," Sev prompted.

"Correct." Tibeus frowned a little, as if he didn't like being prompted, and Sev stopped himself from scoffing. There was a part of him that was still angry at them for causing all of this to begin with. "We used it on the Guild building, but it wouldn't take to the whole building. I had to use it in parts — bond pieces of the building at a time, until the whole building had a single status."

"That is not what you did," Derivan muttered, his voice low; he glanced around as he spoke, presumably looking through the room with Patch. Sev wondered exactly what it was that the animated armor saw.

Tibeus glanced at Derivan, but his gaze softened a bit, remembering exactly why he was explaining all of this. "...The new Familiar came with a skill that it offered to us when we stepped and stayed in the building for long enough," Tibeus said. "It's part of the reason we had to be a lot more discerning with who we allowed to work with us — it's a powerful buff. If we let anyone get it—"

"—No excuses, Tibeus," Lindel said, sounding tired. "I know what our logic was at the time. You know it conflicts with the Guild's principles. If we really wanted to, we could have housed them elsewhere. We could have disabled the Guild, like we do when we rotate out. We made a decision because it was easier for us."

Tibeus didn't respond for a moment, and when he did, it was slow, like he was still fighting the idea. "...Yes. I suppose that's what we did."

"The buff the Guild building gave us was [Reinforcement]," Lindel said, smiling a slightly bitter smile. He summoned a system box, and sent it off to the four of them; Sev caught his copy, and then caught his breath.

[Reinforcement] [Buff]

Applied by [Guild's Hope]. Reinforces health, heart, and soul. increase to Health. increase to mental resistance. Reinforcement increases with connection to [Guild's Hope].

The Health increase alone was monumental; it explained why they'd had such a hard time defeating the cleric and wizard, even though neither class usually had much health. But mental resistance...

Not resistance against mental attacks. Mental resistance.

At a guess, targeted propaganda, to make the Guild members believe their ideas; when they were rotated out, they kept the buff, and those ideas stuck, becoming more entrenched.

"Elyra knew about the buff, I take it?" Sev asked, but he already knew the answer.

"The noble families we worked with did," Lendel said.

"And that noble families were...?" Sev's eyes flickered to Vex, who was leaning in.

"Wisfield," Lendel said, and Vex seemed to relax by a fraction — but only a fraction. And then Lendel continued. "And Ashion."