《Tetsuka's Journal (The World of FRAY)》 01 - The World of JOYs If you¡¯d asked me five years ago where I thought I¡¯d be today, slumming in the Vents, hunched over an old summer school journal, and sleeping back-to-back with my ex¡¯s contract-killer sister would not have been the answer. But it¡¯s what I have to work with. Obviously, things aren¡¯t so hot these days. A lot has changed since I wrote this journal in the first place. I¡¯m older, for one. Way taller. Still got the freckles, still got the arm thing. Oh, and I¡¯m trapped a world away from home currently nursing a hole in my shoulder, two broken ribs, and an arm nearly cut to the bone. My window view is smoggy undercity and the concrete wall of the alley next door. I haven¡¯t seen the sun in, oh, a few weeks. Currently running on four hours of sleep per night, if I can even manage that. And to top it all off, my only ally- my only anyone- is a girl with orders to bring me to the throne of the Champion, dead or alive. Her brother, the boy who I thought I was going to grow old with, who betrayed me and left me to die, is that tyrant¡¯s premier apprentice. His name is Thane. And he is the best fighter I know. Thane left me with these wounds last time we fought, left Cal with worse for her rebellion, and sent us both fleeing into the lawless undercity of the capital. He¡¯s hunting me as I write this. You could say I¡¯m desperate. There was a time in the past where I could beat Thane in a fight, and it was about a decade ago in my father¡¯s garden back home in the outskirts of the Section. Akena, out near the beaches, better place than the Vents by leagues. You can thank said father¡¯s golden, heroic heart for why that¡¯s no longer the case. Dad had a talent for raising monsters of combat. I am one of them. Thane was his best. There is no path to escaping my current situation that doesn¡¯t go through him. And seeing as going out and practicing in the underground arenas isn¡¯t an option in my condition, I have to sharpen myself in other ways. So it¡¯s back to the books. Just like when I was little. All those years in the big house by the sea, all by myself, I didn¡¯t have much to do but read when Thane or Dad weren¡¯t around. I read anything I could get my hand on.. Writing isn¡¯t exactly my forte- arm thing, remember?- but I dictated dozens of hours of notes and bits that I gleaned from old combat manuals, technical textbooks on the eighteen classes, and the history of the JOYs into this journal. Destiny really does have a sense of humor. I made this book to help my younger self beat Thane. So it¡¯s¡­ funny, in a kinda morbid way, that if there¡¯s one thing that hasn¡¯t changed in the rollercoaster of my teenage years, it¡¯s my reason for coming back to it. There¡¯s no better place to start than where everything in my world starts: the JOYs. I don¡¯t think there¡¯s a person on the planet who doesn¡¯t use one every minute of every day. Who¡¯d turn down free access to superhuman powers that you get to pick yourself? Exactly. Even though the powers given by JOYs were originally geared towards combat, as the saying goes, a campfire¡¯s just as warm if you use a lighter or a human hand. Though the translation doesn¡¯t hit quite as hard as the original. Combat is the natural order of things. Our social and political hierarchy is predicated on it. Which is why ever since the Creators disappeared and our history began seven hundred years ago, my world has been ordered into a gladiocracy: a society ruled by its strongest warriors. The specific organization of those strongest warriors changes depending on the Section you¡¯re in- they¡¯re like our territories, each ruled by a different Champion. My Section, Section G, is one of the few that can trace some of its culture to the old era before the Creators. Here in the capital, pro fighters are celebrities who set trends in fashion, class metas, and dominate the news. We have two professional leagues with twenty fighters each, the minor and major leagues, and progress up and down those ranks is determined by simple combat record. The twentieth and last-place rank of the minor league is a position anyone in the Section can walk into the Metro Blockhouse and make a challenge for. Believe me when I say there¡¯s a depressingly high percentage of anyone who thinks they have the skills to last more than a few seconds against a pro who¡¯s devoted their entire life to the art of one-on-one combat. Spoiler alert: they do not. At the top of the leagues is our Champion, the strongest fighter in the entire Section. Anything he says is law. Not for political reasons, but because there¡¯s a certain amount of practicality in not dissenting against a fighter who can wipe entire cities off the map. People who do, end up like me. Beat to shit and couch surfing in the Vents. All the power the Champion wields comes from his JOY, just as all the power I do comes from mine. JOYs are palm-sized metal spheres packed with holoprojectors, a universal interface with the digital world. Phone, wallet, mobile projector, et cetera et cetera- makes sense why everyone carries one. Their real appeal though, is the FRAY system. Couple taps on the screen twines the neural link to your brain and turns a human into a walking weapon with their own customized suite of abilities. Here¡¯s what mine looks like:
TETSUKA TAYLOR MONS (pref: ''TAY'')
MARTIAL ARTIST KI FIGHTER MYTHO
There¡¯s no inherent power to the abilities JOYs give. There¡¯s not like a¡­ I dunno, Level 2 Martial Artist and a Level 1, and the two is just flat-out better. The power a JOY gives just is. It doesn¡¯t pilot things for you. In a way, it¡¯s better to just think of it as giving you access to things you can do. It¡¯s like if ¡®Human¡¯ were a class: all Humans have the capability to do a standing backflip, but it takes a decent amount of training and focus to actually pull one off. In that way, everyone who uses a JOY is equal. Even the Champion. Even me. It¡¯s the underpinning idea of a gladiocracy: if everyone is armed with the same potential, then anyone could be the strongest. It¡¯s what you do with your abilities, and how you combine them, that sets apart the best from the not-best. Sure, it¡¯s easy enough to make yourself a Metal Elemental. But it¡¯s not easy to be Gami. The powers that a JOY can give are separated into eighteen distinct classes, which apply combinations of natural enhancements and general capabilities to your body via the neural link. Each of the eighteen classes represents a different facet of combat. Some grant arms and armaments, others give abilities that extend beyond the supernatural. Elementals control the primal forces of nature. Duelists are walking armories of melee weaponry. Psis tamper with the mind. Martial artists¡­ well, we punch things. The twist is that you can only ever use three classes at a time. It¡¯s the one built-in limit to the JOYs that everyone has to play by. The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. A decent chunk of the population just uses their JOYs to augment their day to day lives, and they don¡¯t care about fighting at all. They¡¯re typically single-classers. Only choosing one and getting the hang of some of its abilities, like someone who only weightlifts. If you do weightlifting and gymnastics, to continue the example, that¡¯s what it¡¯s like to be a double-classer. It¡¯s a significantly higher investment of time and effort to train both to functional levels, versus someone who only uses a single class. The biggest demographic of casual fighters dip into two classes with some sort of synergy. But if you¡¯re set on making a profession out of it, either through the combat colleges or just to make money by fighting for something other than the leagues, you¡¯re going to be triple classing. It¡¯s real rare that you¡¯ll see anyone even in the Sectional minor league running only two classes. Even if your third class is just relegated to giving defensive buffs, that extra coverage can mean the difference between getting mind-slaved by a Psi or shaking off their control long enough to land the winning shot. If someone ever made it to the pro scene with only a single class, they¡¯d be the best fighter in the Section by a long shot. It¡¯s like winning with a hand tied behind your back. Some people think that the three-class limit was imposed by the Creators because anything more was frying people¡¯s brains. Others that it just made for a fun challenge. There¡¯s even some people who say it was a programming mistake. I never gave it much thought. Three¡¯s enough for me. Outside of the classroom, any fighter worth their salt treats each class as an individual unit with its own counterplay and nuance. But when you¡¯re introducing them at school and helping kids pick their first classes, they¡¯re not all that great at understanding high-level synergistic potential. They want to be like that guy they saw on the stream the other night. Or they just want something that will let them hard-counter someone on the playground. Or they just want to copy Dad¡¯s classes. Heh. For that purpose, it¡¯s handy to arrange some of the classes into different organizational buckets due to the similarities they share. If you pick out of the same bucket more than once, typically you¡¯re not getting nearly as much potential as if you picked out of a different bucket- and in some cases it can even be a detriment. Ki Fighter and Elemental, for example. I¡¯ve heard they use the same neural cues of willpower to help guide their abilities. If you take both, you might start crossing wires in the middle of a fight. Same with Duelist and Gunslinger; you only have so many hands. Still, there¡¯s ways to make anything work. The go-to starter classes are called the Cores. They¡¯re the three mundane combat affinities: Martial Artist for hand-to-hand combat styles, Duelist can summon any melee weaponry from a virtual armory using their JOY, and Gunslinger can do the same with anything ranged. It¡¯s a good bet that if you don¡¯t know someone¡¯s classes, they¡¯re bringing at least one of these. Especially in my Section. Martial Artists are- well, were- our bread-and-butter warriors. Next up is the big three of iconic powersets, the Shapes. Shape-type classes use non-physical resource like ki or mana and convert it into new shapes, attacks, and more. Most popular in the meta of the past couple years is Elemental, which gives you free control over a single element each time you pick the class. Beyond the usual four suspects, it also includes thinks like Metal, Gravity, and Shadow. Ki Fighters like me use our stamina and the life energy present in the world as fuel for showstopping moves, and we can fly. Magus has an internal reservoir of mana that they use to cast spells in a variety of ways, both spellbook and non. They can also make their own spells. Not really my type of class. It¡¯s for thinkers, not cannonballs. Influence classes have the power in the name. Biohancers influence the body, typically for healing. They¡¯ve got a built-in heartbeat radar and triage sense, and they can also amp up the body in ways that mimic some functions of other classes. Mytho is for influence of the spirit. They¡¯re force multipliers who imbue the nearby areas with auras of everything from bloodlust to alertness to happiness, and they typically have some angelic or demonic outward sign; like my glowing skin. For influence of the mind, you¡¯ve got the class with the worst reputation of all: Psi. While Psi can technically just be used for telekinetics, the amount of invisible and sinister powers it has- mind control, emotional influence to name a few- make it one of the most dangerous classes. Back inthe physical, Augment classes are for people who want to point-build their way to a custom body or machine. Mecha is for anything on the robotic side- anything from a fully robotic body to a Titan you can hop in and drive- and Modd is for the physical side. People call it the Catears class as slang, and if you browse the Net later in the night, you¡¯d get why pretty quick. But Modd is also one of the most flexible classes. Gami, our Champion, uses it to have a body that¡¯s just a blob of metal. It can also give you natural weapons or transform you into an entirely nonhuman form. Adjacent to that are the Build classes: Innovator, Tamer, and Saboteur. Innovators create and modify technology, whether preexisting or from scratch. Being Innovator-classed is practically a requirement for anyone looking to enter a tech-related field. Pretty much everything we use in modern society was made by Innovators. Saboteurs, on the other hand, are incredible at destroying things. Like Gunslingers, they get to choose from a special armory of equipment that includes all the handheld and launchable explosives mankind has ever thought up, and a few they didn¡¯t. The cutest of the bunch are definitely Tamers. It¡¯s the pet class. You get your own creature (or creatures), get to trick them out however you like, and they even learn with you through their heuristics. It might be the only class that has any kind of scaling feature, because those animals can get smart. Last on the list are the Enhancers. They¡¯re grab-bag classes that have much higher natural enhancements, in exchange for less access to new abilities. Guardians are extremely durable and specialize in barrier-type abilities, which tend to synergize with Duelist and the more grounded Elemental classes. Assassins have a natural weakpoint sense, hit the ground with a fraction of their weight when they fall, and have really cranked-up noise suppression on many things they do. They also get to select from a limited version of the Duelist armory that includes small thrown weapons. And poisons. Can¡¯t forget those. Hunter brings up the rear as the natural-combat and tracking class. It¡¯s great for using extra natural weapons from the Modd class, or just for finding people who don¡¯t want to be found. By now, I imagine you¡¯re counting all of those up and realizing that we¡¯re still one short. It¡¯s for a reason. That class is called Shifter. It doesn¡¯t fit into any bucket. And it is the only one Thane uses. 02 - THE CORE CLASSES
Martial arts. Hmph. Fitting that it is the first affinity, for it is the basis from which all principles of combat were born. When man had nothing, no bronze or tools or technology, he still had his hands. More than any other affinity, we are the masters of our bodies. Humility, discipline, precision, and physicality are our weapons. Our JOYs enable us with the agility to leap twice that of a normal human, the durability to not shatter our bones against a Guardian¡¯s armor, the longevity to run from dawn to dusk; but they do not make us invincible. Make no mistake. To the untrained eye, the martial arts are the weakest, most human affinity there is. The trained eye sees that is also their greatest strength. Rex Fang, seventy-sixth Champion of Section G
So said Champion Fang during a guest seminar at Concordia University uptown, one my dad was lucky enough to record in his junior year. From everything I¡¯ve heard on the Net, the old champ wasn¡¯t much for talking. Preferred hands to words, and patience to action. Even with that disposition, his rise incited a tidal amount of interest in the Martial Artist class that¡¯s perpetuated to this day across the entire Section. My father picked his classes because of Champion Fang, I picked mine because of Dad¡¯s, and neither of us are alone in that trend. That¡¯s the kind of influence a Champion has. When you¡¯re ruled by warriors, your celebrities fight for a profession, and combat is taught from single-digit years, it¡¯s inevitable that people will start idolizing the showstoppers. If you run a niche class or combination of classes, any kind of pro representation- even if it¡¯s only a single fighter- makes that fighter a hero to you and other people who make up your niche. They¡¯re like your mascot, the guy you always cheer for; the one who finally showed the potential of a class that¡¯s well off the beaten path. And in a reverse of that sentiment, Champions themselves bring such a spotlight to their classes that the following rise of interest in said class is almost inevitable. The Champion is the best, which means his classes must be really powerful. It¡¯s a shockwave that¡¯s happened in the past with Martial Artists. And it¡¯s happening now for Elementals because of the reigning Champion, Gami. Obviously, it¡¯s not like classes are hereditary. There¡¯s nothing stopping you from picking whatever classes you like as a kid, or even changing them later if you want to strike out on your own. But there¡¯s also built-in incentives to share at least some abilities with a parent who can fight: they can train you in the basics, show you their special tricks, and put you far ahead of the competition in the early years. And when it comes to the big and famous- pros, powerful families, martial corporations- hereditary classes are practically forced on them. Rebellion against it is as much a statement as disownment. Those institutional groups perpetuate and grow themselves on reputations of certain abilities, so rejecting them isn¡¯t really an option. A Lionhart who can¡¯t swing a sword wouldn¡¯t be a Lionhart at all, right? As a Martial Artist myself, it¡¯s only fair to start covering the eighteen classes with the one I miss most. Though there¡¯s not a whole lot of content to speak of without delving hardore into training manuals on the unique brawling styles. So I¡¯ve decided to bundle in Duelist and Gunslinger into my journal today, too. The Core classes are the keystones of almost everyone¡¯s builds, an easy way to translate some of that theoretical power into physical action through your hands. Without at least one of them, you¡¯re almost always extremely vulnerable to physical attacks, because you don¡¯t have any weapons or training to defend yourselves with. They¡¯re interlinked and somewhat interchangeable because of that. If you¡¯re picking between the Core classes for objective reasons, you¡¯re not so much choosing a method of combat as you are a range of combat. Gunslingers rule the long range, anything beyond a small arc that surrounds your body. Duelists are kings of the mid range, which is that space around your body that you¡¯re not touching, but that¡¯s within a couple of arms¡¯-lengths. Martial Artists are the only ones who win in the close range. All this is in terms of a proper fighting square and regulation rules, by the way. Situation like mine, there¡¯s some giant gaping caveats in the principles of traditional combat. When you leave the square, things get messy. A fight is no longer a math problem bounded within four repulsorfield walls on a clearly defined battlefield with no obstacles. It¡¯s a dynamic, ever-evolving environment of hazards, verticality, interference. The multi-dimensional escalation of a first-year Innovator¡¯s physics homework. When you¡¯re fighting for real, no rules or safety nets, sometimes fights are even won before they¡¯re started. A particular lilt in a Psi¡¯s voice before she slaves your mind. An Assassin¡¯s friendly smile, his poison on the rim of a cup that¡¯s just touched your lips. A Modd-classed monster dropping from the ceiling with jaws wide and slavering. Initiative, in other words. Fortunately for me, Martial Artists might as well be called Initiative: The Class. Close range is our condition for victory. When you pick the Martial Artist class, the tempo for the rest of your classes is also set. If you can close the gap, you win. That¡¯s all it takes. No other class is as strong as you in the point-blank. No other class is as powerless as you at long range. So it¡¯s common to pick your other classes around that paradigm; either answering its weaknesses or shortening that path to victory. Maybe you nab Mecha on the side, get some booster jets in your cyber shell to burst in quicker at opponents. Maybe you pick up Magus to fight from afar. Or you pick the most common complement to the Martial Artist class- Ki Fighter- and do both at once. There¡¯s thematic and practical reasons that Martial Artist and Ki Fighter are paired together so commonly, and if you asked me, I have a feeling it¡¯s the thematic reasons that are the bigger driver. Still, it¡¯s almost the perfect fit as a second class. Fly and augment yourself with ki to power up your strikes or just move faster in general, and then bring in some ki blasts for ranged fighting. It¡¯s a good fit. When it comes to abilities that the JOYs give us for picking the class, there¡¯s not a whole lot of extra capabilities outside the human that are inherent to the martial arts. I imagine you¡¯re wondering what it does give. It¡¯s not like a JOY will fight for you; you can¡¯t just think reverse roundhouse and your body will spring into motion. But it can help guide you once you start to perform the motion. Once it picks up on your intent to perform a specific action that¡¯s registered for one of your classes, your JOY will use the neural link to tug you back if you start to leave the lines. We call that tug the training wheels, and it¡¯s like aim-assist for the body. Neural microadjustments that pull at you like puppet strings. Good for showing newer fighters the ropes of their class during learning sessions. Not so good if you¡¯re someone like me. It gets annoying pretty damn fast when the system keeps trying to pull you back into perfect form. A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. Any serious fighter never turns on their training wheels. Me, I wasn¡¯t even allowed to use them in the first place. I grew up all-natural, so my style did too. Think of it like writing a signature: there¡¯s flourish and sloppiness and off-the-rails linework that¡¯s nothing like the books, yet flows seamlessly from piece to piece in its own special harmony. It¡¯s not rigorous or regimented or anything like the books. Without the training wheels, Martial Artists would probably have ended up being called the Athletics class. What separates it from the Enhancement classes really is the wealth of styles and strikes that it¡¯s got built-in support for. When the wheels come off, you¡¯re a human with vastly amped up endurance and speed. You can jump further, lift more, punch harder. You¡¯re durable enough to punch metal and not feel much. Can¡¯t stop a blade with a barehand block, of course, but you¡¯re much more resilient to the falls and tumbles and collisions of fights both on and off the square. And your reflexes are raised way above the norm. It¡¯s gotta be that way to excel in blink-and-you-miss-it levels of close quarters. In short, the class gives you everything you need to be a cannonball. Which most of us end up being, both on and off the square. Instinct and reflex are core to Martial Artists. The fighting style is all adrenaline. Not so for Duelists, who are patient bookies compared to us. Duelists and Gunslingers are both armory-type classes; the only difference being the kind of armaments they summon and the nature of their training wheels. For Gunslingers, the training wheels literally is aim-assist. For Duelists, it¡¯s like the blade-based version of a Martial Artist¡¯s styles. Gentle tugs to correct form. The armories are the main discriminator between the two. If a weapon is something a JOY considers to be ¡®for melee combat¡¯, it appears as an option for Duelists. Gunslingers are given everything for ranged combat. Which includes revolvers, yes, but also includes rocket launchers, flamethrowers, and the vigilante hero¡¯s wet-dream arsenal that falls under that umbrella. The biggest limiter of said armories is the nature of JOY-created gear, which is a rule that applies to all classes. Duelists and Gunslingers can open their arsenals, pick from any and every weapon, and their JOY will knit it out of thin air within seconds- ammunition included. But that weapon is tied to the JOY itself. If the sphere shuts down for any reason (sleep is the most common, the spheres turn off when you sleep), the weapon dissolves. Ammunition only exists until it¡¯s fired, and bullet casings will dissolve into a slurry of nanoparticles once they pass out of a small radius of the JOY that made them. The weapons also appear in forge-perfect condition every time. If you want to have your own piece, want to modify a weapon, or you just want to not be caught without a weapon when you wake in the morning, having a real, physically-made version of that weapon is the only route. For anyone who takes combat seriously, hand-forged weapons that don¡¯t disappear when your JOY turns off are the only ones that get used. They grow in character and legacy. Get worn to the shape of your particular fingers. Can be modded, and are a hell of a lot safer, because they won¡¯t disappear if something goes wrong. That¡¯s another way my class is superior, though. I¡¯m always armed, even when I don¡¯t look like it. Gets you into places you might not otherwise if you were toting a six-shooter around on your hip. Due to the nature of the Duelist and Gunslinger armories, there¡¯s a wealth of potential fusions with other classes. I¡¯ll end with an example of each.
AJAX LIONHART
DUELIST ELEMENTAL (METAL)
Every story I¡¯ve heard from my aunt or father about Mr. Ajax paints the same picture of his skill. He¡¯s a prime example of a simple class combination that has huge potential to explore. As a Duelist, he had two preferred weapons that he would alternate between based on his opponent: a training-type rapier that used a stunning edge, and a village-style katana. Curved blade, not straight, an incestral icon of the old culture in my home villages out by the sea. Both weapons are made of metal, meaning that Ajax could shape his weapon on the fly without needing to carry around two copies. He could also form himself and his allies light armor from the metal in the surrounding area. It¡¯s the microcontrol over his blade that¡¯s the real danger though. A blade that can shift to liquid on the fly can pass right through an unsuspecting foe¡¯s guard. He could also cycle it between an extended whiplike form and a solid blade at will. Combine that flexibility with a Metal Elemental¡¯s ability to thrive in an environment like the capital, and you¡¯ve got a dangerous combination of classes perfectly suited to an analytical fighter. Someone who takes the time to suit their armory to each fight before peeling apart the opposition with overwhelming mastery of their core class.
BISHOP (Minor #18, Retired)
GUNSLINGER MAGUS INNOVATOR
Bishop was a minor league fighter from a couple decades back; peaked at eighteenth rank in the Metro Blockhouse minor league. While his results were nothing crazy, he¡¯s a good example of a fighter who uses a weapon as a conduit for their main combat class. Magus is inherently the kind of class that wants to keep to a distance, same as Gunslinger, making them a natural fit. Plenty of Gunslingers will run Innovator on the side to help with crafting and modifying their personal weapons and ammunition. While there¡¯s obviously a market surrounding the older foundries that have centuries¡¯ worth of reputation for quality, most of us- myself heavily included- don¡¯t have the cash to drop on a masterwork Valor Foundries Sixer, nor the cases of Type-54 Casull ammo it eats up. In Bishop¡¯s case, he took the ammunition crafting a step further and etched his spellcasts into special bullet casings- meaning he didn¡¯t have to waste words on the cast itself, nor obey the normal rules of their range limitations. He could pre-cast his spells into bullets and just shoot them at people, sometimes even in full-auto. Clever trick, that one. It¡¯s pretty easy to dodge a fireball if you see it coming. Much harder to dodge a bullet traveling several thousand feet per second that triggers a fireball instantaneously on impact. Anyways, I¡¯m signing off. Goddamn hungry. Cal and I are watching more fight tapes tonight, too. It¡¯s become our nightly tradition. Thought it¡¯d be a little more awkward to be stuck with her given our history, but since we made up, she¡¯s been different. In a good way. Still smirking and ribbing, but with a softer streak towards me in particular. We¡¯ve been catching up on the professional leagues over every dinner that I¡¯m back home for. A lot has happened at the Metro Blockhouse since I went off the grid three years ago, but not as much as should have happened. I have a feeling Gami¡¯s hand is behind the stagnation. Just like it¡¯s behind my current situation. Even if I can beat Thane, Gami is a Champion, a warrior-king of an entirely different caliber. The kind of caliber that can take out an entire army of his lessers single handedly. And I have to face that someday. I need to study him more. Just in case. 03 - THE NATURE OF POWER
I do not expect any man of the gladiocracy to place faith in words alone. Observe and understand, Thane. There are eighteen affinities given to us by the Creators. The notion that they were all created equal is a popular lie because it is easier to swallow than the truth: that this world is predicated on inequality. There are weak men, and there are strong men to rule them. The affinities go the same. Some are simple. Others bounded by rules, or menus, or options; things offered, not entrusted. True power is not something you can touch. It is an idea. A concept. This is why the Elemental is the strongest affinity. We are surrounded by the primal elements. To control them is the simplest power. It is to weave and unweave. Shape and reshape. Its only limit is the mind, and you possess one of the cleverest. Under my wing, you will come to understand the world around you down to the atomic level- every isotope, every lattice, every fold. You will understand why our people revere men like Mars as gods. And you will learn how to remind those men of a maxim they have long forgotten. -Champion Gami, then Rank 1 of Section G Major League
- I¡¯m not sure when exactly it happened, but I knew I was losing Thane the moment he came back from that talk with Gami. Every detail of the day is still frozen in my head, down to the fresh snowflakes on Thane¡¯s cape. The pattern his boots left in the white. The hushed admiration of the crowd draining from the stadium; the disdain of the village elders whose brightest children he¡¯d just utterly embarrassed on the field of battle. A martial boy, seventeen and growing still, hair savage black and eyes a molten, magmatic gold. The bastard eagle flourishing beneath my father¡¯s heroic wing. Some would call Thane prideful. Others, aloof. At the time, I called him mine. Though that was a long time ago. The winter tournament hosted in the villages is important for plenty of reasons, but none of them are terribly relevant to my situation now. Suffice to say, it¡¯s a huge deal to win it, and an even huger deal to win as dominantly as Thane did that year. Technically, capital natives like him aren¡¯t normally allowed to enter. Spending half his months out on the coast in school with me was enough to qualify him for entry in the eyes of most, but there¡¯s some hardcore traditionalists who would never stand to let a child of the capital step into their most hallowed ground. Sponsoring Thane in spite of that cost Dad a lot of support that never came back. Thane took first place with a perfect record. I went out in third, ahead of a few hundred other high schoolers. It was my first tournament ever. Most would consider that a pretty damn good placement, but not me. I didn¡¯t have the kind of father who expected the world of me or would hold that failure over me as motivation, and somehow, that was an even worse motivation. He was so unbelievably proud of me for that loss. I hid it inside myself. Ashamed I couldn¡¯t live up to his name, guilty that he was the type to heap genuine praise on me even when I hadn¡¯t earned it. Introverted and a perfectionist; the worst combination for a girl who already spent all her time alone at home and could count her friends on one finger. It¡¯s some irony that the latter still hasn¡¯t changed. After that tournament, I kept my prize cloak on a peg above my bedroom door until I came back two years later and took the win in full. Every top-four placement earns one of those prize cloaks, a trophy mantle fashioned from metallic colors of matching animals. Fourth earns bronze. Third silver, and second gold. First place is reserved platinum, the peerless color. And I remember the exact sheen of that dark metal it was that caught Thane¡¯s eye when we stood on the field after the ending ceremonies, crowds draining from the arena around us. Across the snowfield, looming above our team¡¯s coach, a titan whose shadow stretched for hulking meters beneath the still-twinkling spotlights. Even when he was just a rising fighter in the major leagues, Gami wasn¡¯t the kind of warrior that went easily missed. Huge wings like twin war banners, tail like a serpentine club dragging through the snow. Body a gargoyle visage of pure platinum metal with a simple faceless helm, over three meters of height, and all the implied malice of a loaded weapon with the safety off. Back then, I had no idea how much he would eventually take from me. But I had a damn good idea of it. Instincts, intuition- call it what you will, I knew I was looking at something evil that day, even if I didn¡¯t exactly know why. People don¡¯t use their JOYs to fashion themselves like Gami does if they¡¯re interested in being liked. He only cares about being effective. His classes are geared solely to maximize synchronistic combat potential. His style is the anathema of my father¡¯s famous showstopping flair. It¡¯s soulless, calculated, and dominant. Powerful enough to be the weapon of a Champion who¡¯s got the major league scared enough of fighting him that no one¡¯s tried in an entire year. If you asked me for an opinion on Gami, I¡¯ll willingly admit he¡¯s one of the best warriors of any Section, not just ours. But he¡¯s not a Champion. Not in my eyes. There¡¯s a hell of a lot more to being the leader of our fighting society than just being the strongest. Gami is a monster. A tyrant. Leading through fear and an iron hand rather than admiration. Just because the rules say that someone like him can sit on the throne doesn¡¯t mean they¡¯re right. But to prove otherwise, I¡¯d have to be strong enough to show my belief is stronger than his reality. And that¡¯s a task I don¡¯t know if anyone can match, much less me. I¡¯m not even twenty. Gami is a warlord who¡¯s been fighting longer than I¡¯ve been alive. Still. Even the colossi have their cracks. Everyone in the Section knows Gami¡¯s classes: Elemental, Modd, and Guardian. Each one was picked with a specific purpose in mind. Modd is used to transform his entire human body into a nonhuman shape that I¡¯m pretty sure is just a formless blob of metal, like a slime or an ooze. Never seen it, but I can make an educated guess. Guardian takes that goop body of metal exponentially multiplies its resilience. The bow that ties the two together and also functions as his main mode of combat is the Elemental class. One of the shaping classes, Elemental lets you choose one option from the vast list of things a JOY considers a unique element of the natural world and grants you a degree of free control over said element. Because of that, it¡¯s also the only class that gets any benefit out of selecting multiple copies. Picking two specific elements can also give you access to a hybrid element, such as Fire and Earth giving the Glass hybrid element, which you can¡¯t normally select outright. If you want, you can even pick up to three elements with your three classes- though that leaves you open to getting wrecked by a massive percentage of the population, because you won¡¯t have a traditional weapon. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. As far as I know, an Elemental¡¯s elemental sense is the same as my own sense for life energy, which comes from the Ki Fighter class. Along with Magus, Elemental and Ki Fighter are united in that their basic function is to tap into wells of sixth-sense energy and transform it into our desired shape. Unlike Ki Fighters, Elementals find those wells of energy outside their body, rather than inside it. Our senses of those energies is like a nebulous field of touch and feel that extends well beyond our skin. Almost like an air current brushing against the surface of your skin, but for your mind. Not an easy thing to explain to people who only use the mundane classes, believe me. Once you feel something with your elemental sense, you can exert will over it to transform it according to your class. Will is the keyword that JOYs use to describe the mental control over shapeable energies that¡¯s given to Elementals, Ki Fighters, and other classes. It¡¯s very much a physical muscle that you can work out through repeated exercise, allowing you to grab more energy at a time and handle higher volumes of strain the more you train. When two fighters with the same class try to exert control over the same object, their wills fight for control like a mental arm wrestling match, which can take up a huge amount of their concentration. It¡¯s a blessed quirk of the system that whether you have a class with a sixth sense or not, everyone¡¯s bodies have an insane amount of will attached to them, and that will extends to things they wear or hold. Because of that, it¡¯s nearly impossible to directly fuck up an opponent with an Elemental class- otherwise a certain kind of Elemental would be going around turning people into water balloons on demand. Elements are internally divided by the class¡¯ users based on whether they¡¯re hard or soft elements. Soft elements are ones that can be spontaneously generated from the user¡¯s body without an external source; though it¡¯s always more effective to find your fuel externally. Hard elements are ones that can¡¯t be spontaneously generated. These ones tend to be less flexible and highly terrain dependent, but their power exponentially increases when they¡¯re in a suitable battlefield. Usually this means they¡¯re not as popular as the soft elements, as the more niche a hard element is, the lower your chance to functionally use it in a battle becomes. Even Gami would be kneecapped in a rice field back home, only able to fight with the material he brings around with him. But if you thought for a moment that limitation would make him any less capable, you would be making the same mistake that many, many people have made before you. Those people thought he would be weaker on the mountains of Olympus. They thought he would be weaker in the jungles of Section Z. In the hell-depths of the Golan desert. And in a rice field back home. Every one of them was wrong. Gami¡¯s whole body is a malleable weapon of pure metal. Any part of it can turn lethal on a hair trigger thanks to his Elemental control. Like a giant, amorphous well of potential energy molded from nearly invincible material. Zero vulnerabilities. Zero weak points. Omnidirectional threat, and unlimited flexibility to deliver it. And hell forbid you fight him with any mundane weapon. I¡¯ve watched him warp Duelist blades in U-turns to skewer their own wielders without lifting a finger. A shower of bullets just patches his holes. Gami is the best user of his element that I¡¯ve seen. Others allow themselves to be bounded by their human shape, and with that comes the inevitability of human frailty. Gami has no such weakness. He¡¯s given himself fully over to the art of combat, both physically and spiritually. You can see it when he moves. There¡¯s a laconic dread to the heaviness of his stride; how little he even bothers to look at the people who surround him. They¡¯re gnats of a different species. Fights in the arenas are math problems to practice on. I obsess over his old fight tapes on my JOY to an unhealthy degree. Every night after Cal goes to a bed, I take my JOY and curl up with a blanket down in the shooting range, and I watch. Even through a camera, he is unnerving. He carries himself without emotion. Analyzes without ethic. Acts without doubt. Waiting, always waiting, like an ancient weapon of a past civilization, simply biding his time until the call to reactivate arrives. A sword in the stone waiting for a warrior of true caliber to put him to the test. Maybe that¡¯s why he sought out Thane. I was off limits, and I had a hero father who passed his moral compass on to me. But in the boy I used to love, even I knew there was a kindred spirit with the tyrant who now rules my world. Something capable of setting its human weakness aside to pursue perfection. I can¡¯t do the same. My bonds aren¡¯t my binds, they¡¯re the strength I draw on. Only time will tell if they will be enough to match the monsters of my life. To kill a titan like Gami, I¡¯ll need more power than I¡¯ve ever handled before. But my power, my ki, comes from the heart- and my heart is scarred into unrecognizability. The ki I create is a shade of its former light; black and noxious. Even now it leaks from my chest in a smoky miasma. I can¡¯t even call it an aura. It¡¯s painful to even use for the smallest spark. Cold and bitter, just like the soul that makes it. I could explain the mechanics as to why, but honestly, I''ve found it''s easier to explain ki by means of a story. And that''s a story that can wait for another night. Tomorrow¡¯s problem, tomorrow¡¯s me. You know the drill.
Element Type
Fire Soft
Water Hard
Earth Hard
Air Soft
Thunder Soft
Ice Hard
Metal Hard
Nature Hard
Light Soft
Shadow Soft
Gravity Soft
04 - DYSPHONA No quotes today. Let¡¯s go for a walk. I want you to live through me, just for a minute. Waking up not to an alarm, but circadian paranoia. Bleary-eyed, pawing away the sleepies, scratching them from the corner of my eyes as I gently close the door behind me. Rough up my hair into its usual shape. Blue light in my face as I power on my JOY and my classes. A surge of sharpening hits my brain. Fresh, clarifying energy. Enough to remind me to double back and grab an acidproof windbreaker before I head out. Down the creaky wooden steps from the loft down to the shooting range I¡¯m holed up in with Cal, every step on my toes so the boards don¡¯t creak. My left hand, real hand, calloused fingers padding down the rough concrete wall. Down in the range, it¡¯s quiet. One light on. Bench by the door where I left my shoes. That rough feeling as I fight with the tongue and shove my foot in, it¡¯s the same thing every time. One click seals the battered sneakers tight to my feet. All this focus on the external, it¡¯s for a reason that you¡¯ll soon understand. A distraction from the maelstrom inside my chest. You¡¯d think a ki fighter would boot up their class and start glowing like an angel, fired up like a literal ray of sunshine. They¡¯d feel the pulse of their heart and will it to increase until it physically drove their steps. Like that surge I felt before but exponentially stronger, so much overflowing energy that they couldn¡¯t and wouldn¡¯t keep bottling it up inside their body, instead letting it surge through their pores and into the world beyond. Bathing the souls around them in the song of their heart. And you would be right to think that. Most ki fighters do. My song is one that not even I can bear. Not anymore, at least. So I distract myself from it; that dark ichor pulsing through my veins. The serrated edge of every heartbeat. The ache of my own power trying to find a single crack to escape through. I focus on my hands, just like my father taught me. And I breathe. In, out. The door is creaky, battered metal. The chain for the shutters is oily inside my palm, greased with smog from the undercity air. In, out. While the chain works, my mind roams; my sixth sense for life energy pushing out into the world beyond the range. The shutters clack loudly as they finish rolling. I twist the doorknob, have to stop to unlock it, twist again, and I¡¯m outside. Standing in the shadows of an apartment complex, lost within the upside-down undercity of the capital, slapped in the face with a lungful of muggy, oily air. Concrete rough and firm against my sneakers. Pull out a filter mask, secure the clasps, let it seal tight around the lower half of my face. Sag against the brick wall and threaten to slump down because I¡¯m so tired, so goddamn tired, I was out street fighting at gyms and fight clubs for the entire day yesterday and the week before that and I can¡¯t hardly sleep anymore and it¡¯s too much sometimes, too much for one person to carry it all, but someone has to and no one¡¯s going to do it for me, even if my chest hurts so bad and my heart is doing its damndest to kill me with the ki it makes because it¡¯s hurt too, jagged and bitter and weeping still from the things I¡¯m fleeing, and these streets hold no comfort for me. This is not home. This is not the rice fields, the seaside wind, the noonday sun on an empty asphalt road. This is the Vents. The concrete. The neon. The smog. The shadow of an alley in a slum that¡¯s never seen the sun. Reality. There¡¯s a reason I¡¯m having you soak in every detail. Being a ki fighter means being tuned to the energy of living things; their hearts and the auras they exude. It¡¯s not all flashy blasts and flying like a comet. Ki emanates from all things that live, from the faintest plants to the brightest humans. Light is usually the best metaphor for describing how things feel in your kinetic sense. The stronger a creature¡¯s heart, the more vibrant light it puts out. Plants exude the kind of light that you wouldn¡¯t even normally notice with your eyes, like the gleam of reflection on a can of caf. Fighters who have trained their heart from their earliest years are like walking stars, emanating so much passive aura that it prickles your skin and raises every hair on your body. If you don¡¯t have the class, a normal human can only feel the smallest amounts of the aura, and it¡¯s something that you might not even recognize. Ever gone in a room where someone¡¯s sick? Or taken an exam where everyone around you is doing bad? At the most basic level, aura is just an amplification of emotions. Ki fighters can escalate that amplification so far that it manifests physically. But if enough people manifest enough of the same emotion in the same space, or someone with a high natural talent in amplification feels a really strong emotion all at once, that aura can get so strong that even non-ki fighters can sense it. Like how anyone who comes down to the Vents immediately knows that it¡¯s not a good place. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. Picture that, but you can feel it to an unimaginably amplified degree. A world polluted with suspicion and worry and exhaustion, a downcast and defeated miasma that pours against your sense for life energy like a dam broken. Hopelessness. Desperation. Misery. The crushing, invisible lament of a forgotten people. It¡¯s not an easy place to live in. Especially for someone like me, who grew up on a farm near the sea with my closest neighbor about five miles away. It¡¯s crowded, always hammering at my skull through my kinetic sense. Shutting myself off from it and completely drawing myself inwards helps, but it also blinds me to my own ki. Ki itself is a form of raw, malleable energy that follows a short life cycle. When your heart starts amping up, ki begins to generate and swirl out into the rest of your body until you¡¯ve hit your saturation point. Once that happens, the excess ki begins leaking out of your pores and into the air around you, forming a loose aura whose size scales with your passive output- the amount of energy your heart produces without actively forcing it. It¡¯s like your normal walking speed that you adopt without thinking. Ki fizzles out pretty fast once it leaves your body, so it takes a logarithmically increasing amount of output to keep growing your aura. People who pick up the class for flying home from school might make enough to find their way around the apartment without turning on a light, while a pro fighter will be maintaining a twenty-foot pillar of venting energy for the entirety of an eight-minute regulation fight. Like most energies given by JOYs, your capacity for creating ki follows the normal rules of cardio and musculature. Repeated stress and strain helps build your endurance, and when you push your heart to really amp up ki production, it starts tiring you out like a run. Once you¡¯ve got an aura forming around you, just like an Elemental, you¡¯ll grasp that energy with a trained will and transform it into a specific purpose. As raw energy, ki isn¡¯t inherently easy to shape, nor can it do things as creatively as a Magus¡¯ mana or an Elemental¡¯s chosen element. It makes up for that in blunt-force power. Small surges of ki along your limbs can help you burst forward in quick movement, leap far distances, or reinforce a limb for striking and blocking. Concentrating on your aura itself can let you tighten it into an almost solid barrier for defense, and it can also help you develop reaction instincts for incoming attacks before they even hit you, sensing them as they pass through your aura. When it comes to transforming the aura into more explosive uses, there¡¯s no more iconic ones than ki blasts and flying. Flight alone is the major draw most casual JOY users even grab the class- it¡¯s got easy flight and some small starter perks, and isn¡¯t as clumsy as wings from the Modd or Mytho classes. Beyond that, it¡¯s flexibility is limited only by your ability to generate and concentrate. On paper, it¡¯s the least demanding, most universally applicable Shaper class; the sledgehammer to the Elemental¡¯s ice pick. Growth in the class is easy and instinctual- literally just physical training, which any serious fighter already puts several hours a day into. It¡¯s highly popular because of that simplicity, and it¡¯s also got a pretty high power cap to boot. Not to mention that my Section has a history of Champions who are high-profile ki fighters, like Champion Fang. Historical precedent, ease of use, flashy and fun¡­ it¡¯s not hard to see why it¡¯s so commonly adopted, even if those adoptees aren¡¯t pushing the class to its limits. In the overcity, at least. In the Vents, I don¡¯t think I¡¯ve sensed a little other ki fighter. No one would willingly pick a class that has them soaking in depression like the kind they brew down here. It¡¯s said that the more powerful a ki fighter becomes, the less they are physical creatures as they are spiritual. Food isn¡¯t so necessary, as we sustain ourselves more on the spiritual energy of the world. Injuries, too, are more a reflection of a heart¡¯s will being battered down than an actual physical detriment. Used to be that I¡¯d be walking off even grievous injuries within a couple of days. These days, I¡¯m not so lucky. Ki being a manifestation of one¡¯s heart is what gives it its color and feel, but that manifestation can just as easily be a double-edged blade, especially in a case like mine. My heart has the triplet problem of extreme natural aptitude, ridiculous amounts of training, and overwhelming sorrow. The energy it produces is as polluted as the smog of the Vents, like ethereal black smoke that even now leaks out of my heart, trickling from a cut in my shirt. All it has for fuel is illness. Dark thoughts the same color as the smoke. I can barely even draw on my ki, and when I do, it cuts like claws on the way out. Nearly unusable even when I fight through the pain. Wasn¡¯t always that way, of course. Back in the day it was straight gold. Dad¡¯s was white. Champion Fang¡¯s was jade green. When Thane used it, his was cyan blue, the same color as a JOY screen. I¡¯m a two-classer, so ki has always been my weapon, and martial arts the way of delivering it. Big surprise, right? Tetsuka Taylor Mons, daughter of the most famous warrior in the land, a two-classer. Took me far too long to understand that I¡¯m too instinctual to be concentrating on three classes at once. Instead, I¡¯ve made these mine. My ki used to be on a caliber that outshone even my father like a candle to the sun. Now, though¡­ it¡¯s just the embers. Deep down, I know exactly what I need to do to bring it back. I need something new to fight for; something to replace the pain with a better fuel to draw on. Hate and anger is anathema to my heart¡¯s nature. Yet it¡¯s all that I have left. Hasn¡¯t worked out that well, clearly. Fighting the current of my heart just put me here: hiding in the Vents like a rat, flopped out on a gravel rooftop tossing my JOY like a ball, staring at the blank black sky of the next layer up while oil droplets splatter off my head. But it¡¯s so goddamn hard to let go of that anger, especially when it¡¯s the only thing that dragged me back to my feet on all those mornings of empty stomachs and sleeping in ditches since Thane¡¯s betrayal. Three years I¡¯ve spent obsessing how I¡¯m going to pay him back for everything he¡¯s taken from me. Hard to let go of something like that, even if I know I need to. Nights like these make me miss the stars. 05 - GAGES (REAL) VIRTUE
Someone once asked me why I solo¡¯d with the Magus class. That was the day I learned you could pick more than one. -Jun Soh Gage, First Champion of Section G
There¡¯s a certain irony in our first Champion¡¯s legacy not being his contributions to the martial arts or the foundations of gladiocracy, but the droves of romance novels, stage plays, and bottles liquors named in his honor. By all accounts, Gage the Virtuous wasn¡¯t that exceptional of a fighter, even in an era where almost nothing was known about the JOYs and exceptional fighters were as rare as damascene. Other warriors of the first era have better claim to that fame. Like Morrigan or Loveless or Asmodeus, or even the Creators themselves. But no one¡¯s going up to the bar and ordering a shot of Scorro¡¯s Spear. Gage outlived his contemporaries in the same way he surpassed them: adaptation. No one knows exactly what day the JOYs entered the world. It happened around, or during, whatever cataclysm separated our era from the one came before, when JOYs didn¡¯t exist. There¡¯s no true word for the time when the world started over. Some call it the Upending. Others, just the Cataclysm. Even the Dark Age, for obvious reasons. Any stories about that world- except the pop-culture dramatizations- have been sealed under lock and key since before anyone alive was born. Fortunately for my younger self, I was given an aunt who had a few of those keys. I spent too many bored summer days reading the dustiest files I could find on the Metro Blockhouse servers; some of which were last edited nearly seven hundred years ago, likely during the Dark Age. Though even those were stripped and censored of any significant information. And don¡¯t even bother looking for anything from before then. Out in the villages, our culture predates even the gladiocracies and the Creators, though it¡¯s mostly just religious mumbo-jumbo and tea rituals for farmers. In the wider world, the only evidence you¡¯ll find of a world before the JOYs is oldTech machinery- analog stuff, like speakers and scoreboards and repulsorfields that have to plug directly into a power grid, and can¡¯t pick up their energy remotely. Still. The Metro Blockhouse¡¯s servers have their secrets. With seven hundred years of backlogged history to lean on- not even counting whatever is on the oldTech machines down in the basements- I was able to read between the lines of those romance novels to make a pretty accurate theory of what our First Champion was really like. Turned out those books are better for something than eyeshade while I was napping out on the porch. First: Gage was a solo classer. Surprising, given that our Section has a battle-earned reputation for the pedigree of Martial Artists we produce, and booky Maguses are about the furthest thing from a fistfighter that you can get. But solo classing itself was pretty common back in the day. Before the gladiocracies, existence was a constant, frightening war for survival. There were no governments. No conveniences of an interconnected society like we have today. Just warlords and the brutal kingdoms they ruled. Each with their own rules and laws; some barbaric, others a humanitarian shadow of the old era. Though even they obeyed the same universal we do. Only the strongest shall rule. It¡¯s true even when all other reason collapses. In the Dark Age, there wasn¡¯t a massive stockpile of training materials and class knowledge you could search up on the ¡®Net, nor a societal pipeline to funnel kids right into fighting proficiency in their classes. Combat styles and class-specific tech had to be developed from scratch. The basic understanding for how to mentally grasp sixth-sense energy was something developed over the course of decades, not months. Even navigating the JOY menus wasn¡¯t something well understood. Reasonable, then, that people would only dedicate themselves to one or two classes at most; not three as is common today. What that specialization led to was a style of class mastery where flexibility, not raw power, became the most prized asset. Even if they were easily understood, simple classes like Martial Artist or Duelist were little good for survival, and could combat few other classes on their own. Supportive classes like Innovator or Guardian couldn¡¯t carry out offensive duties solo. One the flipside, the build-a-build classes like Mecha and Modd were highly popular for versatility and survival skills. Which left the Magus class at a special impasse between the two. While theoretically one of the most versatile classes of all, on its own, Magus has almost zero defensive or offensive dominance. It¡¯s vulnerable in the close range, too slow to beat a bullet in the long range. And in the Dark Age, where JOY capabilities were complete unknowns and the Creators themselves still walked the world, the Magus class had no extensive lists of pre-populated spells that have been painstakingly cultivated for every imaginable situation by class researchers over the course of centuries. You were given a book with infinite pages between its covers, and every one of those pages was blank. Picking a class like that in the midst of the Dark Age would actually be suicidal. Which is why I think Gage didn¡¯t have a choice in it. Either it was chosen for him, or he didn¡¯t know what he was getting into when he signed the dotted line. Or he had someone to teach him. Someone who already knew how to fill a couple pages in that book, and could give him pointers on the rest. He mentions her in his letters from time to time, that woman. He called her Sensei. Not in the way that they mean at a dojo or martial artist locker room fightslang, but in a way that¡¯s rooted in the culture of the villages I come from. The old language that hardly anyone still speaks. She was his Teacher, Professor, Doctor. And I think she was all of those, based on the number of things Gage says she knew. Only once does he call her by the nickname Apple. Her true name was a blank space in the text, so she had to have been important. Or dangerous. Dangerous enough to erase almost every mention of. In other words, The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Creator dangerous. With her help, Gage took the first steps down the Magus path and became one of the most iconic pillars of the class. Flexibility was the core his entire fighting technique revolved around. While he might not have the best control of a fireball spell, another Elemental he was travelling with might be able to multiply the destructive potential tenfold. While he couldn¡¯t defend himself from a blade, he could create a force dome to shield an entire group of fighters at once. And the more companions he fought beside, the more places he travelled and the more spells he acquired from the locals, the greater his flexibility became. In a way, Gage used his JOY even better than most people do today. He understood that simply because his JOY wouldn¡¯t augment him with the aim assist of a Gunslinger, the durability of a Guardian, or mastery over a single domain of matter like an Elemental, there was nothing stopping him from casting Spiritual Weapon and learning how to swing an ethereal lance himself. Even if he wouldn¡¯t be as good at melee combat as a grandmaster Duelist, he could still learn to fight from one. That flexibility is a principle that¡¯s pervaded the class, and even the grander ideas of combat, ever since. Maguses are jacks-of-all-trades, mimicking abilities that are eerily similar to those found in the other JOY classes, just without the same power or control. Where a Shield spell will shatter at a single hit, a Guardian¡¯s warding sphere can take on a rain of missiles from five Mecha simultaneously and still be standing on the other side. But a Magus can fire off an Electric Arc, cast a teleportation spells, and inundate themselves with a plethora of buff enchantments before a fight even begins. Their only limiters are the knowledge in the spellbook and the pool of mana they draw on to cast spells. If you¡¯ve read the chapters on the other Shaper classes, Magus mana is no different from a shapeable energy like ki or a primal element. Its only noteworthy factor is that it¡¯s a fixed cap of energy that regenerates slowly while a Magus isn¡¯t casting. That cap can¡¯t be raised by training like a ki fighter can with their heart, nor can one just draw more mana out of the air like an Elemental can. Maguses instead train by increasing the speed, accuracy, and ease of delivery that it takes to cast a spell. Normally, each spell has a fixed cost of mana determined by a long mathematical formula that involves complexity of intent, magnitude of impact, et cetera. A JOY will pick up the intention of the spell a Magus wish to cast as soon as they begin, but speaking the cast faster, more accurately, or more effortlessly has the additional benefit of decreasing the mana it takes to cast. So the more you specialize and practice with specific spells, the less mana they take to cast, and you can repeat the cast more times before you bottom out on energy. And because you don¡¯t truly have to speak to cast a spell, for a much higher cost of mana, you can cast one simply through intention without relying on words. Handy in a pinch, that one. Though there¡¯s no official delineation between the two, most Maguses separate themselves by their primary method of casting. Book Casters carry a physical spellbook on their person, recording spells and keeping the incantation / rune transcription / offering component for each. Heart Casters¡­ cast from the heart. I¡¯d respect them a bit more for that, but in the Magus world- this is just hearsay, I don¡¯t hang with that crowd- they¡¯re generally looked on as the lazier variety. But hey. They do tend to memorize their spells better and cast them way faster, because they don¡¯t have to go flipping through a book to find the right one. Though they obviously can¡¯t keep track of as many as a Book Caster. They tend to be more specialist, focusing on reducing the mana cost of a few select spells. As for how a Magus is supposed to go around finding those spells for their repertoire, there¡¯s a few routes. The ¡®Net has a couple hundred basics you can download for free- basic stuff like laundry spells, breath freshening buffs, a point-light enchantment you can put on a stylus. Most class-specific courses at school will start introducing more flexible and impactful spells, though you won¡¯t learn anything revolutionary there. For heavy hitting spells, signing up for extracurriculars at a dojo is the best way. But for the real elite stuff, the kind of stuff that makes reputations, you have to either learn enough about spellcrafting to write it yourself, or nab an incantation from a really powerful fighter. No self-respecting fighter gives out their custom spells for free though, so good luck on that front. I¡¯m sure a real Magus could bore you to death talking about the minutiae of spellcrafting, but I¡¯m as much of a fish out of water here as I was at the gala with Cal. My way of fighting is my way of living: simple and straightforward. Books and studying are the anathema of a good ki fighter. I know, I know. Ironic. Here I am, studying a book anyways. Believe me, Cal rags me enough about it already. Attached is a list of a few of the spells that have been or can be seen throughout the FRAY series, with descriptors per their entry in the JOY system:
LEVITATE (Memento Mori, 4.13): Suspend the target object up to one meter above a flat, grounded surface. The object may be pushed or will itself into movement while suspended.
MOCKING IMAGE (???, 4.6): Create an illusory second skin that can absorb a single instance of damage from any source. The illusion dissipates realistically according to the nature of the damage.
STARBURST (???, 4.6): Compressed dark matter, mhm?
SPELL DILATION (???, 3.7): A metamagic extension that buffs the next spell cast. Doubles the length of duration-based effects, and converts instantaneous effects into duration-based effects.
AVARITIC ARSENAL (???, 3.7): Buff used on a held object. At will, object translocates back into hand.
ENERGY CONDUCTION (I ¨C V) (???, 3.7): Self-buff to allow incoming ki energy to be stored within the body for a short duration, rather than dealing damage on impact. Increases natural resistance to burnout from over-amplified ki.
06 - BRICK BY BRICK
Among the Olympians, there is a role called the Libero, and you will never see anything quite like it in the Sections. Our societies are built on a foundation of single combat, where personal strength reigns over all other kinds. Defense cannot come without offense. A shield cannot be wielded without a sword. One must wield their tools in both directions if they are to excel. The Libero is not a defiance of this foundation. It is merely an acknowledgement that there is more to life than the square. There are times when a child will run to their father¡¯s arms for safety. When a broken man will weep into the shoulder of his brother. When a woman who bears all burdens begs for another to lift them from her shoulders, even if only for a moment. There are times when calamity comes, primordial dread takes hold, and shelter is the only thing that matters. A Libero is a bastion, a father¡¯s arms, a shoulder to lean on, a breath of respite, and a shelter all may run to. It does not take a Guardian to bear that kind of weight. But I assure you, the extra durability helps. -Crucible IV, shortly before the Exodus
Some of the most unquantifiable attributes of a fighter are also the most important ones to possess, and tenacity definitely tops my personal list. You can train your body in a gym, you can train your mind in a library, and you can train your reflexes on an aim routine, but sheer grit is something that only can be built when you¡¯re faced with choices between doing things the easy way or the hard way. It means becoming the master of your own human weaknesses. Of doing the painful stuff even when you want nothing more than to collapse. Of understanding that you just-got-mauled-through-the-stomach, but someone has to wrap the wound, and you¡¯re the only one who can. Or in my current case, of dictating a journal while doing half an hour of upside-down situps from a rafter in the range. At their core, the Guardian class is designed to make that choice easier. It doesn¡¯t deaden you to your sense of pain. It just lets you endure that pain for far longer than normal people can. Even my aura can¡¯t prop me up to the same degree a Guardian can stay standing- at a certain point of wounding, my body will start needing so much energy to force it into motion that the heat of just conducting that energy into my muscles would incinerate me from the inside out. There¡¯s a gulf between the kind of damage I can take and the unending punishment that Guardians are built to withstand. As one of the classes commonly headlining the Enhancement group, Guardians do come with a hefty amount of passive improvements over the average human. While their sense of pain may be no duller, their body is naturally more resilient to all forms of physical and nonphysical damage. Their wounds cut shallower and seal faster, they have built-in resistance to mental tampering, and they¡¯re less able to be moved unwillingly by outside forces. If a normal body is a wooden fence, Guardians are a brick wall in comparison. It¡¯s a classic mistake to think that they¡¯re slower or stupider just because they¡¯re bigger, bulkier, or tougher. The only reason someone would pick the class is if they had a very specific goal for it in mind. Guardians are tacticians, and their resource is their own health bar. Knowing when to take hits and how to take them is the backbone of their class-specific fighting techniques. Fighting a Guardian is an exercise not just of their toughness, but your own as well: knowing how to probe their defenses and ration your stamina long enough to break them down is something only gained through practical experience. And when they mix that level of durability with a powerful offensive class or two, you¡¯ll find yourself facing off with an opponent who walks your attacks off like scratches and devastates you in return. Not an easy win by any means. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. There are ways to beat Guardians, of course. Force cages, entanglements, flight, armor-piercing weaponry, and outright speed are all avenues that can take them down if they don¡¯t have flexibility to match. By devoting one of their three classes to a solely defensive skillset that offers no extra offensive or movement capabilities, Guardians become more vulnerable to being attacked in a way that they aren¡¯t prepared to cover. Combine that with the relative unflashiness of a strictly-defense class, and you can probably understand why it wasn¡¯t all that popular in the past. Especially in my Section. We love our showstoppers, and Guardians are pretty much the anathema of a high-octane class. Even Gami hasn¡¯t changed the class¡¯ reputation much- he¡¯s just made people realize that they should have been afraid of it. Near invulnerability -gets worlds scarier when it¡¯s attached to a morph-capable titan who can attack in every direction simultaneously. Outside of its dearth of durability enhancements and pop-up shielding abilities, there is one major field where the Guardians can flex their ingenuity. Like Duelists and Gunslingers, Guardians also have access to an armory via their JOYs; though instead of weapons, it gives them free access to a variety of armor types ranging from vacuum-capable suits to combat-grade duraweave clothing. The same armory limitations apply as before: if it leaves your personal reach, it dissolves. But being able to summon and tailor that level of armor on the fly is a financial advantage that lures in plenty of fighters who might not normally pick up the class. Unless you¡¯re a Guardian, combat-grade defensive materials like duraweave needs to be made by hand before it can be bartered for or freely used. The quality of the material depends entirely on the talent of the crafter, and the best textile recipes are carefully guarded secrets of the guilds who created them. Which means it¡¯s expensive. Very expensive. How Dad was able to acquire a seemingly limitless supply of top-tier weave perfectly tailored to every stage of my childhood wasn¡¯t something I ever gave conscious thought. His old uni jacket that I wear everyday has saved my hide on more than a few occasions. In a way, you can think of the Guardian to armor as what a Duelist is to melee weaponry, and the defensive enhancements as a compensation package for picking a class with no offensive capabilities. Famous paragons of the class are almost always defined by the appearance of their armored shell- it¡¯s rare to see an unarmored Guardian, and when you do, it¡¯s usually just a modified appearance to mimic an unarmored style. I¡¯ve never had a chance to fight alongside a user of the class myself. Solo combat is all I ever trained in as a kid- usually against Thane- and while I can handle myself in a crowd, I¡¯ve never been a part of a mass battle like those that occurred during my father¡¯s era. I¡¯ve only got some old vids to study by. While limited, they all paint a similar picture: the larger a conflict, the less reliance there is on a single fighter to dictate victory. No one person is responsible for all their own offense and defense- instead, the burden to cover different roles can be delegated wider, allowing for specialization that isn¡¯t normally possible in a regulation arena match. While a purely defensive fighter would never be able to win on their own, in a group setting, having a bastion that an entire team or strike force can rally behind for protection is an invaluable asset. It lets both offensive specialists hyper-focus on their strongest suits, allowing a dedicated Guardian become a wall against which all enemies break. I¡¯ve heard that kind of team-centric combat is the norm on Olympus. Roles, teams, and factions are more rigidly defined, and noteworthy solo fighters aren¡¯t common to see. It¡¯s a totally different world than home- one I have a near-zero chance of ever being able to visit, given the current trajectory of my circumstances. Sitting on the top of the city¡¯s most-wanted leaderboard isn¡¯t exactly conducive to a long and fulfilling life. ¡­and now I¡¯m hanging with my legs looped over the bar, scrolling upside-down pictures of vacation hotspots on Olympus. Great going, Tets. Stare at that ludicrously buttered crab leg. Think about how good and warm that ocean would feel. Imagine how clean the air must be. Ugh. I¡¯m gonna go take a shower. A cold shower; because the hot water has been broken since day one. Just like everything else in this god-damned undercity. 07 - MONSTERS AND MAKERS As I sit here making this on a JOY with a Shimano Industries shell, typing with fingers powered by scavenged SHI circuitry, watching a uni league press conference on a frazzled stream screen with that world-known fishook logo on its base, I figure it¡¯s about time to talk about the corporation that almost ruled this city. There was a time, maybe twenty years ago, where the name Shimano Heavy Industries was known all the way from Section Y to this tiny, greasy towerside noodle bar that Nabuna picked for us to eat at. Sick of chicken and rice, he said. I¡¯m not picky. Neither are the other grey-cloaked Venters around us. Good noodles are a beat that anyone can dance to. Until Thane shows up on the stream, at least. Behind the boiling oil steam, he steals the stream cam¡¯s attention the moment he takes to the corner of the stage, bookending the lowest rank on the Concordia team. He doesn¡¯t even talk. Didn¡¯t even fight with them- I would know if he had, I check every night- but his presence alone makes people take note. A couple of the Venters start watching soon after I do. Even Nabuna keeps his eyes on the screen. As conflicted as it makes me feel, most of the undercity dwellers don¡¯t have the reasons to loathe Thane that I do. They almost look at him like people used to look at Dad. That glint of hope, that faint awe of seeing someone who¡¯s different to such an incomprehensible degree that they might as well be part of a different world. I can¡¯t exactly say I feel the same. Which brings us back to reality. The crumbling state of the Vents, the looming darkness of the Shocks on the undercity horizon, the abject sadness that swallows my kinetic sense in an unending miasma. Shimano Heavy Industries didn¡¯t build this city, but they very nearly destroyed it. Generations ago, they started as humble autobike makers in the same coastal villages I call home. Only with the rise of their Mecha patriarch Shimano Yor did they earn their reputation as titans of industry that they still have today. Despite their attempt at a coup against Champion Fang, despite the entire Shimano clan being exiled from the Section, and despite the decades-long bloodfeud they waged against my father because of that, the name Shimano still holds two very clear places in everyone¡¯s minds: pinnacle tech, and terrifying Mechas. Every member of the Shimano clan was a Mecha to some degree. It¡¯s as ubiquitous to their reputation as the tech they made, to the point of practically being hereditary. They¡¯re one of the examples of a group that sticks to the tradition of passing down classes. Unlike something like the Lionharts and the Duelist class, the Mecha class offers a staggering amount of flexibility in the forms it can take. When you fire up the class on your JOY, you¡¯re immediately granted the physical changes and augments that you¡¯ve picked for it, which can range from cybernetic augments to control over entire Titan-class frames. Most Mecha differentiate themselves based on frame type; though the class itself doesn¡¯t discriminate between the options it gives. It offers a fixed pool of one hundred points that users can spend on mechanical enhancements, body reshaping, and hardpoint-mounted tech. If it¡¯s related to cybernetics, prosthetics, cyborgs, or mech suits, you¡¯ll find it as an option. Any of those changes that alter the user¡¯s head or mind make them technological in nature, which has the incredibly powerful perk of making them entirely immune to Psis, who can only influence organic minds. That passive perk alone makes Mecha almost entirely worth as a class. While Guardians and other Psis can become incredibly resilient to mental tampering, Mecha are flat out immune to it. On the downside, that inorganic nature naturally clashes with other classes too, like Ki Fighter. Ki can¡¯t conduct through inorganic material- ask me how I know, I¡¯ve got a metal arm and a story for you- which means that Mecha tend to be largely incompatible with the class. One of those rare instances where your classes can directly interfere with and contradict each other. It¡¯s fair to assume that another class suited for building tech, like Innovator, might make some parts of Mecha redundant. But that only holds true to a certain extent. Innovator tech can¡¯t be as freely swapped or applied as Mecha hardpoints, nor does it run off of a limitless power or ammo supply. In fact, Innovator and Mecha gain more synergy when they¡¯re paired together, which is why you¡¯ll often see the classes getting twinned by top-end users. A Mecha can spend a hefty amount of their points on a titan core and customizations for it, but there¡¯s no inherent way to summon/desummon the frame itself. Unlike the classes that can summon objects from an armory, a Mecha who wants to specialize in a titan frame has to build it themselves, meaning it can take real damage without being instantly re-summonable. An Innovator class gives them additional proficiency in creating said frame, and it also lets them save on their Mecha hardpoints by making additional tech by hand; rather than relying on the point system. In a way, it¡¯s not unlike the synergy between Modds and Biohancers. But more on that later. Mecha frames are divided by both the nature of the hardpoints and the size of the frame itself. A cyborg frame isn¡¯t all that different from a normal human on the surface. They typically rely on cybernetic enhancements to power up their normal body. Faster twitch reflexes, greatly enhanced durability, augmented senses like thermal vision, self-healing, and subdermal weaponry are all on the table. It¡¯s not the most popular frame, but it¡¯s a prime pick for the people who don¡¯t want to actively go around looking like a robot. For the fighters who do have that robot fantasy, the exo frame is the standard choice. It¡¯s also the default of the class. Turn on your JOY, and you¡¯re functionally a humanoid robot with a pixel-screen head; fully customizable from there. Exo frames have the downside of openly wearing their modifications, but on the plus side, they don¡¯t have to sleep, they don¡¯t suffer from organic weaknesses- hello, vacuum-capable bodies- and they don¡¯t bleed. There¡¯s entire subcultures of Mecha fashion based on the shape of their helmets and frames, and while they can carry normal weapons, they can also pick from a wider variety Mecha hardpoints that allow for some gnarly options with overlap in both Saboteur and Gunslinger. Micromissiles are a crowd favorite. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it. The rarest of the frames is also the most iconic of the class: the titan frame. Huge machines three meters tall with a cockpit for their Mecha pilot somewhere inside. They¡¯re forces of nature on the battlefield. Slow and unwieldy, yes, but also a moving fortress of armor and weaponry. Massive in every dimension of combat that they charge into. From the clips I¡¯ve seen of my father¡¯s battles against the Shimanos, titans were the favored frame of many of Shimano Yor¡¯s seven sons, and also the patriarch himself. I¡¯ve never had to go up against one myself. Thankfully, it¡¯s not a frame most teenagers have the cash or the technical know-how to support. Much more popular among people my age is the Modd class; especially for the casual users who don¡¯t put combat on a pedestal. It¡¯s the most surefire way to customize your own looks to be whatever you want. By default, you can use your JOY to make lasting alterations to a few cosmetic categories even if you take no class: hair and eye color, skin tone, reproductive anatomy, shaving or makeup scans,et cetera. Some changes are a bit taboo- where I come from, at least- but others like hair color and shaving scans are commonplace. I used one to recolor my hair white before coming to the capital. If you want more advanced anatomical changes, that¡¯s where the Modd class takes over. Using the same point-buy system as Mecha, Modds trick out their bodies with biological enhancements that can range from animalistic features to additional senses, extra limbs, or even a wholly non-human form. The last is definitely the most point-intensive, and one of the least popular due to how hard it can be for a human brain to not go a bit off the rails when it¡¯s living full-time in a non-human body. Some people can work around that dissonance with enough exposure, and some truly can adapt to living in their new shape. But that adaptation often comes at the cost of losing a piece of themselves as they start to reflect the thing they look like. Sometimes that piece isn¡¯t critical. People going full animal with the Modd class is rare, after all. But when that piece is critical, you get the kind of things I¡¯ve heard about the Vents¡¯ resident ghost story: the Mobiak. Apparently it¡¯s some feral Modd-turned-nightmare that used to prowl in the Shocks. Though whether or not it actually exists is still up for debate. In general, the bigger a creature someone tries to become when picking a fully nonhuman morph, the exponentially higher the point cost goes. The largest Modd user I¡¯ve ever heard of is one of Dynasty¡¯s seven Executors: the dragon Krevax. For everyone else who picks up the class, more mundane augments like new senses and cat ears are the go-to things to spend points on. Those damn ears have a resurgence and fall in popularity that repeats at least every couple decades. They¡¯re very in vogue on certain¡­ parts of the Net. Every girl has a pre-teen phase where they try out the Modd class at least once. Yes, even me. And double yes, I made absolutely certain that there are no pictures left of said phase. Modd is one of the more flexible classes in that it can fulfill either a backup role- just granting passive augments- or it can be the defining foundation of an entire trio of classes. Most everything you can spend points on is a passive upgrade, so unless someone doesn¡¯t fight whatsoever, you¡¯ll always see a Modd in conjunction with one or two more classes. It has a lot of natural synergy with classes outside the core trio: Hunter is a natural pick to amp up those new senses and give more enhancements to combat with natural weapons, while Biohancer- typically the ¡®healer¡¯ class- can help jury-rig even more modifications onto yourself. Sometimes it doesn¡¯t even take spending a significant number of points to push the class to its max, though. Look at Gami: from what anyone can tell about his class usage, he only spends enough points to pick a nonhuman form that¡¯s a blob of metal material; basically a metal-themed slime. He uses another class to manipulate that form in lieu of spending points, and in doing so, he uses a Metal Elemental¡¯s control to grant himself an unlimited amount of flexibility that the class¡¯ point-buy system can¡¯t come close to emulating. When I think about picking up a third class- I doubt I will, but I might have to someday- Modd is always somewhere near the top of the list. Classes that are specialized into passive benefits and augments are easy to pick up, easy to customize, and don¡¯t require mastering any new skills like a weapon or shaping class might. Cal would never let me hear the end of it if I picked up Modd, though. I know she¡¯d be asking about cat ears every single time I walk through the door. And I¡¯ve got enough on my plate with trying to fix what¡¯s already flawed with me. Sure, maybe I could finally ditch my prosthetic arm for something new, but I don¡¯t even know if I¡¯d want to. For all I dislike it, for however ugly a missing limb might be when the prosthetic comes off, it¡¯s a part of who I really am; my conceptualization of myself. When I dream, I just have my one hand. Not two. Props to the Shimano corporation where it¡¯s due, though. Their tech is as future proof as you can ask for. Their mark on this city has yet to fade. SHI vending machines are still rusting in the undercity, and SHI autobikes are still the top racers of the surface world. In a way, it¡¯s a shame they¡¯re gone now. A dynasty more than seven hundred years old, one whose culture stretched back to even before the JOYs, finally extinguished in the wars they started. Shimano Yor and the last of his seven sons are gone, the vestiges of their prized creations growing rarer by the day. They were the most famous thing to ever rise from my home villages. Now they¡¯re dust. But that¡¯s the way of my world. Only the strongest shall rule. 08 - AN ASSASSINS PERSPECTIVE ¡­and so there I am just watching it go down, right? This guy just had his ass handed to him publicly, knows she let him off the hook easy, and still decides to start shit in the middle of downtown. And I¡¯m like, well clearly, she can handle herself. But, she¡¯s also new to the big city. Really testy village type, like a dog that secretly likes to be petted but doesn¡¯t want you to pet her, yeah? That, dear reader, is the handful that I¡¯m shacked up with right now. If you¡¯ve been around the capital in the last few years, you¡¯ve probably heard tell of the legendary killer known as Feint: slayer of league fighters, undercity criminals, and everything in between. Immune to JOYs, never leaves a trace, devilishly handsome¡­ or so the news streams say, at least. They haven¡¯t gotten a picture of me yet. If they knew I was a five-foot-nothing girl in my first year of university, they¡¯d probably have a heart attack. I¡¯m not exactly what most people assume an infamous assassin looks like. But that¡¯s not a downside in my line of work. Let¡¯s get one thing straight- I¡¯m not a sucker for Tay. I¡¯m a sucker for rustic charm. She just happens to have a very large supply of said charm squirreled away behind her abrasive personality. You¡¯ll have to take it on faith that it¡¯s back there, because heaven knows she wouldn¡¯t show it if she had a choice in the matter. I only learned she has more modes than moody after she beat the absolute shit out of me. And almost killed me. Twice. Ever been shot at by a ki fighter who makes people like the Showmaker look like they belong in the minor league? Not fun. Very spicy. I¡¯ll be totally honest. When I cracked open her datapad- she left it just sitting on the couch, what was I supposed to do?- I was expecting to see some prime joke material. What¡¯s she really up searching on the ¡®Net at two in the morning while I¡¯m trying to sleep? It can¡¯t really be more fight tapes and class discussion-slash-theorycrafting boards, right? Turns out, someone can actually be that normal. I mean, she is pretty simple on the outside. It¡¯s kinda cute. But all she does is study. This journal is the most interesting thing in her files. Don¡¯t get me wrong, more research is good. Saying we¡¯re in dire straits would be putting our situation in the most optimistic light possible. But come on, girl. Give me something. Anyways. Seeing as Tay hasn¡¯t covered the Assassin class yet, I figure the least I could do is give her a little help. Not like there¡¯s much more to do while I¡¯m stuck here. She gets to go off gallivanting in the undercity while poor Cal Kyriaku is stuck moping around while her arm heals. Woe is me. I deserve a little fun. For starters, the way that she organizes the classes by the groups they teach in elementary school is so, so out of date. Modern theorycrafting puts the eighteen classes into some better defined categories:
ARMORY ENERGY SHAPING POINT-BUY INFLUENCE ENHANCEMENT
Duelist Ki Fighter Mecha Psi Martial Artist
Gunslinger Elemental Modd Biohancer Assassin*
Guardian Magus Tamer Mytho Hunter
Saboteur Shifter
Innovator*
Armory and Shaping classes are pretty self-explanatory at this point, although Innovator alone could have an entire book written about the benefits it brings to society. Unless you¡¯re aiming for a really specific combination of classes, you shouldn¡¯t be picking more than one from each of the five pillars, otherwise you run the risk of overspecializing and becoming extra-vulnerable to someone that¡¯s a hard counter to you. That¡¯s part of what makes someone with classes like Tay¡¯s so good on and off the square, even if she only uses two. Martial Artist and Ki Fighter are absolute fundamental classes that don¡¯t specialize whatsoever, meaning she can take that raw power and apply it to almost any situation she comes across. Assassin is the polar opposite of that. It¡¯s in the running with Psi for the ¡°Worst Reputation¡± superlative in the JOY class yearbook. It¡¯s nearly useless in a regulation fighting match. Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. It¡¯s a homunculus hybrid of an Armory-type and Enhancement-type class, with the most niche parts of both. But what it is good at, is enabling you to do what¡¯s right there in the name. Assassinate. Infiltrate. Exploit. In a way, Assassin isn¡¯t so much a class as it is a job description. It¡¯s the perfect class for corporate espionage, spycraft, or wet work. The bundle of passive enhancements are perfectly suited for stealth: heightened agility and gracefulness, quieter steps, smoother talking, less injury from falls, and when Psis try to read your mind, there¡¯s a passive foil that adds intentional misdirections in what they¡¯re able to read from you. And from the armory side, you¡¯re allowed to select from a limited portion of the Duelist class; specifically thrown weapons. Daggers, darts, stiletto blades, et cetera. All of which are, as mentioned prior, pretty damn useless on a fighting square. Which is why most Assassins you¡¯ll see in the wild won¡¯t be league fighters at all. They¡¯re best as the mercenaries and covert operatives of the gladiocracy- fighters who do their best work away from the spotlight in places where no one else can. The setup to our engagements is more important than the combat itself. My teacher put it best: the outcome of an Assassin¡¯s fight is never in question. By the time they decide to make the first strike, they¡¯ve already won. Because once combat starts for real and initiative is lost, we¡¯re inherently at a disadvantage. So we win outright or we don¡¯t win at all. For most Assassins, at least. Part of the whole ¡®being successful in a gladiocracy¡¯ gig means learning to overcome the detriments of your classes, whether that means finding ways to survive in a real fight or extend the initiative from your opening strike. When you pick up the Assassin class, it naturally orients your classes towards creating opportunities to disengage and restart fights on a micro level while in the middle of combat. Some Elemental classes are good for that- Shadow is a prime pick, and Shadow Assassin is the archetypical combination for a reason- but even Psi can work by throwing out a mental jolt to destabilize someone right before you reengage. For real world utility, Gunslinger enables you to leverage your stealth enhancements from a far greater range, and the tracking capabilities of Hunter are a natural complement to the typical work an Assassin will be hired for. The only classes you¡¯d really want to stray away from are heavyweights like Mecha. Stealth and a couple hundred pounds of walking tank aren¡¯t exactly a natural fit. What¡¯s not popularized about the class is the perks that come outside of your JOY classes. Assassins have a¡­ let¡¯s call it a club, that you can only get into with an invite from another assassin who¡¯s already in the club. The club doesn¡¯t have a name or a roster- really, it¡¯s just a link to the Assassin-only networks that run out of a blacksite ¡®Net server in Section X- but what it does have is our private boards where all the real job opportunities get posted. It¡¯s called the Web. Anyone who¡¯s a major player in the Sections knows how and why to find it. If you¡¯re a corporation who needs a spy to infiltrate their competition, you go to the Web. If you¡¯re a criminal syndicate who needs a nosy bureaucrat removed, you go to the Web. If you have any sort of job that¡¯s questionable enough to not be posting on a public board in your local ¡®Net, you go, yes, to the Web. I was first introduced to the Web by my teacher, which is also around the time that I started working under the pseudonym Feint. Teachers themselves are something of a taboo in Assassin culture. It¡¯s seen as a massive risk, as both student and teacher will have intimate knowledge of who each other are behind their personas. She could only teach me so much about the class itself, though. Because the biggest secret of yours truly is that I¡¯m not an Assassin by class- only by trade. I¡¯ve worked with a few JOY classes in case I need them, of course. I just don¡¯t keep them selected. If someone checks out my public profile, all they¡¯ll see is Cal Kyriaku, classless. In everyday life, I¡¯m one of the most unassuming people you¡¯d meet on the street. I¡¯m the opposite of a threat. Even if people are suspicious of my lack of classes, it¡¯s not like they¡¯d think I¡¯m a threat. I¡¯m just a cool girl who¡¯s a real smooth talker and easy to make friends with. Got an internship in the Metro Blockhouse¡¯s counterespionage division, a normal life as a university student, and a bigwig brother who¡¯s the most popular bachelor on the capital news streams. Boring stuff. Which is usually what my targets are thinking in the moments before my Relic cuts on, their JOYs shut off, and I¡¯m finishing a job in one smooth strike. The Relic is my real class. Relics themselves are one of the biggest remaining question marks in the world. They all share a few commonalities: they¡¯re shaped like jewelry, they¡¯re made of damascene, and they¡¯re usually broken. Damascene is the loanword that historians use to describe the material that Relics are made from, but technically, the material itself doesn¡¯t even have a name. Similar in looks, it¡¯s a kind of rock-metal hybrid, black with silvery wavelike patterns. Damascene is an entirely unique genre of material that¡¯s obscenely resistant to outside forces. It doesn¡¯t register as interactable for any of the Elemental JOY classes, nor is it organic. It¡¯s almost unshapeable by heat, pressure, or gravity. There¡¯s few things besides more damascene that can even leave a scratch on it. The material would make for incredible armor if it weren¡¯t as rare as stardust. The only damascene that¡¯s ever been found in the Sections is the Relics themselves, and Relics have only ever been found on Olympus, the ancestral home of the JOYs. The one I wear around my wrist was recovered when Olympus¡¯ upper half opened two decades ago. It¡¯d been sitting around in the Metro Blockhouse¡¯s vaults until I was given it to play around with, and a year later, I was in possession of the only recorded Relic to have ever been activated. Forcing the thing to give up its power was a nightmare of a task. No one else has ever done it before. I¡¯m pretty sure I just got lucky, if I¡¯m being totally honest. But it¡¯s one-hundred percent mine now. I¡¯m the one and only Relic user in the Section; probably in all Sections. Its power is pretty straightforward: it shuts down anything powered by JOY-based tech in a limited radius, and it can dispel incoming energies that are created by JOYs. Like Tay¡¯s ki. That means it erases all classes and all passive enhancements. It¡¯s the perfect tool for an assassin. A wholly unique ability that I¡¯ve never seen or heard of before, almost like a portable version of the electromagnetic device that the Shimanos used near the end of their war. But that device was entirely oldTech, an ancient analog machine that they dredged out of Crucible Station and dropped from low orbit. Ancient, but understandable. My Relic is almost alien in nature. It¡¯s nothing like a JOY, and it only shuts down JOY tech- it doesn¡¯t indiscriminately target analog equipment too like an electromagnet would. And the damascene is¡­ well. The fact that no Elemental can interact with it is something I¡¯m still trying to figure out. Maybe it was just one of the Creator¡¯s trinkets that they were experimenting with before they disappeared. But I have a feeling there¡¯s more to it than that. I don¡¯t believe in coincidences. I don¡¯t think it¡¯s a coincidence that no one¡¯s been able to activate a Relic on besides me. And I don¡¯t think it¡¯s a coincidence that this thing lights up ros¨¦ when I do.