As we sat in the back of the carriage, separated from the driver up front, I heard a sudden voice.
“Hey, Arlan,” Erani said, “do you mind asking Index to help me with something?”
“Hm?” I asked. “Sure. What’s up?”
Erani paused for a moment, like she was suddenly reconsidering. She’d been silent ever since she got back her memories, which I’d assumed was because she’d been looking them over and deciding which Firebolt Upgrade to finally take. Seemed like she needed help, after all. Though I wasn’t sure what sort of a question she’d have in this timeline that she wouldn’t have had last time.
After a moment of silence, she answered. “So, I guess I just wanted to know whether or not one of my Upgrades would work.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but she stayed silent. “Are you gonna tell me what the specific Upgrade is?”
“Oh. I thought it would just…know what I’m talking about. It knows everything, right?”
Index?
“I can’t read her mind. But I can assume what she’s asking about. Though I thought she just didn’t want to take the Upgrade or something, considering how obvious the problem is and how long she’s gone without asking about it. Anyway, tell her that Double Firebolt won’t function without both of her hands being intact.”
…Ah. I think I get why she wasn’t eager to ask about it.“Oh, that?” Index asked, reading my thoughts. “Meh, not sure that I get it. Seems like it’s pointless to get all sad and embarrassed about a missing arm. Who cares? If that’s actually why she waited, she’s kinda stupid.”
Index. Don’t talk like that.
“What? Holding the team—and thus, you—back just because of a little discomfort at a topic is a pretty horrible thing to do. If she’s willing to do something that horrible to satisfy an objectively incorrect emotion, then she’s got no self-control, and is, thus, stupid.”
I…I don’t even know how to respond to that. She’s perfectly fine not wanting to remind herself of something thing like that. Just let me talk with her for a moment and answer her question. And don’t talk about her like that again. I mean it.
“Are you okay?” Erani asked, looking at me with a concerned face. I’d gotten pretty good at making out her expressions through Distortion Strike by now, so I was pretty sure that was what she was looking at me with. “You look upset.”
“Uh, yeah, it’s okay,” I said, not wanting to tell her what Index had said about her. “Just bad news, I guess. Well, assuming you’re asking about an Upgrade called Double Firebolt? Index said it wouldn’t work with, um, your current situation.”
Her face visibly fell. “Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll take the other option then.”
“Was that your first pick?”
“Well, yeah, probably. I guess I hadn’t entirely decided on what my choice would be, but it was what I was leaning toward. B-but it’s alright; the other choice is still a very decent increase to my effectiveness as a fighter, so there shouldn’t be any issues. And Double would cause some issues anyway in terms of finding time to practice it, so maybe things are better this way. I guess—”
“Do you really feel that way?” I asked, interrupting her.
“What?”
“Do you actually think it’s better to be locked out of picking Double Firebolt?”
“Well, maybe. I’m not sure. But it’s not worth thinking about now, is it? And I certainly don’t want to make myself feel worse about not being able to have it, so…I may as well try to think of things in terms of positives, right?”
I shook my head. “I don’t agree at all. If you always convince yourself that things are okay the way they are, you’ll never have the motivation to make them better.”
“This isn’t a situation you can make better, though. Good enough is okay, sometimes.”
“See? You’ve already lost the motivation. Let me see…what about a wand or staff? Those can be enchanted to serve as extensions of your limbs for Spellcasting purposes, right?”
“Yes, but this Upgrade specifically requires your hands. It’s known among Magic-Types that if you’re planning on taking it, you don’t want to invest in something like that specifically because it can’t function with them.”
“What about a prosthetic, then? We were already planning on trying to find a way to make one for you.”
“You were planning on that. I’m not convinced it’ll ever happen, plus I don’t even know if it’d work anyway.”
Index?
“Uh, depending on how the item is Enchanted, it could effectively serve as a body augmentation instead of a tool, such that…Yeah. Yeah, you could make it work. It’d most likely make things trickier for whatever poor Enchanter you get to make this thing for you, but it’s possible with the piece of example tech you have with you.”
“Index says it’s possible,” I said simply.
Erani sighed. “So, what? You want me to take the Upgrade in the hopes that it’d maybe end up working out?”
“I’m not saying I want you to do anything. But if you’re going to make a concession that’s going to make you unhappy for the rest of your life when you aren’t being forced into making it…I’m at least gonna advise you to reconsider.”
“You’re overexaggerating.”
“Maybe you’re underexaggerating.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are you just being intentionally difficult?”
I leaned back against the railing. “Okay, maybe a little bit. But I’m also being serious. How can you be so flippant about this stuff? Aren’t you always the one saying you need to be more careful? Do more research? More preparation? Haven’t you told me you do all that because you don’t want to regret your decisions? I don’t see how you can decide to take this Upgrade knowing that you might be fucking yourself over with it.”
“There’s no time you can ever make a decision like this without at least a little bit of doubt. What you can do is mitigate risk. I’d much rather be slightly disappointed one hundred percent of the time than be happy half the time and absolutely miserable the other half.”
I frowned. “That sounds completely turned around. Wouldn’t you just be hopeless in that first scenario? Sure, don’t take unnecessary risks, but you’ve gotta take some. Hells, most of the decisions you make should be risks.”
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“If most of the decisions you make are risks, you’re bound to fail sometime.”
“Yeah, and then you just take more risks until you’re not in trouble anymore.”
Erani stared at me. “You sound like someone who just got themself into massive gambling debt and is now trying to convince themself that if they just gamble more then they can fix it all.”
“Okay, okay, that was partially just me being difficult again. But speaking of, I should definitely go and gamble sometime, with my Talent. Anyway that’s beside the point. The idea is, like…Sure, in your scenario, taking a risk and failing is a big hit. Because you haven’t taken any risks before. You’re not used to it, and you’re in a position where a loss would really suck. But if you take a chance on ten separate things and only one of them falls through, then who cares, right? Those other nine went well enough that it doesn’t matter. Or, hells, reverse it. You take risks on ten different things, and sure, nine of them went belly-up and it was all a waste of time and effort, but if just one went well, that can be enough to set you up for life. And I get that I’m being really general with the way I’m speaking, but you get the overall idea, right? You have to take some risks at some point in your life, so set yourself up enough that it doesn’t matter if it fails miserably.”
Erani just sighed. “I suppose I understand your perspective. Being an adventurer carries a lot of risk with it in the first place, so I would even say I agree, on some level. But life isn’t the way you seem to think it is. Sure, you probably see and hear all of these stories from successful people, saying ‘Yes, yes, I got to the point I’m at because I took a risk and it paid off, so my advice to you is to take more risks.’ And to them, of course you should live life on the edge, and do crazy stuff, and chase every insane dream you can think up, because they took a gamble and won big. But I’m sure that if you walk up to a few beggars and ask them what not to do, they’ll tell you they got into their position doing the exact same thing. They’ll tell you ‘Don’t take risks, don’t live dangerously, don’t gamble what you have on a childish dream.’ Looking only at the survivors will carry an inherent bias with it.”
“I think there’s more difference between the successful and the unsuccessful than just pure luck. Sure, there’s an element of luck to it, but…Imagine you have the ability to bet everything you have on a single coin flip. Heads will double your money, tails will lose it all. Only, this coin is weighted in your favor. It’s got a sixty percent chance of heads, not fifty. So then, it’s technically a good idea to flip the coin, right?”
“Mathematically, sure. But practically—”
“Right. It’s simply not worth risking everything you have on the chance to maybe increase your means, even if the odds are in your favor. I agree with you on that. But then, imagine you have the chance to flip that coin a thousand times, and then take the average of all the results and that’s your result. If the majority were heads, then you win. And since you’ve got it just barely rigged in your favor, doing it enough times will basically guarantee an overall win for you. So I feel like the difference between these people is that they’ve got just tiny differences in their chances. Even if one person does two percent better than average, or someone else does just two percent worse—things that are completely unnoticeable in daily life—that’s absolutely massive when you’re taking a person’s whole life into account. That’s a lot of repeated coin flips.”
“But then you’re just gambling on something else then, right? You’re betting that you’re one of the people with the odds weighted in their favor.”
“Well, how do you feel? You’re the one who's lived your whole life. You’ve got a record of every single one of your coin flips. Do you think you’ve got enough merit to come out on top more often than not?”
She pursed her lips, clearly unsure of how to respond.
“I’ll tell you what,” I said, “I’m gonna go ahead and give you my own vote of confidence. If you take this Upgrade, even if it’s got all these caveats, I think you can make it work. And if it’s truly better than the alternatives—or even if you just think you mesh more with the fighting style that comes along with it—then I think it’s worth taking that risk for the sake of yourself. We’ve got a little time, and we’ve got some resources. If you waste it all acting as though we have nothing, then once we’re in trouble again, you’ll have really wished you acted differently back when you were swimming in opportunities. When there’s a chance for greatness in front of you, you’ve gotta at least reach for it.”
Erani closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll just wait to make the decision. We can see how things pan out with this whole ‘making me a new limb’ thing.”
I nodded. “I’ll be by your side either way you go. Just don’t want to see you do something you’ll end up regretting.”
“Believe me. If you can actually manage to pull off acquiring an Enchanted prosthetic in the middle of an Enchanter drought, I’ll be too happy about that to be disappointed about some random slightly suboptimal Spell Upgrade decision.”
We sat in silence for some time, simply feeling the soft bumps of the sand sinking beneath the wheels of the carriage we sat in. But it didn’t take long for that silence to be broken.
“Excuse me,” a voice came from my side. I looked over and saw one of the guards, a man with a scraggly beard, having approached us from the back of the cart, walking along from behind. “I’ve been trained to be a poor listener when it comes to private conversations held in these carriages, and I won’t even pretend to have understood half of what you two were talking about. However, I still couldn’t help but overhear a few words, and it sounds like you’re trying to get some sort of Enchanted prosthetic limb made?”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “That’s kind of one of the reasons we came here. All of the Enchanters were called to the capital for military stuff because of the Demons’ invasion, right? If you happen to know any experienced, high-Level Enchanters in town looking for work, that’d be perfect.”
“No, no, I was coming to tell you the exact opposite. Sure, there’re plenty of Enchanters in the capital, but they’re not about to be accepting deals with randoms. They’re all bogged down with official empire work, and most of the important ones are even kept in walled-off properties so they can focus.”
“What, like prisoners?”
He just shrugged. “All I know is they’re not available.”
“Well, shit.” I looked over to Erani and saw the unbearable sight of dejected eyes. “Is there anything else possible?”
“If you signed up for military service I’m sure they’d outfit you with some gear. Other than that, I dunno. Go to the Koinkar Kingdom? I hear they’ve got plenty of Enchanters.”
“Yeah, I don’t think either of those options are entirely possible,” I said with a sigh.
“Hey, not every military job is all guts and glory. Plenty of Magic-Types get holed up in bunkers somewhere casting healing Spells and such.”
“No, it’s nothing like that. I just don’t really want to be tied down doing whatever the empire tells me to do. Sounds like a waste of time and energy. Besides, we have places we need to be, and getting moved around as part of an army contingent would obviously get in the way of plans.”
“I guess I get what you mean. I definitely prefer doing escort jobs. Lets me get by without fighting, and I get to see my family on my off-days. And I’m definitely not strong enough to take up one of those special recruitment programs to try and get treatment like that from the military. Maybe you could join my employer’s contingent,” he nodded to the woman driving the carriage. “She pays well enough that you could probably get the money to buy some Enchantments once the whole Demon thing blows over and demand settles down again.”
“Wait, what was that?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, she’s got a whole group of trusted people that she normally calls on for escort stuff, so—”
“No, what did you say about a ‘special recruitment program?’ What’s that?”
“That? I honestly don’t know much, myself. But apparently it’s Emperor Etrin’s way of trying to incentivise higher-Level Classers to actually sign up. Military doesn’t really attract people who’ve already got power, y’know, just those who’re weak and want to get stronger. So he set up some sort of competition where the best of the best get to come on as sort of contractors, doing government work without signing their lives away. But, I mean, you’ve gotta be really powerful to perform well in those things. I even know some silver-plates who got thrown out in the first round of eliminations for one of them.”
I frowned. “How do they work? Do they just ask you for your Level, or ask you to take an aptitude test, or what?”
“Again, I don’t know the specifics. But ever since the empire got afraid of these Demons, they’ve been rushing to hold these contest things back to back to back. And once you’re out of one, you’re disqualified from any future ones. They don’t want sore losers mucking up the ranks, or something. But I’m sure they’re getting full up on soldiers by now; I doubt they’ll need to do desperate stuff like that much longer.”
“And whoever wins one of these contests, they get the full benefits of the empire’s resources? Gear, Enchantments, everything? And they don’t necessarily need to follow a bunch of orders?”
“You really like asking questions I don’t know the answer to. I’m not totally sure, just going off of what I remember hearing about this stuff when I was in town last week. If you want to know more, go talk to one of the organizers or recruiters or whatever once you get into town.”
“I might just do that.”
I looked over at Erani, who was staring at me as though she thought I was about to say ‘I told you so.’ I wasn’t going to say anything like that, however; I hadn’t been proven right yet. All I knew was that there was a chance.
But a chance was all I needed.
“So,” I said to her, “you wanna take a risk?”