I had a gander at the three options as I walked.

  Okay. So these were all coherent. Worryingly so.

  At a base level, all of them made sense. That, I suspected, was the point. Each one addressed a real limitation I had already run headfirst into, and each one promised a way to turn the earth itself into leverage rather than background scenery. The problem wasn’t identifying which was useful. It was figuring out which one would still matter after the novelty wore off.

  That alone was not enough to choose. The real question wasn’t which one was best now, but what choosing one would mean later. It was about whether this was a fork in the road or merely the first stone laid, and whether picking one would quietly bar the others, or if the system would allow me to pursue all three in time.

  I did not like irreversible decisions made without full information.

  So I asked Ceralis.

  The reply arrived without delay.

  That... helped.

  Not because it made the choice easier, but because it told me this wasn’t a question of who I would become, only what I would build first.

  Stone-Answered Guard was seductive in a very specific way. On paper, it rewarded competence: meet force with force, be precise, be disciplined, and the system would pay me back. The issue was that competence was not something I could assume under pressure. A ‘successful’ parry still meant being in the right place, at the right time, with the right angle, and not getting my arms torn off in the process. My dexterity and form wasn’t good enough. Building my foundation on something I couldn’t yet do reliably felt like asking the earth to catch me before I learned how to fall.

  Lithic Anchoring was worse. Immensely powerful in the abstract, catastrophically conditional in practice. Standing still for three seconds in a real fight was brave and unfortunately stupid. Too many things shoved, pulled, detonated, or redefined ‘ground’ altogether. I survived by moving, by staying just out of reach, by refusing to let anything get a clean line on me. Anchoring myself ran directly counter to that.

  Which left the first option.

  Subterranean Reserve didn’t care how well I parried. It didn’t demand I stand my ground or gamble on ideal conditions. It just... worked. More AP, always. That mattered.

  Still, the unease lingered. These weren’t skills. They were foundations. Picking wrong here didn’t mean a bad fight; it meant a bad future. And that future, inconveniently, was not one I controlled alone.

  Too much of my recent growth had been contingent on Anabeth. She was brilliant, unpredictable, and perpetually in motion, and I had no illusions about our paths being permanently aligned. People like her didn’t stay. They intersected, briefly and intensely, and then moved on.

  This meant my opportunities to meaningfully engage with these pathway-based boons were likely to be limited. I couldn’t assume ideal conditions or prolonged campaigns. I couldn’t plan around stability when my closest constant was someone defined by transience. Whatever I chose needed to justify itself immediately and without ceremony, because there was no guarantee I’d be given enough chances to make the wrong choice pay off later.

  I could feel the familiar itch of analysis crawling over me as I leaned against the shadowed wall, peering at the tiny display Ceralis spat out. The devil was in the details. The numbers mattered. I had to know exactly what each level would give me, not just the first taste at Lv.1.

  I tapped through the interface, scrolling the projected data with precise care. Subterranean Reserve, Stone-Answered Guard, Lithic Anchoring—every one had a breakdown of what growth would look like at each stage. It wasn’t vague, it wasn’t abstract; each level had a concrete AP increase, a cap, or a passive modifier.

  For Subterranean Reserve, it was simple and steady: +10 Max AP at Lv.1, and +4 more for every subsequent level. It was reliable and predictable, but once I looked at the other options, I realized it was far outscaled by the other skills.

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

  Stone-Answered Guard revealed the kind of raw potential that could explode if I ever managed to parry consistently, but the numbers screamed “conditional.” Lv.1 gave +1 AP per parry, overflow capped at +10, climbing steadily to +10 AP per parry with a +60 overflow at Lv.10. There was power here, but only if I could actually pull it off, and my parries were notoriously sloppy.

  Lithic Anchoring looked like a beast for careful, immobile builds: +1 AP per second for 3 seconds stationary at Lv.1, capping at 10, ramping all the way to +10 AP per second with a 100 AP cap at Lv.10. That was ridiculous output, but to leverage it, I’d have to actually stand still in combat, which was rarely an option with monsters like these, or with Anabeth running interference.

  I leaned closer to the projection. Ceralis’ interface didn’t just stop at Lv.10, but it allowed a glimpse beyond, a window into the next boon in the path. Subterranean Reserve, it seemed, wasn’t just a flat AP booster. Its progeny were designed to deepen the bond with the stone beneath my feet, to turn a simple foundation into a bulwark.

  I scrolled through the next tier of boons, and for the first time, the logic behind the system hit me in a way that was almost humorous. Stone-Answered Guard had started as purely defensive—gain AP for parries—but its follow-ups doubled down on that philosophy instead of abandoning it. Bedrock Bastion took the act of meeting force head-on and turned it into endurance, stability, and resistance to being moved at all.

  Funny, in a way that made me suspect whichever Saint had designed this was a sadist, but at least a consistent one.

  Then I looked at Lithic Anchoring’s next tier. That was when my chest tightened. Resonance. Real, raw, untapped resonance. My RES stat had been sitting at zero since the day I was born. But here, the boons weren’t just giving me AP—they were giving me the lifeblood I didn’t know I needed. Standing still, anchoring to the earth, drawing on the natural bedrock... every second I committed to it would feed my resonance. With RES, I could finally activate the dormant functions of my weapons. I could eventually start tapping into the kinds of spells the real magi took for granted, the ones I’d only ever observed from the sidelines.

  It was staggering to consider. Subterranean Reserve was reliable and safe, yes, but Lithic Anchoring was a literal key to growth in ways I hadn’t even dreamed of. Standing still in combat might be dangerous, but the earth itself seemed to hint that some risks had outsized rewards.

  I chewed on the logic. Subterranean Reserve would make me slightly stronger right away. Stone-Answered Guard might reward me if I learned to parry like a proper knight. But RES... resonance unlocked everything else. Did it matter if I could use Static Surge two more times? I reckoned not. That alone wouldn’t make me remarkable. But RES would let me become remarkable eventually.

  I picked Lithic Anchoring the exact moment I returned to the spot where I last hid my Aetheric Parasitic Resonance Detector. It was still there, behind the ragged cloth I’d half-heartedly draped across it. The little device looked almost smug in its stillness, as if it knew I’d been worrying over nothing. I brushed the cloth aside, grabbed it, then confirmed the final choice.

  Now I must hurry. At this rate, Anabeth would return before I did.

  But of course, the moment one earnestly wished to be quick, the world took it as a personal challenge.

  I heard a clinking sound.