Of course he was cursed. Why wouldn’t he be? It really would be his luck to get magic – to finally get to live a legitimately interesting life – and he’d end up cursed out of it. An apparently fast-acting fatal curse, too. Jay’d been here twenty minutes at the most and it’d already ticked down his health once.

  How fast did he regenerate those points? The summary sheet hadn’t said. How quickly did the curse take them from him? The notification hadn’t said. How did the health points actually relate to his ability to stay alive? Nothing had even mentioned it. Maybe he’d just keel over the moment it hit zero or implode like some Pac-man knock off the moment he touched anything.

  The wind blew again, and this time the chill it brought registered, moving him to action. He’d put something under his foot, right? Jay bent down and picked it back up, looking into the swirling golden depths again. It was a statement of how chaotic the last dozen or so minutes had been that he hadn’t been able to keep it in mind. Jay fervently hoped that that level of activity wasn’t going to be frequent.

  The ball was still glittery and misty inside, but the turbulent movement seemed to have increased and some of the flecks had turned black. There was only really one thing that had changed since the orb had materialized initially, so Jay guessed it was responding to the Class Curse setting in. Was this a cure of some kind? Something to help?

  He really hoped so. He also really hoped he would be able to break it, as much of a shame as it would be to break something that pretty-looking.. The muddy ground made stepping on it not a guarantee, but that was what the description said. As if to prove that those were the words, the box with the description in it reappeared. Annoying, Jay thought, but at least he had as close to absolute confirmation as was possible. Interestingly, his senses didn’t abandon him when it came up this time. Maybe that was only something that happened the first time he got each individual box?

  The small box that listed his health darkened into full visibility again, ticking down another digit. A reminder to get on with breaking the orb. A very effective one. Jay dropped the golden sphere on the ground and drove his heel into it. To his relief, it shattered completely the moment his foot touched it, and a new box appeared, this one gold-text-on-black and so long as to be all-encompassing.

  Jay barely had to do a mental double take at some of the information that message had revealed before it vanished and was replaced by two more boxes.

  Jay reeled involuntarily as a pounding headache thundered into place, the condensed hatred and anger in the delivery of each of those Divine Command upgrades flooding through him and then draining just as fast. And suddenly he could feel things around him, in the ground mostly, little places where there were spots of emptiness waiting to be filled. That didn’t make any sense, Jay knew it didn’t make any sense, but there weren’t better words for it.

  What he did know was that it was from whatever the Class Evolution had been. Whatever it had done. Ability suite bolstered? New resource? What exactly had it done to him and why was he so certain it was all because of that and not just something he hadn’t noticed before?

  Jay considered, for a brief second that probably wasn’t as brief as it should have been, screaming at the sky in an attempt to get whoever that had been to smite him. Clearly whatever it – she? Hadn’t it referenced being a she at some point? – was, it was some deity, or at least a very convincing imitation of one. Surely anything that powerful could smite him as easily as he could smack a particularly fat fly out of the air.

  The rumble of actual thunder snapped him out of that line of thought. Hadn’t the smell of rain been fading before? Had he been stuck in that absurdly long text crawl of a System box for so long a different rainstorm was coming in? He looked up at the sky and immediately threw that thought out of the window.

  Normal clouds didn’t cluster and swirl directly above his head. Normal clouds weren’t gold-flecked expanses of a deep, thick blackness. Normal clouds didn’t have soundless bolts of green lightning rippling across them in rings.

  Gold and black. The same colors as that message. Was that what was causing this? Was this apocalyptic-looking storm a consequence of him receiving the Divine Command? And what did green mean, if it was important enough to be included in whatever all of that was?

  The hair on Jay’s arms rose with a tingle and he knew just enough to look up at the storm above. His eyes burned as he looked at the rings of lightning condensing into a single disc directly above him, thick and crackling, their shared luminance bleaching the green until the disc was only barely tinged green at the edges. The center – the part directly above Jay, the part that was burning his eyes so severely but held his attention so captive he didn’t look away – was a harsh white.

  The ring descended, wreathing Jay in that harsh almost-white green, and he reflexively flinched, breaking the grip it had had on him. Before he’d managed to blink the flash-blindness out of his eyes, the lowering ring became a hollow cone, gripping him in an entirely different way. The bottom edge stayed just above the muddy ground, strands of electricity arcing off and sinking into the thin white sticks that were barely poking up above the mud.

  Or at least he had thought they were sticks. They definitely wouldn’t have looked out of place coming from the pale trees he’d gotten glimpses of. But once the ones that the lightning touched began wriggling, some even rising up, and Jay got a look at the smaller offshoots of white coming off the main length, the illusion was broken. They weren’t sticks. They weren’t wood.

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  They were bone. Spines, honestly, long and thin and – if archeology shows had taught Jay one thing – definitely not human. The twitching bones settled into a sinuous curve before they stopped moving, one end raised above the rest as if to look at him despite the lack of a skull attached. Jay’s eyes darted around, taking it in as the spines – now undeniably serpentine – did the same on all sides, as if they were hemming him in, like he had anywhere that he could actually run to that wouldn’t just end with him getting zapped with all of the power the cone of lightning had.

  But there was nowhere to go. The vortex of lightning had him trapped on all sides and the more it closed around him, the more true that became. There were five feet of space on either side of him. Then four. Then two, and suddenly Jay could see that it was more textured than just a single funnel of electricity. The original rings that had formed it were still there, intertwined and layered over and through and between each other. Then there was one foot between his arms and the wall of lightning, and it arced as if reaching out to him. Then there were inches.

  Then there was no gap and the lightning was in him, pouring in through whatever medium it could, including stabbing in through his eyes and crawling into his mouth. It seared through Jay, coursing deeper into his body from everywhere the funnel had made contact before scorching back outwards. It felt like it was scouring him of something, but he couldn’t put a name to what specifically was being burnt out.

  Slowly – so slowly Jay almost thought he was imagining it – the intensity began to decline. The lightning consolidated into something else that was almost-but-not-quite a liquid that felt like it was being absorbed into his bones, but his vision didn’t clear up at all. If anything, the green light was growing more concrete, and he’d already been pretty confident about having to blink spots out of his eyes for days.

  He realized what it meant barely a second before his guess was proven accurate. A window formed, green this time but with the seemingly standard black text. It wasn’t quite as harsh as the light itself, thankfully, but it was still an uncomfortable almost-neon green.

  There wasn’t an option to decline.

  Jay was getting very tired of not having a choice in the things that were happening to him. He was equally tired of not knowing what things were. Was there some special significance attached to his family? How could there be when he wasn’t even in the same world he was born in?

  Then the word clicked into place with the context of magic and he realized what it really meant. Something about this new resource pool didn’t fit with the fact that he was human. Jay guessed that’s why there was no way to decline the change. It’d probably kill him if he was able to and did. Or maybe it’d settle for giving him another curse. He hit accept and mentally prayed to whoever had given him the Command that his skin wouldn’t turn the same color as the lightning or the message box.

  It didn’t, happily, and the change also didn’t hurt for once. Jay watched as his hands darkened as if he was getting the most realistic instant tan ever, then watched further as gold began to color his fingernails and run in trails up the back of his hand. The same effects were probably spreading across his body, but he didn’t exactly have much in the way of visibility past the wrist.

  Who cared? He didn’t hurt. The storm and its lightning funnel were both gone. He might not be entirely human anymore, but he wasn’t some goblin. He just had neat fingernails.

  The small box with his health value in it phased back to full opacity as it ticked down again.

  It was a good reminder that he had things to do and Jay definitely wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack about his own imminent mortality from it now that the shiny lights had vanished. No, absolutely not. He was better than that. He’d died once – why couldn’t he remember it? That felt like something he should remember easier than most other things – and there was no way doing it again would be too bad.

  But he had a path to solving it. He had a chance. He’d cling to it like a life preserver if he had to. He definitely needed a plan of some sort. Jay wished he had one of his notebooks, but it seemed like he’d have to do it all mentally.

  First things first: where was he? It was a swamp, he already knew that much, but he needed a landmark. Something that could point him towards a place with people, preferably, and all the better if whoever he found had invented the concept of a public library. And research.

  He picked a direction and started walking, idly pulling up his – what had the notification called it? – summary sheet to really see what this new world had in store for him.

  Five abilities wasn’t bad. He knew what most of them did already, and [Commune With Spirit] seemed self-explanatory. [Wither], though, could have been a few very different things, so he tapped on it.

  That was pretty good. He did the same with Omnilinguist and Reviled, hoping traits would expand the way the abilities had. They did, thankfully.

  That second one felt like valuable information if he was going to have a shot at undoing the Class Curse. More than a single city’s population hated him at such a deep level the System felt the need to note it. Jay had held a slight hope that the curse had been put into place by a small group, even if he knew it was unlikely, but if that many people despised him…

  It wasn’t a good picture. But at least he’d know the language when he finally found people. A small benefit, but Jay would take what he could get. He swiped the windows away and picked up the pace as best he could in the ankle-deep water and muck of the swamp.

  *

  Hours later, Jay cursed himself as he tripped on a tree root beneath the water for at least the third time and had to catch himself. He knew speeding back up had been a bad idea, but there hadn’t been any dry spots in a while and he definitely didn’t want to try to sleep in the swamp water. That sounded like a recipe for leeches, especially if he was remembering rightly that they were nocturnal.

  Also, there was something barely peeking up above the bare treetops. Something large. Something with sharp corners. Something that very clearly wasn’t a piece of nature. It was the first potentially man-made thing Jay had seen since Kalras’s office that wasn’t his own clothing.

  He didn’t know whether it was a building or not, but any sign of civilization was a good one compared to more of this swamp and its oddly frequent bone collections. Seriously, it was like he was moving through a shock-value-only horror movie. Regardless, he wanted – needed, even – to know what it was.

  He got there faster than he expected. The monolith of gray stone was only barely taller than the trees. The way things had been going, Jay had almost expected it to be really far away specifically to keep him from getting there easily.

  The monolith itself was standing perfectly on the edge of the nearest grass, once the swamp’s water had turned to mud and the mud had turned to actual stable ground. It had no distinguishing features, at least on the side facing the swamp, but giant slabs of stone didn’t put themselves upright. Jay was going to have to walk around it to see the other sides, but just the thought of moving again after he’d finally stopped made his leg muscles scream.

  He glanced up at the sky. It was almost completely dark now and, despite the occasional firefly, the darkness was more complete than he’d expected it to be. He didn’t even have a way to make fire to brighten things up. If there was something written on it like he suspected, he wouldn’t be able to read it.

  But it would still be there in the morning. Jay let himself slide to the ground at the foot of the monolith and could feel himself falling asleep the moment he was really sitting. Right as he dropped off, a final blue window appeared in his vision.

  That…was a nice bonus.

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