CHAPTER THREE: THE COST OF ASKING QUESTIONS
Two weeks passed.
In real life: school, work, instant noodles, the particular grind of being seventeen with no buffer between yourself and consequences. My shift supervisor at the grocery store had started scheduling me fewer hours because I'd asked once — once — if I could swap a Tuesday for a Thursday to make a school exam. He hadn't said anything about it directly. He'd just quietly reduced my Tuesday shifts by half. That's how those conversations go when you're the one who needs the job more than they need you.
In Aethoria: I killed rats, then wolves, then something the game called a Thornback Boar which was exactly as unpleasant as the name suggested. I ran deliveries and gathered materials and did the kind of low-level work that experienced players didn't bother with because the coin-per-hour wasn't worth their time. It was worth mine.
By the end of two weeks I had leveled up three times and earned just over four thousand Void Coins.
Four thousand Void Coins was about eight dollars and twenty cents.
Eight dollars and twenty cents was two days of instant noodles and a new pair of socks. It was not nothing. I'd stopped thinking of it as nothing.
---
Level 4 meant I'd had three opportunities to assign attribute points — one per level. I'd put all three into Perception. People who played games normally, I was learning, usually split points across several attributes early on, building toward a specific build type. Warriors pumped Force and Vitality. Mages went hard into Resonance. Agility builds were for players who knew what they were doing and had the mechanical skill to justify it.
I didn't have a build. I had a suspicion.
The suspicion was this: in a world where I could barely see threats coming before they hit me, where I'd been pickpocketed in a crowd and surprised by rats coming around grain sacks and nearly walked into a PvP ambush near the north gate, the most expensive mistake I kept making was not seeing things in time. Not the actual combat — once I could see what was happening, I could usually figure something out. It was the moment before combat, the moment where I was already at a disadvantage because I hadn't noticed fast enough.
Perception, at Level 4, had started doing something interesting. I began noticing things at the edge of my awareness — a shift in a shadow before someone stepped out of it, the slight change in ambient sound when a mob was near. Small things. But small things were the difference between choosing to fight and being forced to.
Wind Pulse was still Level 1. I had used it hundreds of times.
I'd stopped worrying about the level. I was too busy thinking about what it could do.
---
On the fifteenth day I discovered the Merchant's Quarter.
I'd been avoiding it. Markets meant crowds and crowds meant pickpockets, and I'd lost coins twice more in the two weeks since that first time — once in the market district and once near the auction house, which I now understood was a hunting ground for low-level theft specialists who camped near high-traffic areas and preyed on players distracted by item windows.
But I needed better equipment. My chipped starter sword had survived three levels through sheer stubbornness and the fact that I never fought anything I hadn't already chosen to fight, but it was starting to fail me. The damage difference between it and even a basic iron sword was significant enough that I'd started tracking how many extra hits each fight was costing me, and the math was annoying.
The Merchant's Quarter in Varnholt was a covered arcade — a long passage with stalls on both sides, the roof a mix of stone arches, glass panels, and one section of corrugated chrome that had clearly been added later by someone who didn't care about aesthetics. Players and NPCs moved through it in a constant stream. The noise was a physical thing: haggling, auction calls, the clang of a blacksmith's stall two units down, someone arguing loudly about a trade that had apparently gone wrong.
I moved carefully, keeping to the right side, watching my coin count.
The iron swords were priced between 300 and 600 Void Coins depending on the seller. I had 4,100. The 300-coin ones were players who'd found them as drops and just wanted to move them quickly. The 600-coin ones were player blacksmiths who'd actually crafted them and were charging for the quality.
I was examining one of the cheaper ones — running my thumb along the edge the way I'd seen people do without entirely understanding why — when someone stopped beside me.
"You're checking the wrong thing," they said.
I looked up.
The speaker was a girl, about my age, with the slightly washed-out quality of a low-bandwidth connection — her avatar's edges were crisp but the textures flickered faintly if I looked directly at them, the way a streaming video stutters when the internet is struggling. She was wearing starter-grade cloth armor with a few pieces that looked hand-modified — a sleeve reinforced with what appeared to be wrapped cord, boots with extra straps that weren't part of the original design.
She was looking at the sword in my hand with a critical expression.
"The edge matters less than the balance," she said. "At your level, weapon speed is more useful than raw damage. You swing a heavy sword slowly, you miss. You miss, you take damage. You take enough damage, you die and walk back. A lighter sword that actually connects is worth more than a heavier one that looks better."
I looked at the sword. Then at her. "How do you know I'm struggling with missing?"
"You're level four with a starter sword. Everyone at level four with a starter sword is struggling with something." She tilted her head. "Also you just ran your thumb along the edge like you were checking sharpness, which doesn't tell you anything useful. Sharp swords don't stay sharp in this game — edge quality is a visual thing, not a functional one. It resets after every combat. What doesn't reset is the base weight distribution. That's what determines swing speed."
I looked at the sword again. "How do you check weight distribution?"
"Open the item detail window. Not the preview — the full detail. There's a balance rating tucked under the secondary stats. Most players ignore it."
I opened the full detail window for the first time. There it was — *Balance Rating: 62.* I had no idea what that meant relative to other swords.
"What's a good balance rating?"
"Depends on your build. For someone who looks like they're not committing to a straight damage build—" she glanced at my stats in the way players can when they're partied, and then caught herself. "Sorry. I didn't mean to look at your sheet."
"It's fine." I hadn't partied with her. In Aethoria, stats were private unless shared. The fact that she'd glanced at where my sheet would be and then stopped herself meant she was used to having access to people's stats — probably a support player, used to partying. "I'm not in a build," I said. "I don't know what I'm building toward yet."
She seemed to find this more interesting than concerning. "Okay. Then for a flexible playstyle, you want balance rating above 70. Anything lower and the sword is fighting your movements instead of supporting them. That 300-coin one you're holding is 62. It's cheap because it hits harder but swings like a door." She reached past me and lifted one from a different rack — slightly shorter, thinner blade, price tag of 380 coins. "This one is 78. Better."
I looked at the price difference. Eighty coins.
"Also," she added, "that merchant two stalls down sells the same model for 340. He just prices lower because he's trying to build reputation."
I looked two stalls down. She was right.
"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.
She shrugged, but it wasn't a dismissive shrug. It was the shrug of someone who had thought about the question before and arrived at an answer they were comfortable with. "Because someone told me once, when I started. And I remember what it felt like to not know things that everyone else seemed to just know." She paused. "Also you looked like you were about to spend 300 coins on a sword that was going to make your life harder."
I bought the 340-coin sword two stalls down. Balance rating 78. The weight of it in my hand was immediately, noticeably different from the chipped starter blade — it moved when I moved, rather than slightly after.
When I looked back to thank her she was already gone, absorbed into the crowd.
---
I saw her again three hours later.
She was at the edge of the market district, sitting on a low wall with a battered notebook in her lap — actual paper, actual pen, which was unusual enough in the game world that I noticed it — writing something with focused attention. Her avatar's connection flicker was more noticeable here, away from the crowd. Without other people around her to provide visual context, she looked slightly less solid than the world she was sitting in.
I stopped. "Low-bandwidth connection?"
She looked up without startling, as if she'd already heard me coming — or maybe she just wasn't the startling type. "School terminal," she said. "I log in during lunch break and after school. The connection's shared with the whole building."
"Notebook," I said, nodding at the paper.
"Game doesn't let me take screenshots with a shared terminal. Too many restrictions on the connection tier. So I write things down." She held it up briefly. I caught a glimpse of densely written notes — numbers, diagrams, what looked like maps. "Item prices. Spawn timers. Mob movement patterns. Drop rates." She lowered it again. "Information is the one thing in this game that doesn't cost coins to gather."
I sat on the wall nearby, leaving enough distance to not be presumptuous about it. "You study the game."
"I study everything I can access," she said. "The game is just — available to me. Barely, but available."
There was something in the way she said it that I understood without needing it explained. Available barely was still available. You worked with what you had.
"I'm Kael," I said.
"Sora." She glanced at my new sword. "Better."
"78 balance rating."
The corner of her mouth moved in a way that might have been a smile. "You checked."
"You told me to."
She looked back at her notebook. I thought that was probably the end of the conversation, but after a moment she said, "You're using Wind affinity."
"Yes."
"Offensively?"
"Barely. Wind Pulse doesn't do much damage."
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't." She turned a page in her notebook and I caught a glimpse of what was written at the top: *Wind Affinity — Observed Uses.* Below it was a list. I couldn't read most of it before she tilted the page away, but I saw enough to understand she'd been watching other Wind affinity players and taking notes.
"How many Wind players have you observed?" I asked.
"Eleven, so far." She paused. "They all use it the same way. Direct casts. Point and shoot. Some of them manage decent damage at higher levels when they get into chain-cast territory, but early game they mostly treat it as a weakness they're stuck with." She looked at me sideways. "I watched you in the warehouse district yesterday."
I looked at her.
"Not following you," she said, without particular defensiveness, just correcting the record. "I was timing rat respawn rates for my notes. You happened to be clearing the warehouse. I watched because I was curious." She held my gaze steadily. "You used Wind Pulse to move the rats, not to damage them."
"Yes."
"None of the other eleven did that."
I didn't know what to say to that, so I didn't say anything.
"The idea of using your own magic to redirect enemy movement while repositioning yourself," she continued, "is — I've been trying to find a precedent for it in the forums and patch notes, and I can't. Which is interesting." She seemed to be choosing her next words carefully. "The game has a system. For skills. Where if you do something original enough, repeatedly enough, it becomes—"
"The Void Echo System," I said.
She looked at me with visible surprise. "You know about it?"
"I read the terms of service."
A pause. "The full terms of service?"
"I had time." Three nights ago, after a session, unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling. The terms of service for Infinite Realm Online were forty-seven pages long. Most players accepted them without reading. I had read them because I had a habit — born of necessity — of understanding exactly what I'd agreed to before I found out the hard way. "Section twelve," I said. "The Void Recognition Clause. The game system monitors player behavior for emergent techniques that qualify as distinct skills, and upon recognition, formalizes them with bonus effects."
Sora was staring at me with an expression I couldn't entirely read. "You're level four," she said finally.
"Yes."
"With a school terminal and a chipped sword two weeks ago."
"Starter sword," I corrected. "It's gone now."
She looked at her notebook. Then at me. Then back at her notebook with the expression of someone reorganizing something in their head.
"What affinity do you have?" I asked.
"Water. Support branch." She said it without apology, which I respected. Support builds were notoriously undervalued in Aethoria's early game — the benefits didn't scale visibly until mid-game, and most players didn't want to invest in someone who made *them* better rather than themselves. "I'm building toward a healing specialization. Long-term."
"That sounds useful."
"Not to most people. Not yet." She closed the notebook. "Most players at this stage want someone who can deal damage or take hits. A healer is an investment. They want to be the ones who benefit, not make an investment."
"I'd party with a healer," I said.
She looked at me.
"I die a lot," I said honestly. "Not as much as I used to, but still. The respawn walk is the part that bothers me — losing the time more than anything. Someone who could keep me alive longer would be worth more to me than someone who hits harder."
Something shifted in her expression — not dramatically, just a small adjustment, like something that had been slightly out of place settling into the right position.
"I'll think about it," she said.
---
I ran three more quests that afternoon, and for the first time I cleared all of them without dying.
The new sword was part of it. But the larger part was that I'd been thinking about what Sora had said about the other eleven Wind players — how they all used Wind Pulse the same way, direct and attacking, and got the same mediocre results. I'd been using it differently by accident. But accident wasn't enough. If I was going to be different, I needed to be different *deliberately.*
On the last quest — clearing a storage cellar of a different infestation, this time large insects rather than rats — I tried something I hadn't planned.
The insects moved in a group. Clustered, swarming. My sword was effective one-on-one but the moment more than three of them came at me simultaneously I started taking damage faster than I could deal it. I stepped back against the wall, bought myself a half-second of space, and cast Wind Pulse — not at any single insect, but at the ground in front of the group.
The burst of air pressure hit the stone floor and expanded outward in a shallow cone. The insects nearest to it scattered — not far, but enough. The cluster broke. For three seconds they were disorganized, bouncing off each other and the walls, and in those three seconds I moved through them and took out the two largest ones in the center before the group reformed.
The remaining insects were easier.
I stood in the quiet cellar afterward and turned the action over in my head. I'd used Wind Pulse against the ground to create scatter. Not a directional push — a dispersal. The angle of impact had mattered. The surface had mattered.
Wind isn't a force. It's a *shape.* It takes the shape of whatever it encounters.
I kept thinking about that on the walk back to the quest giver.
---
That night — real night, sitting on my bed in my actual room — I got a message on the game's messenger system.
I'd given Sora my contact details before she'd left, more out of habit than expectation. Players exchanged contacts constantly in Aethoria for trading and party coordination purposes. I hadn't expected her to use it the same day.
The message said:
*Checked the Void Recognition documentation more carefully. Section 12, paragraph 4. There's a note about prerequisite conditions for skill recognition. It mentions 'conceptual understanding' as a weighted factor — heavier than repetition. Most players and even most guides focus on the repetition. The understanding part gets skipped.*
*I think you're approaching it right. For what it's worth.*
I read it twice.
Then I typed back: *How do you have access to documentation most players skip?*
Her reply came after a few minutes: *I have a lot of lunch breaks and a bad internet connection. I read slowly but I read everything.*
I thought about that for a moment. Then: *What do you get out of taking notes on other players?*
Longer pause this time.
*Understanding the game. Actually understanding it, not just playing it. Most people are in too much of a hurry to notice how things actually work.*
I looked at the message for a while.
*I know that feeling,* I typed.
She didn't reply after that, but I hadn't expected her to. Some things don't need a response. They just need to be said and received.
I lay back on my bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about wind taking the shape of whatever it encounters, and about a girl with a school terminal and a paper notebook who read everything slowly and remembered all of it.
The water stain on the ceiling hadn't changed. The room was still small and cold.
But I was thinking about things that were bigger than the room.
That was different.
That was new.
---
*End of Chapter Three*
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