All The Skills

The thief sprinted across the flat, gray soil at normal human speeds. There wasn’t any sense he was using any sort of body modification.

Brixaby snorted in amusement. And even though Arthur was feeling completely lousy, he smiled too. He was halfway rooting for the thief, despite himself. He’d always had a soft spot for underdogs.

And it was clear that the man had less than no chance of getting away. Two of the Lightning Cats, including Jon, were fast on his heels. Unlike the thief, they had enhanced speeds. Jon pulled out in front as if he wasn’t wearing a good thirty extra pounds of chainmail armor.

He caught up with the man in no time flat, but just as Jon reached for him, something interesting happened.

The fleeing man… shifted his position in space. Somehow.

No, that wasn’t quite right. Arthur had a hard time understanding what he was seeing. It was as if for a moment, the man grew impossibly, illogically, irrationally flat. He was as tall as he’d been, and the same width. But there was… Nothing to him at all. Jon’s hand fell to his shoulder but had nothing to grip onto.

Jon fell forward, completely taken by surprise, and the man ran on. With his second stride, he popped out of his odd flat state and became normal again.

"What happened?" Brixaby asked. "Was that an illusion?"

"No…" Arthur drew out the word, because he was unsure, himself. "I think he shifted some aspect of himself. He had height and you could see him from side to side, but he just became flat." He shook his head. "I think he bent reality somehow or… Put himself into another reality?" He shook his head again.

Also, how anyone planned to catch him. Maybe something as extreme as hiding all of the mass in your body had a cool down.

But the thief pulled the same trick again and again whenever somebody caught up to him. They’d reach out for him, and suddenly there would be nothing to hold onto. The thief became thinner than the finest piece of silk. There was literally nothing to hold onto.

Despite everything, the thief was getting further and further away. Arthur was just starting to wonder if he should send Brixaby after the man and see if the man could dodge a stunning shout. So far no one had tried a ranged attack, but that would be the next step.

Then, to Arthur's surprise, one of Lopez’s men actually managed the trick. He was one of the few who rode a horse and he rode up beside the man while twirling a loop of rope over his head. He cast the rope out, and as he did it took on a white glow of a card power.

As the thief made himself thin, the air around him suddenly flexed. His condition reversed back to normalcy, and the rope settled over him, tightening over his arms and torso in an instant.

Brixaby rumbled in pleasure. "Nullification magic."

Arthur trusted his dragon’s judgment, considering that Brixaby’s natural magic was also nullification. He likely felt sympathy with the power in that lasso.

The thief yelped and tried to shrug the rope off, but the undersheriff dismounted his horse in a flash. With expertise, he twisted the thief up in loops. The thief soon found himself hogtied and tossed over the saddle with the horse being led back to the auction.

Everybody cheered and then was treated to a show as the man was scanned for cards he did not have in his registry.

"The heart deck is clear, but you have five cards in your anchor, and only registered two." Lopez tsked. "Give them over. All of them in your anchor tattoo."

"But I only took three," the man protested.

This caused a minor uproar in the crowd. It seemed most people assumed the man had tried to sneak away one card, or maybe some shards. Three extra cards got on people’s nerves.

Lopez was less than sympathetic. “You know the rules. You steal, you forfeit the whole shebang,” he said. “Don’t make us have to kill you for them. You know the city administration won’t care, and you’ll be dead even if they did.”

He flicked open a knife that had the etchings of runes engraved on it. The few runes Arthur identified from his enchanting book suggested that it was a knife made to cut through all types of personal shields. It was a nasty piece of work.

Arthur winced and resisted the urge to rub at his own painful card anchor tattoo. At least the thief had been fortunate enough — or smart enough — that he hadn’t put the stolen cards in his heart.

The thief whined a little bit about this not being fair, but he must have caught the looks of the people standing around. No one was on his side, and by some dark expressions, they wanted all of his cards.

Finally, he gave in, allowed himself to be untied, and sullenly removed five cards from his anchor.

Arthur hoped one had been the thinning card, but it seemed that one lived in his heart.

The others were very interesting, though, and quickly sent an uproar through the rest of the adventurers because three of them were body modification cards. One was an inner healing card powerful enough to reattach limbs.

Arthur was interested in an academic sort of way, but far more interested in the thief’s two non-body modification cards. One was a feather fall card which was useful for somebody who regularly rode a dragon. It would be like having his own personal safety device. The last card made his heart sink to his toes.

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Endless Grindstone

Utility

Rare

The wielder of this card will be granted the ability to pick up new crafting skills at a vastly accelerated rate, with the chance to learn the basics of a new skill by casual observation reduced to one in three. The wielder will be able to learn these and previous skills 50% faster.

This card was perfect for him. But he had spent all of his points. And by the way everybody was gathered around the body modification cards, no one would be outbidding him soon, freeing up those points again.

He was not the only one with this problem, and several yelled out to Sheriff Lopez to wipe all of the bids clean and restart the auction entirely.

“I wouldn’t have bid if I knew there was a body regenerative card on the line,” someone said.

“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have jumped first, and thought later,” a woman sneered at him, then went forward to the new bidding sheet and wrote down points on the healing card.

Lopez's expression was hard. “The rules were explained from the very start. In fact--" he would have said more but was drowned out by loud exclamations.

“That’s not fair!”

“I bid before we saw these cards!”

“This is a conspiracy!” a third person yelled, without basis. But Arthur understood the sentiment.

I wouldn’t have bid either, if I knew there was better coming. He thought in frustration, looking back at the card. Everybody was so focused on the body modifications that no one had given the skill card more than a glance. Maybe Claude would understand the value of something like this… Or perhaps not. Did his Kludging power fall under crafting?

Lopez had gone red in the face and raised his voice. “In fact,” he said again, “to ensure there will be no more surprise cards, I’m ordering another rescan of everybody in the auction.”

This quieted people down suspiciously fast, and a wave of angry grumbling went through the crowd.

Arthur suspected that the thin man hadn’t been the only one to keep extra cards while harvesting.

He didn’t care. He was hurting, and now he was angry he didn’t have a single point to put forward.

“I need that card,” he told Brixaby.

His dragon growled under his breath. “If not for you, this silent auction would not be possible. You ought to have been awarded above everybody else.”

That was a dangerous way of thinking, but Arthur didn’t correct him because he was feeling sourly put out. He’d quietly thought the same thing but kept it quiet for the sake of peace. Now he felt like he was being cheated out of the card that was meant for him.

On top of that, more than a few people glared at Arthur, as if he were at fault for Lopez’s hard-nosed decision.

Arthur was just sick of it. He wanted to go back to the city and get medical help for his card anchor tattoo. Then find a bed and sleep for a week.

But I’m not leaving without that card, he thought and nodded to himself. He tried to be moral, but he’d reached his limit.

A plan brewed up in his mind, and returning the angry glares with equal vengeance, he stepped up to be the first to be scanned for extra cards.

Brixaby, following his cue, was right behind him.

It was done quickly, and the undersheriff in charge of the scan nodded and recorded that neither Arthur nor his dragon had extra cards.

Seeing Arthur fall in line caused many other people to do the same. Arthur casually wandered back to where the cards were laid out, as if he was giving them an extra look. Still, no one seemed to notice, or care much about the grindstone card. Arthur suspected the crafting aspect turned people off.

Arthur mentally swapped out his classes which was an aspect of his Master of Skills card. He swapped out Cooking for Thief. It hurt, but not nearly as bad as it was about to.

He glanced at Brixaby who was watching him curiously, knowing that Arthur was up to something, but not sure what.

“Cover for me,” Arthur said.

Brixaby didn’t ask any questions, but subtly expanded his size, lifting wings to provide more of a screen between Arthur and any watching undersheriff.

Turning, Arthur kept an eye on the people being scanned, using his Acting skills to keep his face neutral, even though his heart beat hard, and his arm throbbed worse than ever from unconscious tension.

Meanwhile, the atmosphere among the rest of the adventurers was turning sour, with more people objecting to being scanned.

So, there wasn’t too much of a surprise when someone tried to pull a trick out of desperation.

“Hey! Those two are swapping cards between one another,” one man yelled, pointing. Off to the side, a man who had just been scanned was receiving two cards from a woman who was about to get in line. They were caught at the worst moment possible with the cards visible between their hands.

And suddenly the crowd had a target for their anger.

A cry went up of “Cheaters!” Even though Arthur suspected a good handful were the pot calling the kettle black.

The crowd surged forward, quick to apprehend the two — and to get a good look at the new cards that were about to be put up for auction.

The two didn’t even have a chance to try to escape before they were piled on. The sheriffs yelled out and rushed to restore order. For a few moments, it was a complete melee.

And Arthur knew it was his time to act.

He activated every stealth skill that he had, as well as concentrated on his thief skills. Anything he thought would help, and it was a lot of skills: Stealth, Silent Movement, Heightened Awareness, Camouflage, Evasion, Deception, Concealment, Acting, Sleight-of-Hand, and Pick-pocketing.

To say that it hurt was a mild understatement. Waves of pain flashed from his arm to his very heart. For a wild moment, he had the urge to take a cleaver and just chop the limb off. That would be a relief.

Even Brixaby grunted as if some of Arthur's soul-deep agony had reached out and touched him.

Arthur might’ve felt bad for it if he had any room in his mind for anything else. He had to clench his jaw to keep from screaming.

His Pain Resistance instantly reached level four. That didn’t take away the pain, but it gave him the extra edge he needed to work through it.

It was one of the hardest things he had ever done. Through watering eyes, Arthur took the two steps to the card. And under the cloak of all of his skills, he grabbed it.

He certainly couldn’t put it into his card anchor, and wouldn’t risk shoving it into his heart. If they rescanned him, they’d know what he’d been up to. There was only one thing Arthur could do with the card: It turned out there was a point where he was willing to bend his morals, and this was it.

This is going to hurt, he thought, though he wasn’t certain how he could possibly hurt any more than it did.

Arthur consumed the card.

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