The Understudy

Chapter 2: Three Options

The voice didn't come from the room.

It came from inside his own skull, flat and clean, like a recording played back in a room that had been emptied out years ago.

[The Ultimate Choice System — binding successful.]

[Rewards are granted upon completion of a choice.]

[Facing: Levi Hale's provocation. Make your selection.]

Warren didn't move.

He was still leaned back in his chair. Levi was still standing over him, chest going up and down, and the whole class was still holding its breath, and not one of them had heard a thing. The fan ticked. Somebody two rows back shifted a foot on the tile.

The text kept unfolding, in the dark where only he could look at it.

[Option A: Beg him to leave you alone.]

[Grants title: Coward. Minor increase to movement speed.]

[Option B: Ignore him. Settle it later.]

[+5 Strength.]

[Option C: Expose him for the paper tiger he is.]

[+10 Spirit.]

Warren's heart hit once, hard, and then went quiet again.

Attributes. Not skills — attributes. He'd sat through the senior orientation on this, the part where the Guild rep had put up the slide with the four bars and explained, in the tone of a man reading a will, that attributes could not be trained, could not be bought, and could not be pulled out of any dungeon. They came from items. Rare ones. Auction-house items, the kind that surface twice a year and get bid up past what his parents made in eighteen months. Every last point of them.

And he was unclassed. Even if he had the money, there was no version of this where the money went to him — it went to the four Awakened he could have outfitted with it instead, and every adult in the building would have made that trade in the time it took to blink.

Ten. Ten points of Spirit, sitting in a box that had opened inside his own skull, offered up for the price of saying one true sentence out loud.

Option A, he didn't even finish reading. A title that said coward on it, on the system's own record, permanently — for a couple of points of movement speed he had no use for, because unclassed didn't get to run from anything. There was nowhere for them to run to. He didn't need a box floating in his head to tell him that.

B was real. B was five points, no audience, no risk, take the hit and cash in later, and it would still be there tomorrow morning and nobody in this room would ever know he'd gotten anything. Five points. It was the sensible one.

C.

Levi was still standing there with his fists half-curled, waiting for Warren to be the one who broke first, which meant Levi had already cast the scene: Warren looks down, Warren mutters something, Warren quits, and the whole class walks out of here with the version where Levi Hale stood over the write-off and the write-off folded.

Warren read the line again.

Expose him for the paper tiger he is.

He'd had his own scores read out to him in a hallway yesterday by a woman who wouldn't meet his eyes. He'd watched Frankie go red in the face arguing with her, arguing for him, while nineteen other people stood around nodding and not one of them had walked down to the third floor. He'd known since last month, on the day the Awakening results went up, exactly what he was worth to this building and to everyone in it, and he had not been wrong about a single part of it.

He'd kept all of it flat and cold and shoved down past the ribs, the way you keep a thing you don't plan on showing anyone.

And now his own heartbeat was loud enough that he could feel it in his jaw, because there was a number on the table, and the number was his.

Warren's eyes came off the text, and without meaning anything by it — he hadn't decided anything yet, he hadn't moved, he hadn't said a word — his eyes landed on Levi. Steady. Almost curious.

Levi saw it. Whatever he'd expected to find on Warren's face, it wasn't that. His mouth pulled tight at the corners and his chin came up a degree.

Warren let it sit. All the anger he'd been carrying since the Awakening, banked and quiet for a month, and now there was somewhere to put it.