Chapter 6: Power Discovery
1490 Words
The morning after the Class Trial, Kael woke up and walked through a wall.
Not on purpose. He was reaching for his boots beside the bed, his mind still half-asleep, and his hand phased through the stone floor like it was water. He jerked back, heart pounding, and stared at his fingers. They were intact. Solid. But for a fraction of a second, they hadn't been.
"Brother," Ren mumbled from the other bed, eyes still closed, "if you're going to do weird Void things, at least wait until I've had breakfast."
"How did you know?"
"You shimmered. Like heat haze." Ren rolled over. "Also, the floor glowed purple for a second. Kind of hard to miss."
Kael looked at his hand again. The Void energy was there — a faint hum beneath his skin, barely perceptible. His new class was still settling in, still finding its balance. Like a muscle waking up after being asleep for too long.
He needed to practice.
The Academy's training yard was empty at dawn. Kael stood in the center of the sparring ring, alone, and activated [Void Step] for the first time with intent.
The skill description said five meters. He focused on a point five meters to his right — a wooden post wrapped in rope — and pushed.
The world glitched.
There was no other word for it. Reality stuttered, like a skipped frame in a film, and then he was standing beside the post. No movement. No transition. One moment here, one moment there. The air around him shimmered with faint purple particles — tiny fragments of something that wasn't quite light, wasn't quite matter.
He looked back at where he'd been standing. Five meters. Exactly.
The cooldown was ten seconds. He counted them off, then did it again. And again. Each time, the sensation was the same — a brief dislocation, a skip in reality, and then a new position. No momentum. No sound. Just absence, then presence.
By the tenth teleport, he understood the limits. Five meters was the range. Ten seconds was the cooldown. He couldn't teleport through solid objects — he'd tried the training hall wall and bounced off like it was rubber. But he could teleport through open space, around corners, and over gaps.
It wasn't combat power. Not yet. But it was mobility. And in a world where a single hit from a monster could kill you, mobility was survival.
[Probability Eye] was different.
Where [Void Step] was physical — a tangible shift in space — [Probability Eye] was perceptual. When activated, the world didn't change. But Kael's understanding of it did.
He turned it on and looked at the training yard.
Every surface, every object, every person was overlaid with numbers. The wooden posts had a 3% chance of structural failure within the next hour. The rope bindings had a 7% chance of fraying. The sparring dummies had a 0.2% chance of toppling in the current wind.
It was like seeing the world's underlying code — the probability matrix that governed everything.
He turned it toward Ren, who was walking across the yard with a bread roll in each hand.
Chance of tripping: 2.3%.
Chance of dropping bread: 8.1%.
Chance of being attacked by a bird: 0.01%.
"What are you staring at?" Ren asked.
"Your bread has an 8% chance of hitting the ground."
"It does not."
"It does. You're holding it wrong."
Ren looked at his bread, then at Kael, then at the sky. "Is this a Voidwalker thing? Because it's weird."
"It's a Probability Eye thing. I can see the chance of anything happening."
"Can you see the chance of me eating this bread in the next thirty seconds?"
Kael focused. "Ninety-four percent."
Ren shoved the entire roll into his mouth. "Ha. Beat the odds."
The real test came during the afternoon training session.
Dr. Vey had organized a group exercise — thirty students in the courtyard, running obstacle courses while other students fired practice projectiles at them. Rubber-tipped bolts from crossbows, designed to sting but not injure. Standard Academy training.
Kael was observing from the sideline, waiting for his turn. His [Probability Eye] was active — a habit now, like breathing. The world was layered with numbers, percentages, chances.
He noticed it when the numbers changed.
One of the crossbows on the far platform — a heavy model operated by a Level 4 student named Fen — had been behaving normally all morning. Every bolt fired at 2% injury chance, well within acceptable parameters.
Then, mid-session, Kael saw the number jump.
Chance of equipment malfunction: 12%.
He blinked. Focused. The crossbow's string was fraying. Not visibly — not yet — but the tension distribution was off. The Probability Eye could read stress patterns in materials the same way it read attack trajectories.
Chance of equipment malfunction: 15%.
Chance of bolt trajectory deviation: 23%.
Chance of serious injury to target: 0.1%.
Zero point one percent. Low. Negligible. The kind of number that no one would think twice about.
But Kael's PER read deeper. The 0.1% wasn't random. It was concentrated — aimed at a specific moment, a specific angle, a specific student. A girl named Wren, Level 3, running the obstacle course directly below Fen's platform. If the string snapped at the exact wrong moment, the bolt would deflect downward and strike her neck.
Zero point one percent. One in a thousand.
In a dungeon, one in a thousand was every day.
In a training yard, it was unacceptable.
"Fen!" Kael shouted across the courtyard. "Stop! Don't fire!"
Fen looked up, confused. His hand was already on the trigger.
"The string is fraying," Kael said. "If you fire now, there's a 0.1% chance the bolt deflects and hits Wren in the neck."
"A 0.1% chance?" Fen laughed. "That's nothing. I'll take those odds."
"Don't."
Something in Kael's voice — the same something that had made Brennan trust him in the Goblin Cavern — made Fen hesitate. He looked at the crossbow string. Then he looked at Kael.
"You can see that?"
"I can see everything."
Fen set the crossbow down. Dr. Vey, who had been watching from across the yard, walked over. Kael explained what he'd seen — the fraying string, the trajectory deviation, the 0.1% lethal chance.
Dr. Vey examined the crossbow. She pulled the string back gently, and it snapped in her hands. The bolt would have fired at a downward angle — directly at the spot where Wren had been running.
The courtyard went silent.
"He just saved her life," Ren said quietly to the student next to him. "With math."
The story spread faster than Kael could contain it.
By evening, every student at the Academy knew. The orphan with the Mythic class had used his ability to predict a training accident that had a one-in-a-thousand chance of happening — and stopped it.
The reactions were mixed.
Some students wanted to talk to him — to ask about his class, his skills, his stats. Some wanted to spar with him, to test themselves against a Mythic. Some avoided him entirely, as if his uniqueness was contagious.
And some — the ones that mattered — watched him differently.
Ren watched him with pride. "You're not just a legend anymore, brother. You're useful."
Dr. Vey watched him with academic fascination. "Your Probability Eye is reading material stress patterns in real-time. That's beyond anything documented in System theory."
And Elara Voss watched him from across the courtyard, her expression unreadable. She didn't approach. She didn't speak. But when Kael met her eyes, she didn't look away.
That night, on the Academy roof, Kael tested [Probability Eye] on himself one more time.
He looked at his locked skill. The question marks that had been there since the day he awakened. The mystery that no one — not Dr. Vey, not Torvin, not even the System itself — had explained.
Chance of unlock: 0%. Condition not yet met.
Same as before. Zero. Not now.
But something had changed. The number felt different — not final, but conditional. Like a door that was locked, not sealed.
He just needed to find the key.
Below him, Aethermere hummed. Somewhere in the city, a dungeon gate pulsed. Somewhere in the wilderness, monsters stirred. Somewhere in the darkness, something was watching.
Kael closed his Status Screen.
He was Level 10. Mythic class. He could teleport five meters and see the probability of anything happening.
But the most important thing he'd learned today wasn't a skill or a stat.
It was that 0.1% mattered.
In a world of monsters and dungeons and death, one in a thousand was not a number to ignore. And the people around him — Ren, Elara, Dr. Vey, even Fen — were worth protecting from even the smallest chance of harm.
That was what his PER and LUK were for. Not for power. Not for glory.
For the moments that almost didn't happen.
- Writer
