Not that all that rationalizing of it helped with her anger. She hadn’t had the time to parse the details, then, and she certainly didn’t have the full picture still, but by now, Malwine had a general idea of just what had set Veit off.
She’d known he was widowed, and while she hadn’t really cared to consider the implications of that, him having a mortal wife made sense. A mortal wife who was apparently part troll.
Malwine had little to no interest in unpacking that at the moment. For now, the knowledge that this woman—‘Pola’—had been part troll was enough for her to connect the remaining dots. She’d been mortal, and Forgers would not help extend her life, because she wasn’t entirely human.
Even in another world you really can’t avoid that interspecies discrimination… Granted, the widow’s Earth had nothing other than humans, but they’d excelled at fighting among themselves just as fiercely. Discrimination against non-humans had been limited to fiction and to court cases about button-pressing dogs who demanded better rights, but the concept was close enough.
Veit hated Forgers for a reason. Malwine wouldn’t forget his reactions anytime soon… but she understood. Somewhere within, in the part of her that had been the widow—a far more spiteful person than she believed the forester to be—she understood.
It’d simply take a whole lot more than understanding for her to forgive him in full.
Another topic she’d benefited from alone time with was the whole… well. The thing with the god. Malwine found she was a little bit worried about how little she cared. Between the normalization of Devils and the widow’s predispositions, the knowledge that she’d spoken to—yelled at!—a deity was little more than a footnote she could see herself bragging about down the line. Much further down the line.
Maybe it was her own history with the fell—or more accurately, her history of being impacted by her ancestors’ history with the fell—but Malwine would have been far more concerned had she learned she’d communicated with some trickster fey or the like.
If anyone had to worry about the deity, it was Anselm.
I wonder if Veit will actually investigate that. The lines between his actual duties and the things he did because he felt like it were clearly blurry, and she feared he might renege on that promise if it wasn’t truly something required of him, now.
She’d at least take the forester at his word on the suggestion that she steer clear of the deity, though. Avoiding the trial should have been all that took, but Malwine knew herself well enough to know she’d probably do something stupid if given the chance to.
The locket and his sudden desire to have it back. His hidden Status Effects. That refusal to have whatever ailed him checked out, which honestly went past any impressions of him wanting to keep his privacy, and sailed right into suspicious territory.
If she wanted excuses to question her uncle, Malwine had those aplenty.
But for now, that advice that she should be careful actually held her back.
For now.
Speaking of things Veit had told her not to do… Malwine had to admit the technique was quite effective.
Him expressing how he expected her to just ignore him and do something stupid with [Earthless Glory] was actually making her avoid playing around with it—she wasn’t about to prove him right, even if she had found the warnings reasonable enough as it was.
While he’d kept things relatively vague, the process he described—that of outright splitting his consciousness—sounded terrifying. Could it be powerful? Probably.
But just as the widow had been, she was reckless. Not brave. Malwine would take no risks with something she doubted she could bullshit her way out of—a perfectly justified stance.
Or so she told herself.
Unfortunately for her, the matter of [Earthless Glory] and the mechanics it may or may not have been tied to had become the pink elephant in the room. Intentionally training that Skill without thinking about how she would evolve it—but not right now!—was a Sisyphean task, and it didn’t help that it was leveling up at a snail’s pace.
Just like [The Way of the Clave].
The matter of imbalanced categories had been easier to ignore before she had Skills she could watch basically freezing before her eyes. [Shieldwork]’s relatively decent growth pace had lulled her into a false sense of security. Malwine had started to think any consequences from that would be mere inconveniences, not insurmountable obstacles, even after Veit had warned her.
Her
It wasn’t a Skill she’d have been likely to choose were it not for her personal circumstances, but it was undeniably strong. And a Forged Skill, at that. Even the notification when she’d gotten it had emphasized that fact—not that she really cared, then or now. She simply couldn’t help but wonder if she should have been treating that as a bigger deal or not.
The short of it was, she refused to treat the Legendary Skill as the source of her problems. If rarity, by itself, was what caused Skills from other Classes to have their growth slowed, it meant [Mediation] was throwing everything off, through its mere presence. While she’d indeed taken a risk in getting [Enforced Longevity], the Uncommon Skill felt like a far worse outlier than that.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
If Malwine fixed this, if she got [Meditation] to match her next-lowest rarity Skill, her lowest value for Skills she could get without risking a repeat of this would be Rare. She’d go from an ‘Uncommon, Normal, Rare, Epic’ range of safe rarity Skills to a ‘Rare, Epic, Legendary, Mythic’ one—finally putting her a bit closer to matching the rarity of Elflorescence’s Curse, if only in terms of potential.
The imbalance of her Class categories wasn’t that hard a problem to wrap her head around once she simply accepted that [Meditation] was dragging her down, plain and simple.
The subsequent problem was that she was utterly at a loss when it came to fixing it. Veit’s explanation on evolving Skills had practically gone in one ear and out the other, between his bizarre tangent and how angry Malwine had remained at the time.
While the concept of pushing the Skill’s limits was simple enough, Malwine shared one of the widow’s tiny flaws—she didn’t believe in limits. Rationally, she understood them, but being told this or that wasn’t possible—or didn’t exist—just led to her becoming convinced that it must have been a case of no one having found the right way to do it yet.
In some ways, this new life had mellowed her ego out… at least slightly. It had been far easier for the widow to maintain that ‘couldn’t be me’ attitude towards others’ failures and bad luck alike. While others might have hit walls in their research, she made a life out of proving anyone who claimed no more information could be found wrong. And bad things happened, but not to her. She’d lived in a relatively mundane world, where at the end of the day, she held value even if she was far from the best—no measure of power on that Earth changed the fact that everyone was nothing more than a human being. Everyone was equal in that aspect.
And therefore, in the widow’s head, no one could ever be truly better than her.
For Malwine, pondering that realization was a strange way to watch her age ticking over—she was now five years old, for The Fire had come.
A five-year-old in a world quite different from the widow’s. Understatement of the decade.
She shook her head reflexively. Veit—of all people—had called her out on that habit of being a contrarian more than once. But the truth was, it was an intrinsic part of who she was, for better or worse.
Not a part to be extricated, but an impulse to be curved.
Again, Malwine exhaled, and finally opened her eyes.
No notifications greeted her. Hate you too, [Meditation], she pouted. Rising from where she’d sat in her best attempt at the lotus meditation position, Malwine made an effort to reassure herself—of course admitting what she’d already known, deep down, wasn’t the type of thing that could push the Skill to evolve.
She’d have to go back to her nonexistent drawing board now—this had been her first and only idea, after all. Not to mention—
Malwine’s attention was drawn away, in a way that reminded her a bit too much of Adelheid’s new Skill. But her perception of the world hadn’t shifted to announce the girl presence—no, an entirely different panel manifested before her.
Malwine choked on air. Her brain caught up to her soon enough.
OHeidi. But why now? Was the implication there that the zombified remains of Adelheid’s great-grandmother had remained on fire all this time? If the system was only crediting her for it now…
The rest of the notification’s contents slammed into her like a trainwreck. Level 813? With a Proclivity?! She’d seen this kind of notification before—during the trial for Katrina—but there was something bizarre about getting one firsthand, what felt so soon into her life. And at last, she’d gotten to see how the system depicted the golden hue of the Immortality stage. It’s different from that deity’s gold. Curious.
Malwine found her mind going in so many directions at once that she hadn’t even initially recognized OHeidi shared another Affinity with Veit, too.
Is {Yore} just a common noble Affinity? She could see that being the case, especially when combined with a Devilish Proclivity. Though the forester seemed eager to dance around the subject, she had a strong suspicion that his mother had been a relevant noble, for all the names of both him and his father lacked that ‘fon’ Grēd?cavan nobility seemed partial to.
There wasn’t much else for Malwine to guess, however. The notification calling OHeidi a stranger had stung despite it being entirely true. She might have been able to argue she technically met the sibyl prior to setting her on fire, but the original Adelheid fon Hūdijanin? No, that woman had been dead before she’d even been reborn.
The names of Classes were also clearly open to interpretation, so Malwine had to stop herself from trying to craft some theories of dubious accuracy then and there.
By then, it felt like there was little else for her to do, other than stare at the panel as if something were about to change. The notification had sidetracked her completely, her thoughts of resuming the brainstorming for [Meditation] all scattered now.
She was, above all, just admittedly confused. She’d half a mind to just deal with it as she often did—time to ignore this!—but before she could fall back on that, the intrusive thought arose, and the notification panel solidified before her.
Malwine wasn’t even sure why she bothered trying.
Predictably enough, there was no response. What would she have done had that not been the case? Yelled at it, probably.
She shook her head and resettled on her bed. Adelheid was going through another of those phases where she only showed up to greet her every now and then, keeping to herself. Considering how much the girl had opened up to her over the past year—not to mention, they were sisters, now—it was only fair for her to have some time to herself.
The lack of lessons did bother Malwine, however. It was an annoying reminder that the family only really cared about arranging those for Adelheid’s sake, and while she’d probably get a similar treatment if they knew about her advancement, she wasn’t about to reveal anything just for the sake of Anna Franziska spending even more time in their room.
At times, she’d even craved some alone time herself, anyway.
All that left Malwine with little else to do but wallow in her frustrations. While she wouldn’t have gone as far as to call herself uncreative, she did think of herself as… uninspired. She’d been scrambling for fresh ideas for a while now, and directing the evolution of her irksome Skill was only made harder by her not knowing where to start.
The lowering of accrued [Toll] and [Integrity] restoration were properties she didn’t want to give up, in any case. As far as she was concerned, recovery should have been at the core of any meditation Skill. That said, the alleged small chance of improving values when she pondered them had literally never triggered for her. She’d had better luck with trials than with thinking about her attributes—that source of potential seemed about as dried up as those initial attribute bonuses she’d unlocked so long ago.
As such, she continued staring at the Skill panel. After a moment, Malwine dove into her visualized pier, sitting down on her {Legacy} Root. There, she summoned a panel with the [Meditation]’s own description on it, and resumed her continuous stares.
This would be taking a while, would it not?