After getting his class and leveling up, Daemon finally had some skills.
"Let's see what the goodies are."
[Hunter's Insight]
Rank: Common (Lv.1)
Description: A foundational understanding. You can easily identify creature tracks, distinguish basic herbs, and read the general layout of the terrain. The knowledge allows you to adapt faster and make better use of resources you find in your environment.
[Hunter's Senses]
Rank: Common (Lv.1)
Description: Strengthens all the hunter's natural senses slightly beyond normal limits. Allows you to better track, find, and understand your surroundings. By intuitively feeling out the environment, you can navigate and move faster across any terrain.
[Hunter's Sight]
Rank: Common (Lv.1)
Description: By pushing a small amount of magic energy to your eyes, your vision extends further and clearer. At closer distances it catches subtle details — like the tensing of a muscle, the shifting of a pupil, or the rhythm of a breath — giving you a basic read on what your prey is about to do next.
[Hunter's Adaptation]
Rank: Common (Lv.1)
Description: Allows the hunter to acclimate to new environments more easily and grants better resistance.
…
Daemon read through each one carefully.
Individually, none of them were remarkable. They were common rank, level one — the foundation basically. But taken together, they painted a picture of someone built to operate alone in hostile environments: read the terrain, sharpen the senses, extend the vision, adapt to whatever came next.
Daemon wasn't overwhelmingly happy with the skills. Not a single skill that boosted his attack.
"I should be happy with what I got, but for the moment I performed that overwhelming ability against the Corps Golem, I felt it was gone only recently I got the feeling of something recharging. But god knows when it will be ready. Nor do I have the time to wait nor do I wish to do so." To Daemon having the ability to finally change his pathetic life and not do so was unimaginable.
He noted that Hunter's Sight worked through magic energy — which meant it drew on his MAG stat, his lowest stat as of… always he thought. Something to keep in mind.
He filed everything away, closed the status window, and looked at the window. The light crystals embedded in the city's walls and structures were still glowing at their daytime intensity, casting the familiar cool blue-white across the stone.
It was still early in the morning. He had slept and ate well and had plenty of time to spare.
No point wasting it.
He found the old man downstairs, lazing behind the counter.
"Is there a market in the city?" Daemon asked. "Equipment, weapons, that sort of thing."
The old man looked up briefly. "Several. The ones near the center cater to guild members and people with money to spend." He paused, as though something had struck him. "There is a market on the south side, closer to the outer wall. More affordable. The quality is decent enough for someone at your level."
"How do I find it?"
The old man gave him directions in the same flat, efficient manner he delivered everything — no unnecessary words, no repeated instructions and Daemon liked it, he committed them to memory, thanked him, and left.
Behind the counter, the old man frowned at the door after it closed.
Strange. Why was my first instinct to point him toward the ones near the center? He's clearly a newcomer, only recently entered the Tower. He shook his head slowly. Have I gotten so old I've become senile?The south market was easy enough to find, and considerably less impressive than he had hoped.
The south market was easy enough to find, and considerably less impressive than he had hoped.
It occupied a wide open section of the city's south district, rows of stone stalls and low-ceilinged shops built into the walls of the surrounding corridors. The light crystals here were fewer and dimmer than near the center, giving the whole place a slightly gloomy cast that matched the general mood of the vendors.
Still, there was equipment. Weapons, armor, tools, provisions. Daemon moved through the stalls slowly, taking a general look.
Then he saw the price on a one-handed sword.
He stopped.
It was the same type of sword he had received for free from the police station — standard issue, nothing exceptional about it. One of the weapons given to every registered Awakener as basic equipment before they entered the Tower, well to every one in the Grand Union Domain as he did not know the standard equipment of other Domains.
The tag read: 200 Unranked Magic Stones.
Daemon stared at it for long enough that the seller noticed.
"Something wrong?" the man asked.
"Two hundred stones," Daemon said. "For this."
"For that," the seller agreed pleasantly. "You're welcome to find one cheaper. Of course, the other option is going into the labyrinth and collecting equipment from dead Awakeners — but that does require them to be dead first, which tends to involve its own complications."
Daemon looked at the man for a moment, then back at the sword, then turned and walked away.
He moved through the rest of the market with his hands in his pockets and his expectations firmly revised downward. Everything was expensive — not extortionately so, by the standards of people who had been clearing dungeons and accumulating magic stones for months, but entirely out of reach for him who had entered the Tower yesterday.
Better provisions were affordable, barely. Anything that would actually improve his combat capability was not.
He spotted a scroll containing the most basic fire spell — a Fireball — priced at 1,000 Unranked Magic Stones.Daemone left the market with nothing. The seller wasn't wrong after all.
He walked without a specific destination for a while, letting the city fill in around him.
It was different in the daytime — or what you could call a daytime down here. The crowds were thicker than the previous evening, clusters of Awakeners moving between inns, markets, and the various guild outposts that had been established throughout the city's districts.
The search frenzy from the night before had settled into something quieter but no less present — he could see guild crests everywhere.
"It almost looks like a manhunt, not just a recruitment." After Daemon had his fun looking at those people like he was looking at some headless chickens. He made his way toward the outer wall.
It was said to be a sight that strikes everyone at the core and they weren't wrong.
The walls of the Hidden City of the Fallen were everything the name's grimness implied — tall, dark, built from the same weathered black stone as the rest of the city, and clearly constructed with the intention of holding against some incredible foe.
He found a staircase cut into the inner face of the wall and climbed it.
What he saw from the top stopped his heart for a slight moment.
The city stood on an island of shorts. He hadn't fully understood that from street level, but from up here it was immediately, viscerally clear. On every side, the ground simply ended — dropping away into a chasm so deep that the bottom, if there was one, was invisible from where he stood. The darkness down there had a particular quality to it, almost one of illusions that seemed to want to devour the world.
The chasm stretched no less than three hundred meters across in every direction, a black border separating the city from the surrounding labyrinth. And spanning it, at each of the city's four cardinal gates, were the bridges.
Daemon looked at them for a long time.
They were stone — ancient, by the look of them, probably as old as the city itself, possibly even older. Each one curved slightly downward, narrowest at the center, three hundred meters of span with railings that reached no higher than the knee. They looked, in his honest assessment, like something that should have collapsed generations ago.
They were also, he realized, the only way in or out.
The design wasn't accidental. The bridges were narrow enough that no more than two people could walk abreast, which meant anything trying to cross in force had to do it single file. The curve downward to the center meant that anything crossing could be seen clearly from the walls above. And the knee-high railings meant that anything that lost its footing had nowhere to go but down.
It was, Daemon thought, a genuinely elegant piece of defensive engineering.
This is the safest place in the Basement, he thought, looking out at the labyrinth beyond the chasm — the dark tunnels extending in every direction from the far ends of the bridges, disappearing into the underground. Safety should still be taken with a considerable grain of salt.
As Daemon stopped looking outside the city and looked inside it he saw The Spire, it rose at the city's center, piercing upward through the dome overhead and out of sight. From up here he could see how everything oriented around it — the streets, the districts, the four bridges all pointing toward it like compass needles. Whatever this place was, the Spire seemed to be the reason it existed.
He stood on the wall for a long time, looking at all of it, until the light crystals began their slow shift toward the dimmer blue of the night cycle.