Chapter 64

Rain woke slowly, drifting back to consciousness on a fluffy white cloud of bliss. He felt good, no, he felt amazing, incredible even. He felt stronger, sharper, and more aware, like he could think more clearly, with more clarity, a haze of fuzz seemingly lifted from his mind.

He hadn’t realised how much his torment had been weighing on him, just this small relief was stunning. He almost thought it felt a little too good- Should his revenge have caused him to feel like this not just mentally but physically too? Really? ... Well, maybe, but he found himself struggling to give a fig at that particular moment, he was simply too content that it was in small part over.

He could feel a slight pressure on his stomach and his eyes drifted down to see Opal curled up on his abdomen, her knees tucked up and her black hair fanned across his fur. He could see her face, eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. As he watched a tiny soft snore came from the Goblin.

After a moment of wondering what to do about the adorable Goblin girl he slumped back with a sigh and stared at the ceiling. He couldn’t move her, obviously. Too cute.

Instead he closed his eyes and brought to mind something that he had been putting off.

Literally brought it to mind.

When he had touched that level orb in Lynthia something else had happened that he hadn’t spoken of. Something new had appeared, as though the touch had allowed a crack for that something to slip through, using the part of him that was still Human to get inside his head where that something really really shouldn’t have been.

He had seen how disturbed and unsettled Lyra and Opal had been by what had happened and decided to keep it a secret. Opal thought of him as a monster, he didn’t want to risk changing that. Lyra feared him, and the unknown, he didn’t want to make that worse.

The thing that he brought to mind flickered and shifted, only visible in his mind’s eye, its many colours roiling and changing as they moved across the broken shards.

There were numbers there, and letters. Broken, chaotic, trying to form but failing.

He knew what it was.

When he was a Human he could call something like this to mind, the version that he had when he was Human however was just a plain sheet of paper, a soft bland display of information that he could call up that stated his species, his non-existent Class, and his level. All levelers could do this to varying degrees, it was how a Class imparted more specific information to its user.

Some when they called to mind that information would see an open book displaying their details- Skills, and various other relevant numbers, others would be shown a scroll or engraving, some just saw floating lettering on a plain paper background, Rain’s used to be like that, simple. He had heard high level mages had particularly detailed versions that could even quantify the amount of mana they possessed, or how certain spells interacted, or more.

He had no idea what the fuck he was looking at right now was supposed to be however.

Broken shards of chaos, a fragment of a leveler’s power inserted into a monster, twisted and deformed, an intruder in a violently hostile environment, continually burning away in a vat of acidic fire but still somehow existing.

Rain tried to focus on it, pushing and pulling at the fragments with his mind, trying to make something of it, but it was no good, it was simply broken, a ruin masquerading as something of use. He could see his name written amongst the flickering colours, and where it might normally display a class, or N/A if there was no class, instead was a shifting morass that tried to sometimes name him monster, which wasn’t a Class atall, or sometimes just errored out. His species was ... it seemed like the fragment of a system was incompatible as it just threw up more errors and told him nothing.

He ceased his prodding and studied the colourful shards more closely...

... The colours. The shifting drifting overlapping oil slick rainbows that mesmerised the eye, a chromatic opal magnet that demanded to be seen, to be acknowledged by its owner.

He knew those colours. He had seen them for the entirety of his Human life, not in a menu or book or a scroll in his mind’s eye or anything like that, no, he knew them from the vast night sky, the Many Coloured Moon. Those same shifting colours that lit up the sky at night now also existed inside him, inside his head in a little fragment of a leveler’s power.

The question was, why? Why was the thing inside his mind like the moon in appearance? Why not a book, or a scroll, or a simple stone tablet like every other leveler he had ever heard of?

A tired memory dredged itself free from the murky depths of his past. He recalled ever so long ago hearing from his Father a children’s story. A bedtime tale that described the benevolence of the gods in giving a gift to the sapient when the sapient were falling and dying to monsters, when all hope was lost and the last light of civilization was faltering. That gift was the gift of levels. Power. And the thing that the gods used to administer that system of levels was the moon they saw in the sky each night, the Many Coloured Moon, a machine of the gods that kept balance in the world, the system’s ‘mind’. It was just a story though, right?

If there really was something that watched over levelers and made things work smoothly ... then perhaps it didn’t understand what he was and was trying to treat him as just another leveler, using that part of him that was Human to get inside of him. He didn’t like that thought. Some unknowable device out there trying to force a leveler’s system of power on him.

Except he wasn’t a leveler, he was a monster, he just was, and he was sure he wasn’t meant for this. This was unnatural. Wrong. That was made clear due to how much the thing in his mind was burning away, every atom of his monster body an anathema to its very existence, with every second dissolving it into nothing, oblivion.

Yet it was still there somehow, and he could call it to his mind’s eye whenever he wished, just as when he was a Human. He wasn’t sure what to do about it, it was just sort of there now, a useless thing in his head that he could call up and see the pretty colours. Hopefully there would be no side effects. He really hoped there would be no side effects. Putting something that was designed to kill monsters inside of a monster struck him as a really bad idea. Maybe it would eventually stabi-