Double-Blind: A Modern LITRPG

Chapter 300

I left the Order's headquarters in a hurry, taking a portal exit that put me a few blocks away from one of the few coffee shops still up and kicking. After a bit of dark roast and rumination, I came to the conclusion I could worry about what the absence of the Personal Objective meant later.

There was a good chance it was nothing. Supporting that, none of my existing, outdated quests displayed the objective as failed. Perhaps it'd been long enough that keeping my identity guarded was meant to be assumed, and the objective had only been there as an early guard rail.

More to the point, I'd already failed it, intentionally. As a merchant, Kinsley—the first person I'd divulged my secret to—was a bit of a gray area. But Nick and Sae were Users, and despite belonging to the exact group of people I was supposed to shield my identity from, I'd told them explicitly.

Smart or not, Nick needed to hear it.

Similarly, Sae was so vulnerable and alone at the time that keeping her in the dark would have been borderline exploitation.

I told myself it made sense. I'd received unachievable objectives in quests before, but never—to my knowledge—because the criteria itself was simply inaccurate to reality. I received the quest to help Jinny before she died. Her death was imminent, and given the swiftness with which it happened, there was little anyone could have done to stop it barring some form of precognition. But up until the moment she died, it was still achievable.

"You're going to bring me back, right?"

I drained the coffee, trying to force the caffeine to clear my head through sheer power of will. All it left me with was jitters and an empty cup. I'd been too deep in my head lately. And when I found myself lost in the feedback loop of my own thoughts, there was generally only one thing that helped.

Getting back to basics.

Matt

Level 24 Ordinator (25 Pending)

Strength: 6

Toughness: 12

Agility: 33+

Intelligence: 20+

Perception: 14

Will: 21

Companionship: 3

Active Title: Jaded Eye

Feats: Double-Blind, Ordinator's Guile II, Ordinator's Emulation, Stealth II, Awareness I, Harrowing Anticipation, Vindictive, Page's Quickdraw, Squelch, Acclimation, Hinder, Escalating Fire, Assassin II, Mind Spike, Decisive Action.

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Skills: Probability Cascade, LVL 21. Suggestion, LVL 32. Command, LVL 15. One-handed, LVL 34. Negotiation, LVL 29. Unsparing Fang (Emulated), Level 23. Bow Adept, LVL 13. Twilight's Nocturne, LVL 16. Subjugation, LVL 31. Riposte, LVL 11.

Boons: Nychta's Veil, Eldritch Favor, Ordinator's Implements, Retainer's Guiding Hand

Summons: Audrey — Flowerfang Hybrid, Bond LVL 11. Talia — Eidolon Wolf, Bond LVL 15. Azure — Abrogated Lithid, Bond LVL 20.

I'd noticed the pending level earlier, a little after my horrific hangover had loosened the vices on my mind. It wasn't like me to miss a notification, especially one as significant as a level-up, so it had to have happened in the tower after Julien's boss one-shot caused me to lose consciousness.

Unamused by the memory, I lingered on silently cursing the problematic perk.

Keeps the user conscious until the moment of death my ass.

It'd been a questionable selection from the beginning. I'd picked it out of pure necessity, needing a way to keep myself conscious and functional in a critical moment. Having endured the unpleasantness of patching me up after the fact, Dr. Ansari railed on the stupidity of the perk with searing veracity.

"The mind loses consciousness for a reason, Mr. Matthias. It may keep you conscious, but it could kill you just as easily. Elevated stress hormones and the potential for psychological trauma alone are not to be trifled with. Maintaining awareness in the midst of something truly agonizing could easily give someone as young as you a heart attack. It could kill you even when the physical trauma itself would not."

Despite that, I'd been hesitant to get rid of it. If it hadn't so recently shown itself to be unreliable, I probably still would be. With lingering reluctance, I pulled the respec charm from my inventory—a gift from a crafter in my region—and selected Vindictive from the dropdown.

Huh. Not what I expected. The system was so often malicious that it was a surprise when things worked in a logical, not-out-to-fuck-you-over manner.

The additional points opened up some options. I'd planned on banking the feats for this level, but there were a lot more expensive options that were suddenly viable choices.

As I scanned them, I felt the familiar buzz behind my eyes that indicated Azure was looking through them directly.

"Need a consultation from a nosy summon?" Azure asked.

"By all means." I leaned back in my chair and scrolled to the top of the list. "Gonna take the whole night, otherwise."

A slight shudder went through me as Azure assumed control, glancing over the level information as he went down the list. My eyes glanced towards the pastry bag that now housed only crumbs. "If I was petty and unwise, I might demand another scone as payment."

"Take human form after we're done, I'll buy you one."

He said nothing, and I internally sighed. "You want to eat it in my body."

"I just want to taste it the way you taste it. Mimicking a human is easy. Recreating functional taste buds that are as vast and complex as a human's is pretty much impossible. But I won't ask for that because you'll say—"

"—It's weird, yeah. Especially when you start moaning. With my voice."

"It was my first time experiencing pizza, but fine, keep holding it over my head." Azure whined, continuing to scroll the list. "You don't really need more Perception, or feats that latently achieve increased Perception. It's a little low and I know you're worried about it, but the fact that you have both and summons—multiple sets of eyes watching all around you at any given time, all of whom are capable of sending an immediate silent warning, puts you far above average."

"Great. What else?"

The many feats blurred as Azure scanned through them.

There were a few promising options. potentially paired quite well with ensuring any attack to a pain or nerve center was more likely to disorient and stun the target. It wasn't a straight damage increase, but it created more potential windows for attack, so in an oblique way, it kind of was. Azure spent a few minutes arguing for the feat that bestowed enhanced melee accuracy and critical chance while dealing damage from above, until I sent him a mental image of me, jumping down from the rafters on top of a knoll who moved at the last second and left me face planted on the ground, and he begrudgingly moved on.

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Azure idly flicked from one page to another. "There's an obvious choice. Not something you'll go for, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than bulk dumping points into intelligence."

My stomach dropped. "No."

"Yeah, it's a touchy subject." Azure sighed, still toying with the feat page. "But the point is, there's options. Some of them actually make the core ability more palatable."

I paused. But only for a moment. "The only reason I have is because we needed a trump card. The capacity to tip the scales in a critical moment after every other avenue fails. And only after."

"Perhaps," Azure said, in the way he often did when there was more coming. "But by creating such tight criteria, you are, in a way, admitting that if specific circumstances occur you are willing to use it every time they do, yes?"

I caught a glimpse of him in the window's reflection, leaning over my shoulder like a concerned sibling. A bit inaccurate—so far as I could tell, when Azure and I communicated mentally, it was entirely internal. He wasn't hanging over my shoulder like Casper. But these projected hallucinations were common, likely a subconscious rumination on his part that communicated a sense of camaraderie.

Begrudgingly reminding myself he was looking out for us, I forced myself to answer honestly. "Yes."

"Then I'm not understanding why you're so vehemently against making that—arguably inevitable outcome—less horrifying."

I wrested control from him for a moment to rub my temples. "Let's just stop talking abstractly, this is already giving me a headache. The variant of you want me to look at. Does it offer any practical benefit to us beyond lessening the long-term impact?"

"It does," Azure said immediately, the pitch of his voice rising with cautious excitement. "It slightly lessens the initial damage, but the real kicker is it won't permanently disable ranking up the stat anymore. Obviously a big benefit to the target. Simultaneously, if you and a mage, they have the potential to build themselves back up. Eventually, given enough levels and steady commitment to recovery, they could be as capable as they used to be. It's a—ah fuck, you're baiting me." He realized, sourness seeping into the mental connection.

"Just making a point." I smiled at the waitress as she filled my coffee, suddenly in control of my faculties again as Azure retreated. "The entire point of a nuke is the capacity for catastrophic destruction. It shouldn't be conventional, have multiple use-cases, or be easy to justify. The second you get comfortable with the idea of pressing that button is the second you've lost."

"Please spare me the Kissinger rant." Azure said, still sulking.

I sipped the coffee. "Dead motherfucker aside, I always found the counter-arguments to the tactical nuke take kind of compelling. Escalation, for one. Slap someone across the face and they punch you in the jaw? Take it to civil court all you want, maybe there's even a case, but no one's gonna genuinely believe you didn't have it coming. Because escalating is human nature."

Azure drifted into my sightline and lounged beside the table, mental apparition ghostly and orange, his expression the picture of false calm. "I'm aware of the necessity of rules when it comes to engagement. There's a reason you let Sunny's boy go. Why I've never considered proposing we go after Aaron through his only obvious weakness."

"Careful. If Daphne heard that, she might beat you to death in an alley."

"She's not weak." Azure rolled his eyes. "Just more vulnerable than him. But I get it, why we can't use her. For the same reason I would rather it be literally any other human on earth than the necromancer who targeted your sister."

"The gloves tend to come off. And they always take it farther than you think they will."

"What I don't understand," Azure said, hovering closer to the ground and literally putting his foot down, "is why you can't recognize the difference between a weapon capable of ending countless lives that is impossible to conceal, and an untraceable single-target ability that affects one person at most."

"Does it, though?" I set my coffee down unevenly, sending ripples across the surface. "Because I'd argue it affects the lives of everyone they rely on, people dependent on them, the victims of any accidents their diminished acuity may cause. Their children."

"As it would if they were killed or maimed in a pedestrian way." Azure's head lolled to the side, eyebrows knitted in exasperation.

I felt for Azure, I really did. To him, my caution must have seemed utterly irrational. It just wasn't something we would ever see eye-to-eye on. His logic and reasoning excelled at mimicking a human's, but like his sense of taste, lacked nuance. Spared little room for undefinables.

And somewhere between and was an undefinable I couldn't shake. wasn't permanent. It could be used in a way that instilled a dogmatic sort of loyalty, but that was entirely optional. and if used responsibly, all had the potential to leave the victim's psyche unharmed.

was the complete opposite. It battered the psyche, inflicted permanent harm to the sheer, ruthless purpose of lowering the target's stats enough to give my other abilities a foothold. I'd tried it only once, on a small group of hostile goblins in the tower. At the time, I figured testing on dumb, hostile mobs was kinder than targeting something neutral. It was necessary—for one thing, I would have never realized, possibly until there was zero room for error, that it was the only Ordinator ability I'd encountered that deployed a visible projectile.

As it worked out, neither was kind.

"I don't want to make it easier to use. More convenient or justifiable. Easier to stick to the rules that way."

"And I'll respect that, for now." Azure phased through the booth's wall, checking the perimeter for the second time that hour, his troubled voice still perfectly clear. "Because it helps you function. Right and wrong doesn't factor, for me. We could dangle Daphne off a building by her ankles tomorrow for all I care. I abide by your wishes because I care about you. And objectively, there's wisdom in being careful."

"But?" I prompted.

Azure, still facing away from me, breathed out, his shoulders slumping. "There's too many rules. They're too restrictive, and eventually you're going to paint yourself into a corner."

"I'll break them if I have to."

"Exactly." Azure looked up, watching the fading golden glow of the skyline, hands stuck in the ghostly manifestation of a hoodie. "You're capable of it, sure. But it weighs on you. Every time you cross a line you've set for yourself, the... hope... dulls a little more. It's dim enough as it is. Maybe this is a stupid sentiment, but I don't want to see it gone."

"...What hope?" I pretended not to understand. Not out of cruelty. It was just easier than the alternative.

Azure rubbed at his face with his sleeve then snapped out of existence. After a few seconds, I felt the buzzing behind my eyes again. "Just take . It pairs nicely with and you'll get practical value out of it quickly."

"Was thinking the same thing." I said quickly, scrolling down the page. "Still leaves us with two points though."

"Nothing else stood out. Maybe just bank them."

"What about this?" I pointed out a feat I'd been considering for a while.

"Transmogrify Equipment?" Azure asked, puzzled. "Why? It's entirely cosmetic."

I pulled up the description while I waited.

The light came on. "Unless," Azure realized, "You've recently upgraded your arsenal and don't want those recent, rather distinguishable acquisitions locked to Myrddin."

"Like you said, I have too many rules." I tried to offer it as an olive branch. "Maintaining different sets of equipment, leveling up skills for said equipment, it all splits too much focus. I've been pissed as hell at the Adventurer's Guild for dragging their feet, when in reality I've been doing the same thing in a different way. I'll still work on archery, of course. That'll only open up more options for me, and bows are a good fit."

"As we've observed before, Knives and Crossbows are relatively ubiquitous." Azure disembarked, reclining on his back and floating in front of me with his hands behind his head as if carried by an invisible cloud. "But the list of skilled, high-level Users who rely on them instead of switching to a sword is far shorter. Myrddin sits at the top of that list."

"Yeah. Gonna need to misdirect. People have already noticed that my page abilities aren't that different from a rogue's, so no point in going overboard. Need to style myself differently without sacrificing effectiveness. Just can't stand in the middle of a storm the same way. I'll give it some thought."

"Take your time," Azure raised his wrist, looking at an imaginary watch. "You've got... twelve hours, give or take?"

I tried not to let that get to me. Tomorrow needed to go well. I didn't even want to imagine the clusterfuck that would play out if there was a repeat of the last floor.

It was a defining moment.

And there were only a million more things I needed to do to get ready.