Chapter 104: The One Who Watches

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Surprisingly, Cayden seemed to be the one least bothered by their team’s loss – aside from Marvenal, of course, who seemed to care for nothing unless it affected Velic’s safety.

Velic was clearly angry from the way he stomped back to their seats from the tunnels. He didn’t say anything out loud, but it was obvious he blamed the loss on Delphia’s failure at the end of the match from the way he kept shooting her glares.

Which Delphia seemed to accept as her due. She was difficult to read, but to Cayden’s eyes she seemed even angrier at herself – or perhaps ashamed – than Velic was, her hood pulled so low over her face that Cayden doubted she could see the rest of the projected matches.

Cayden tried to cheer her up with questions and assurances that she’d done the best that could be expected, with Jeremy joining in after they returned to the stands, but she refused to be consoled. She hunched in her seat, ignoring all attempts at conversation until they finally gave up and let her brood in peace.

For his part, Cayden was certainly disappointed in their loss, but he was surprised at how small his disappointment was. With only a single test remaining, their loss meant it was unlikely for their team to qualify for one of the top three spots by the end of the year, with the first-place spot almost guaranteed to be out of their reach. But, despite that, Cayden found it difficult to care.

For all that the rewards were stellar, Cayden was less drawn towards them than he’d previously been. With Elise’s commitment to finally craft some enchanted equipment for him, the second and third place rewards held little appeal. And while the skill-stone reward for finishing in first would be amazing, it no longer felt quite as amazing as it had before he’d switched classes.

Between [Save Progress] opening up many more options for tier-three skills, [Borrowed Power] enabling him to acquire any skill he witnessed, his new racial skill, and even the princess’ stat-sacrificing skill he’d yet to learn, Cayden felt he was already drowning in options and things he needed to work on. He still had so much testing he needed to do with his existing skills – adding a new, random skill to his build when he had so many other things to explore felt unnecessary and, frankly, exhausting.

And while he’d relished the challenge of the test, it simply hadn’t measured up to a real dungeon delve. There was no danger, no stakes that he couldn’t recover from – so in comparison, defeat seemed so much less impactful.

Cayden didn’t want to become the kind of person who didn’t care about anything if lives weren’t on the line, but neither could he find it easy to be so invested in the loss when the cost of failing the previous ‘test’ had been death.

So, despite their loss, Cayden wasn’t too shaken up as he watched the rest of the matches. He didn't pay nearly as close of attention as he had previously, but he enjoyed the show nevertheless.

Jeremy’s match was interesting. Their variation was that each lover was split into four shorter glowing pieces and scattered across each territory. The team which first reunited five different pieces within their territory would be the winner. It forced Jeremy’s team to split up, severly weakening the usefulness of the formine’s skill. The instant communication was obviously still useful, but where their team excelled was in their teamwork, and they lost much of that strength when separated.

They still managed to scrape a win, but it was sloppy, with only a single one of Jeremy’s teammates ‘alive’ at the end of it.

The princess’ team also won, but in a very different fashion. Cayden didn’t think there was any sort of favoritism from the instructors at the academy – on paper, the matchup between the first-place princess’ team and third-place team would be a close one. But the princess’ team absolutely destroyed their opponents, Henrietta the only one sporting even light wounds after their match.

Cayden gave his ‘beau’ a thumbs up of support after she returned to the stands with her teammates, which had her skipping happily back to her seat with a wide smile on her face.

The rest of the matches continued throughout the day, with only a small break for lunch. Many different skills and strategies were displayed, but they were harder and harder to give their due attention as the day dragged on. Cayden felt especially bad for the final couple of matches – their nerves had to be killing them, having to wait the entire day before competing, and then they had to deal with their peers not giving their match the slightest bit of attention, too focused on the upcoming dinner and return to their dorms.

But eventually, the final match concluded, and Instructor Blyre appeared at the front of the stands.

“Thank you, students, for participating. We will deliberate and have an updated ranking list in three days. You are dismissed.”

Cayden joined the surge of students relieved to finally be done and left the arena.

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“Hmm, I don’t think increasing his perception will help. At least not as much as you might think.”

“Really? Why?” Jeremy asked.

“Well, it’s a vision skill, but it only seems to apply to what he’s consciously focused on, not things in his peripherals. While increasing his perception would allow him to better process multiple things in his vision, its the ‘concious’ part that I think is more important – which wouldn’t be affected by perception.”

It was the day after the test, and Cayden was testing the limits of [The One Who Watches] with Elise and Jeremy. He had already experimented with the skill before using it in the test, but it hadn’t been nearly the level of experimentation that Elise claimed was necessary to fully understand the limits of the skill.

They were currently at the edge of the Lost Forest remedying that.

Now that Cayden wasn’t worried about spoiling the surprise of his new skill prior to the test, he didn’t have to work so hard making sure he never looked directly at anyone who wasn’t on his team. He supposed he should have expected it, considering the results of his two other racial skills he’d gained from primordial mud, but the physical aspect of [The One Who Watches] had caught him by surprise.

His eyes now glowed red to anyone he was looking at, and made the target of his gaze feel apprehension while simultaneously cutting off any movement abilities. It was especially curious because the effects only applied to someone he was looking at – Elise confirmed that when he wasn’t looking directly at her, his eyes appeared their normal green.

Cayden wasn’t entirely happy with his new eyes. They seemed to affect people differently – Velic had flinched back when first encountering Cayden’s gaze, which prompted Marvenal to pull a blade and move between them. And though Velic never again displayed any alarm from Cayden’s looks after the first, the way Marvenal’s hands drifted to his blades whenever Cayden looked at him was impossible to miss.

Elise had also flinched the first time Cayden looked at her after accepting his new skill, but after learning the source of the feeling she’d seemed entirely unconcerned, and hadn’t reacted at all afterward. Which was comforting to Cayden – he wasn’t sure how he might have dealt with his best friend flinching away from him every time he looked at her.

Delphia had had the worst reaction. Even after being given a warning, the first time he’d looked at her she’d instinctively activated her stealth skill and retreated to her room, only emerging fifteen minutes later to apologize.

Cayden figured he’d have to get in the habit of not looking directly at people when speaking to them to avoid having to deal with the negative consequences of his skill. He doubted many shopkeepers would be inclined to give him a good deal after feeling the new ‘weight’ to his gaze.

But as bad as it was, he supposed it could’ve been worse. He couldn’t imagine what the physical change to accompany [Implacable Hunter] might have been. A wolf-like snout? Massive bat ears? Compared to those, being forced to look over people’s shoulders whenever he talked to them seemed a small price to pay.

One benefit of the his gaze’s new weight was that it corresponded perfectly with the primary effect of his skill. Elise had borrowed a movement-based enchanted item from her teacher to help with their tests, and had quickly confirmed that the constraining effects of his skill only activated if she also felt the weight of his gaze. With that in mind, she’d been able to return the enchanted item to perform more tests by simply seeing when she was able to feel his gaze.

They’d confirmed during the matches that his skill didn’t activate if he was only looking at an ‘image’ of a person through the magical projection, but with some quick tests Elise also confirmed that it had to be his eyes looking at someone directly – his skill wouldn’t activate if he was looking at someone through a spyglass. Which was curious, because it did activate when he looked at someone through a simple pair of eyeglasses. Neither Cayden nor Elise could figure out an explanation for that, but Elise promised to give it more thought.

The skill didn’t have a distance limit beyond how far Cayden was able to clearly see – so about half a mile. Perception would likely help with that distance limit, but as Elise had been explaining, it was unlikely to help with his current inability to ‘look’ at more than one person at a time. Anytime he’d tried to ‘widen’ his gaze to encompass multiple people at once, Elise had reported the weight behind his eyes immediately fading.

“Hm, what if we put something between his eyes to divide his vision? Could he learn to focus each eye on something different?” Jeremy suggested from where he was lounging underneath a tree.

Elise had originally wanted to bring Delphia with them to help with the experimentation, as parts of it needed two people to test, but after seeing the girl’s initial reaction to his gaze Cayden decided Jeremy would be the better choice.

Beyond the first twenty minutes of testing, Jeremy’s presence had been largely unnecessary. But he had leaned into his role, joining Elise in brainstorming for more tests to push Cayden's skill to the limit.

“I suppose that might work…” Elise hummed to herself. “I still think there would be an issue of him being able to ‘focus’ through both eyes at once. Maybe increasing his mind stat would fix that?” She shrugged. “Worth a try, though.”

Cayden simply sighed as Jeremy and Elise collected sticks to fashion into a divider he could hold in front of his eyes, resigned to living out his role as a [Test Subject].

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