There were very few things you could count on, but at least taverns tended to be the same everywhere. Clayton had seen hundreds of them on his way to the edges of the map, all of them succeeding to be warm and welcoming to the average traveler at the end of a long, dusty day of travel. They came in wood and brick, with baths or without, and with an extreme variety in size and shape, but they were somehow all the same on some vague but fundamental level.

  They were places you could stop that and feel normal, no matter what bizarre section of the world was showing up outside the doors. Today, that felt especially important.

  “No. Absolutely not.” The innkeeper, a Merkie, puffed up her feathers. “That ale is for guests.”

  “It’s too expensive for the guests. Nobody who comes out here can afford it.” The Merkie man held the small keg to his chest, protectively. “None of them even like this kind of stuff. Too fancy for the trash that…”

  The Merkie inn keep moved fast. Clayton could track her with his eyes as she crossed the room and body-slammed the man, but he couldn’t have done a single thing about it if she had aimed it at him. It was a raw-stats thing. An inn keep would lose to any class meant for fighting who had a similar level, but an inn keep who had a solid fifty level advantage on a swordsman would bat him around a room like a beach ball, especially in the comfort of their own inn.

  Whatever class the young male Merkie had, it wasn’t leveled enough to close that gap. Despite having wings, Merkies couldn’t usually fly. This one was an exception, blowing through a doorway and into the wood floor on the other side with so much force Clayton worried for the supposedly expensive keg of beer. He shouldn’t have. When an exhausted and frustrated huff from the older Merkie drew his attention, he saw she had recovered the keg in the process of absolutely demolishing the other guy’s pride. Shaking her head, she set it on the table.

  “Not an ounce of hospitality instinct in the boy.” She looked Clayton up and down and tilted her head to the side. “Cimma?”

  Cimmas didn’t have feathers or fur, and were more or less shaped like humans. They didn’t look exactly like them, but when Clayton was mistaken for anything familiar to the inhabitants of this world, it was always a Cimma. Though there was enough wait-and-see in the inn keep’s question that Clayton knew she hadn’t made the same mistake entirely. She had either noticed his eyes were too wide, he had one too many fingers on each hand, or that his legs were a little thicker than a Cimma’s would generally be.

  She seemed perceptive. He didn’t even put it past her to have noticed one of the dozens of more subtle ways a Cimma and a Human would tell each other apart.

  “No. Human.” Clayton gave a little bow. Not every culture bowed like that, but it never hurt to do a little extra. “A reborn.”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Since the edict, there’s been more and more of you wandering around. I think it’s a shame, really. They should give you a shot at life like everyone else.”

  The world of Dyne was a magnet world, negatively charged with magic in the same way the magic-less world of Earth had been positively charged. Power flowed from one to the other in a single un-looped direction, like how water ran downhill. Sometimes other, more exotic forms of energy got caught in that current as well, like the occasional human soul.

  Like Clayton’s soul, to be exact.

  Dyne’s charge had increased over the last few generations, Clayton was told, which meant a lot of immigrants from other worlds who had needed food, shelter, clothing, and training.

  Eventually, most of the nations had developed ways of dealing with this, establishing programs that would help their new citizens get by. But even the most generous of them wasn’t willing to entirely subsidize another world’s immigrant population, so when Clayton’s starter city had turned out to be in a nation that handled their newcomers in a different way, he had no options but to go along with it.

  “It’s what it is,” Clayton said. “At least I got to make the journey out here. I saw a lot of interesting things on the way.”

  “I’ll bet. Even so, this is a travesty.” The Merkie turned and started fiddling with a pot of stew. Every inn served something like that as their cheapest dish, some calorie-heavy mix of things that they kept cooking at all times. Ladling out a bowl, she slapped it on the table in front of him. “No charge. It’s the least I can do for someone my king is sending to the Far Places to die.”

  “To settle.” Clayton didn’t refuse the food. He was far past the point of pride. “To build something.”

  “We both know what they say.” The Merkie pointed out the window. “But look. How do you settle that?”

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  In the distance, a mountain was drifting across the ground. It wasn’t moving quickly, at least from their perspective. It moved at the gentle speed a cloud might on a mostly calm day, with little of the fuss he would have expected from countless tons of earth rock making a journey across the horizon.

  “How would you build something when the ground itself shifts? Tell me that,” the inn keep repeated.

  “I don’t know,” Clayton admitted.

  “Damn right you don’t.” The in keep grabbed her ladle and topped off Clayton’s bowl, refilling the few bits he had managed to choke down in the last few moments. “Magic overflow breaks the rules that the knowing races need to survive. The mountains are the least of it, traveler. Imagine monsters that change levels midfight. Imagine magic charges in the air that take spells you intended for one thing and change it into another.”

  “Less of a problem for me.” Clayton pointed to the spear on his back. “I’m a martial. The way of the knowing spear.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “All my magic is internal. I’m Int-Dex-Strength, in that order, but none of my enhancements leave my body.”

  “What do they do?”

  “So far? They give me better reflexes.” Clayton intentionally dropped his spoon towards the ground, waited a tic, then caught it a hair-thin fraction of a second before it hit the ground. “See?”

  That was Clayton’s party trick. Every reaction he made, he made as if he had seen the triggering action a few seconds earlier. When he had spared with other people during his training, that had meant he was hard to hit, harder to pin down, and generally as evasive as a greased snake.

  That kind of build came with very real downsides. Some martials put all their points in strength and dexterity, with vitality as their third stat. They were as fast or faster than Clayton, stronger by than he was, and could take more hits.

  The sparring Clayton had done during his training had been inconclusive on whether or not his class was decent. Like all reborn classes, it was non-standard. For the most part, it seemed to work. He fought like a much better, more experienced warrior, but putting so many points in intelligence meant he was doing it with fewer relevant stats.

  Combat Medium, his first skill, was a standard melee combat skill with a few added perks having to do with his foreknowledge of the future. It had leveled a few times, each advancement coming with its own small increase to his combat power. Fate sense, his precognition skill, never leveled once he got it. He didn’t know what he was doing wrong, or even if he was making an error. Nobody could tell him the right answer, given the weird nature of the skill.

  The description of the skill wasn’t much help either. It was weeks of testing in the outskirts of his arrival town before he really understood even a part of what it did.

  After repeated wanderings in the relatively safe countryside, it had been some kind of carnivorous horse that had triggered the skill the first time. He knew it was there before it was ever visible, and was able to take it down because his skills told him what to do to avoid its attacks.

  The rest of what the skill did was lost on him, if it meant anything at all. Still, it wasn’t useless, and he wished he could make it better.

  “I think If I could get my skills higher, I’d have a better chance. One of them hasn’t advanced in proficiency at all though,” Clayton answered.

  The woman huffed.

  “Won’t help you much if you run into something stronger than your skills can compensate for, and there’s plenty out there. What level have you reached? Can’t be much more than five.”

  “Six,” Clayton said. “And I agree. But one of my skills lets me sense danger. And other things.”

  “How much in advance?”

  “Days, supposedly. So far, the only thing I learned more than an hour ahead of time was a monster wave hitting a town we weren’t anywhere near. It’s proportional to danger, you see.”

  “I see.” The Merkie woman sat down. “Helen, by the way.”

  “Clayton.” He gave another bow. The woman’s name wasn’t Helen, and if he pushed through the influence of the system enough, he’d be able to hear whatever squawking nonsense it actually was. There was no reason to, though. The system thought that the closest her name was to names he knew was Helen, and just trusting it on that kind of thing had never steered him wrong. “Do you get much business in here?”

  “Sure. You’d be seeing it too, if you hadn’t come by the road from Paulson.” That town name was nonsense too. Clayton ignored the impulse to figure out what it actually was and waited for more details. “That’s a short route, but not a popular one. Folks coming from Greensburg won’t get in for another hour or so.”

  “Not even the higher level martials? I’m sure they could make it quicker if they hurried.”

  “Hurried? Son, you are on the edge of all things. You’ll find nobody hurries much until they have to.”