Lorelei vomited—for what felt like the four-hundredth time—wiped her mouth and slumped back heavily against the bus shelter as though it were the last bastion of civilisation amidst an apocalypse of grotesque revelations.

  It wasn't just the impact of coming so close to death that had her stomach in rebellion. And it wasn't merely the randomised Status Effect from that made the world smell like a dairy farm from the ninth circle of hell—although that certainly contributed to the sheer horror of it. Nor was it even the leftover adrenaline from fighting Wolves—fighting fucking Wolves!—that made her feel like every nerve in her body was a live wire wrapped around a razor blade. No, it was the dawning realisation that the success of her new existence was entirely out of her hands.

  Her first emotion when she finally managed to trigger was one of unholy relief.

  Her health had shot up to 72/250, but crucially, it stopped its deathly descent. She assumed it would now slowly tick up over time—health regenerated just like mana, didn’t it?—but considering she had absolutely no mana available, she would need to hunker down for a bit and let things settle. Hunker down and pray that whatever dice were being rolled didn’t come up snake eyes.

  If she stumbled into another clusterfuck battle in the near future, she was going to be toast. But not the warm, comforting kind. More like burnt, charred, tossed-to-the-dogs toast. And it was this realisation that triggered the epic vomiting to start again, the bile tasting of something far worse than mere stomach acid.

  Lorelei remembered her brother holding forth, at length, as to his frustrations with "glass cannon" mages. He'd never let her choose that Build whenever they'd gamed together. "They're just total liabilities," he'd said. "Sure, the damage numbers look pretty, but it's all fun and games until someone puts a spear through your eye. They're just too squishy for words."

  But right now, she was in an even worse position than a squishy mage, wasn’t she? Because at least glass cannons had the 'cannon' bit reliably going for them. Of course, if everything went to plan, Lorelei’d yet to come up against something she could not royally fuck up - she studiously appeared not to be counting the Dragon in this line of thinking - however, the randomised nature of her skills meant she was as likely to be killed by a twisted ankle as she was in a pitched battle. How was all this remotely viable when her attacks might worsen things, and even her healing was unreliable?

  Lorelei indulged in a good twenty minutes of moping—punctuated by occasional heaves that brought up bile laced with the taste of despair—before taking a deep breath and dragging herself to her feet. There was no sense in borrowing trouble from the future. Right here, right now, she was two fights in—she still did not seem to be counting the Dragon for some reason—and she was the only one left standing. There were five dead Kobolds and three slaughtered Wolves that could attest that this glass cannon wasn’t wholly without some ‘boom’.

  Plastering on the stiffest of her upper lips, Lorelei moved to the body of the last Wolf she had dispatched and triggered the Loot facility. There were a couple of clinks as copper coins were added to her bank balance, and her Money, Money, Money quest was updated to 11/50.

  Not bad. Especially as she also seemed to have collected a Skinning Knife and two pieces of Wolf meat.

  “Guide,” she said, “where’s the Skinning Knife come from?”

  “I don’t know why you’re being so pissy with me,” Lorelei said aloud, then blushed as she realised no one was actually about to address her words. “It’s not like I have any control over this!”

  A sniffy silence was the only response as if the Guide were actively deciding that she was beneath its notice. For a moment, it blew Lorelei's mind that she was being ignored by something that existed on a scale she couldn’t even comprehend, an entity whose disdain could crush her just by existing in the same universe. And then the emotional dampening kicked back in.

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  “Okay, be like that. See if I care. What do you mean by penalties?”

  “You seem to have put an awful lot of thought into something that you’ve only just realised is a thing…”

  There was a noise like an electronic raspberry being blown. Then the ticker tape message flashed more quickly than usual, almost angrily, as if the Guide’s patience was finally fraying.

  Goodness, Lorelei thought, and I considered the Prick to be touchy when questioned.

  She looked down at the Wolf and considered her options. The penalty for was not especially significant at a low level. The gap was not too bad until whatever profession she was levelling reached 100. Sure, it’d lag a bit behind someone who had ‘learned’ it correctly, but not in a disastrous way. However, once she levelled it past 100, the disparity would begin to tell…

  On the other hand—and thinking about the Skinning Knife pulled it out of whatever inventory she possessed and into her grip—Level 100 was a long way off, and, with the unreliability of her Skills, she needed every advantage she could get. And it wasn’t even like she knew where she could find any trainers in the first place…

  Skinning the Wolf was more straightforward than she would have thought. She simply needed to be holding the knife and to . . . want to do it. As soon as she did that, the Wolf’s carcass vanished, and she received a snarky notification.

  Lorelei walked over to the second Wolf and repeated the skinning action after looting it for another ten copper coins and two more pieces of Wolf meat. This also caused the body to vanish, leading to another [Leather Off-cut] and a +1 increase in her Skinning skill.

  As the Level 4 Wolf had already had its pelt removed by the Demon, her had summoned, beyond fifteen coins and another hunk of Wolf meat, there was nothing else to be gained.

  With 36/50 of copper coins in her inventory towards Money, Money, Money, a lovely new passive skill that she sensed would, finally, make her dad proud of her and a bit more of a spring in her step, Lorelei put her best foot forward and continued her journey back to Glyde and Glyde.

  *

  I really, really should have better things to do than this, thought Fortuna, stepping out of the shadows of the building Lorelei had been fighting in front of.

  She was currently in her avatar of a tall, elegant, dark-haired woman in a red dress—Luck be a lady tonight—and stood out somewhat dramatically in the grey afternoon sunshine. Not that she cared. She was so far above the power of any of the beings on this baby planet that should anyone so much as look upon her true form, they would be driven instantly insane, their minds turned to jelly by the sight of a truth too vast, too terrible to comprehend. Zeus, the old lech, got that bit right after all.

  Honestly, this is a bit embarrassing. Of all the cities, on all the planets, in all the universes, I've chosen to strut my stuff around this one. This is such a colossal waste of my time.

  And yet . . .

  The position of Fortuna’s Herald was not one of the more prized roles that existed in the pantheon. There was something about serving a Great Celestial Being whose defining characteristic was their capriciousness that hardly lured in many takers. When you were delving a Legendary Dungeon, parties tended not to want to call upon the services of someone who was the definition of a 'wide-eyed chaos monkey.'

  Fortuna's eyes unfocused momentarily as she surveyed her current roster of Heralds, and the sight made her lip curl in distaste. For sure, there was the occasional decent soul amongst them, usually on the more pacifistic of worlds, but to be honest, it was all rather a succession of maniacs, lunatics, and neer-do-wells.

  And then there was Lorelei Norton.

  It was utterly ridiculous that a Level 2 had come to her notice. Fortuna doubted she’d ever hear about this planet in the usual run of things. After all, System integrations were coming thick and fast nowadays, and the protocols that prevented just the sort of interference she was contemplating were pretty watertight.

  The Old Ones had all agreed that it was best for new planets to work the kinks out of their societies for a few hundred years before they descended upon them in all their Glory. There had been too many shitstorms caused by one of them or another getting overly involved to let the free-for-all continue.

  But, Fortuna reflected, it was more a guideline than a hard-and-fast rule.

  Provided she didn’t do something completely outrageous—what, like twist the future so that your Herald survives a critical hit!? a disloyal part of her mind shouted at her. She expunged it carelessly, leaving that version of her to drift in the air for a moment before dissipating with a pop—there was nothing to say she couldn’t hang around here for a bit and keep an eye on how things shook out.

  It had been so long since she’d been on a newly integrated planet that this could be viewed as a holiday. Yes, that was it. A holiday. Just the sort of silly, random thing she would be expected to do. The restrictions couldn’t apply if she weren’t planning to interfere, could they?

  Fortuna turned to watch her newest Herald bumble her way towards the city centre.

  She had been looking for just this sort of opportunity for millennia. If she got lucky, there was every chance she could pull down the whole house of cards around them before the others even knew what she was up to.

  And she absolutely specialised in that sort of thing . . .