Beneath Notice

The deep Yellow did not have a boundary so much as a change in the weather.

The scattered gold banding of the outer country closed up over about two kilometres into something continuous, a deep banked colour that sat on the landscape and made the air visibly thick. Breathing it was like breathing near a fire. The mana pressure pushed against his skin from every direction at once and did not let up, and after four days of it he stopped noticing, in the way he had stopped noticing a great many things.

He worked the edge of it for a month at Level 52 and did not go deep, because the things in there carried a full three along the spine, and a full three was a category and not a difficulty.

He was killing constantly.

That was the other change, and it was not the country's doing.

Every one of them arrived in him now. The small ones registered as small and he worked through them without breaking stride. The larger ones sat in him for an hour or a day, arriving through the same route Rill's ending had used and lodging in the same place.

He had tested whether it could be shut off, and it could not. He had tested whether it faded, and it had become ordinary instead, which was a different thing.

So he ate, and he climbed, and he carried a low continuous weight that grew by increments every time he did the thing he had to keep doing.

He got used to it. He was aware that getting used to it was itself a kind of event, and he did not examine it, in the way he had learned not to examine a number of things.

* * * *

The Ashfang walked past him on the eleventh day of the second month.

He had been in the open. That was the part he could not get over afterward. Not behind anything, not flattened, not doing any of the several hundred things he had learned to do with a body in the presence of something enormous. He had been crouched in low scrub reading a game trail with his hands in the dirt, and the Ashfang had come along the trail at nine feet and eleven hundred pounds and had walked past him at a distance of about twelve feet.

Its head had turned. He had seen the eye move over him.

It had kept walking.

Gesbiek stayed exactly where he was for four full minutes, and then sat down in the scrub and thought about it.

It had not failed to see him. He had watched the eye track across and register something and continue, which is not the movement an eye makes when it has found nothing. It had seen a shape and had assessed the shape and had concluded that the shape did not require anything.

He was Level 52. The Ashfang was a full 3-Yellow and probably somewhere past 70.

To it he was scenery.

He knew that feeling from the other side of a life. Wolves in the spring had looked at a starving runt and routed around him the way they routed around a rock. Snarl had walked past him a thousand times in the Sludge Pits without registering that anything had happened.

He had spent his whole existence being beneath notice, and had regarded it as the central injury of his life, and had built an entire personality out of enduring it.

He sat in the scrub at Level 52 and looked at it as a mechanism for the first time.

* * * *

The Sight told him what he wanted to know in about an hour, once he asked it the correct question.

He had been asking things *what are you*. He asked the Ashfang's departing signature *what am I to you*, and the System, which had never once refused to answer a question phrased in terms it understood, gave him a number.

[RELEVANCE: 0.04]

He looked at that for a while.

Then he spent the next week establishing what the number did.

Everything in the world carried one, calculated against whoever was doing the perceiving. It was not size and it was not level, though both fed into it. It was a running assessment of how much a given observer needed to allocate to a given object, and the observer's own perception ran off the result: high relevance got tracked, medium got noted, low got composited into the general background of a world too full of things to attend to individually.

Below a threshold, an observer's attention did not report the object at all.

Not blindness. Bookkeeping. Every creature in the forest was running a filter it had no idea it was running, and the filter was doing exactly what it was built to do, and had been doing it to Gesbiek since the day he was born.

He sat with that for an evening and did not enjoy any of it.

Then he asked the question that mattered, which was whether the number was calculated about him or reported by him.

* * * *

It was reported.

That took the best part of a fortnight to establish and cost him two broken ribs and a genuinely stupid encounter with something that had a higher threshold than his projections allowed for.

The mechanism was the same one he had been exploiting since the spring, which by now he found almost funny. Everything the System did, it did by asking a thing about itself and believing the answer.

Analytical Sight worked because objects answered questions. Freeze worked because the System could be asked more than it could hold. Clip worked because a surface asked two incompatible questions at once produced an answer it could not settle.

Relevance worked because he was the one being asked what he was worth, and he had been answering honestly his entire life.

He learned to lie.

Not dramatically. He could not report himself as absent, because absent was not a value the field accepted. What he could do was hold the report at a fraction of true while the Sight ran underneath, feeding the field a number appropriate to a small unremarkable object in a forest full of them.

The first time it worked he was standing eight feet from a 3-Yellow pack predator with his hands at his sides, and it looked at the space where he was and its eye did not stop.

He held it for forty seconds. Then his concentration slipped and the number came back up and the predator's head snapped round with the specific violence of something that had just had a piece of scenery turn into a goblin.

He got out through a rock face with about a third of a second to spare.

[SKILL ACQUIRED: VANISH (v0.1)]
[COST: 20% MANA | DURATION: 5:00]
[OPTICAL CAMOUFLAGE + PERCEPTION FILTER]
[WARNING: THIS IS NOT A SANCTIONED PROCESS]

Five minutes, once he had it stable. Twenty percent, which after Freeze at thirty was almost polite.

He noted the ceiling within the week, because he made a point of finding ceilings before ceilings found him.

Against Green and Blue-tier creatures it was total. They had coarse thresholds and a great deal of world to composite, and a low number went straight into the background with everything else.

Against a full three it thinned considerably. Something at 3-Yellow had a finer filter and more attention to spend, and a sustained low report from something standing four feet away eventually produced the specific unease of a creature that could not find what was bothering it.

He measured it as roughly two thirds effective and wrote the figure down, because a number he could rely on was worth more than a skill he trusted.

* * * *

After that the deep Yellow opened.

He did not fight his way through it. He walked through it, at a relevance of about four hundredths, past things that would have removed him from the world in a second and a half, and killed the ones he wanted from positions they had no reason to be watching.

Level 58 by the end of that month. Level 66 a fortnight later.

The technique stack had become a system without his ever having designed one. Vanish to arrive. Clip to be somewhere the thing had not accounted for. Freeze for the two seconds that turned an ambush into a certainty. Merge to convert everything he could not use into something he could.

He stopped needing to be careful and started needing to be organised, which was a different job and one he was better at.

He got bigger. Four feet became four and a half somewhere in the sixties and he stopped tracking it. The plating across his shoulders and forearms went from emerald to something darker with a grain in it. His claws stopped chipping.

At Level 67 he caught his reflection in still water and stopped, because he had been expecting the goblin from the pool outside the Processing Station and had got somebody else.

He looked at it for a while and moved on, and did not go back to that pool.

* * * *

He hummed while he worked.

Four notes, repeating. He had heard them once, from a rock ledge, on an afternoon he had spent considerably longer on than the assessment required.

He noticed himself doing it about twice a month and stopped each time and started again within the hour without noticing that either.

He did not use Possession on anything with a mind. He did not make a rule about it. He simply went round it, in the way a person walks round a place in a room where something happened.

Beetles for scouting, twice more. Once a bird, to get a look at a valley he could not reach.

Nothing with words in it.

* * * *

The country ran out at Level 77.

He noticed it as a change in the quality of his own days. He had spent two years in a forest where every zone had something above him in it, and somewhere in the seventies the sensation of climbing had been replaced by the sensation of clearing.

He tested it properly, because a suspicion was not a fact. Two weeks of sweeping every sector he could reach with the Sight held wide, cataloguing everything above Level 60 and finding, at the end of it, a list short enough to hold in his head.

The Ashfangs, which he had been eating for months.

Three 3-Yellow pack predators in the northern valleys, none of which would be difficult.

And one other thing, in the deep eastern interior, which the Sight came back from with a tag he read twice.

[STORM-TUSK CHIMERA | 3-YELLOW | LEVEL 78]

Three shards along the spine. Three separate heads.

He went and looked at it from two ridges away, at a relevance of four hundredths, and spent an afternoon watching it move.

It was twelve feet at the shoulder and it argued with itself. That was the thing he noticed first and kept noticing: the boar head and the eagle head and the serpent head all attached to one body and all under the impression that the body was theirs. It would start a movement and stop it. It would turn its shoulders one way while a head went another.

Somewhere very far back, on a storm night under a cloak that smelled of herbs and old goblin, somebody had held up three fingers and said that three lights were a storm and nobody fights a storm.

Gesbiek was Level 77 and had a stopped clock and a route through stone and a way of reporting himself as nothing at all.

He watched the Chimera fail to agree with itself for the fourth time in an hour, and understood that he was not going to be fighting three heads.

He was going to be fighting one body with three opinions.

* * * *

He went back to his position that evening, which was a rock overhang in the eastern hills that he had improved to the point of being almost comfortable, and sat with the last of the light.

Level 77. Twenty-three to go, and the curve steepening, and one thing left in this forest worth eating.

Below him the Darkwood went on in every direction, dark and enormous and hunted out. He had come into it four feet inside the Bone Perimeter with a bucket's worth of arithmetic and no idea what a level was.

He was aware that when the Chimera was gone there would be nothing left in here for him, and that the next problem would not be a creature in a forest.

He turned the river stone over in his hand, which was a thing his fingers did in the evenings without asking him.

Then he put it away and started planning, and somewhere in the middle of the planning he began humming four notes, and did not notice, and went on.