Knowledge Is Power: The Last Reader
Chapter 22: Excellent Administrative Judgment

Chapter 22: Excellent Administrative Judgment

Milo made a decision on his way down the corridor, and the decision was this: he was not currently equipped to have an existential crisis about whose reflexes were doing his talking for him, and he was going to schedule that crisis for a later, more convenient date. Ideally never. Realistically, probably Tuesday.

There were more pressing bureaucratic matters at hand.

The Crown’s legal apparatus, it turned out, had exactly one setting for a knight caught mid-affair with his commanding lord’s fiancée, and the setting was, roughly translated, tut tut.

"Seven days," said the clerk processing the paperwork, not looking up, the specific flat tone of a man who had filed this exact complaint under a dozen different names and found it equally uninteresting every time. "Confinement, standard cell, reduced rations. He’ll be back on rotation by the week’s end."

"Seven days," Milo repeated.

"Yes, my lord."

"For the affair."

"For the conduct unbecoming, my lord. The affair itself isn’t formally chargeable. Only the lady’s conduct carries a statute." The clerk finally glanced up, and had the decency to look faintly apologetic about it, in the specific bloodless way bureaucrats apologize for things they didn’t write and have no intention of fixing. "The law’s a bit lopsided on this particular subject, my lord. Always has been."

"Wonderful," Milo said. "So the man who ruined an engagement, got a woman formally ruined for it, and will absolutely do this again to someone else the moment he’s bored enough, gets a week of bad soup."

"That’s the statute, my lord."

Milo already knew, of course, the way he knew everything about this world that arrived uninvited and unasked for — knew that Reeve, freed and humiliated but fundamentally unbothered, would spend the next several years quietly cultivating exactly the kind of grudges and connections that eventually made him extremely useful to exactly the kind of people who wanted a spy inside a rival house. Seven days of bad soup was not going to fix that. Seven days of bad soup was, if anything, going to make Reeve considerably more motivated to become a problem later.

"I have a solution," Milo said.

"My lord?"

"Reassignment. He’s still my knight, is he not, regardless of the current unpleasantness?"

"Technically, yes, my lord, though most commanders in your position would consider dismissal—"

"I’m not most commanders." Milo smiled, the specific pleasant smile he’d learned watching Corenne’s face fall apart an hour earlier, and found it disturbingly easy to produce a second time. "I think a man who’s shown this much initiative deserves a posting that actually uses it. The southern border garrison’s been asking for volunteers for the Kessa Hollow patrol route. I understand it’s very demanding work."

The clerk’s pen paused, very briefly, over the page.

"The Kessa Hollow route, my lord."

"The very one."

"...Nobody’s come back from a full rotation on that route in eleven months, my lord."

"Is that so." Milo let the silence sit exactly as long as it needed to. "Well. I’m sure Sir Reeve will distinguish himself. He’s shown a real talent for landing on his feet."

He did not, technically, order anyone’s death. He wanted that distinction noted, mostly for his own benefit, since nobody else in the room seemed remotely interested in drawing it. A reassignment was a reassignment. What happened to a man on a garrison route nobody survived was simply the unfortunate, statistically predictable cost of doing one’s duty to the Crown, and Milo intended to sleep exactly as well tonight as a person sleeps after making a decision they’ve decided not to examine too closely in the lamplight.

I’ll feel bad about this specific one later too, he thought, filing it directly behind the crisis about the lying, in the same drawer, with the same lock, and a note reading not now in handwriting that was starting to look less like his own and more like a man who’d had considerable practice not looking at things.

The Temple, when he found it — and he found it easily, because Loof’s memory apparently considered it as unremarkable a landmark as the palace kitchens — was, structurally speaking, exactly the kind of building Milo had spent an entire Chapter of his real life privately mocking.

A single stone, worn smooth by generations of desperate palms, sitting in the center of a round room that smelled like candle wax and unearned reverence.

"Of course," Milo muttered, standing in the doorway. "Of course it’s a rock. Every world apparently agrees a rock is the appropriate shape for a god. I’d love to meet whoever started that trend and ask them, calmly, what the rock had that the rest of us didn’t."

The attendant on duty — an old woman this time, instead of an old man, though carrying the exact same air of having explained this ritual to ten thousand skeptical strangers and stopped caring whether the eleven-thousandth believed a word of it — didn’t look remotely offended by the muttering. If anything, she looked faintly entertained.

"You’re not from around here," she said. Not a question.

"You have no idea," Milo said.

"This world’s stone does something yours apparently doesn’t," she went on, unbothered, gesturing him closer with the specific patience of someone reciting a speech she’d given so many times it had worn a groove into her own memory. "Skill points. Every soul gets fifty at the start, whether they ever learn to spend them or not. Place your palm down, and the stone will show you exactly how many you’re carrying, and exactly what they can buy."

Milo, who had been informed of his own fifty skill points approximately once, in passing, by a system window he’d been too busy nearly dying to properly interrogate, felt something in his chest sit up very straight.

"Go on, then," she said. "Everyone always wants to know what fifty points actually does. Might as well find out properly instead of carrying the number around like a coin you’re afraid to spend."

He placed his palm on the stone, and the number confirmed itself exactly where it had always quietly lived, waiting for him to notice it mattered.

[SKILL POINTS AVAILABLE: 50]

[FUNCTION: REDUCE ABILITY COOLDOWN, INCREASE ABILITY POTENCY/EFFECT, OR BOTH]

[ADDITIONAL POINTS OBTAINABLE — RARE, DIFFICULT]

"Fifty points," Milo said out loud, mostly to hear how absurd it sounded after everything he’d already spent tonight on far stupider things. "Fifty points, sitting unspent this entire time, while I’ve been overcasting shields until my nose bled and learning skills from terrified assassin ghosts."

"You’d be amazed how many people never spend a single one," the old woman said. "Fear, mostly. Once you spend it, you can’t un-spend it. People like holding onto potential more than they like actually having power. It’s a very common, very human kind of cowardice."

Milo thought about that for exactly as long as it took to decide she was completely right and he had no intention of being one of those people.

He thought, first, about Mana Shield — about a nosebleed in a goblin tunnel, about a golem’s claw cracking gold light a half-second before it would have ended someone he loved. He thought about Assassination, barely used, barely necessary tonight. And then he thought, with the specific clarity of a man finally looking directly at the one bottleneck that had cost him more than any single monster ever had, about a phantom that only answered his call once every thirty days, no matter how badly he needed a second conversation with it.

That, he thought. That’s the one. Everything else is a tool I already know how to swing. That is the actual chain.

"Power of Knowledge," he said out loud. "The active function. I want the cooldown reduced. Whatever it costs."

[CALCULATING...]

[COOLDOWN REDUCTION: 30 DAYS → 16 DAYS]

[COST: 50/50 SKILL POINTS]

"All of it," the old woman said, with the specific respect reserved for people who commit fully to a bad-looking decision that turns out to have been the correct one. "Bold. Most people spread it thin across three or four things and end up mediocre at everything instead of dangerous at one."

"I don’t need to be mediocre at four things," Milo said. "I need to stop waiting a month every time I need to actually learn something."

The number settled into place, quiet and permanent, and Milo felt it the way he felt every real change this Archive and this book had ever handed him — not loudly, not with fanfare, just a small, structural shift in the exact shape of what he was now capable of.

[POWER OF KNOWLEDGE — COOLDOWN: 16 DAYS]

[SKILL POINTS REMAINING: 0]

[ADDITIONAL POINTS: EARNED THROUGH EXTRAORDINARY ACHIEVEMENT ONLY]

"Sixteen days," he said, and let himself, for one entire unbothered second, actually enjoy something without a catch immediately attached to it. "Sixteen days, I can live with. Sixteen days, I can actually plan around."

He was still turning the number over, still feeling something close to genuine pride about it for the first time since a market square had taught him what this world thought of readers, when a herald’s boots came pounding up the Temple steps behind him, entirely too fast for anything that was going to be good news.

"My lord Loof." The herald was out of breath, and worse, he was pale. "You’re wanted. The palace. His Majesty’s heard about the scandal — the lady, the knight’s disappearance, all of it — and he’s asked for you by name."

Milo felt the good second end exactly as quickly as it had arrived.

"By name," he repeated.

"By name, my lord. Tonight."

Of everything this story had thrown at him so far, this was the first time it had used the actual word king like it expected Milo to already understand exactly how much trouble that word was about to be.