The Skill Thief of Manila

A LitRPG Apocalypse by Ramon Galvez

CHAPTER THREE: Jasmine

The hallway was longer than I remembered. Fluorescent tubes overhead, classrooms on both sides. My socks swished against the cold linoleum. I passed Room 304 and heard nothing. Room 306 had a chair wedged under its handle.

The scream came again, not words anymore, but effort. It was coming from the stairwell at the end of the corridor, the one I always avoided because the bad boys secretly smoked there and I didn't like cigs.

I found her in that stairwell, on the landing between the third and second floors, and I wished it did smell like bad boys being bad, not blood. She was against the wall, using a thick textbook as a weapon, in scrubs. Green top, gray bottoms. Which meant she had duty-hours later at the UST Hospital. Had. The dark spreading through the fabric at her side wasn't sweat.

There were three goblins, one dead with an arrow in its neck. The other two were on her. One had a shiv out and was working the angle on her left—feinting, pulling back, feinting again. The other had grabbed fistfuls of her top and was hauling, insanely, to drag her down. She had the textbook up in both hands and wasn't letting go: blocking, driving its spine into the grabber's wrists.

Her breathing was ragged, elbows dropping. And the feinting one found an opening. She twisted—book taking the worst of it, her taking the rest—but she didn't make a sound. Neither did my socks.

I'm not going to walk through what happened next in detail. They were smaller than me, and I was trying to save someone. I dropped the shiv, grabbed the baton with both hands, and just kept going until the notification appeared.

[You have slain: 2 Goblins. Received: 20 gold.]

I almost gave the screen a finger when she dropped. I caught her before the landing, and we ended up against the wall.

Shallow breaths. Measured, each inhale a small private act of will. Her hands were pressed to her left side. I looked, did the math, and slid the sum onto a table I wasn't revisiting.

"Hey," I said.

"Hey," she said.

"I'm Josh. Joshua Dimagiba."

"Jasmine." A small pause. "Jasmine Lim."

Her eyes moved to the ceiling—the focused expression of someone taking inventory of a bad situation. The kind of face that, under normal circumstances, defaulted to composed. A small Sanrio charm dangled from her lanyard clasp—a two-dimensional, lightly-tanned Hello Kitty with a bright-blue bow.

"College of Nursing?"

"Surgery. Second year." Something in her that might have been a laugh died on its way out. "Don't say it."

"Wasn't going to," I promised.

"Everyone's going to say it."

"Everyone except me."

She tilted her head and measured me—which, I felt, cost her something—and one short nod later, something between us shifted from strangers to not-quite.

"What class did you get?" I asked.

"Necromancer." The word dropped between us like an unclaimed item from Lost and Found. "I picked it because the card had a woman in a long dress who looked like a boss lady. Made sense at the time."

"It still makes sense."

Excitement blossomed in my chest, and I sat on it hard.

That was when I noticed the icon floating just above the crown of her head, about an inch from her skin—a shard, small, translucent, spinning slow, lit clean blue-white. My hand shifted slightly, just to check. It drifted toward my fingers.

A living target. No no-sign. Just available in a way that Mr. Maglalang's hadn't been.

"How about you?" she asked, and I snapped out of it.

"Apparently, I'm a dirty little thief now." I let out a sigh with a smile as I gave her the truth as a joke.

"I was with Professor Panelo. He shot one." She pointed a weak finger at the dead goblin three steps from the top of the stairs, facedown. "Then he pushed me."

"Your professor pushed you."

"Panelo." Her voice was weakening. "Dr. Gregorio Panelo. Communications chair. He couldn't get another arrow up in time, so." It was her, calling his name while I was with Mr. Maglalang—after he pushed her to save himself.

"I'll find him," I said. "Just to say hi."

She nodded. We sat with it for a moment.

"My parents are in Cebu." She said it like she'd been holding it in her chest and had decided it was time to set half of it down in someone else. "My dad's name is Dante. My mom is Cora. They live in Consolacion—no address—there's a road off the highway, you turn at the sari-sari store with the Tanduay sign, it's the fourth house." Precise, careful. The recitation of a Last Will and Testament.

"Dante and Cora Lim. Consolacion, Cebu," I said. "Got it."

"You don't have to—"

"Dante and Cora Lim. Consolacion, Cebu. The sari-sari store with the Tanduay sign. Fourth house."

"You don't know them," she said.

"No."

"But you'll—"

"Yeah."

Something in her face settled. Not relief exactly. More like peace.

She started talking about Consolacion. The road. Her mother's carenderia, open every Saturday, the smell of that kitchen, the kakanin rice cakes she made every week without a written recipe, all of it in her hands.

My voice stayed even. My eyes on her face.

The interface opened when my fingers passed near the icon—a grid of squares with rounded edges, one occupied. The shard spun slow inside it.

The square enlarged to a size I could fit my hand into. The edges vibrated faintly, and some instinct told me clearly, don't touch, like Operation, except error didn't equal buzzer, and Cavity Sam wasn't Jasmine Lim, looking up from your lap, telling you about her father.

I settled my weight through the shoulder, elbow floating, the way I held my mouse during a far shot with Razorsong's longbow I couldn't afford to miss. My hand was crossing the threshold—sliding into a square hole into her soul—while she asked if I thought the flooding in 2022 had changed the waterways around Cebu.

"Probably," I said.

"He built a wall after that," she said. "While everyone was collecting trash in garbage bags, Papa was making measurements."

"Sounds right," I said. "Good men are like that."

"Men of honor."

The shard spun slow and warm-looking, about the size of a folded letter. I carefully closed my fingers around it and felt for resistance. There was a slight magnetic pull I tugged against.

It came free, dissolving before I had it fully out. A warmth settled somewhere in my chest, and there was a soundless click of something slotting into place.

[You have stolen: Raise Skeleton.]

Fuck.

She was still talking about her dad.

I said, "My parents are in Malinta," to keep up the lie that I was a human being, not a monster, which meant I was a shameless monster.

Jasmine looked at me.

"My mom, Dolores, runs a salon. My dad, Rodrigo, drives delivery."

"Malinta." Jasmine said, as if to file it for a later we both knew would never come.

"Valenzuela side. By my old high school, St. Jude Academy. I'm on my way there, now, to see if they're alright."

She paused. Smiled with her eyes closed. "You're a really good person."

"I told you." I stopped. Closed my eyes. Pulled myself together. "I'm just a dirty, dirty thief."

I wished I was dead.

We talked for another few minutes. In the middle of telling me about her father's wall—how he'd laid the first course crooked and drove himself crazy for a week, before he tore it down and started over—she wasn't there anymore. There, and then not there, mid-sentence.

I wiped tears from my face and swallowed. I did the Sign of the Cross for the second time in an hour. I thought my Jesus was Razorsong. I didn't fully decide what happened next.

That's not an excuse—I'm not trying to excuse anything. I'm just reporting the sequence: I felt the skill. I looked at her. My hand moved.

Green fire ignited and took her fast—flesh, muscle, all of it unraveling into dust winnowing with the flame. The lanyard shook and the shadows looked like they were trying to climb up the walls before everything stopped.

"Jasmine?"

Her skeleton sat up, scrubs loose at the shoulders and cinched wrong at the waist. Hello Kitty still dangled from the vertebra where her neck used to be, and her skull turned slow, taking in the stairwell the way someone takes in a room they've just woken up in. When her sweep ended on me, I saw green flame burning where her eyes used to be, low and steady.

I couldn't tell, for sure, whether there was someone in there. She looked almost at peace, which was nice until you remembered that a moment ago, she all the way was.

That almost was me.

Joshua "Almost Me" Dimagiba, forever and ever, amen, pass the wine.

A locker slammed somewhere not far enough below. She tilted her head and broke something not little in me. It was the same tilt from when she told me to not say the word ironic while she bled to death as a medical professional.

I made myself breathe.

"Okay," I said.

Her eye-flames lit brighter for a second.

I stood up.

Jasmine stood up, too.

We went downstairs.