Archive Of Potentialities.

Short story: A Salaryman's Supernatural Induction 8.

".....what?"

Confusion. My mind has been plunged into such a state.

Not too long ago I had been pondering on the absence of new skills. And now, here I am.

Observe huh....

Tachibana was as undisturbed as ever, still fully dedicated to getting a handle on atmospheric magicules.

She has been at it for a while, beads of sweat had formed on her forehead, her face was frozen in a state of intense concentration. This was expected, I estimated that she would take about 3 days to get a hang of it. Three days is actually pretty fast for a normal human to learn this ability, but I'm factoring in her innate talent for energy perception.

Anyway, seeing as she's still going at it, it's the perfect time to test out this skill.

Extra skill [Observe].

I analyzed the skill within me and the results sparked one specific thought in me.

Suspicious...

This skill was truly suspicious.

By definition, an extra skill is a level above common skills in performance and it usually has basic effects, like manipulating water really well and the like. There were a few extra skills that were really broken to be called extra, example being rimuru's black flames. Taking all this into account though, they still fell under the realm of "extra". Even black flames was just a skill that burned things to oblivion at the end of the day. What made the skill suspicious then?

[Observe]: Grants the power to ascertain the qualities of any target that has not been directly influenced by the user.

That seems a little too deep for an extra skill, no?

My mind raced through various reasons for why a skill like this would suddenly appear, but I have nothing more than speculation at the moment.

The only reasonable conclusion I could reach was that it was the degraded form of a unique skill, one that couldn't be acquired because I lacked sufficient magicules and achievement.

Oh well, I'll have to move on to something else now, speculation only goes so far. Now, I can test this skill.

First, what constitutes "directly influenced"? I assume it's something that has not been altered with my energy or magicules or anything of that manner.

If so, Tachibana should be a valid target for this.

Okay...let's do this.

I activated the skill and set Tachibana Naomi as its target.

Much like when I used magic sense, information flooded into my mind. It carried details on Naomi's magicule count, flow efficiency, and ....what's this?

How does someone in this world...?

This is.... unexpected, though I guess it answers a few questions about her monstrous instincts.

In my calculations, I had factored in Tachibana's innate talent for energy perception, giving her 3 days to be able to finish this part of her training....but if this skill is reliable...

"I got it! I got it! I can sense it now! I can feel the layout of the park, I can even feel how you're shaped, I can even identify the objects around me in a limited radius. This is so amazing!"

Yup, there it is.

This skill is more powerful than I expected, it was able to look into the nature of her soul.

The information I got was very interesting.

Her soul had something different in it...like a mutation. This "mutation" seemed to have given her magicules the ability to completely attune itself and adapt to other magicules around it, the blending was so perfect that she would feel any slight discrepancy around her. It all makes sense now, her initial wariness of me.