For a moment after Sam spoke, nobody moved. The only noise in the room was the quiet breaths being taken by the man.

I noticed Sam wasn't actually breathing now that I was thinking about it. Technically alive, my ass.

The Inquisitor's pleading look cracked for just a moment, revealing a smirk hidden beneath.

The world exploded into motion as Sam blurred towards him. I didn't see the result of their clash because I was already flying towards the Priestess myself. A sheen of silver coated the world as I called upon my Strand.

A half step from her, otherwise known as three metres, a spray of metallic needles was ejected from her body, and she disincorporated into a pile of slop. My shield flew into place, catching the volley before collapsing into fog due to the strain of stopping so many individual projectiles.

I really needed to figure out how to make the thing stop leaking.

In the moment I had blocked my vision, she changed again, this time forming a crude approximation of my sleep paralysis demon from back when I used to sleep. Terrible times, those.

Then she pushed all four limbs off the ground and launched herself at me with a screech. Just before we collided, I pulled my staff out of my Inventory, swinging it at her head.

Instead of taking the hit like a good little slime, her body seemed to morph around it, just barely avoiding touching it and activating the Cold Mana release. Then she slammed into me, her claws carved grooves into my shell just before she bounced off like a rubber bouncy ball being thrown at a metallic surface, a look of shock crossed her bat-like face for just a moment before she slammed into a wall. I froze my velocity just in time to avoid colliding with it as well.

I hadn't really had a chance to test the increased inertia from [Argent Flow], but it was good to know my body was the equivalent of a wrecking ball.

With a wave of my staff, I manifested a wave of ice shards and threw them at her, then pushed my aura outwards to try and cover the whole room.

"Switch!" yelled Sam, flying past me to pound the Priestess into the ground. The frozen parts of her body were smashed into pieces.

"We really should have coordinated—ah, whatever fuck it," I replied, turning to the Inquisitor.

I could see why she wanted to switch.

Surrounding the glasses dude was an orb of pure Fire Mana. Luckily, I was mostly heat-proof with my Scorchbranch skin.

I tried to throw ice at him, but it sublimated on contact with the Fire. He threw several Fire darts at me, but they hit my cloak and dispersed.

"We're at an impasse, I see."

"Really? You want to have a chat while we try to kill eac—" He was cut off when I began pounding his shield with silvery metallic thorns. Each one embedded slightly deeper as he strained against something.

I wasn't sure why he seemed to be struggling. Did manipulating Mana take effort for humans? Or maybe it was holding it in place with Authority that was the issue? That must suck for them. I just ordered it to do what I wanted, and it did exactly that. Though I also had to pay Mana to create it, so I suppose there were tradeoffs.

There was a flicker, and the Mana surrounding him changed attunements. I didn't recognize the new one, but I was suddenly no longer able to even puncture the orb. The thorns I was pounding him with started to skitter off the outside of it.

Man, fighting other system users was fucking annoying. Having a seemingly random toolkit of Skills allowed for a degree of unpredictability. No wonder Autumn told me to keep my ability to hand it out close to my chest.

I miss that little goober.

A wave of darts flew from him again. This time, they pierced through my body like it was made of paper. Then he began performing the hand motions to cast a spell and muttering under his breath. He wasn't manifesting the Mana in the darts; it's just that whatever type it was seemed to be unreasonably solid.

I wondered if I could abuse that fact.

Running towards him, I raised my staff and brought it down on the barrier.

"Shatter," I whispered an instant before the collision.

The Mana shield shattered into tiny pieces as my staff slammed into it. His eyes went wide, and he fumbled whatever spell he was casting. A flash of white—then he tumbled over, Novi's little doll body having sliced open his ankles.

As I was about to capitalize on his stumble, there was a bang and something dismembered my lower torso, slicing me in half. Then, while I fell as well, trying to aim my staff towards him, Mana exploded outwards from his body, throwing my tangle of parts into the wall.

"Switch!" Sam yelled uselessly.

"Little late for that!" I fired back, already using the body template I had stored in my ring to reconstruct my legs rapidly.

Whatever the slime girl did to herself led her to now being painted in stripes across the walls, slowly reincorporating together in a pile.

With one hand, I slammed the base of my staff into the ground and yelled, "Freeze!"

Frost bloomed outwards, coating every surface. The slime finally stopped moving.

Ignoring the kill notification, I turned my attention to the guy who should have been pummeled into the ground by now. Instead, Sam was floating in the air, trying to lash out at him with kinetic whips that cracked through the air with every strike. Despite their attempts, a wall of Mana rebuffed those whips.

A bullet from Novi ended their struggle. They fell to the floor as the Inquisitor's brain created an impressionist painting on the wall.

"That could have gone better,' I groaned.

"Well, at least you're able to regrow your body instead of scrounging around for a new one in a corpse pile," Sam replied.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

That did sound fairly miserable.

"How are we handling tomorrow? There are three of them to two of us. Which means if it comes to a brawl, we're at a disadvantage."

"Oh, don't worry about that. Just don't leave your room for thirty seconds, give or take a few tomorrow," Sam replied while pocketing the guy's glasses, which were somehow in pristine condition despite it all.

I had to pause at that.

"Did you seriously just 'Don't come to school tomorrow' me?"

"I don't follow?"

"It's probably lost in translation. What language are you speaking anyway?"

"Shughni," they replied.

"That's not a real language. Are you fucking with me?"

Sam gave me an unimpressed look and left the room. I had to follow them out due to my Role, Novi at my side.

"No, seriously, I've never heard of it before. Which means it's definitely incredibly obscure. Are you even catching everything everyone says? I think I remember the translator being kind of clunky and unreliable," though that was mostly with non-human languages.

"I have noticed that sometimes when people are speaking, it sounds really weird and definitely isn't words, but I can understand them anyway," Sam mused.

"Oh!" That was certainly a revelation. That meant the backend of the translation system was probably a Mana-based language. What type of Mana, though?

Does System Mana exist? No, that wouldn't be quite right. None of us were attuned to the same type of Mana or had undergone whatever process is required to learn one. Also, wouldn't it be easier just to shove something like Language Mana into everyone if they were going to use a basic Mana type?

My eyes widened as I came to a realization. Ugh, again with that? I think I'll just leave the extra circuits that grew when that happened. It was annoying having to rip them out every time I was surprised.

More importantly.

"Holy shit, are they using a Mythos to translate what we're saying?!" It made sense. I knew a Mythos had to have weird extra properties, and being able to translate languages without a single drop of Mana used could be one of them. I was definitely asking Eryx to tell me more about the system if I ever gained access to his memory fragment again. I felt like the question I asked him was worth waiting for, but there was so much about the system I didn't know.

"What the heck is a god Mana?" Sam asked. I regretted announcing my revelation. Autumn has kind of freaked out when I mentioned hearing about that from the person whose house I have a Quest to travel to.

"Don't worry about it. You'll learn it when you're older."

"I'm thirty-six…"

I shot Sam a look, "And? The goal here is to live forever. Either you'll learn when it becomes relevant to you or you'll die before that happens. When you turn ten thousand or whatever the fuck we make it to, I'm sure you'll see your current self as basically a child.

"I know things I shouldn't know. Things that probably aren't safe to know. Trust me, it's for your own best. You're living with the humans, right? You've got to be right by Fateswatch, where the centre of Kaelzar's power is concentrated. Or at least the centre of power on this Plane." Hazel had been very informative in that regard. I should probably stay away from the city itself if I didn't want Nyxie to put my Core through a metal compactor. Not that I didn't want to go back to a safer part of the world, it's just maybe a few hundred kilometres from the city would be the safest. "I don't want to tell you something that could get you killed."

Sam sagged in some emotion, couldn't tell which, but it was certainly one of them.

"That's fair. I'll see you tomorrow, then?" they asked.

"Yup! I have something I'd like to ask of you and have something juicy to trade for that ask. So no matter what you do, please survive," I said, then, after a moment's thought, realized I should probably ask. "What's your gender, by the way? I've just been using 'they' in my head to refer to you, but I never really asked."

They chuckled, "It doesn't matter, call me whatever you want. I lost that when I died."

That was a little sad, but I didn't feel like thinking about it.

"Alright, cool, cya!" I said, then we split, and I headed back to my room.

Sam was pretty cool, no matter how dummy thick his mind was.

Once back inside, I was surprised the blonde guy wasn't here trying to recruit me. It would have been an easy ambush. Maybe he went to Sam's room? Sam could handle himself if that happened.

I opened my kill notification, as well as the one Novi sent me.

[Killed Morphogenic Slime I-53 / Formshifter I-13 / Gel Cook I-36]

It was definitely her Capstone Skill that sliced me in half. Whatever the hell that was, it had way too much power for her level.

It was sad that we had to lose another non-human. There weren't enough of us already because of our spawn points being randomized. She wasn't even made of meat either.

[Killed Human I-60 / Elemental Initiate I-21 / Apprentice Lenscrafter I-99]

Class Level (Neophyte Conduit) Increased +1 (52)

+2 Wit, +3 Spirit, +2 Fortitude, +3 Arcana

Levelling sure slowed after fifty, huh.

I chuckled at the man's profession. No wonder his glasses were so nice. He likely spent a lot of time making them over the past few days.

What was more interesting was his Class. He displayed Fire Mana obviously, but that more durable Mana type must have been Metal. Which meant we were probably using the Chinese five-elemental model.

But that would mean Wood Mana was one of the base Mana types. That seemed too complicated to be a base element. There was a way for me to figure out if it existed, though.

I shifted some circuits around in my hand and used the splitting rune to break Nature Mana into its component parts.

The result was a mess of hundreds of Mana types that I just absolutely didn't have time to sort through. So I just released the puff of Mana.

Dozens of tiny images formed in that puff for an instant before it dissipated, and I was fairly certain I could see a tiny grove filled with trees in there somewhere, which was my target. If I understood the way Nature worked correctly, that was probably Forest Mana, which would probably break down into Tree Mana, which could then be broken down into Wood Mana.

So Wood Mana did exist, and it was one of the lower types.

I was really wasting Nature Mana just creating thorns to throw at people, wasn't I?

I let out a sigh and began shaping a miniature version of [Everwinter's Shield] into the air. The idea of language being shaped into a construct midair was something I could use more often, even if it weren't in this incredibly intricate form.

It was basically like creating a ritual, except instead of using a material to hold the Mana flow, you did it yourself. Manually holding Mana in place in order to cast a ritual by hand.

The tricky part seemed to be that if you wanted an effect that contained more than a single symbol, you needed to build stabilization as a concept into the ritual. Otherwise, the Mana you shaped would violently activate every time you drew a symbol. Winter was a very good aspect of Mana to do this with, which was probably why I unlocked the ability to cast spells like this already. I was obviously under the level where you would normally try to perform… Ritualcasting? That seemed like a good name for it.

It made me wonder what the hell Hazel was even doing for hundreds of years. Did she actually just spend that whole time perfecting silly handwiggles? That seemed like a waste of time to me.

"Hey, you there?" I pinged the artifact I'd left with her.

There was only static over the line.

Which wasn't right, there wasn't supposed to be static. It was a direct Spatial connection, not some kind of radio transceiver. What the heck was going on?

The last thing she told me was that she was going to try to find a way to teleport to me. Which was ridiculous; there was no way she was going to get that to work.

Did she fall off the Plane?

No, the Spatial connection should work even across Planes. Or at least that's what my Capstone Skill was telling me.

I hoped she was okay.

The rooster's crow signalled the start of the day. I focused on my internal clock, waiting for thirty seconds to pass.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.