As the world around me dimmed and the air-cooled, I realized I was still unable to hear anything. It was as though I was all alone in the world. Even the wind seemed to have abandoned. The silence that surrounded me reminded me of the saying ‘Absolute silence leads to sadness. It is the image of death.’ It was a quote I had read somewhere long ago and only now did I understand what the author meant.
Silence was never an absolute thing. In our modern world, everything generates some form of noise. From the fans moving air to the soft hum of electricity. Even when I got here, while the noise was less, it was never missing. Yet now I could hear my own heart beat out a rhythm as it pushed blood through my body, my lungs rasping as they pulled in air, but that was it.
While no one around me talked, or even moved, I was in a room full of people and I barely heard a thing. Something told me that was not something natural. Finally, the silence cracked as one of the people near me cried out.
Every person in the room jumped, ran, teleported, and otherwise got away from the person crying out in pain. I didn’t need my Mana Sense to know that everyone was holding spells and weapons at the ready. Ready to kill this person, to destroy their body, if they did something to suggest that they were infected by whatever we had just been fighting against.
While they fell to the ground, it was only to their knees as their body started to glow with mana and power. Within moments, another person simirly fell to their knees with a pained gasp of breath. In utter horror, I slowly backed away from everyone. Even when my back hit the corner of the room, I pushed into it as I watched whatever was happening hit person after person. The more I watched, the more I realized there was nowhere to go, no way to escape the pain. I just got lucky, or unlucky, as I was the st to be affected.
It started dull, barely there compared to the pain of all my torn muscles and ligaments, but it quickly grew until I tore a gasping cry from my lips. Slowly, it spread throughout my body until it consumed everything. Pain stabbed into every muscle and organ. Even my mana pool hurt. I didn’t even know it could.
Then it dissipated. Draining from my body until it was little more than a figment of my imagination. Of course, that didn’t st long. Searing pain stabbed into my brain as mana began to struggle to push through my body. The odd liquid no longer acted as if it were like water but closer to thick mosses. Whatever the reason, my Mana Sense yanked and pushed at the liquid as it struggled to stay active.
The sensation reminded me of the struggles to force cold grease into a space that was already nearly full. It was painful, messy, and mostly pointless. Which was bad enough when dealing with cold, hard machines. When it was done to a human body, it was not pleasant, to say the least.
Seeing no other choice, I dropped my Mana Sense. Letting my ability to sense the mana flowing through the world around me fall away as I waited for the sensation to diminish in any way it could. To my surprise, it completely vanished. As if it had never been there. Confused by this, I decided to run a few tests.
Or at least I tried to run a few tests. Turns out the very act of moving mana through my body had itself become painful. While I hoped that the feeling and pain were just a temporary condition, I decided to double-check my status. What I saw had my jaw practically hitting the floor.
Name:
Kyren Vulpier
Race:
Kitsune* – Demonic
Level:
43 (+12)
Css:
Arcane Elementalist
XP:
329523/362.9k
HP:
1465/1465
HP Regen:
50.5% (739.8) per hour*
MP:
176/1210
MP Regen:
57.5% (695.7) per hour*
Current Ailments:
Status Imbance*
Current Buffs:
Somehow I managed to gain enough experience to jump not one or two levels but twelve. With those levels came the stats my css gave me. I jumped over to my stats page and damn. Each had jumped quite a bit. Three of them had even managed to break the three-digit mark.
Current Stats:
Strength (STR):
80 (+15)
Agility (AGI):
90 (+21)
Vitality (VIT):
101 (+22)
Intelligence (INT):
121 (+39)
Wisdom (WIS):
115 (+28)
Dexterity (DEX):
93 (+20)
Charisma (CHA)
89 (+12)
Free Points:
156 (+60)
Vitality was a great one to increase as it seemed tied to my health and its regeneration. The other two, though, were better, at least in my mind, because they increased my mana and mana regeneration. Both things that I needed given that most of my abilities ate through both. Even now, the amount of mana I currently had was low and what little I had left in my colr was barely enough for a few spells.
Still, nothing on the stat page told me why my mana was having such a hard time. It wasn’t until I returned to my status page that I found my answer. Sitting on the current ailments section was something I should have expected: Status Imbance*.
I groaned as I mentally clicked on it and read over the information. My intelligence stat was starting to leave the majority of the rest in the proverbial dust. The worst of which was my strength stat. Well, I say worst but it was the only one that was below the minimum threshold. Not that agility was far behind.
Status Imbance detected. Strength stat is currently 66.12% of the highest stat. While you can work with more mana, you will find every bit of it harder and more painful to work with. As the value difference is not more than 5% off, your control over mana is only marginally affected.
To me, the system also seemed to be trying to warn me that I would find mana harder to work with if I let this difference grow much rger. “Now why would controlling mana require strength?” I mused aloud, not expecting an answer.
“Oh, that’s because it takes strength, mental and physical, to control the flow of mana and the effects generated by it.” Someone said from nearby. Judging by their tone and the fact that they were focused on something in front of them, they had absentmindedly answered the question. Still, their answer was interesting to hear and it made a sort of odd sense. I mean, mana was around us, affecting the world almost as much as the world affected it. How else would we be able to use it to create spells after all?
Now, I just needed to figure out how to solve my little issue. Sure, I could go exercise for a few days to raise the stat, but I doubted that whatever had bsted the halls had managed to get every creature. There was also no way in hell that I was going to walk around without something to protect myself from being bitten. My only other option was to spend the points to bring the stat up. At least I had enough of those to waste a few without worry.
As the points went into the stat, my mana returned to feeling just as easy to move and control as it had been before. I also noticed that there had been one hell of a deep throbbing that had been pushing at the edges of my brain. As it faded, my mind cleared up.
Clear of mind, I took a second look at my status screen and narrowed my eyes. There was no way that I could have gained that much experience from one fight. Of course, all of the information I needed was in the log. A log that was full of so much information. It took me filtering what the screen dispyed to everything in the st day to expin just what had happened.
{Level 15 Weaponized Splider defeated. No XP Gained…
Error Detected.
Isoting Error.
Error Isoted.
Creature level too low for for normal XP distribution.
Local ecology threatened.
Calcuting incentive.
Incentive found: Minimum XP allocation allowed.
Minimum XP allocation for this creature is 10 XP per kill.
Setting Allocation.
Recalcuting.
{Level 15 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x989
{Level 16 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x915
{Level 17 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x823
{Level 18 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x777
{Level 19 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x702
{Level 20 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x653
{Level 21 Weaponized Splider defeated. Minimum Allocation Distributed.} x651
{Level 22 Weaponized Splider defeated. A tiny amount of XP has been awarded.} x548
{Level 23 Weaponized Splider defeated. A tiny amount of XP has been awarded.} x443
{Level 24 Weaponized Splider defeated. A tiny amount of XP has been awarded.} x308
{Level 25 Weaponized Splider defeated. A minor amount of XP has been awarded.}x247
{Level 26 Weaponized Splider defeated. A minor amount of XP has been awarded.} x129
{Level 27 Weaponized Splider defeated. A minor amount of XP has been awarded.} x182
{Level 28 Weaponized Splider defeated. XP has been awarded.} x37
{Level 29 Weaponized Splider defeated. XP has been awarded.} x108
{Level 30 Weaponized Splider defeated. XP has been awarded.} x91
It took me a minute to lift my jaw off the ground and add together the number of creatures I had managed to kill. After double-checking it, I found that I had managed to kill over seven and a half thousand of the creepy crawlies. I mean, how had I managed to do that?
As I looked back, I realized that it wasn't all that weird. Each of the things were weak as all hell. Their danger came from their ability to reproduce simply by biting their opponent. Add to that their tendency to swarm and I could see how the numbers were so rge. A fact that I had taken full advantage of as I carpet-bombed them time and time again.
Looking back at my level, I admitted that this fight, while creepy as hell, was well worth the amount of mana and effort. More than worth it. At least for me. Maybe not so much for all those that had died. A reminder that had me looking through the shield on the door and into the quickly darkening corridor.
I didn’t realize until that moment that the light that had suffused the room was still coming from the door. I found it odd given that most of the heat had already dissipated. As I watched, the st of the light faded and left behind an impenetrable pitch-bck nothingness. Confused as to how there could be no light out there but light in here, I scanned the ceilings of both areas to find that there were no lights on the ceiling.
In fact, the dim light that lit my current space came from an odd series of balls that circled one of the women. It likely had something to do with her SoulStone transformation or something. Honestly, it didn’t matter to me. The only thing that mattered to me at that moment was to somehow get my bone and to get gone.
As I scanned everyone’s face, looking for the doctor, I found him half-slumped in the corner of the room. His arm was torn off and he looked pale as all hell. Cautiously, I approached the seemingly dead man.
The moment I got within arms reach, he lunged. His good arm grabbed mine. My front foot managed to catch me just as he tried to yank me toward him resulting in the man pulling himself toward me. Though, judging by his face, he didn’t mind.
Then again, I didn’t know if the man realized just what he was doing at that moment. His eyes were full of hunger and his cracked lips split as they parted to reveal a pair of long fangs. Without thought, my left arm reached forward to either stop or divert the man's current, neck-bearing trajectory. All it managed to do was give him a closer target.
His arm released the mine as it fshed over to the closer one. Wrapping itself around the limb as his mouth collided with the muscle just above my wrist. I felt it as both fangs smmed into me. Going nearly deep enough to reach the bones below in their master’s bid to attack me. His entire body rapidly curled around my arm as he started to pull. Blood rushed out of my arm and into him just as my other hand came down on his head.
Empowered by mana, the fist hit his head hard enough to knock his brain against his skull and ring his ears. Still, he didn’t move. Which left me no choice. While any fireball I cast would be unlikely to burn me, it would hurt the rest of the people in this small room. So I decided to do something stupid.
With a flicker of will, guilt, and a small river of mana, I added fire to my blood. Not real fire, at least not inside my body, but small sparks of mana that would burst into fme as soon as it left my control. Control that was limited to said body. Within moments, the first of the blood-fire pellets exited my body and entered his mouth where it promptly popped.
My breathing picked up speed as I found myself struggling to get enough oxygen. The resulting increase in my breathing came just as an acrid smell hit the air, carried by the steamy smoke that forced its way past where the man's lips were tched to my skin. While it did little damage, it was more of a warning than anything. It was meant to tell him to back off or else. Unfortunately for both of us, the moron ignored it as his throat pulled blood out of the two punctures in my arm.
Already feeling lightheaded and left without a choice, I shook my head, sighed, and released the swarm. And while I didn’t want to see what was about to happen, I felt that I had to. Not because he was likely about to die but so that I knew what kind of effect this makeshift spell would have. If it is worth it to use this method a second time, assuming I let myself get into this position again.
