Picking up a few pieces of rubble that got blasted off the walls by the necromancers, I throw them at the mage. The first bounces off the magic shield, the second one flies over it, and the third and final one I throw high, landing near the mage.

  "Could I climb over it?"

  I peek out from behind the pillar and shoot the second-to-last necromancer with my revolver, leaving only the feral, the mage, and the last necromancer. The feral is the biggest threat right now. The mage and the necromancer are cautious and won't attack me, but the feral is a wildcard—I don’t think even they can tell it what to do. It's been trying to sneak up on me by going the long way around. I crouch-walk over to the other side of the railing and wait for the feral to come around the corner. When it does, it will have a crowbar waiting for it.

  After waiting, I hear something—as if a big cat is trying to run on a narrow fence. As I look up, the feral is mid-jump off the railing toward me. I duck again as it flies over my head. The feral lands on its head, but by my guess, there isn't much brain to damage, so he is basically fine. The moment he gets his bearings, he launches himself at me once again.

  I hold out my crowbar, and he latches onto it, biting down with all his force, all the while trying to claw my face off. It gets a good scratch on my collar before I can get my leg under him and kick him over the railing.

  "Ahhh, damnit," I say as I look over the railing and watch the feral bounce off a replica lunar rover, my crowbar still clutched in its maw. "I'm not leaving that one behind," I grumble as I watch the feral twitch next to my favorite weapon.

  I turn back to the mage and necromancer before seeing something round the corner—the T-rex skeleton has found me. I look through my bag for anything I have to defeat it.

  "No, no, no, that won’t do. Shooting it won’t do much either."

  I pull the one stick of dynamite from the bottom of my bag and try to form a plan.

  "I need to be careful with this—I only have one."

  I put it in my pocket and come to the conclusion that I will need to set a trap to defeat the T-rex. While trying to form a plan, the T-rex has been slowly approaching me. I shake myself from my thoughts and begin to run towards the necromancer. My sudden rush catches them by surprise, but what catches them even more by surprise is that I don’t attack the necromancer—I use him as a stepping point to jump over the mage's shield. My newly heightened agility really helps me make the jump, but it doesn’t help me with the sudden parkour. My foot slips, and I take a tumble. The mage, trying to protect himself, begins chanting some lizardy spell but is cut short as I fall on top of him, breaking his concentration and causing a misfire of his magic in the form of a green cloud that smells like what our base smelled like before fixing the air filters.

  "Aw, dude, that’s disgusting, man," I say, nearly gagging from the smell. Quickly, I begin to drag the mage into the maintenance hallway to finish him off. I throw the mage into the hallway and slam the door behind me. As I turn back, he’s trying to crawl away. It seems my fall left him in a worse state than it left me. I walk up behind him and get ready to curb stomp him, but suddenly, he begins to try and negotiate.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  "I will tell you where treasure is," is what I think he wants to say, but I can't understand Lizard. So I bring my boot down on his throat, and with a crunch and some thrashing, it's done.

  Suddenly, after crushing the mage, I get two messages—one from the dungeon and one from the system. It seems the dungeon handles rewards and the system just manages what I can do. I try to activate Electric Affinity, and I feel it's no longer just "activate and forget"—now, there's something more involved. As I feel it in my chest, I try to figure out how to use it, but mentally poking it doesn’t do much. I try to poke it a bit harder, but it only moves from my heart to my lungs and just makes it feel weird. I poke it back in place before trying to move it up to my head.

  As I do, it leaves a trail of tingling sensations from my heart to my throat to my brain, and then I push it too far, and it ends up in my eyes. With my eyes now very tingly, I open them—and I don’t like it. I can see all the electricity moving in the cables in the walls, all the components, and even the lamps and how they work. I look up at the flickering light above me and concentrate on it with my new electric vision. Its flicker and hum are nearly overbearing. As I begin to focus more, I feel some of my newly acquired mana leave my body and enter the lamp. The lamp, however, doesn’t like me doing this and promptly explodes, showering me and the dead mage in small shards of glass.

  Now covered in white powder and a few shards of glass, I brush myself off and push the electric feeling back down to my heart. But while halfway there, I start pushing it down my arm toward my hand and try to force some mana to combine with it. After a bit of trying, I figure it out. Combining the electric feeling with the mana, my hand begins to spark with small arcs of electricity. Touching one of the arcs with my other hand, I don’t feel anything—but when I touch the dead mage, he twitches for a second before my mana runs out.

  "I am the taser now," I say with a slight manic chuckle as the absurdity gets to me.

  Looking down at the fallen mage, I begin to loot his corpse, looking for anything of use. First, there's some evil-looking talisman.

  I don’t use dark magic, but it might be worth something. I'll ask Freja when I go to trade.

  I dig through the pockets of his cloak and find a pipe, tobacco, and an enchanted lighter.

  I throw the pipe away but keep the tobacco—I don’t want to be the origin of whatever lizardman diseases are on that thing.

  Lastly, I pick up the big leather-bound book he was carrying and open it. Flipping through the pages, it seems the mage, while not able to speak English, could write it. But what’s in it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s filled with recipes, spell formations, and rituals, most of the ingredients I've never even heard of before.

  "What in the hell is a Cooksonia?"