Tyler sidestepped a duneclaw’s lunge, twisting with all his might to slam the thing down from midair with an elbow. With his other arm, he jerked his two fresh duneclaw corpses to the side, blocking a wicked pincer strike aimed for his forearm.

  He moved to kick the first one, but a third one hissed at him from behind, demanding his attention lest he lose his head.

  He fended off a couple more strikes, but he had to let go of his corpses to do so, and so his next free breath was spent grabbing back onto their tails instead of moving. His breaths came heavy and strained, and he hissed as a jet of compressed water slammed into him from behind, knocking him off-balance.

  Tyler was within sight of his cave, but he was getting surrounded.

  They were beginning to swarm to the smell of their dead siblings — a phenomenon that he’d been carefully strategizing around for the past weeks. But he’d lingered here far longer than he had any time prior, choosing to risk it for more corpses instead of fleeing back to the safety of his cave.

  Now he was out in the open, drenched in the imperceptible smell of dead duneclaw and with the closest shoreline past where his cave was sitting. And duneclaws weren’t the only thing he had to worry about.

  Another jet of water shot at him from above, and he cursed the giant magical seagulls that were intent on harassing him. They were apparently scavengers, and they probably believed that if the duneclaws felled him they’d be able to fend them off for long enough to swoop in for a bite.

  The added distraction of an aerial enemy was incredibly inconvenient. Still, he’d been dealing with fights like this for weeks.

  As he continued his delicate dance with death, Tyler took stock of his situation.

  He was tired and wounded, and he’d lost his spear and most of his rocks in his sprint to get back to the cave. The Aspect of Resilience would accelerate his healing over the next few days, but it would be of little immediate help.

  A few weeks ago, he would have let the Core of Protection activate and shuffled back to his cave happy with the two corpses he’d claimed. He was near enough that he’d make it before the barrier ran out, and he’d concluded after many nights of testing that the duneclaws really couldn’t get the leverage to move his log.

  But today, he wasn’t satisfied with only two corpses. And he had other cards to play.

  When the next strike came, he took it on the forearm.

  Before, even with all of his bone-strengthening exercises, he would have never dared to take a tail strike head-on. But now the Dragon’s Bones settled within his arm, reinforcing his Resilience-touched skin and letting him take the blow with nothing but a jolt of pain. He let go of his corpses and shot his other hand out to grab the living duneclaw’s tail, spinning it around him like a flail to ward off the trio of incoming strikes at his back.

  Then, with all his strength, he threw the creature up into the tree where the seagull was planted. The insectoid alien crashed into the bird with an enraged screech, which quickly turned pained as the seagull instinctively expelled seawater all around it. The liquid splashed everywhere, drenching the duneclaw and splashing all around the area as the remaining insects scuttled back.

  There was a reason that the seagulls were comfortable flying into a swarm of enraged duneclaws to steal a kill. His Analysis had told him that they came from an entirely different environment from Korshaan — one much more similar to his current surroundings. They didn’t have any encounters with these things in their evolution, but upon mixing with them, they bullied the duneclaws like an invasive species.

  After all, these birds could only do one lick of magic — water manipulation. They used it in their natural habitats to catch small fish.

  But as Tyler had found out, duneclaws really didn’t like water.

  The duneclaw and the seagull tumbled downwards in a heap, the insectoid monster writhing in pain as its carapace was flooded with far more moisture than it could handle. But the bird was in pain too — its bones were notoriously fragile, and the monster that had hit it must have weighed at least five times as much as it did.

  Tyler easily sidestepped a lunge from behind and brought his knife through the fallen creatures, one by one.

  Four corpses, nice.

  He’d probably use the seagull for food, rather than feeding it to the tree. The meat of these things tasted a lot better than duneclaw jerky, and the birds themselves seemed to contain less Resilience within them than the insectoid creatures.

  For the past week he’d been satisfied with this number, fleeing to consolidate his gains rather than risk more for a number of corpses that would be incredibly impractical to carry while fighting.

  But now he’d done that same song and dance quite a few times, and he was growing impatient.

  The next duneclaw struck at him, and he pounded its head into the ground, driving the full force of his mana into the strike. Another came from behind him, and the Flowing Sands let him easily catch it in the belly with a fist.

  For so long now, he’d been treating these creatures as foes of equal strength. He’d been so impacted by his first experience with these things that he’d always gone into battle with a skittishness to him that urged him to run at the first sign of trouble. But he’d grown a lot since that first terrifying day.

  Jab. Sweep. Slam.

  His limbs cracked hard against crumpling chitin as the Flowing Sands drove his attacks through monster after monster. Glancing blows caught him in the calf, in the shoulder, in the hip, but with each injury, he claimed another corpse.

  The swarm screeched as they were driven on by more and more death, and he roared in challenge, driving his body further than it had ever gone before.

  He was unstoppable.

  His pool of mana was so deep that he could continue fighting for hours, and a flood of Resilience coursed through his soul like a torrent of rain upon a wilted forest. It was like nothing he’d ever seen before — just an influx of Resonance so deep that it took him from two-thirds of the way through Mid-Novice to the verge of breaking through his Saturation Point.

  One strike, then another. Block, dodge, hit.

  The Flowing Sands turned his movements into a blur, and the Dragon’s Bones stopped their attacks on his bare skin. The thrill and adrenaline of the fight coursed through his mind like a firestorm, and he found himself laughing through the chaos of battle. He felled monster after monster, building up and up and up until…

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  Tyler blinked, his fists shaky as he held them out in front of him in search of a target. He swiveled around in an instant, his senses screaming to watch out for another attack on his back, but all that he saw were broken corpses.

  The remaining duneclaws were fleeing.

  He gasped for breath, falling to a knee as the Flowing Sands slowly left his body, bringing back the inflammation and exhaustion that the adrenaline and thrill of battle had been hiding.

  His body was littered with injuries, and he chided himself for letting go of the Flowing Sands so early. The time it would have taken to build it back up in such a disoriented state could have been a death sentence if any waiting enemies decided to set upon him while he was down.

  But none were coming.

  They were gone. All gone.

  A memory arose from the back of his mind, a detail noted in his Analysis back when he’d been researching the creatures’ swarming behaviors.

  The duneclaw swarm was a species-wide defense mechanism — a threat to any predators that if you tried to hunt one of them, you’d better be prepared to face an entire army of its siblings.

  But duneclaws were far from the dominant force on Korshaan. When faced with too powerful of a foe, it wouldn’t do to sacrifice your entire species on the death of one member. And so, when the pheromonal stench of death grew too great, the instinct would switch. Now, instead of swarming, they would hide away as fast as possible to protect their bloodline from total annihilation.

  But to get to that point… just how many corpses had he claimed?

  One, two, three, four, five…

  No. That couldn't be right. He must have miscounted.

  But as he counted and recounted, he found that the fan of dead insects spread around him was obviously more than the typical handful that he typically brought back with him. The little clearing was positively littered with them, so much so that it was harder to find a spot that wasn’t drenched in their sticky green blood than a spot that was.

  Eighteen. He’d claimed eighteen corpses in total total — fifteen duneclaws and three of those seagulls.

  As the gravity of that number washed over him, Tyler let out an awestruck breath.

  The trial to enter apprenticeship as a Warrior required you to fell twelve duneclaws in unaided combat. He’d thought that he’d hit that number once he’d reached Peak-Novice, as was traditional for Reaman adolescents. But he was still Mid-Novice — he hadn’t even used his accumulated Resilience to break through yet.

  Tyler jumped to his feet, his wounds temporarily forgotten as he let out the loudest, happiest victory scream he’d ever hollered.

  It wasn’t long ago that he’d been just a frail bag of skin and bones, plagued by inflammation and scared shitless by these monsters. And now he was on the path of a Reaman Warrior.

  As he slowly engaged the Flowing Sands to drag his kills into the cave, he couldn’t help but marvel at this new life he’d carved out for himself.

  Every day, he learned more about the natural world and the ancient alien culture that guided his magic. He spent his days relentlessly pursuing what he wanted, rather than slaving away just to line someone else’s fat pockets. The Aspect of Resilience was stronger than ever within him, and a fair bit of muscle had even begun growing on his frame.

  The pain was still there, but it was quieter than it had ever been before, and it just felt so easy to ignore in the face of all the progress he was making.

  Especially now that he was on the precipice of advancement again.

  He placed his corpses at the base of the now-huge banana tree, watching as they dissolved into motes of light to sink into the small bed of soil. He’d gathered more dirt around the magical plant as it grew, but after a certain point he’d realized that his soil surely couldn’t be doing that much given that he was only really piling it on top of the tree.

  A sharp crack would occasionally sound out throughout the cave in the minutes after he gave the plant its daily offering, and after a couple of heart attacks he’d come to the conclusion that the tree must have been growing into the stone.

  The tree’s leaves now covered a third of the cave’s ceiling, melding with the shape of the stone to make a pleasant roof of foliage. Its trunk was thicker than two of him linking arms together, and motes of light permanently floated around it now in true magical fashion.

  And dangling near the center of the cave was an absolutely ginormous bushel of bananas.

  As it turned out, each of the petals of the bulbs that it sprouted held a handful of flowers underneath them, and each flower — if given enough energy — could sprout into a whole banana.

  Dozens and dozens of bananas ringed the bulb like kernels on a cob of corn, each one various shades of green and as big as his hand. And as the energy from the duneclaws slowly made its way up the tree, the bananas grew even more, the ripest ones morphing to a pleasant yellow and ballooning outwards until they were almost a foot long.

  Tyler took a deep breath. They were finally ready.

  Anticipation welling in his chest, he picked the first banana.

  It looked slightly different from the one Savadiere had given him all those weeks ago — it was much bigger and a more vibrant yellow, and now that he had the senses for it, he could see that it absolutely shone with Resilience.

  It peeled back smooth, revealing soft white flesh… and no seeds?

  Huh, that was interesting.

  He took a bite of it, and sure enough, there were no seeds hidden inside the flesh either. That was both convenient and incredibly saddening, because he'd been entertaining plans of farming the duneclaws like cattle and feeding them to an army of magical banana trees.

  Then again, he was sure there was another way to propagate banana trees, since modern industrialized banana trees didn't have seeds either. He was sure his Analysis could give some more insight on that — it was very good with Earth stuff — but for now, he couldn’t hold himself back any longer.

  Tyler gave the tree an appreciative pat and settled down in a meditative position by his bed. The Resilience was already pooling into his overstuffed soul, threatening to tip him over the edge.

  As soon as he finished eating, he closed his eyes, circulating the energy in the cultivation pattern of the Art of the Sandstorm. The wounds on his body slowly patched over with fresh skin, and his entire soul tensed for just a moment as his mana gained another layer of depth to it.

  Congratulations! You have advanced to High-Novice.

  He whooped, sitting up as a new influx of strength bloomed in his body. Just as before, his exhaustion was instantly vanquished by the cocktail of rejuvenation and excitement that shot like lightning through his veins. He couldn’t wait to see what he could do now, and he instantly took off to his training area, ready to record every little change in his body and soul.

  But if Tyler’s soul had been just a bit more powerful, he might have caught hint of the building reaction occurring right underneath his feet. If he had been just a bit more skilled, he might have even been able to connect the buildup of dimensional energy within the tree to the newly-energized enchantments used for generations in the Reamans’ greatest and most sacred ceremonies. Ceremonies such as the initiation of a new Warrior’s apprentice.

  The enchantments reached across spiritual connections that had served them for generations, sending mana from their millennium-old stores through to find their counterparts in the vast network of caves that once dotted this tribe’s lands. But no matter how far they reached, their magic seemed to always stop short.

  There was no network of caves in this new realm that the Cave of the Ancestors had been transported to. It was the sole artifact of its tribe, a foreign landmark meshed with the soil of a thousand different worlds that had been so apart from it prior they might as well have not existed. But the connections still existed, through the fabric of space and time and reality itself. They could feel them, through that new chaotic, primal magic that had woken the enchantments up in the first place.

  And so, through this new coat of cosmic energy that sparked bright against their mana, the enchantments pulled.

  And if Tyler had paid just a bit more attention, he might have noticed a faint whisper building in that new chamber in his mind associated with his System Boons. A whisper that would gradually build throughout the days, until it was so loud that it couldn’t possibly be ignored.

  The Dimensional Storm is Coming.