After a time watching over the Expeditionary Force, James’s consciousness flew through the air, streaking like a shooting star back toward the Fisher Kingdom.

  The sense of severance he had experienced before was gone, and he felt certain that his body was available again.

  As he landed in his own flesh, it felt markedly better than it had before. The injuries, he sensed, were still crippling enough that he imagined a normal person might never walk again with them. Still, for James, they were not so bad. Merely the worst he had ever experienced.

  He felt a dim green light at the edge of his vision—with James’s superhuman senses, he could make out light and shapes even with his eyes closed. He inhaled and smelled the scent of her.

  Mina…

  The green light faded.

  “Skapi?” Mina’s voice shook slightly, with what James read as a mixture of hope and fatigue. It was strange, now that he was back in his own body, to have all his old senses again—including his various social Skills. He had been bereft of them inside the shell of the wyvern, but there was a purity to that. Now he instantly felt that he could interpret the sound of his wife’s voice, without even seeing her expression.

  James opened his eyes and smiled at his wife. Even moving the corners of his lips seemed to come at a cost. He could tell his body would not have much energy for a while, even if his Stamina Stat were to suddenly climb into the four digits.

  Still, he forced his lungs to cough up a word.

  “Hey,” he said, winking.

  “Glad that you are alive,” Mina said, sweeping a hand in front of her face to move a strand of hair that wasn’t there.

  James thought his wife looked like she had just run a marathon.

  She had her long mane pulled into a ponytail, though a few strands of hair had come loose over the time she had been healing her husband. That process had been ongoing for hours, he guessed. Her face was paler than usual, and more sweat clung there than James had ever seen before. The parts of her top immediately in front of her breasts and around her armpits were also drenched with perspiration.

  “Me too,” he said.

  There was a movement at the corner of his vision, and James noted Yulia’s presence.

  “Hi there,” he added, twitching an eyebrow at her as a way of acknowledging his little sister-in-law.

  “You really can’t move,” Yulia said, sounding astonished.

  “Of course he can’t,” Mina said, giving a little snort. “He’s got so many broken bones, shattered into so many pieces. We’ve been working on him half the day, I would think you would know that already…”

  Yulia looked slightly embarrassed, and James thought that both sisters must be exhausted.

  “Thank you both for all your hard work on healing me,” James said. “I think my body can take over from here, but I feel like I probably would have died if you hadn’t both worked so hard.” Even after all the healing, it took a lot of effort just to speak. He could tell his jaws were too weak to chew anything harder than applesauce right now.

  “Well, Gupta and Zirndorf came over and healed you for an hour, too,” Mina said. “Until they pronounced you stable and said that they were running out of Mana.” She gave a dismissive wave of her hand as if to say, That’s how much I think their opinions are worth…

  “It gave us a nice break, at least,” Yulia said. James noticed a breathlessness as she spoke. Then Yulia covered her mouth to stifle a yawn.

  Mina nodded, seeming not to notice her sister’s yawning. “That was good of them. We’ve kept up the pace of your recovery since the medical people left, and without that break, I don’t know if our energy would have lasted.”

  Mina sounds so proud, James thought. She probably pushed herself and Yulia very hard to get me recovered to this extent.

  After all, the previous time he had tried to reinhabit his body, the sheer pain and damage had broken through all his Skills to manage it and forced him immediately out.

  “Well, I think all four of you can probably lay off for now,” James said gently.

  “Oh?” Mina asked, arching an eyebrow. “Are you going to get up now?”

  “No,” James acknowledged, still smiling.

  Yulia yawned again from behind Mina. She again seemed not to notice.

  “Then we—” Mina began.

  “But I think the two of you need to get some sleep,” James interrupted. He turned his eyes to Yulia. “Please check on the kids, and then go to sleep.” He spoke those last words softly, but with the same firmness of voice he applied whenever he issued a command.

  Yulia nodded and looked relieved.

  “Thanks again,” James mouthed.

  She smiled, and she quickly ducked out.

  “The children did not actually need to be checked on, skapi,” Mina said in a slightly disapproving tone as the door closed behind Yulia. “They are being watched by, um—” She hesitated, clearly forgetting the name of whoever was babysitting.

  James raised an eyebrow. “A mystery protector? A silent, watchful guardian?”

  Mina was silent, just looking at him strangely.

  “Are our children being watched by Batman?!” James asked with faux excitement.

  “Skapi, I’m tired,” Mina said, chuckling in an exhausted tone. “Please no dad jokes. Unless you’re really feeling well. Then I guess I could make myself laugh at something.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  James frowned. “So, who’s watching the kids?”

  “That—the warrior woman from your Orientation. The woman in white.”

  “Oh, Hilda!” James said.

  Mina nodded. “Yes, her. I would have remembered her name, but—” She yawned and stretched her arms over her head like a cat—“I am suddenly so tired.” Mina lay down and curled her body next to James’s.

  “We’ll have to thank her,” James said. His mind was racing with things to do, priorities that needed his attention, projects to check up on around the Kingdom.

  At the same time, his body grew more exhausted with every word exchanged with his wife. He could feel there was a tiny reservoir of energy that had built up while he was not using his body, though James was quickly burning through it now.

  He supposed that proved he had really been away for a while, though it had not felt particularly long to him. He wondered if he was influenced by the sense of time of the wyvern.

  In the rush of mental activity, he returned to an important subject.

  “What happened to my mother?” James asked.

  “She’s right over there, skapi,” Mina said in a tired, half-yawning voice. “The Healers said she was stable too.”

  James reached out with his senses and heard the faint, delicate sound of his mother snoring.

  Is she on the floor? he wondered for a moment. No, of course not. It must be another mattress Mina brought in.

  “Great job, Mina,” he said softly.

  “Thank you, James,” she cooed directly into his ear.

  James wished he could move his body properly again. He loved the sound of that voice. But all his muscles were truly useless right now, bound as they were to shattered bones and badly bruised flesh. So, instead, he just lay there as Mina wrapped herself around him. Entwined with her warm softness, he fell asleep.

  For once, James’s sleep was not a cover for him to Dreamwalk or otherwise astrally project himself away from his body.

  It was a peaceful, dreamless sleep—like turning out a light.

  In the morning, James checked his body’s systems and found that they were still barely functioning—enough to keep him alive, not nearly enough for him to move around even in bed.

  Then he knew how he was going to spend his day.

  He asked Mina to take care of his mother and not worry too much about healing him. He would be absent from the disabled body for most of the day, not suffering pain from his injuries—even if he didn’t have Pain Resistance up to a high level—and unlike Zora, he could recover from being severely injured on his own anyway, given time and food.

  “But my mom needs your full attention,” James said. “I don’t like the fact that she hasn’t woken up, even though she didn’t take the brunt of the attack herself…”

  Mina just nodded and looked as if she would reluctantly accept his wishes.

  “I’ll be back around dinner time,” he added. “I think I’ll be in good enough condition to eat by then. It’s less tiring to talk now than it was.” He did not mention that part of why he wanted to leave his body behind was that he felt if he stayed, he would sleep all day and get nothing done. There was every chance Mina would want him to stay completely idle, on the off-chance that it would promote his swifter recovery. But that went against James’s nature as well as his priorities. He wanted to check on the Expeditionary Force, formulate new plans, and probably float around the Fisher Kingdom itself, checking on the progress of developments there.

  “That’s good,” Mina said seriously. “I was going to chew your food for you and feed you like a baby bird if all you could do was swallow. I figured you were probably all right now that you can talk.”

  He smiled, he tried and failed to shake his head at what Mina had said, and with that image—of his wife feeding him mouth to mouth—still fixed in his mind, James left his body behind him.

  His astral form shot across the landscape as it had done the previous day, rocketing West as if it fled from the glow of the rising sun.

  He landed within the body of the Great Solar Wyvern, comfortably basking in the sunshine, surrounded by its brother creatures. James saw the Fisher Expeditionary Force had just barely neared the edge of the tortoises’ territory. They were not in any trouble at that moment. They did not need help from the wyverns.

  So, rather than immediately informing Alan of his presence or rushing down to keep the Force company, he simply enjoyed the experience of gliding inside the body of this wyvern for a time.

  James had very little experience of flying around in his own body. What little he did have had come from his use of an item—the Royal Aeromaster Cloak—that an enemy had dropped. The experience of using it had been a bit like having a winged animal attached to his back. The cloak was almost alive. It was a different thing to fly under one’s own power.

  Marvelous, James thought. He soared into a high, rough current of air and let it shake and roll and whip him about. The turbulence was so much fun that he did it once more. Just like riding a roller coaster!

  He reluctantly returned to the other wyverns when he thought the people on the ground were starting to notice the one wyvern that had gone off on its own, and he simply enjoyed the sensations of normal flight for a while.

  More importantly, as he flew, he had time to think.

  How can I improve my body and the productive value of my Skill, Talent, and Title stack? he thought. How can I prevent an injury like this from ever crippling me again? How do I bounce back stronger? How can I get stronger and protect my family?

  He of course knew, in the back of his mind, that he wanted additional power for more than merely defensive reasons. But his foremost focus as he considered means of strengthening himself and his Kingdom was home defense, not violent invasion of the territories of others or the desire to destroy strong opponents.

  James had already been chastened recently by the System, in a place where he had assumed himself essentially untouchable: the Fisher Kingdom. He could not afford to ignore the lessons of that experience—not when mystical visions of his wife’s death and his land under attack were still within recent memory.

  Dozens of inspirations floated through his mind. Perhaps he could obtain—or fuse to obtain—a Skill that would allow him to liquefy his body or turn intangible. That would have nullified the System’s attack that flattened the whole area around him.

  It would completely prevent me from protecting anyone, though, unless I could somehow take them with me. James’s mother would have surely died if he had not been there to place himself between the impact and her. That seemed like a very bad result.

  So, the brainstorming process continued.

  Some of the time, James found himself drifting off into what he considered to be “wyvern thoughts.” The brains of the beasts whose bodies he inhabited were complex—they had become far more complex since he forcibly merged the creatures—but they were still bestial.

  When not pushed and forced by rigid discipline or a specific purpose, they defaulted back to contemplating questions of their own survival. Food, finding a safe place to roost, and growing stronger—which interestingly seemed to be as basic an instinct for them as were food and shelter.

  More than once, James caught himself wishing that he could eat one of the tasty-looking humans on the ground, if only the master had not ordered the wyverns to protect them.

  When that happened, James felt a kind of morbid amusement. He was the master, and judging by the way the wyvern thought about him, it did not seem to even recognize that he was possessing its body. Or perhaps it understood that it was under an outside influence, but the feeling of James directing it was too familiar to be properly examined.

  None of it made James uncomfortable, because he could feel how firmly his command had hold of the monster. It was an iron law, not a suggestion.

  Well, I definitely have to keep Monster Generation and Monster Control…

  James spent the rest of his time in the wyvern’s skin, as best he could, thinking about optimization for his body and Skills. Then he flew back to his body for dinner—and to put his theorized changes into practice.