Before heading over to the massive red heap of the Scorpion Queen’s destroyed form, I moved first to the base of the Jingu Bang. More like a fallen tower than a weapon, even I was impressed with the size it had become. A slight panic rumbled within me at the thought of having to move the immense staff with just my own strength. Not just impossibly tall, I remembered the weight of the staff when I kicked it. It had been one of the foundations for Perfected Strike, even.

  That final attack on Reysault had been a serious gamble in many ways. I hadn’t expected there to be a limit for the Jingu Bang’s growth, but I had found one anyway - Myself. Restricted only by the amount of strength I could give, it was then my mistake entirely when I simply gave it everything. The staff drank my power up happily, not thinking to leave me any. With a little more mana, I could have dodged the incoming retaliation but alas.

  I found my worry was a needless one as soon as my hand touched the weapon. The air around me seemed to suck in a quick breath. I actually stumbled forward, unprepared for the sudden vacuum in the air. I wasn’t a perfect judge of size, but the base of the staff alone had to be wider than a standard football stadium to start with. Within a second, the familiar sized staff was sitting happily in my grip once more.

  The return to form was almost as impressive as the crater it left in its wake. For a few seconds, the staff simply buzzed and showed how happy it was to return to my grasp. I was still marvelling at the capabilities of the weapon, and I gave over to cooing a little. “You’re so impressive,” I said aloud, “and I would have died ten times over if it wasn’t for you.”

  It would have felt silly to give praise to an inanimate object, but as with the Xaverweave Pouch, the Jingu Bang wasn’t quite inanima-

  “THE POUCH!” I roared, clutching around at my waist and chest, despite knowing the weight of it had been missing since I awoke. Staff in hand, I fell to my knees at the start of the impossibly long gouge in the earth towards the Scorpion Queen’s body. My eyes burned with fury as I looked at the murderer of my true first companion in the dungeon. The Jingu Bang was a powerful artefact, but the cute pouch had been a constant companion since I awoke.

  “This one?” Naea’s voice surprised me, but not as much as the tackle to my chest as I turned to face her. It wasn’t Naea which hit me, but the fuzzy shape I had just been mourning. With excited whooping, I clutched the Xaverweave Pouch to me while waxing lyrical about my amazing items.

  “Oh you silly thing!” I scolded it playfully, like a puppy which had made an adorable mistake. “I thought that nasty scorpion lady’s poison had destroyed you! You worried me! Did you miss me? Huh?”

  “Ahem.” I snapped out of the playful mood instantly when I remembered Naea was watching. She was looking like I had just given her the greatest gift of all, but I couldn’t even stay on guard as the Xaverweave Pouch got comfortable on my waist once more. Intensely grateful to my past self for being a little over prepared, I removed a change of clothes to replace the things destroyed by the caustic poison.

  With a pair of self-made boots, a Clive’s Café t-shirt and the Longstrider Leggings which were unsung heroes of comfort, my staff at my side and my bag of holding on my hip, I felt a little more normal than I had in quite a while. That my new normal consisted of a bo staff with attitude, a fairy companion and an eldritch handbag which could eat basically anything I fed it was its own problem but one for later. “Thank you,” I was grateful to Naea for returning the pouch. “Did you come to stop my breakdown?”

  “Something like that. This one has nothing to do with me, though” she admitted with a shrug. “The poor thing came running to me after your fight, shivering. Must have dodged the attack you didn’t manage to before coming to find me. I didn’t even know you were fighting the second claimant.”

  “I see you left her body alone so I could get the pleasure of looting her. So double thanks.” Naea ate the bodies left in the dungeon, and one as juicy as this must have been hard for her to ignore while I was trapped. The fairy just shook her head, not willing to accept the praise.

  “It doesn’t usually matter but it's technically better to loot your own kills than to let someone else like Merownis do it. The System just prefers it that way.” I tried to remember if I knew this before, but I was struggling to see when it would have come up before. I normally made a beeline for the loot in most situations. “Plus, I’m not too confident about eating up a Grade One to start with,” Naea said, though the glint in her eye suggested otherwise. I decided to leave it.

  “Shall we?” I asked, gesturing towards the large boss monster’s body along the path of the Jingu Bang’s fall. Despite her words, it was easy to see that she was practically salivating at the idea of getting her hands, mouth and whatever other appendages she had on the corpse. I tried not to think about it, and failed. So many tentacles. So much hair for some reason.

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  I shuddered, drawing a quizzical look from Naea. “Bad memories,” I answered truthfully. We made small talk as we walked the length of the staff’s fall. She told me about the changes I could expect in the forest zone, and I was excited to see them for myself soon. Especially when Naea said that they had started to build actual beds. In turn, I explained to Naea what I had experienced within the poison in general terms, and what it had led to for my skills and strength.

  “Manually altering your skills?” Naea asked sharply when I got to that part. When I nodded, she didn’t respond right away. We walked for a while, and it might have been the longest that Naea had ever been silent in my company. She moved to hover in front of my face, concern clear on her’s. “Don’t do it again, okay?”

  “Uhh, sure?” I said. I wasn’t planning on drilling through my mana channels again anytime soon, even if Tag within my Mind Palace was constantly working on ways to upgrade what we had already done. The skill was basically acting as a processor for ideas I had, and I would leave it up to my other version to decide whether we actually implement them or not. Apparently happy with my answer, Naea flitted forward at a higher speed. Despite walking for a while, we were still a fair distance away.

  I was wondering whether I felt up to using my mana to catch up as she sped away, and it seemed the Jingu Bang noticed. It started to vibrate, practically begging me to do it. “You missed me too?” I asked the staff, “huh buddy?” The weapon just buzzed again in my hand. “Alright then, fuck it.”

  The skills were all there, in fairly pristine condition aside from the crafting ones. The damage was mostly gone and if I was being honest, my mana seemed to move through me with even more alacrity than ever before. It may have been a trial by poison, but the lessons learned and the struggles overcome had made me more powerful even if the Attributes Window didn’t say so. As I relinquished the tight control I had been keeping over the energy within, it flooded out to all corners of my body.

  Mana Manipulation was a mostly passive skill. Anyone could manipulate mana, I had been doing it since my first hour within the System. The skill simply made the act automatic, while allowing for more intricate use than I had been capable of without it. I could now form shapes within my mana itself, and use those forms to add a kind of detail to the energy. The most familiar design for now was a drill, and I did a small test.

  Two Magic Missiles appeared in the air. If Mana Bolt had been like filling a water balloon in my hand before throwing it, Magic Missile was the equivalent of loading premade balloons directly into a cannon before shooting. The metaphor wasn’t perfect, but as the nearly identical pair of projectiles blinked into existence above my shoulders, it felt apt. Instead of physically throwing the energy, all I had to do was release it.

  Two decent sized explosions of sand marked the impacts, and the difference between the two was clear. As always, more experimentation would be needed but as I inspected the impact zones, I got the results I expected. The “plain” Magic Missile had acted like a fast moving stone or bullet before bursting into a flash of light. The “drill” version had punched into the sand and forced its way through a large amount of it before stopping. “You having fun?” Naea called from a distance away.

  “I’m about to,” I whispered, psyching myself up. Magic Missile had worked perfectly, with no pain or discomfort slowing me down. I spun the Jingu Bang around and it whistled loudly with pleasure. “Alright, alright. Main event time.”

  The mana which touched every inch of my body started to sizzle as I injected heat into my image of it. The mana within me became pure excitement. It was the burn of the poison in its most pure form. The sting of a workout pushed to the limit and then that limit being broken. The euphoria of a second wind. My mana was an ignited fuel and I was the engine.

  Infusion.

  The dampening of sound and light by my increased speed was like a swaddle for a baby, surrounding me with a feeling of safety as the world froze around me. The dusty sand particles which were still falling stilled immediately and even breathing became harder as the air itself struggled against the force of time. For a few seconds I was like a statue myself, just acclimating to the feeling. My instinct was to start sprinting as the electric energy coursed through my body but I also knew such an action would tear my muscles.

  So, I took a single step.

  I quickly deactivated the skill as I tumbled through the sand. The simple push off the sand to start catching up to Naea had been enough to shoot me forward like a ballista bolt. Unprepared for the intense velocity, I absolutely ate sand. The speed was way too much with the skill going at full force. A quick look at my mana total while I rolled to a stop showed me that the skill was pretty expensive, too. Even in my own perception, it had only been active for around ten seconds, and half my mana had been expended.

  Spitting out sand, I still smiled. That was exactly the type of trump card I had wanted Infusion to become. Lots of practice required to deal with my new abilities, though. Shaking off the sand, I looked up, surprised at the distance I had travelled. It seemed I had screamed past Naea entirely and arrived much closer to Reysault’s body. The curving walls of the Jingu Bang’s crater had stopped me from flying off into the distance, at least. “What the hell was that about?” Naea asked, catching up quickly.

  “Growing pains,” I answered, placing my hand on the ruby red carapace and accepting the loot.