“Oink!”

Noah woke up with a start to some oinking. He looked around to see that the sun had just begun to rise and that the expected mama boar was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he saw a small boar with its snout pointed towards the sky lying down by his feet. It glanced at him and at the rising sun then oinked disapprovingly as if to admonish him for waking up so late.

“Don’t look at me like that. The day just began!”

“Prancer! Where’d you go?!” Came Mark’s voice from out in the hall.

“In here!” Noah shouted back.

Mark walked into the room holding two piglets in his hands and a worried mama boar followed after him.

“Prancer, what did I tell you about wandering off?”

“Oink?” Prancer looked at Mark, confusion clear on its face. Seeing this, Mark could only sigh as he knew that the little piglet couldn’t understand him fully yet.

“So, Prancer huh? Is one of them named Rudolph too?” Noah asked.

“Nope, no Dancer either since I figured that piglets can’t dance, at least maybe not yet. Who knows, with levels thrown in the mix, maybe we’d be able to see pigs actually fly in the future.” Mark chuckled at that thought.

“But why reindeer names? Is one of us supposed to be Santa Claus? And what did you end up naming mama boar?” Noah asked in quick succession, genuinely curious at what his cousin had been up to.

“First, because there are seven of them and I’m bad at naming things. Second, who’s to say, maybe we’ll be gifting stuff to people someday? And third, I named her Emeri, short for…” Mark got close to Noah as he whispered “Emergency food”. Noah gawked at that and they both started laughing.

Suddenly, they heard the beating of wings and then they heard the sound of things falling over and breaking. Noah and Mark immediately dropped the piglets and told Emeri to stay with them as they went up the stairs to check on the commotion.

When they opened the door to the tenth floor, they saw Talal in his giant bird form covered in blood. Talal heard the door open, looked at them, and said “Hey guys, this majestic me might need some healing.” He chuckled to himself and then coughed up blood right after. “Yeah I’m in pretty bad shape, but I’ve been worse.”

Mark hurriedly got to work on healing the massive bird of prey and quickly emptied his store of mana. That wasn't saying much considering his mana pool was only at a measly twenty-six. A far cry from his cousin’s one hundred and thirty points. But, with his innate skill [Diagnosis] halving all mana costs for healing spells, he could make twenty-six points be worth at least double.

As Mark repeatedly cast his healing spells on Talal, Noah couldn’t help but inquire. “How’d this happen, Talal? What could even do this to you?!”

“Invaders. I went into a dungeon and fought some invaders. I got unlucky and entered one where the invaders had lightning magic.” He sighed as he continued “They were all weaker than me but had the advantage in numbers so I had to run and get to the nearest healer, which is here. Thank you by the way, guess I owe you guys one”

Noah and Mark glanced at each other and nodded as Noah said “Well, we’re cashing that favor in. We want you to be more than just our neighbor, we want you to be our friend.”

“I thought we already were friends?” Talal had a look of genuine confusion on his face. While Noah and Mark just laughed.

“You had the kind of look that reminded us of how cats looked at their humans, kind of like we were your pets.” Mark remarked as he laughed.

“Guess old habits die hard.” Talal shrugged as he spoke. “Anyway! We’re friends now. Do you guys want my help in taking down that boss orc?”

“Nah. Like you said, we need the levels so we’ll handle it.”

“If you say so, just run in this building’s direction if ever you’re in trouble.”

And so, Mark emptied his mana pool again and again in order to heal Talal back to peak condition. Which took roughly seven cycles. It took the better part of the first half of the day for the healing to be done and Noah and Mark were hungry, and itching to hunt some mana sto… orcs.

They did a quick hunt of a few rabbits, those guys were never in short supply, fed Emeri, said goodbye to the piglets, and then finally marched in the direction of the orc encampment. They set a goal of wiping out at least two orc hunting parties before they ended their hunting session for the day.

But, as always, not everything goes according to plan. Two level ten scouts spotted them and almost immediately went after Mark. Mark was stunned for a second and couldn’t move as both scouts cast [Stun] on him. Luckily, Noah reacted in time and cast two [Earth Spike]s in quick succession directly in the way of the two orcs and they basically impaled themselves on the spikes.

“I really need a skill that can sense these scouts before they sense us. We’re fucked if ever they decide to go after me first” Noah sighed

Finally able to move, Mark stretched his limbs, jumped around, and spoke “Yeah, being unable to move is a little frightening.” He sighed and continued “Let’s rest here first while you get to work on that spell of yours”

With that, Noah first put away the corpses in his artifact and then sat in meditation. He thought about what could enable him to sense others and the only thing that came to mind was a radar of some kind. But his map didn’t offer such a function. So, he sank into meditation once again. “Wonder why I haven’t gotten the meditation skill yet?... wait… radars just send out pulses of radio waves or whatever, out into the air and wait for it to bounce on something and come back right? Can I do that with mana?” Then he got to work.

He first formed a dome around himself and willed it to expand rapidly, but it didn’t work. The mana dissipated too rapidly as it was spread too thin. ”Hmmm… Maybe a dome is too ambitious…” Then he thought of forming a thick ring of mana around him which ate up half his total mana pool and tried to will it into expanding but found that it felt too heavy to move. “Hmmm… what about if I attach the mana ring to a mana bomb of some sort?”

“Take a few steps back” He warned Mark as he didn’t know if this would work.

He then activated [Mana Manipulation] to help him control and reduce the mana cost of the whole spell. In hindsight, he should’ve activated the skill from the start but there was no use in crying over spilled milk.

He condensed mana into a ball, ten points, twenty points, then finally at thirty points the mana was dense enough to be visible and it took him quite the effort to maintain the ball shape. Then, he put the mana bomb the size of a kiwi into the center of the once-immovable ring of mana and it actually magically snapped into place, as if they were two parts of a whole.

Noah wiped the sweat from his brow and looked on proudly at his creation. The next part was something that he always wanted to say ever since he watched that one particular anime. He took a few steps back and stood beside his cousin and with an over-enthusiastic smile on his face he said…

“EXPLOSION!!!”

THUD

A muffled thud sounded throughout the forest as he triggered the explosion but at the same time that he did, he and Mark collapsed, but for two very different reasons. Noah collapsed because of an overload of information as the pulse of mana actually reached over ten kilometers in diameter and transmitted all the information on lifeforms in that area. Including trees, various different animals, and of course the orcs. All ninety-five of them. Every leaf, every hair, every groove, and even every pore on the bodies of the orcs, all of that information was sent back to him.

So, Noah lay there. Blood gushing out of his nose. And ten seconds later, Mark finally came to. He looked around confused as to what happened, immediately saw his cousin lying in a pool of his own blood and hurriedly went over to heal him. It took a few cycles of healing but ten minutes later, Noah woke up.

“HOLY CRAP MAN WHAT WAS THAT?! I WAS OUT FOR AT LEAST TEN SECONDS!” Mark exclaimed at the newly awoken Noah.

“Shhhh, not so loud. My head is killing me. Ugh…” He massaged his temples as he spoke. Then like a torrent, not unlike the first time he got his class, all the information that his little spell gathered in that five-kilometer area came and flooded his brain again. He stumbled and almost fell but Mark caught him.

“Are you okay?” Mark asked worriedly as he cast a couple heals.

“I’m fine, just… too much information on that radar skill I was developing.” Noah smiled weakly and tried to stand on his own. He wobbled at first but eventually found his footing. He then looked at the bell icon in the top-right corner of his vision and pressed it and a bunch of notifications came out including his level up from killing those two scouts.

 

 

 

 

Noah immediately put all his stat points into intelligence and selected yes. His map winked out of existence and a few seconds later popped back up with an added switch to toggle the radar on and off and a slider to regulate the amount of mana he wanted to spend per pulse. He tried it out with the lowest amount of mana possible which was ten points. That resulted in a pulse that reached around one hundred meters in diameter and all the information was neatly color-coded on his map. White for plant life, gray for neutral animals, green for allies, and red for enemies.

As he watched his new map come to life with different colors, Noah was giddy with excitement as his latest spell-crafting session was a resounding success. But he suddenly began to feel lethargic. He rushed to find the cause and it was actually his new radar. It pulsed every second so that was ten mana per second at its lowest setting and he was almost out of mana. He immediately switched it off and finally relaxed.

He looked at his cousin and spoke. “I’m awesome, aren’t I?” he said as he smiled a smug smile.

“Yeah yeah, you’re the best mage in the whole wide world! Now, out with it. What was that and why did it knock me out for a full ten seconds?”

“Oh, nothing. I just made a mana bomb and you were just standing too close to it. Cool right?”

“Well, it would’ve been cooler if you didn’t shout that line from that comedy anime we used to watch.”

“Hey! That was the best comedy anime hands down!”

“Okay okay. I’ll give you that. That shit made me laugh till my stomach hurt. Shame we won’t be able to watch any more new seasons though.”

“Yeah…” Noah replied listlessly then, he snapped out of it a few seconds later and clapped “Okay enough of that let me just regen my mana and we’ll continue hunting.”

It took a bit under two hours for his mana to regenerate fully. Then they went and continued the hunt. It took another half hour of them circling around the encampment for Noah to see a solitary red dot on his map, hiding in the trees.

“There’s another scout up ahead, around fifty meters away. Here’s the plan, I’ll conjure a mana bomb and you get as close as possible without it noticing that you know it’s there. Then you throw the bomb at it and I detonate it. After that, it falls off the tree and it’s easy pickings from there. Sound good?” He grinned evilly.

“Sounds good.” Mark grinned back

A few minutes later, Mark got close enough and threw the bomb at the scout.

“EXPLOSION!!!”