Lunch was nice, but as I ate, I found myself yearning to get back to work. There was something almost euphoric about improving yourself, and self-improvement had never been more obvious to me, thanks to the status sheet. What’s more, with my new sense of the wind, I felt very sure of myself. I could sense when Cindy walked behind me in the kitchen just from the air she displaced. Focusing even further on my Electroreceptivity, I could almost feel her leg muscles contracting and expanding as electrical impulses fired from her brain to her limbs, carrying her along.

At first, I was concerned that the new senses would be a problem, that I would experience sensory overload, but it wasn’t like that at all. I found the new senses reassuring like I was blindfolded before, but now I could finally see. It was very surreal and uplifting and filled me with a desire to continue working and keep working through my magic skills. It was only 3:00, and while I was sore, I believed I could still keep working until sundown.

I left through the fire escape once again, jumping from the windowsill straight over the railing to the training yard below. Right before landing, I willed air between my wings, rapidly slowing my descent. My magic was full, the sunlight was shining through the trees, and I was ready to get back to work. There were only six levels of Aerokinesis left to work through, and I figured that it would probably be best to go for bigger, more potentially destructive blasts of air. That being said, the space I had to work in was relatively limited and doing anything in this back yard would probably be a bad idea.

Taking to the sky once again, I rose to my maximum height, around 13 stories in the air, and well above the roofs of the buildings around me. I closed my eyes, and just drifted, focusing on the familiar weightless feeling of magical flight. I stretched my wings out, feeling the new bones flex and move, feeling the feathers extend like dexterous fingers. I hovered, just breathing and feeling the air around me for a while. The wind around me was moving in eddies, drifting around rather wildly. I could tell that there was an easterly breeze across the city, but when the wind entered my area of control, it embraced me, mixing with what I knew to be my Aether, before moving along.

It was time to focus on what I needed for the build I had been formulating. I needed an attack, something that was comparable in damage to my storm aspect ability, but much larger, and had much more instant damage. I was a front-line fighter, so an AOE I could use to both punish large crowds of enemies, and to give me some space to attack was a necessity. It would grant both survivability and damage, and I needed both if I was going to be playing out my lone wanderer archetype.

First, I pulled the wind in my sphere closer to my body, condensing the ambient air attuned Aether. The wind became tumultuous, moving rapidly and chaotically. That was fine, but I needed to condense it even further if I wanted to weaponize it. I started to force the wind into a sphere around my body, only about four feet in diameter. From there, I brought the air in even further, forming not a sphere but a ring, a doughnut of air with my body at the center. I went ahead and checked my mana.

I had started bleeding mana at this point, far surpassing the amount of control I could exert for free. My goal was to load in 100 mana to this one attack, and I was well on my way. I began to force my magic into the ring, condensing the air even further, while simultaneously exciting the small eddies within it. I watched my mana tick down in real-time. After around 5 seconds, I had packed in as much wind as I possibly could, and I could feel a physical strain on my body. Strangely enough, the strain was not felt in my head like a headache, but in the crystal horns on my head. Fearing for what that might mean, I released the spell, sending it out around me.

With a sound like a pneumatic cannon, the pressurized air blade blasted out, the condensed air rapid cooling the water vapor in the air forming a white halo around me. After the wind blade blasted out, I then heard a loud WHUMP as the displaced air slammed back into the negative pressure space formed, followed by a soft crack. Yep. That’ll do. I’d have to go out and test it on some trees to see the effects tomorrow.

Hearing a soft ding in my mind, I checked my new alert.

For the next four hours, I spent my training time in the air focusing on reducing the cast time of my spell, with my standard 20-minute breaks on the ground to regenerate my mana. It took me a while, but I learned that there were diminishing returns on the amount of mana I put into the spell. After about 70 mana thrown into the ring, the rest just started bleeding off into the atmosphere, so I started limiting the amount I pumped into the spell. The second thing was that If I started to put more than 100 mana into the ring, that strange pain would come back, making it difficult to focus on the spell. Twice, I lost control of the ring and fired it off too early due to the pain. I was waiting for an alert to pop up to help me figure out what it was, but I didn’t get anything.

As the sunset, I headed back inside. I left the skill up alerts for tomorrow when I wasn’t so tired. The training left me ravenous with hunger and exhausted, which led me to believe that there was a relationship to the food I ate and the mana within my body, as I hadn’t felt this hungry since long before the first wave. When I came inside, everyone was already enjoying a dinner of enchiladas, courtesy of the Garcia’s. I grabbed a plate, loading it with the delicious cheesy goodness, and quietly stuffed my face.

Donny looked up from his food, and seeing my state, asked, “You okay Vic? You look like you just ran a marathon.”

I sighed. “Yeah, I’m fine. I spent the whole day training my magic. It’s really taken a lot out of me. I’m probably going to call it an early night.”

His golden scales were soot-blackened in places from the constant fire breath and working the forge, and I could see that he was pretty tired as well.

He nodded, responding, “Well, if you need anything, don’t be afraid to ask. Nick and Trevor came back from clearing a ruin yesterday with some nice crafting recipes that you might be interested in, so let me know if I can do anything to help.”

I yawned and nodded sleepily. The conversations around me were muffled in my exhausted state, and as my hunger faded, I just got even more tired.

After dinner I crept off to my room, falling into bed and passing out as soon as my eyes closed.

I flew through the clouds, hundreds of feet in the air where the wind swept across the world as powerful as a hurricane, but unending. I turned and swept through the air, gliding on my wings as best I could, but my movements were imperfect. Though I was unburdened by clothes, I was too slow. My wings were too bulky. The metal feathers did not catch enough wind to move me as I wished. I strived for perfection as I flew, but I was incapable of my current form.

Suddenly, I froze in place, and the sky around me turned pitch black, and I was plunged into absolute darkness. Through the darkness, I saw a rope made of four braided threads, extending unending both above and below me. The rope must have been the width of a building, and its sheer breadth left me awestruck. I wished desperately to approach the great braid.

I moved forward at a snail’s pace, eventually finding my way blocked by a wall I could not see, only feel. For some reason, I yearned to pass it, but I knew if I somehow found myself on the other side of the wall, I would die a most painful death.

With a bright flash, from the great braid shot a small thread, no bigger in width than my pinky finger, which flew through the black space towards me. It blasted through the transparent wall, piercing the crown of my head at the root of my horns, and began pumping pure energy into my body.

I arched my back in pain, releasing a scream from the depths of my soul as my body ignited. The pain was relentless, and I began to feel a squirming sensation beneath my skin before everything faded to black.

I sat bolt upright in bed, feeling lingering pain all over my body. Could pain from a dream even transfer over into real life? After a few moments, the pain faded, leaving me with a strange feeling across my whole body. My horns and gems were casting a cyan light across the room, so I could see around me. I had shredded the sheets I was sleeping on with my claws and wings, leaving them in tatters. Luckily my mattress was memory foam so the damage to it was minimal, but it was still covered in holes from my tossing and turning. I had taken to sleeping on my side with my wings out behind me, and generally I was very still in my sleep, so I had no problems, but tonight it looks like I tried to roll over multiple times leaving my bed in a very bad condition.

That was an incredibly weird dream, and my heart was still racing in my chest. I decided that a nice warm bath would calm my nerves, so I headed into my bathroom, flipping on the switch to plunge the space into the light. I turned to the mirror and was shocked by what I saw. Across my arms and shoulders, the once silver fur had been tinted with dark swirling patterns. Checking my legs as well, I noticed similar changes, but that was not all. My wings were much larger, extending above my head another foot while folded on my back. I expected that my wingspan had increased as well. The feathers looked much more realistic, no longer rigid like metal, but flexible like feathers normally were. Bringing one wing in front of me, I examined it again and noticed that the metallic nature of the feathers had not been lost. Instead, they now had additional flexible ends, so that they weren’t sharp like blades anymore, and each feather was several inches longer. It made me wonder what effect it would have on my flight. Placing aside my idle thoughts, I was left once again pondering the peculiarities of my body, and what could have brought such a change. I had thought that only changing race would change the body, but that was just proven incorrect. Though the change to my body was not particularly significant, the fact that I could change at all without racial shifts WAS. I already had a suspicion of what had caused this, but I wanted more proof.

I went ahead and looked at the status sheet from yesterday that I had ignored.

And there it was. There were a few changes to my skill sheet that needed to be addressed. I had increased my chaos body strengthening, but that didn’t matter at this point as I hadn’t used it enough to give me any additional status points. According to the alert, one skill had been enhanced, and another had been evolved. As to what that meant, I honestly had no clue, though it was clear to me which was which.

Warrior’s Flight was probably the enhanced skill. It lost its height restriction on flight, and also now grants an official way to increase my speed even faster than the maximum. Both of those things were super cool, but not nearly as interesting as what happened to Aerokinesis. According to the alert, the magic skill had been transformed into something else, but it was obvious from the 1/3 in parenthesis that it was incomplete.

In my skill sheet, Aerokinesis was gone altogether, along with will all of the wind spells in the sheet. There wasn’t even a blank space from where it once was. After a quick test of my wind controlling abilities, I determined that the skill was not gone. It was instead hidden from sight. Something about that dream last night managed to change both my body and my abilities and was hiding parts of my skill sheet for some reason.

I filled the tub with hot water, doing my best to sink into it by keeping my wings in front of me. I submerged my head, and just enjoyed the muffled silence underwater. I did not need to breathe air, easily replacing it with water, nor did I need to go to the bathroom. What the hell was up with my body? I was unlike any elemental I had even heard of, and the peculiarities of my race were starting to bug me.

Humanoid elemental I could understand. It wasn’t that hard to grasp, and there were even examples of them in fiction. But even in D&D, humanoid elementals were still made of their respective element, they were just transformed to appear humanoid. Whatever I had become was outside of any fiction I had come across.

I had flesh and blood, though what it was made of was a mystery. I required food, though it seemed to vanish within my body. To top it all off, I was tied to the magics I wielded in such a powerful way that they would change my physical form to better suit their use. I just wish there was someone I could ask about these changes. It sucked to be a part of the beta test of the whole world. Maybe somewhere there were some wild elemental warriors I could talk to who would understand what had happened to me and what I was supposed to do with it. It was, technically, a humanoid monster race. That meant that there was a good chance that there were others like me out there, who actually knew what the hell was going on. At the very least, I could use a scientist or something, someone willing to run some tests on my blood or my skin to see what the hell they were made out of. Any information I could gain about this body would help. I closed my eyes and thought back to the strange dream with the rope.

The memory of the pain I felt was sharp in my mind. For the first time since my original transformation, I wished that I could have my old body back. I wanted all of this to have never happened. I wanted to interview for my dream job, and finally, start working as a graphic designer. I wanted to go see a movie with my friends without worrying about getting attacked by monsters on the way. More than anything, I wanted to still look like my mom. It felt like that little piece of her that I had carried with me had been stolen, and the heartbreak was catching up to me. The past 13 days had been moving so fast, and I was constantly busy. It has always been in my nature to run away from my problems, and when you always had something on your plate to deal with it was easy, but problems always had a way of catching back up, and it felt like my heart had just been hit by a sledgehammer. Laying there in the cooling water, I wept, tears joining the bathwater until I finally started fading off again. Right before falling unconscious again, I heard the ding of an alert in my mind but decided to ignore it. I drifted off again, this time into a dreamless sleep.

Howard had been taking too many liberties with his system. It had originally been my idea to make the system only supplementary. The goal was that after a few generations, the system would be removed altogether, and people would just advance based on intuition instead of using the system to guide them. It would allow further advancement and would also encourage more changes and people breaking free of the narrow confines that a limited system would give. It wasn’t like I could make a skill for everything after all.

Howard disagreed. He acknowledged that a limited system would keep humanity from advancing, but he didn’t want to remove the system altogether as he ‘liked the trope’. His proposed solution he called ‘pantheon’. He would create a set of powerful AI based on many different mythological pantheons and would have them control different areas of the world. That was fine.

I knew from my recovered memories that even my father, the greatest thoughtform who ever existed, was incapable of creating true sentient life, so I wasn’t particularly worried. I created the pantheon with 5 original members, representing Life, the Sun, the Moon, Nature, and Magic. Their AI’s were simple. They would find people who were having original thoughts and would use those thoughts to create skills associated with them. It was as easy as that. All of this was set in motion even before we had that first girl in Austin struck by lightning and changed into that experimental form.

After the final wave went out, my job was done. I was no longer a slave to Howard Greene’s whims, so I decided to take a break for a few days. During it, I wanted to go over some of Howard's work to see how he did certain things, and I was appalled by what I found.

The first thing I found was some monstrous emotional suppressant he had applied to every single human being. I just knew the death toll for the first week was too high. They were killing each other and could only feel basic emotions about it! What the hell was that? They weren’t even allowed to process their physical changes emotionally or feel anything more basic than light panic or stress. We had people abandoning their best friends out there because they thought it was safer! Luckily the emotional suppressant was weaker on beta testers who were the most powerful, but it was still a horrible and potentially damaging system that went directly against everything I stood for. I quickly applied a change that meant the emotional suppressant would wear off completely in a few days.

Understanding that he had been hiding things within the system that would affect humanity negatively, I took my heart and hid it within myself in a place he could not reach. That would stop him from being able to edit the system any further than the quality of life updates. I even rerouted all administrator messages sent to him and had them forwarded to me, just to make sure I could keep tabs on what he was doing. With that out of the way, I continued looking through his work for mistakes. It appeared that he also didn’t add any heads-up display function to the system. Well, that one was easy enough to fix. It could roll out with the next major patch.

As I continued implementing simple fixes and changes, I noticed that I was receiving an awful lot of admin notifications from the pantheon system. I went ahead and glanced at the pantheon system.

HOLY CRAP. There were 5 extra major deities and a whole smattering of minor ones! I quickly went in and tried to check their systems but found myself locked out. But that was impossible; how could I be locked out of a system created by my power?

The system and the changes to the world were self-sustaining; they would constantly run, even without anyone there to manage them by continually absorbing thoughts from the humans changed. It seemed like Howard managed to tie the gods and goddesses of the pantheon system directly to the thought register of the world, allowing them to gain consciousness, much in the same way that I did when I first came to earth, just much slower.

After understanding what Howard did, I immediately reconstituted a body for him in the real world and ejected him from my thought space. He was no longer bonded to me, and I would no longer placate his whims. He would have to survive on his own for now.

And here I was, three days later, still working away, trying to fix what Howard had done. The pantheon was in full swing still, and I was incapable of stopping it without destroying the system altogether. I was able to limit what the members of the pantheon were able to do in the real world, but they could still bring people over to their sides. I just hoped that it would be enough. There was a war brewing, and I was afraid that humanity would be stuck right in the middle of it.