As I flew, I looked around me at the ridiculous carnage I had perpetrated. It didn’t matter to me, but I was sure in my effort to clear the eastern garden of greater spitters, I had to slay more than 200 of the things, and their corpses were now rotting in the sun across several dozens of acres. It was easy to do now, my mobility, defense, and offense miles above where it was even two floors before. Though the fight against the guardian of agility was difficult, that was more a symptom of a bad match-up than the guardian being out of my league. Even then, I had managed to defeat it.

I looked back to when I first found the kangor gauntlets and boots, how strong the equipment seemed. I had build my current fighting style around keeping an open torso and using my four limbs as improvised shields, and though they no longer actually provided the protection they appeared to, I still felt bare. Now, even fighting an enemy with full plate kangor armor seemed doable. My spells and blade could sheer right through the rank 1 metal. As soon as I left here, I wanted to find some more heavy armor to replace my gauntlets and boots, but I needed an upgraded metal. Hopefully, my eggshell would do.

Next up was the guardian of strength, a variant of the skullback warriors. It was slightly innocuous-looking, but I feared that it would be just as fierce as the guardian of agility, presumably for a completely different reason. Lucky for me, finding the strangely muscular black-shelled spider was not difficult. It stood, all alone, atop a hill of rubble, watching as I approached. It bared its strange club-like appendages at me, making no other sign of hostility, and showing no fear.

Now that I was closer, I could see that the hill on which the guardian stood was covered in strange gouges, blasts of earth removed from the ground pushing away from the guardian. It seems to have been attacking any spider that approached it with something, killing its kind. Just In case, I started to build up another hail of icicles from a full 50 feet away. I wanted to finish this one off before it could have a chance to retaliate.

As I cast the spell, my attention drifted away from the spider ever so slightly, when suddenly I heard a sound like dynomite going off and felt a pressure wave of wind coming my direction. The water I had collected behind me was blasted away into droplets, all of the ice I’d hardened scattered into dust and vapor in my suprise. My wings, stressed by the wind, were likewise forced backward and I careened through the air uncontrollably. After falling a dozen feet, I was able to gain control once more. Looking down at my clothes, I noticed that two of my three health potions had shattered from the air pressure, and my skin and new leather armor was scuffed and scratched all over like I had been covered in paper cuts.

I rose high into the air again, taking another look at the spider. It stood completely still on its strange precipice, showing no sign that it had just attacked, entirely unmoving. I guess long cast-time attacks were out of the question unless I decided to retreat even further, but I wanted more information on this guardian before choosing a plan of attack. I decided to perform a quick strike and use my lightning step to get out of the way if it started to attack again, planning to retreat before it could make its move again.

My sword ready, I charged a lighting bolt in my left hand and filled my wings with wind mana. Turning my body downwards in a dive angle, I launched myself through the air towards the guardian. My sword was drawn, prepared to slash, and I was milliseconds out from striking distance when I heard another blast and the whole world erupted. I spun through the air, landed hard, felt a crushing pressure on my chest, and then everything faded to black.

I awoke with a groan sometime later. Everything hurt, and my entire body was covered with bruises and bumps. I opened my eyes, then immediately realized something was wrong. My vision was limited to half, my left eye either destroyed in the attack or blocked by something. I started hyperventilating in fear at the loss of an eye, before I managed to calm myself down. This was a magical world now, and loosing an eye was only a temporary proposition. If I couldn’t heal it, a dedicated healer definitely could, so there was nothing to worry about just quite yet. I carefully looked around and realized that I was at the top of a tree. Above me, branches were shattered and broken from what I assume was my crash landing. My wings were, thankfully, perfectly fine. I had no broken bones as far as I could tell, and other than the missing eye, I was okay, though thoroughly skaken by the experience.

Checking my health, I could see that I was only missing 100, but obviously, that didn’t reflect the damage I still posessed. Yet another reminder that the system could only approximate numbers, and it was still mostly a mystery what health actually represented.

Luna, what the hell was that? What happened to me?

Vic! I’m so glad you’re okay. I don’t think you realize how lucky you are. When you landed, your health potion broke and healed you. With that, you were able to survive, but just barely. You’ve been out for almost six hours now…

Holy crap. Luna was right, I was lucky. And I was an absolute idiot. What other animal in the world has hands just like that spider? I remembered seeing it in a nature documentary, but it was so long ago that I had almost forgotten. The guardian of strength seemed to be mimicking the mantis shrimp, a crustacean that can attack with such speed that it creates pressure vacuums to stun and kill fish. From close range, they have the power of a .22 caliber rifle. If the scale was the same with this guardian, I survived getting hit with a cannonball from two feet. Damn right I’m lucky to survive. I was shaken, but not bad enough to keep me down, the fear gently turning to conviction and anger. The attack had just been so fast it almost didn’t even seem real.

First thing’s first, I needed to rest and recuperate for a while. My backpack had been blown away with me, and it’s contents were scattered around the small copse of trees I now found myself occupying. I had lost a few copper coins, but I didn’t care about those. The food and clothes were much more important. Interestingly enough, my light armor was almost unscathed, having repaired itself while I was unconscious. In the future, I would have to look for magic items to wear. When you had as many limbs as me, and needed pants that could survive a beating, there was nothing better than the absolute bullshit tailoring that magic provided.

I was able to collect most of my supplies save a few unimportant bits and bobs, as well as my sword that was also completely fine. It seems like my face took the brunt of the attack, and I chuckled a bit after realizing that I cared more for my sword than the state of my face. Through the search, I was constantly annoyed by my shortened range of vision. With all of my extra perception abilities, it wasn’t that much of a loss, but it was still a pain in the ass trying to adapt to poor depth perception.

It was now time to try and get my health back and fix my remaining injuries. I started casting healings spells once more, focusing again on how they functioned. I sensed as the water attuned mana was converted to water attuned aether to repair injured flesh. This time, I was able to focus it a bit deeper, and instead of just casting the spell on myself, I forced the mana into particular places across my body. After only a couple of casts, I found that the ratio of mana expense to health was now 1 to 1. I still had to cast the spell in chunks of 25 as Aqua Heal required, but the change made it feel far more efficient. Seeing the immense difference knowledge could make, it made me curious to find out what a true healer could accomplish, even a 2 to 1 health to mana ratio now within reach. I still needed to test if the spell worked the same way on other races too, though.

After reaching 100 health, I was saddened to realize that my eye still had yet to heal complely. It felt far better, but there was still something off about it keeping it from working correctly. This time, I tried to focus the healing spell over a much smaller space, condensing all of the energy of the cast right inside of the eye socket. With a strange tickling sensation, I felt the organ begin to regenerate. After a few minutes and four casts, I could finally see with both of my eyes again, and I felt an alert in the back of my mind.

How unexpected. It had been a long time since I had just gotten a skill on my own through hard work. Even more interesting, it seemed limited to high-rank beings. Was my early transformation into a higher race the cause, or something else?

Luna, what do you know about Aether Channeling?

I designed it, so quite a bit I’d imagine. I guess explaining it would be rather difficult though without you understanding Aether. How much have you been able to figure out on your own and with the help of the system?

Not much, unfortunately. I seem to produce it naturally, and I learned a bit when I ranked up and accessed my body strengthening technique, but it’s still confusing. I think there’s something about converting Aether to mana because I’m a monster?

Hmmmm. Alright, I guess I’ll start at the basics. You might want to get comfortable; this could take some time to get through.

As she recommended, I settled into a comfortable sitting position at the top of another tree, munching on some reclaimed jerky.

Here we go. Aether is the new form of energy I created to fuel all of the strange magical constructs and creations that this new world demanded. It is completely flexible, able to transform into particles temporarily, generate heat or electricity, or even simulate life by stimulating moto-neurons through magical effects, ergo creating necromancy. Like all energy sources, Aether is conserved, and cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

Monsters produce more aether than they require to live, ejecting it into the atmosphere when they die and are converted to experience. They also produce small amounts of Aether passively. That’s what happens to the food you eat Vic, why you never have to go to the bathroom yet still need to eat. You're casting off the energy into the atmosphere. When Aether dissipates into the atmosphere it transforms into a more usable form, becoming mana that can be taken in by magic races or mages to cast spells. Loose atmospheric mana eventually joins natural collections of Aether called aether streams, turning back into its more primal source. The aether streams fuel magic plants and create more monsters, and thus the cycle repeats.

You, however, can run the cycle in reverse. You can convert your mana pool right back into Aether with that new skill. The effects this can have vary wildly, healing being only one of many.

That explained the ability and helped me understand a bit more about how my body worked. Some of It was information I had learned through my rank up, but it was still nice to see it condensed and explained again. It also helped give me some ideas about how I could improve my Storm Command. I would need to experiment with Aether a bit more before I came to any solid conclusions. I continued to ask questions as I finished my lunch, particularly regarding how monsters functioned and why they were important to the world’s new ecosystem.

I first learned the difference between types of monsters. They were differentiated by how many aether streams they were connected to. I was connected to the streams of air and water, as well as the stream of chaos. That made me a storm elemental. If I was connected to the stream of order instead, I would be an ice elemental.

Because the streams changed in strength depending on where you were, different monsters would spawn, and then those monsters would create more attuned aether, making the streams even stronger in the area, almost like a filter for the world, sorting different elements. That was probably why the news people were talking about changing weather so much. They started to notice the different monster spawning grounds and effects that the streams had on the environment and documented them. I would need to bring this information back to the guild because it meant we could track groups of powerful monsters based on slight changes in weather they caused. I’d imagine that being a meteorologist had never been a more useful profession. What’s more, we could also predict what types of monsters could spawn in an area based on the aether streams there. Of course, we would need the ability to detect what streams were in the area and to document as many types of monsters as possible and what streams they preferred. It would be a large task, but well worth it.

Alright. I had waited enough, and it was time to go try and take on the guardian of strength once more. I felt like an idiot for not realizing just how dangerous the thing was earlier. The guardian of agility was the fastest thing I had fought to date, while the guardian of strength was the strongest thing I had encountered, most likely even more so than the skullback knight.

What I needed before I could confidently form a plan against it was to see it attack. Once I could determine the attack range and the attack frequency, I could get some better ideas. I took flight once more to engage my fearsome enemy, but this time I had no health potions to act as a safety net. I would need to find more later. Maybe I could even go back and see the spider merchant from the previous level. Regardless, I was stuck on this floor until I defeated all of the guardians, so I had work to do.

I found myself flying a couple hundred feet away from the guardian’s hill once more. In all this time, the thing had remained completely stationary. Now that I was looking, the gouges in the earth all ended around 60 feet out of the spider. That didn’t mean that it was the max range of the blasts, but it was probably the point at which they went from lethal shockwaves to powerful gusts of wind. First, I needed to bait its attack to actually try and see what I was dealing with.

I levitated far enough out from it that It could not touch me, but still within line of sight, and began to cast my icicle hail once again. I summoned large amounts of water, stopping my creation of projectiles when I reached 200 mana left over. I had managed to create 91 spears of ice as long as my arm, and they were all locked and loaded, ready to attack.

With that out of the way, I slowly approached the 100-foot mark. I heard the blast and felt the shockwave before I could even notice the guardian twitch, but my solid projectiles resisted the attack now, and because I was ready, I could navigate the turbulent current with ease.

The guardian stayed right where it was before, though I could see steam coming out of the joints of its rounded forelimbs. It must have used both arms to generate that attack, but the steam gave me an idea about this guardian’s limitations. I started using the icicles as spears, sending them down to pierce the exposed joints of the guardian as it waited. Just as I expected, though it was receiving attack after attack, the arachnid remained completely still.

The guardian of agility sacrificed strength and regeneration in exchange for extreme speed. This guy must have given up agility and regeneration to receive such a powerful attack. After exactly 40 seconds, another shock wave careened towards me, but I was still so far away that it had little effect. I watched as the holes my icicles made in the spider were ripped even deeper due to its sudden movement. This thing was killing itself with every attack.

Over the next 30 minutes, I continued pelting the spider with ice as my mana slowly regenerated. It was incapable of making any move to stop me and could at best slowly creep towards me or crawl away. Eventually, I hit it with a final attack, and it fell to the ground. I got another alert, and as I watched, a small chest fell next to the guardian signaling the end of it’s life. I brushed away the alert after seeing I had gotten another two levels from the fight. These guardians were worth more than 200 of the normal spiders. Hunting them down was far more effective leveling than grinding their weak counterparts, almost making them worth the risk.

While this was an easy fight the second time, it was only possible through patience and experimentation. If I was grounded, I would have lost. If I didn’t have enough health to tank the shockwave I would have been obliterated. If I couldn’t heal, I would be down one eye. My skillset was catered specifically around keeping me alive in situations where I could only rely on myself. I couldn’t imagine a typical adventurer being able to do what I could.

What’s more, I could ask Luna for advice whenever I needed to, giving me a further leg up over others. She was like a walking encyclopedia, and while I was technically working for her, I was also very grateful she was with me on my very first full dungeon dive. I went down to the spider. This time, instead of just leaving the corpse where it was, I decided to take both of its front limbs. I’d imagine I could sell them for a pretty penny in town, and someone could get a very fancy war club.

As I crouched down next to the guardian’s corpse, I noticed a slight magic hum coming from the body. It didn’t feel dangerous or hostile, but it was rather peculiar and I hadn’t sensed anything quite like it.

Luna? What’s that strange hum I’m feeling?

Oh? I can’t sense whatever it is you’re feeling right now. Based on the description though, it sounds like this guardian has a monster core. They’re very rare. You should take it if you can.

The monster core was a rather typical motif in lots of fantasy books, so I wasn’t shocked that they were a real thing. With a heaving breath, I turned the guardian on its side, revealing it’s slightly softer underbelly. Using my sword, I carved right into where it’s brain would be, and after a few minutes of gruesome digging, pulled out a tetrahedral crystal around the size of a baseball in a unique striking dark green color.

Luna? Care to explain what clarity is?

Clarity is how potent the core is. The higher the clarity, the stronger the core. Just like all tags in the system, it has a max of 10, and a minimum of 1. Monster cores should be impossible to generate within dungeons because the monsters don’t fight each other, but because of the unique nature of this one, it was able to form.

Thanks, Luna!

No problem. Let’s check out what’s in the box, shall we? I’m rather curious about what it will drop.

Don’t mind if I do.

I excitedly opened the chest, eager for what I might find. The chest was identical to the last one in color and shape, though it appeared a bit smaller. Opening it up, I found the second key to exit the floor, identical to the first I found, though it was engraved with the word ‘strength’ instead. The two large gold coins were happily added to my coin pouch. The last item, though, was very intriguing.

Not useful for me at all, but I could imagine many people would be curious about learning what this thing contained. I would have to check if one of my friends was interested in the spellbook, or I could sell it for a pretty penny. It was a tough fight, but it wasn’t the first time I had almost been killed. It probably wouldn’t be the last.

Falc0n

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