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SORRY, I released this chapter on RR a couple of days ago but must have missed posting it here. It is hard to schedule on SH for me because the Calender doesn't adapt to my timezone.

Mike's eyes flickered open again to an unfamiliar setting. He needed to stop doing this. He moved his neck, memories of the fight and passing out right after, facing a stranger with a bow. He tries to lift his right arm but found it restricted.

He lifted his head to down his body, terrified to see it tied to him or shackled, but it wasn’t. His arm had been securely wrapped in a bandage around the shoulder and was currently fastened rather snugly into a sling across his chest. He had another brief moment of panic as he saw that the tattoo wasn’t covering his arm.

As he thought of this he saw the dark lines of the tattoo fade into existence around his fingers and fade out again. It was hiding with magic somehow, Minor Illusion again? Or something else. He noticed then that he wasn’t wearing his jacket, just the thin undershirt and the sling around his arm.

He reached up with his left hand this time to feel at his head. His fingers touched more bandages, wrapped around his head. He pulled his hand back quickly as he felt a sting from the cut that was still there. No superpowered healing for him, yet.

As he flinched from touching the bandage he heard a voice, he tried to spin his body to face it but only managed to turn his head. There was a campfire to his side a metre and a bit away, and sitting across from beside it was likely the person who had found him earlier.

He looked like a middle-aged man, late thirties or early forties, his hair was short and blond but speckled rather liberally with grey, especially at his temples. He had light brown eyes and pale skin that had seen enough sunlight to get some colour, but not enough to burn. He spoke but it sounded like gibberish.

Not like a language that Mike didn’t understand, but like random sounds and noises that didn’t match together or have any structure at all. They seemed to match his mouth movements but that was it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that, do you speak Gildaic? I understood you before.” Mike said, trying to use his left arm to lift himself off the ground, with little success. God having Eight Strength sucked. He ended up just staying lying down, his head falling back. It hit something padded and he turned his head to find his Jacket folded up beneath it.

The man’s eyebrows rose, “Aye, I do. Though it is odd to need it with a Human. Do you want some help getting up? You seem to have had a rough time of it.” He said with enough of a smirk to show that the understatement was intentional, he spoke with an accent that made him sound rural.

Mike wondered exactly how the AI was doing this, it must have done some very odd things to his brain to make him perceive all languages as English, and even give them accents. Ishare had sounded kind of middle eastern, not that Mike had ever had an extended conversation with someone from the middle east.

Mike sighed, “You seemed to have helped me plenty already, so I won’t refuse.” He raised his hand for the man to help him sit up.

The man smiled as he stood and took a few steps around the fire to grasp Mike’s wrist and help him up into a sitting position, Mike had to steady himself on his hand as he felt a brief spell of lightheadedness.

“It’s nice to meet you, and thanks for the first aid, I’m Mike,” Mike said as he moved his hand down to grip his palm and shook it, only thinking that he didn’t know if that was a thing here. He was relieved as the Man shook back.

“My name’s Crosse and it is nice to meet you as well,” he said as he let Mike’s hand go, and moved back around the fire little ways before sitting down. “Even if you be a stranger near my home, capable of taking down a peryton with a knife. Thanks for that by the way, saved me a lot of work hunting and trapping the fucker, not to mention all the arrows it would have taken to take him down.

Mike blinked in surprise, “You were hunting the Peryton? That seems… brave.” The man didn’t seem any different from a middle-aged man on earth, and that bird had been big.

“Aye, it’s been causing trouble around my hometown lately, a few hunters like me were sent out in different directions to kill it. The fuckers don’t nest and stay put like most predators their size, they roam around and kill most anything that moves if it is weak enough.” the man, Crosse, Explained.

“Well, I don’t envy you that duty. Was there a reward for taking it down?” Mike asked, curious.

Crosse tilted his head back and laughed, “A reward, I suppose there can be, you did us a favour, even if it almost killed you.” Crosse’s face got more serious after that. “Now I’m not normally a nosy man, but I have to ask how you managed it? You don’t have a bow or anything to bring it down with, yet you managed to get it on the ground long enough to walk up and stab it in the throat with a dagger?”

Mike’s face tried not to show worry on his face but was saved by his stomach protesting loudly. “I hope you don’t mind if I go behind one of these trees and get some business done before answering?” He said. He needed privacy to open the AI screens and re-equip acting, he suspected that that was his, deception, persuasion and intimidation skills all rolled together.

Crosse nodded and reached into the pack at his side, not Mikes, which Miked now looked around for, and found a foot or so from his left side. As he looked back to Crosse the man was leaning forward to hand him a bundle of leaves. Mike blinked in confusion and took the leaves, as he grabbed them he both realised what they were for and was surprised again.

The leaves were made of metal, very thin metal, they had the texture of leaves and as he rubbed the stack of them against each other the moved and bent like leaves too. “Don’t recognize iron-leaf?” Crosse asked, looking puzzled.

“I’ll explain when I get back.” Mike managed to stand by setting his hand against the ground and getting his feet under him. He wobbled up and nodded to Crosse as he made his way towards the nearest tree.

After he had walked around its huge trunk he leaned his back against it and took a deep breath. Cross was right, the peryton had almost killed him. If he had chosen any other class he would have been in a better situation to fight it.

A Sorcerer likely would have been able to react in with magic in the instant he had seen the danger, and an Elementalist likely would have found a way to use the light magic offensively, not needing to make the desperate move of swapping his skills mid-fight.

To start with, what had he been standing in the middle of a wild forest looking around like a buffoon, looking at the pretty lights. He could have swapped to Arcane magic and tried it out instead of standing right in the middle of a fucking spotlight.

He had gotten caught up in the long term and missed the short term implications of his choice, again. He took a deep breath, now wasn’t the time to beat himself up, he had to work some things out and he didn’t have a lot of time before Crosse came looking for him. He mentally prodded the AI to show him the quests he had received and the one he had made, one right after escaping and one after killing the peryton.

So one to help him get by in the wilderness and one to help him judge the strength of opponents, the ‘I’ next to the Spirit beast quest suggested it was the first of its kind, perhaps the AI would need another quest like this one for Spirit beasts over level ten.

The Quest he had prompted the AI to create wasn’t incredibly useful, but it gave him a goal, Level 15, He wondered how the AI had reckoned that number, under the AI’s standards, was that Ishare’s Wizard Level? It couldn’t be but Ishare was the only wizard he had ever seen and that High Elf Cleric had been significantly stronger than him.

He closed the window and this time willed his status and his Skill window open.

Even though he had almost died, he had gained as well, the EXP from the peryton had been useful, he was almost level 4 in Physical already and the gain in the Magic aspect was good as well.

Again he wondered how the other classes would have gained differently from the fight. He felt like Monk may have been in an almost as bad situation against the peryton, but the Mana breathing may have made him faster and better able to retaliate.

He decided to spend his points now, all of them, he didn’t know when he would get time to himself like this again. He put his two Physical stat points into Strength. Not being able to lift himself with one hand had been embarrassing.

He thought about the Magic points and the General points. The Magic points could go into a few places, he felt like he didn’t need more Control right now, but he wondered if his low Attunement had had something to do with his inability to sense the offensive uses for Light mana, as well as his rather short sense range. It hadn’t been a problem in the cell because the whole place had been chock-full of Light mana, but here not needing to take one step closer to the nearest source of power could save his life.

So he put the Magic points into Attunement. The GP were a different story, he had to make the choice to either bring his Attunement up to the same level as his Control, or he could put them into Endurance to make himself both sturdier and tire slower. He remembered those last few steps towards the peryton as it writhed in false agony, and passing out less than a minute after beating the creature. Endurance.

As he decided that something happened that he hadn’t seen before, his Mental EXP went up. A whole 15%, well that either came from Wisdom or Intelligence. Wisdom, if he remembered the descriptions correctly, and as he thought that it ticked up again, 5%, bringing him to 85%. That was likely intelligence, getting EXP for remembering everything correctly… Damn, none for that one.

He put the points in Endurance and closed the window, feeling the Magic merge with him fully and change him subtly, making him stronger, more durable, and better at sensing magic. He could sense the Physical stats much better than the magic stats, but with 9 Attunement who could just barely feel something in the back of his awareness.

He was running out of time, He had been back here almost 10 minutes now, he quickly swapped Arcane Logic for Acting, He would need it more now, and equipping it meant getting it closer to levelling up. If he played this right he could probably level Language as well. He grabbed a few of the leaves from his hand and rubbed them against the bark of the tree, hoping it would make a noise that sounded like the actual purpose of the leaves.

He dropped a few on the ground and went back around the tree to the fire. He had some explaining to do.