CW: Gore (Summary at the bottom authors note if you skip the chapter!)

  The way we end up defeating the slimes is with Jess’ help.

  She freezes them using her skill, turning the critters into little more than blobs of ice. Then, they don’t explode when killed. I stomp another one of them into angry ice cubes.

  [You have killed a lv. 2 Slime]

  Thatch leads on and we follow.

  Slowly, the sun sets. Nighttime doesn’t come fast, really. It feels like the sun is clinging onto the sky, but its time is running dry. We still haven’t found Sylves, but we are heading the right way.

  Worst case, we’ll camp the night here. I think Norman and Bay might not be very happy with it but… well, they might need to get used to it. It doesn’t seem likely for us to camp in nice, comfortable beds all the time for the near future.

  How many points in heart before the ground gives against my skin, I wonder? How much power before walls become suggestions? Well, I don’t really care about those two as much.

  I move around the mana puzzle in my hands, twisting and turning it as I add more magic from my vessel into it. It makes me move it around, spin it around the maze’s twists and turns, while keeping it in thin threads.

  It’s difficult, but a fun exercise. Every time I fail, I waste some energy, but the task is so delicate, it takes hardly any mana at all. I still work to solidify more of it, too, but it’s dissipating a little too fast. I need to keep my current stash of grains constantly filled with a part of my regeneration.

  Add in the part of me that focuses on suppressing the damn parasite burrowing through my flesh, and my ongoing practice with the healing spell whenever I save up enough energy… well, suffice to say, I’ve been greedily tapping most slime cores we’ve come across.

  My thoughts are interrupted when Thatch stops. “We’re here,” he says. The location he’d marked, then. Where he’d seen Sylves.

  She’s not here anymore, of course. None of us have tracking skills, either. I can feel a faint, tiny difference in the mana in the air, but it’s far too small for me to describe, let alone follow. Instead, we’re just kinda left standing there.

  “What now?” Amelie asks.

  Her question makes sense, really. It does. And she isn’t asking out of malice, just curiosity. I need to find Sylves, so how do we find her?

  “It feels a little silly, but we could try just yelling really loudly,” Inu suggests.

  I blink. “Sure. Go ahead.”

  “What if we draw in more monsters?” Norman hisses. “We’ve only seen slimes, but there’s no way to know if those are the only things here.”

  “Then we kill them,” Opal says casually, waving a hand.

  At that, he frowns, but remains quiet. I think they want a class, too. All of them probably do. Maybe it’s finally sunk in that being weak is as good as a death sentence in this world.

  I wonder, for just a minute, if there will be another change tonight. Dungeons and lifted limits after the first day. Would the next change happen now, or after a week, or after a month?

  Inu draws a deep breath of air into her lungs, then screams, as loudly as she can. “SYLVES!!!”

  It makes my ears hurt a little. Must’ve been socializing too much, recently. We all hold our breath and wait, but there doesn’t seem to be a reply. I wish I could just text her, but my phone really has become not much more than a fancy mp3 player.

  Not that I mind. I like music. As there isn’t an answer, I slowly sink to the ground, leaning against a tree. “Let’s call it a day,” I say.

  There aren’t any complaints. Everyone pulls out a bit of food and water from backpacks, eating dried and preserved things and washing them down. I turn on my headphones, and they connect with a beep, and I start playing music.

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  I close my eyes, and the world fades into silence.

  For just a little bit, I feel serene.

  Then that fucker in my abdomen squirms and starts nibbling on my ribs again.

  I hate it. The feeling is disgusting. I’ve been ignoring it, pushing it all aside, and I was very good at that, but right now, when it stopped me while taking a breather? That was too much.

  Causing me pain and suffering I can tolerate, but not respecting my personal space? That’s where I draw the line.

  “Gonna use the toilet for a sec,” I announce, getting up. “Be right back.”

  And then I walk into the forest.

  It’s darker, now. I might have nodded off for a moment to the music. I don’t care. The little fucker had done it. So, I walk into the darkness, below the leaves. There are no city lights here, no fireflies, nothing.

  The silence is heavy and oppressive and I do not care. I pause my music, putting the headphones around my neck. I’m far enough away now. None of my friends would hear or see this.

  I take a breath.

  Four skills. [Selection], [Suppression], [Solidification], and [Deconstruction]. Those are my tools. My logic gates. The operations at hand that I can use on my environment and the thing inside me, alongside the botched healing spell, too shitty to even be recognized by the system.

  [Selection] is the one I use first, activating it on the thing. A tether connects me to it, and I can feel the way it rummages around inside me, almost as if it knows what is coming. It hurts, but that’s fine. I let the tether settle, making sure it’s properly in place, and focus.

  [Suppression] comes down next. It triggers, slamming into the thing and turning it slow, sluggish. I can almost ignore it, but not quite. Its slimy exterior is still worming around in there. Writhing, struggling against my hold. It’s gorged itself.

  Then, I lift my shirt.

  It’s in tatters. Stained with blood, and full of cuts, but still mostly covers me, which I’m grateful for. I don’t enjoy showing too much skin, generally. Now, though, I lift it, to see that there is a splotch of darkness showing beneath my flesh. It looks like a big bruise, a nasty, darkened patch of skin, but it moves under there. It’s alive.

  My suppression knits itself tighter, until I can barely see the squirming anymore. I take a deep breath, and take one of the goblin knives.

  The blade is made from some kinda sharpened rock, maybe obsidian. Surgeons use that for scalpels, right? Surely this shouldn’t be a problem. Probably. Surely.

  I use one of the cleaner ones, bringing its tip up against my scabbed skin, the thin gash where the creature had snuck into me.

  And I slice myself open.

  The pain is fast and burning. It’s not too bad, but I don’t have the focus to suppress it, so I simply accept the way it burns. I hiss quietly, breathing through my teeth. It would get worse, still, but that’s fine.

  Part of my mind focuses on my solidified mana needles. I take one of them between my fingers, pinching it tightly, and squeezing it. Reshaping it.

  [Solidification 3 > 4]

  The thing becomes thinner, denser. Until it’s not much bigger than a tack. Then, I push it under my skin.

  Again, it hurts, but I ignore it. When my fingers can’t get it any further in, I push against the mana with my mind. It obeys, as it always does, slowly sinking deeper into my body. Through barely healed tissue, into the cavern carved out by the parasite.

  The inky thing tries to writhe, but my will clamps down around it. The needle presses into it, stabbing stygian flesh. It struggles, it fights, it tries to hammer against my skin and escape, eat its way out. And I [Suppress] it. Brutally. Over and over, my mind slams into it. Until the cage is woven so tightly it can’t move.

  [Suppression 5 > 6]

  My needle sinks into it. There’s a smoky darkness that tries to eat at it, tries to dissolve my skill, but it’s tight. I feed it a steady trickle of mana, keeping the tack alive, even as the thing tries to dispel it.

  And then, it sinks in. Ethereal darkness parts to reveal inky flesh. It’s squishy, but the needle sinks in. How ironic is that? A piece of me, inside it, inside me again. Like a russian nesting doll.

  I focus again, making a second tack. And a third. And a fourth. Until I am all out of solidified mana.

  By then, my vessel stat feels low. I have been feeding all those bits of solidified mana more power to keep them going inside the thing’s body. They wanna fall apart, but I don’t let them, not yet. Not yet.

  Only when the final one pierces the parasite, do I detonate them all.

  My mana floods it, breaks into it, crashes into its mana and dispells it. The darkness the thing seems to ooze abates, suddenly no longer sustainable. I drain it, its resources evaporating as they clash against mine.

  My will clamps even tighter around it, not even letting it wriggle in pain. I know it must fucking suck to be in its position right now, but that’s fine. This is just the start of it.

  When the effect abates, when my needles have exhausted its resources, disabled its skills for a moment, I play my last card.

  Mana spins into a spiral within my chest, forming a tool. [Deconstruction]. It’s a wonderful skill, I think, meant to destroy, take apart, and understand. I can choose to focus on different bits of that, and right now, I want to break the parasite. I want to tear it to pieces.

  The skill begs me for a target. I give it one.

  is 40 Chapters ahead!!!