Matt was utterly paralyzed. Nothing was working, and nothing was responding, no matter how hard he wanted them to. His sense of urgency kept begging him to move. Dodge. Do something. And yet, he couldn’t. He was simply frozen in place. Unable to run. To respond. To think.

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  The ringing in his ears was growing more insistent, as if drilling through his brain, slowly taking over his mind. It was the only sound he could hear. Harsh… piercing… unrelenting.

  Blood had started dripping from his nose and ears. The feeling kept him grounded. It let him know that he was still there.

  He needed to hold onto that feeling.

  It didn’t make sense to him how a howl could incapacitate someone to such a degree. It was much more powerful than the one he had experienced before. It went beyond being unfair. How was anyone supposed to deal with it? Was there really no counter?

  It didn’t matter now. What mattered was that he needed to get out of this situation. But… how?

  Everything felt upside down. He had no sense of direction, and with his eyes being clouded, it was as if he was trapped in a void.

  He hadn’t even realized that he was already on his knees.

  Mana control! the thought hit him. If he could control his mana like last time, then he could block the worst of the damage.

  He tried raising his hands towards his ears, but… they weren’t responding. They were there. He was sure of it. But it was as if no signal was reaching them.

  Was his brain so overwhelmed that it couldn’t send signals anymore? Or was it the other way around? Were there too many signals flooding from his body?

  The result was the same either way, his limbs hanging uselessly beside him, like a puppet with its strings cut off. Could he flood his brain with mana to try to calm it down? And why was the howl that much more powerful? Was it more than one?

  Thoughts were racing through Matt’s mind when something sharp struck him, sending him barreling across the hall’s carpeted floor, ending with him on his face, prone, with countless cuts and scrapes undoubtedly marring his body.

  He couldn’t feel the pain from his injuries. The only pain he could feel was the one threatening to split his head open. He could, however, feel the warmth and wetness on his body.

  His health was at 35% and dropping, as death slowly crept towards him, its inevitability a looming threat. He tried casting [Repair], hoping, nay praying, for it to work. He needed a lifeline, and right now [Repair] was his only one.

  The slight mana draw made his heart jump, and then the relief hit him. The feeling of the healing power of his skill wrapping him in its embrace was so surprising he felt he could cry, with the comfort and solace lifting a weight off his shoulders he didn’t know he was carrying. He immediately checked his health, still in a state of shock and disbelief that he had to get a visual confirmation.

  40%

  He breathed out as he tried to get his hammering heart under control. His mind was a chaotic jumble of emotions, with relief being the predominant one. Being able to heal himself meant they would have to try a whole lot harder in order to bring him down. And that was something he could work with.

  The relief, however, was short-lived as something descended on his back with a truckload of weight, attempting to crush him into a paste.

  More mana was pushed through [Repair] as Matt attempted to hold on. To not succumb under the colossal weight. The object pressing on him eased its pressure, only for him to get kicked, claws slashing his shoulder open in the process.

  Matt could feel the anger and resentment in the kick, but he could do nothing about it as he was sent careening through the hallway, slamming, and breaking what he could only assume was a room door, as all the wind was knocked out of him.

  This time he at least managed to stick the landing, ending up in a sitting position with his back against a wall. The blessing in disguise during this entire ordeal was the lack of pain. He could feel that something was wrong with many of his bones and most of his muscles, but there was no pain, only discomfort and the wetness of blood.

  [Revitalize] was the next skill Matt tried. His mana was dropping from healing himself, but stamina was the main issue, slowly blinking at 25%. Every hit dropped it more and more as his muscles struggled to keep up with the traumatic experience. Thankfully, the warmth of his resource-restoring skill filled him, as both mana and stamina started filling up, showing that [Revitalize] too was working.

  It had a shorter range than [Repair] which meant his hands needed to be much closer to his body, and with that being out of his control, he needed to make use of it whenever a chance presented itself.

  Matt’s reprieve was short-lived, as something solid slammed into his underside, pushing him into the ceiling, keeping him pinned in place as it attempted to crush him for a few seconds before vanishing and leaving Matt in a freefall as he hit the floor like a wet cloth.

  He was being treated like a rag doll, which was really starting to piss him off. All he wanted to do at that moment was get up, grab the wolf by its neck and slam it into the floor as many times as it took to form a wolf-shaped hole in the ground. But he couldn’t. Not yet anyway.

  With only one hand being close to his body this time, he kept alternating between [Repair] and [Revitalize]. An opening would come, and he needed to be topped up for when it did.

  The wolf seemed to notice that something was amiss because its next move was biting into Matt’s thigh, shaking him around like he really was a rag doll as it attempted to tear the limb off.

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  Matt knew what was happening. He felt it, and in his mind’s eye he could vaguely see it, and yet there was still no pain coming from his thighs.

  He didn’t know whether the lack of pain was good or bad, and whether his psyche was still intact, or had long shattered into pieces, and yet he persevered, pushing as much mana as he could into [Repair], mending the limb over and over again, with the wolf’s sharp molars getting pushed out, before digging back in with valor

  If Matt could feel pain, he was sure his brain would’ve long given out. Just the thought of what was happening threatened to overwhelm him, and yet all he could do was hold on and wait for the wrongness to pass.

  The wolf, unable to tear the limb off, eventually gave up, tossing Matt through the sliding glass doors of the balcony.

  Glass shattered as Matt flew through the glass panel, before flying out of the balcony and onto the sunloungers down below, landing in a heap of himself.

  He could feel shards of glass now embedded in his body, and bones that bent in ways that shouldn’t be possible. Thankfully, both hands were now under him, allowing him the opportunity to heal the worst of the damage.

  His mind raced as he tried to come up with a solution, plan, idea, anything… but… nothing. He kept drawing blanks, not even finding straws to grasp at. What could he do if he was blind, deaf, and worst of all, paralyzed?

  Being able to heal himself was the reason he was alive right now, but he also doubted he could continue on endlessly. At some point his hands won’t be close enough to his body, or the wolves would put two and two together, realizing why and how he was able to survive through their endless onslaught, or any of a thousand different scenarios. He was hanging on by a thread, and that thread could snap at any second, taking his last lifeline away from him.

  Yeah… the future was looking bleaker and bleaker by the second.

  There was something he could try. It was stupid, risky, dangerous, and definitely bordering on suicidal, but it also was the only thing he could think of, and this was the perfect place to attempt it.

  The balcony he had flown through overlooked the pool. In fact, every room in the resort overlooked the pool. And if there was one thing water was very good at, it was absorbing sound. He also knew the general direction of the pool from how he had landed, so the only thing left was for him to find a way into it.

  The problem arose with the ‘way’ that Matt had managed to find. Questionable didn’t do it justice.

  His idea was to create a mana blast strong enough to send him flying into the water. He had done so numerous times during his attempts at unlocking [Knockback], blowing up his fingers, hands and arms. Now though, it had to be bigger, and for that he needed his health to be high enough to survive both the wolf and the blast.

  In moments like this, he was thankful he couldn’t feel pain, because he was sure it would’ve been a miserable experience otherwise, more than it already was.

  [Repair] and [Revitalize] were going full blast when something landed on top of Matt, crushing him and breaking a few more bones, before slamming a giant paw on his back repeatedly as it attempted to squash him like a bug. To flatten him against the porcelain tiling.

  Matt gritted his teeth, pushing through the wrongness of the situation. The feeling of bones being shattered and repaired, muscles torn and mended, tendons ripping and recovering, yet the pain was nowhere to be seen. His health has long stopped moving up, the healing skill unable to keep up with the damage sustained from the endless barrage of attacks, meaning he didn’t have much time.

  He knew he wouldn’t get another opportunity, as either his mana or health would bottom out, so he needed to make this one count, and for that he needed his timing to be impeccable.

  The wolf was unrelenting in its attempts to crush him, not giving him a chance to even breathe, with the intensity of the attacks only increasing as time went on. It could tell that Matt should’ve been dead and was probably half-expecting him to fall from any of these attacks. And yet Matt held on. Waiting for his opening.

  Now! Matt blasted all the mana gathered in his palm underneath him, just as the wolf was raising its giant paw after another salvo of attacks, praying the blast was strong enough to toss him into the water, but not too strong as to blow him to pieces.

  A mana blast rocked the resort, rocketing a flailing and unmoving Matt across the poolside in a tumble of painless agony that felt like it went on forever, before finally, the sweet embrace of the soft, cold water took him in its wide open arms.

  It felt like a hug from a longing mother, smothering, slightly suffocating, yet ever so welcome, the chlorine in the pool never smelling better.

  The first thing that hit Matt’s senses was pain. Unimaginable pain coming from every part of his body. No bone was intact. No muscle was unharmed. And no organ was in one piece, as every part of his body sent distress signals, screaming… begging for reprieve. He was thankful he couldn’t see because he was afraid of what had become of him. But he was alive, which was the only thing that truly mattered right now.

  His health, mana, and stamina were all dangerously low, with his stamina being the highest of the three at 21%. He was still blind and unable to use [Sense Mana], and was now potentially facing multiple opponents, but he could move once more.

  The ringing was still stuck in his head, his muscles were on the brink of collapse, and his brain was a breeze away from exploding, showing just how dire a state he was in.

  The water helped enough, absorbing much of the howl’s energy, but he was still going to have to block his hearing.

  Not wasting time, he moved his hand to his ears, the sudden movement causing him to wince in pain, before spending some of the mana he had left on forming the mana marbles to block his ear canal.

  After what seemed like hours of endless abuse, finally getting a chance to fight back felt like true bliss. But it wasn’t over yet.

  He started casting [Revitalize], ignoring his health completely, not wanting to waste any mana as he tried to regenerate as much of the precious resource as possible. He did have another solution for his health after all.

  With his other hand, he touched his Blessed Earring of Recovery, willing its effect to activate. He felt his body heat up to uncomfortable levels as water started boiling around him. His bones snapped into place, torn flesh mended, tendons reattached themselves, and muscles reconstructed, all in but only a second. He hoped it would fix his [Sense Mana] and sight, and had even considered using it on more than one occasion to see if it would, but his fear of wasting it when he was already in a dire situation was what ultimately stopped him, and he was so glad it did, because even after his body was healed and restored to tip-top condition, with even the ringing finally stopping, he still couldn’t see, and the void in his chest from the lack of mana where [Sense Mana] trigger used to be was ever present.

  At least now, with his health back to full, and mana and stamina slowly getting there, he had a fighting chance, even without his sight, hearing, and scepter, which he had dropped once the howl had hit him, his grip unable to hold on to his one and only weapon.

  Taking a few precious seconds to compose himself, calm his racing heart, and get his mind back on track, he started thinking logically. He couldn’t just rush out or the wolves would simply run circles around him, he needed something that could change the tides of the battle. Help him land a decisive blow.

  He had the building blocks for an idea he had wanted to try with [Sense Mana], but he didn’t know if doing it with just mana control was possible or not. His understanding of mana and how it interacted with the world around it was beyond ignorant, but it was a workable idea, and if it worked, it would finally push the odds in his favor, at least slightly.

  It was finally time for his counterattack.