Seventh woke up to a ceiling full of blue boxes. They weren't actually there, just inside his mind.

  There had never been any pop-ups during battles, or when he was scouting around. A safety mechanism to keep his vision and focus clear.

  Now, he was back at the inn. In the room where he had found the sword and his satchel.

  Fang was keeping watch just outside his door. Other ratkin were sprinkled around the inn and courtyard as a safety net.

  If a god gives a task to kill something, it's common sense to assume it can also kill you, and precaution is advised. Not that Seventh had any idea what an umbrefel was.

  Focusing on his extra eye on the outside, Seventh had a view to the outside. He had cast the Wandering Eye and floated it to the ceiling straight above the well before coming inside.

  He could see the inn's front door, the temple door, barred gate, stairs and ratkin keeping watch.

  With a mental dexterity, Seventh moved the boxes to one pile and started going through them one by one.

  The grueling combat had skyrocketed his skills and attributes to new ranks. Some even ranked up twice, and almost everything was ranked F.

  Everything fighting-related except the Soldier class and Cleave skill. Seventh hadn't done anything else with his spear other than poke and stab with it.

  His eyes moved to a handaxe leaning against his nightstand. A weapon utilizing Cleave.

  Yeah, that skill is going up soon, he thought.

  Shadowbolt and Raise Dead had a pleasant surprise. They had gained additional effects.

  Shadowbolt had a small damage-over-time effect and Raise Dead could be used without a line of sight. All he needed was a minion close to a corpse.

  Sadly, new effects came with a price. Shadowbolt had lost its extra damage in the dark, and the special Raise Dead used a lot of mana on top of the normal cost.

  It also wasn't clear how exactly Seventh was supposed to use Raise Dead without seeing the target corpse.

  Wandering Eye perhaps? Floating it up in the battlefield and popping up new minions as the battle continues? He mused.

  Still staring at the Raise Dead box, Seventh wondered how he could command new minions. Shouting over distance?

  No, wait. No. I didn't command the thrown ratkin? He just... started fighting?

  During the battle, he hadn't ordered new undead at all. Old ratkin had their commands, but fresh ones didn't. They just stood up and fought.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  Seventh lost track of time while wondering about the undead raising mechanics and spellcasting. Skill descriptions or innate knowledge gained from the skill didn't give him any other insight.

  In the end, he chalked all that up under the mental list of what-I-need-to-ask-from-a-proper-necromancer-when-I-get-out-of-here list. It had grown to a substantial length.

  Attributes were still a slight mystery to him, but after gaining rank-ups in Essence and Focus, Seventh had a vague idea what everything did.

  Might and Agility were the easiest. Might was strength and power of his attacks. All of his attack skills listed that as their first attribute.

  He remembered throwing a ratkin corpse at the archers.

  He felt powerful then. Strong as an ox. Maybe that was needed to rank up? Absolute need for power? Or want?

  Agility was ease of movement and precision of his attacks. Light Armor Proficiency gained from the rank-up hammered that conclusion in.

  Still wondering, Seventh closed the system windows congratulating him ranking up Might and Agility, and skill notifications.

  He had no idea what Precense was. Something between physical and magical? Meditate used it as a main attribute, so maybe it had something to do with his mental state and thinking?

  Seventh had started to suspect that the Essence was the place where his mana flowed through. The spot just below his heart, behind the lungs. It clearly had a connection to mana and Seventh could swear he had more mana now.

  Essence is the amount of mana and Focus is... Control? Power of magic?

  Focus was still little fuzzy to him. The skill Mana Crystallization did hint that Focus greatly affected the flow and control of mana, but why were they separate?

  I gotta ask these things from somebody. The only one who has talked to me here is an absolute loon of a god, Seventh thought.

  He took in a sharp breath of air through his teeth and made a grimacing face.

  Can gods read minds? Probably not. Hopefully not.

  Distracting himself from existential dread of meddling gods, Seventh continued his perusing of his Status Screen.

  Scholar and its skills were still obviously at FF-rank. He had an eerie feeling that the skills were hard to rank up, especially with fighting. Quill was stronger than the sword, but he wasn't quite there to fight with a sharpened feather.

  "Huh," Seventh exclaimed out loud.

  Literacy mentioned something about language and comprehension.

  He rose up from his borrowed bed and made one long step to the small table and his satchel. He searched it, and pulled out his rolls of parchment.

  All were stained deep-black by a broken ink bottle. Quills were snapped in half.

  Sighing heavily, he emptied satchel from ruined equipment and glass shards. A small piece of chalk would do for now.

  With a neat handwriting, Seventh vandalized his room by writing 'umbrefel' on the wall. He would have preferred to write things on parchment, but there wasn't new loot in the inn. The floor was still splintered where it was excavated, and no new boxes of potions.

  Fang had two potions on him. The diluted potions carried by ratkin. He kept them at knife point.

  Opening the door, Seventh peered at the narrow hallway and saw two small red eyes gleaming in the dark. "Fang, could you come here for a second?"

  Without nodding or making a sound, Fang dragged his feet to the room. He had been on a foul mood after the washing. Not a single nod or retch since yesterday.

  "Do you know what an umbrefel is?" Seventh asked while pointing at the text-covered wall.

  Fang looked at the wall, then at Seventh, and back at the wall. With a subtle head-tilt, he conveyed his feelings about Seventh's intelligence to him.

  Seventh realized what the problem was. "You— don't know how to write."

  A sharp nod.

  "Well, anyways. I need a sounding board and a local. Not a linguist," he said, separating 'umbre' and 'fel' with a vertical line. He also underlined 'umbre'.

  "So. Umbre is easy to figure out. Just a local variant or dialect of umbra— shadow." Seventh said while wiping the e off and replaced it with an a.

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  "What shadow monsters are in this dungeon?" he asked Fang.

  Without missing a beat, the ratkin pointed at the undead necromancer with a tendency to explode people with shadowmagic.

  Seventh sighed. "Other than me?"

  Fang shrugged his shoulders with an indifferent expression.

  "Do you know if there has been shadow monsters in the dungeon?"

  Tilting and turning his head, Fang seemed to think the question a bit longer. Seventh waited until his last party member came to a conclusion.

  Fang shrugged his shoulders again, but also lifted his hand and made a small hand gesture by waving his palm from left to right.

  Seventh copied the gesture. Fang saw the copying and continued his own gesture.

  They stood for a while waving their hands.

  "You mean... Maybe? You don't know?"

  A thumbs up.

  This was one of those moments Seventh hoped he had someone who could talk with him.

  "Right. I'll just list some words here and tell me if something clicks, okay?" Seventh said and started to write.

  Felt. Felsic. Falt. Fellow. Felis. Feline.

  Slowly, Fang's head had started to slump backwards. Undead eyes gaining new, shiny glaze while Seventh wrote the words and said them out loud.

  Something in the last word, feline, perked up his interest. A cat? With claws and fangs?

  His ears twitched and Seventh stopped writing the next word.

  "You got something?"

  Thoughts started to flow in Fang's head.

  Yes. Yes, he had. There was a mission. A group. Somebody got hurt? No, somebody got hurt before. Gatherers. Castle. Chieftain.

  Prowl-Shadow.

  As a reflex, Fang threw one of his knives at the word 'Prowl-Shadow' and let out another low hiss. His ears dropped low and his hand found another knife.

  Seventh had yelled loudly while dodging the knife. He looked at his companion with interest. "So a cat sort of thing? You know anything else?"

  Closing his mouth in thought, Fang tried to remember. Not all what had happened to him before his awakening was clear.

  Mostly just how to stab and kick and bite and fight. And tunnels and how to use them as terrain and throwing bouncing knives.

  Fang scratched his neck while thinking. The survivor had spoken about the monster. What had he said?

  It was hard to think of those memories. Old ones. Not his.

  A shadow that moved around. Pounced.

  He snapped his fingers and pointed at the first word. If Seventh said it meant a shadow then it meant shadow. Fang didn't know how to read. Or write.

  Seventh looked at the wall. "What?"

  Rolling his eyes, Fang walked to poke at the word.

  "Shadow?"

  Fang nodded and made a small jump. Seventh looked at him expectantly. Fang repeated the poking and jumping.

  "Shadow... jump?" Seventh asked.

  His ratkin party member gave him a wide, toothy grin while nodding vigorously.

  Seventh had a confused look on his face. "What's that?"

  Fang slapped his face. Hard. This idiot.

  For the next minute and a half, a ratkin jumped around a small room in an underground inn, trying to get his master to grasp intricacies of Shadow Jumping.

  By the sixth or seventh time, Seventh seemed to finally get it. "Okay, so a skill that lets you jump from shadow to shadow? Like a limited teleport?"

  He was praised by two thumbs going up by Fang.

  Seventh paced around the room, thinking and stroking his chin, dreaming of a beard. Fang tried pulling his knife off from the wall. He jumped repeatedly trying to reach the handle.

  Shadow Jump was a problem. How to defend against a foe that could teleport behind you to slit your throat? And how did it work? Umbrefel would appear from a shadow, sure, but did it need a line of sight? Was it teleportation from shadow to shadow or just to shadow?

  He didn't know the size either. Assuming the worst, the monster could weigh anything from few hundred pounds to a full ton.

  Hopefully not.

  Seventh imagined a cottage sized housecat playing with a ratkin corpse. Then he imagined it playing with his own corpse.

  He shuddered.

  Next time I get a quest to kill something, I'll make sure there's a library where I can check for weaknesses and proper tactics. Just winging it isn't safe, Seventh pondered.

  After losing almost... everything just by walking around and hoping for the best wasn't an appealing plan.

  But that was the only plan for now.

  Interrupting Fang's game with a knife by pulling it out from the wall, handing it to the ratkin— earning a softer than usual retching— and collecting his few belongings, Seventh was ready to move out.

  "Let's move. I have new skills and spells to test."

  Ratkin on his heels, Seventh descended the stairs and walked out of the inn to the courtyard.

  He saw the broken mosaic and the door. Remembered what was behind it. A god.

  Chanting his new spell, a wall of white and yellow bones rose from the ground in the middle of the yard, hiding the door from Seventh's eyes.

  Like his skill told him, it was five by seven feet and a palm's width of thickness. Knocking the wall with his knuckles, Seventh could hear and feel the sturdiness. Not as strong as stone all around him, but definitely better than wood or nothing.

  Making some distance from the wall, Seventh fired Shadowbolts for testing purposes. Every hit made him feel the magic keeping the wall standing weaken. It took five bolts before crumbling to dust.

  Seventh made a new wall and talked to his minions. "Alright boys, have at it!"

  All of his minions attacked the wall with their long knives and claws. It could take barely twenty seconds of relentless punishment before disappearing.

  Testing made Seventh smile a little. Now he could create cover on the fly for his group. They couldn't make shield wall anymore since they didn't have any shields.

  He had briefly considered tearing up the flooring from the inn and making makeshift shields, but that would play against ratkin's major strengths.

  Mobility and ferocious attacks. Better to keep ratkin as fast strike group and give them cover by magic. Bolts and walls alike.

  Wall sapped a moderate amount of mana from him so thinking ahead and assessing the situation would be crucial.

  Seventh sighed, nothing new for him. Majority of his spells now either took time to cast or were major manahogs. Only Shadowbolt was fast and reliable to use in battle.

  Speaking of slow and hard to use skills, Seventh tried Mana Crystallization while filling up with the magical energy. His manabar emptied in a second, and mana from Meditate went straight from his core to his right palm where the skill manifested.

  With full bar and channeling a little more mana, he had made a grain of sand sized essence stone.

  His head felt suddenly very light and full of cotton. His vision gained grainy, multicolored edge. He had no idea how long the disorientation lasted, but in the end he was staring at the grain.

  "All that for this? Really?" he groaned. "I don't even know what to do with these," he continued to grumble.

  The stone was too small to see clearly, but there was a mixture of soft-red and deep-black in the stone Seventh could see. He weighed the grain on his hand and noticed he could actually feel the grain. It had some heft behind it.

  Ripping a piece of parchment from his satchel, he stored the lone grain in a makeshift envelope and carefully stored it in his satchel.

  Maybe he could start collecting them or something. Make one after sleeping and use them to keep rough time?

  Absently, Seventh tested making different sized Bone Walls. Shorter, but thicker. Larger, but thinner. All of them had same mass, and he could make less wall with lowered mana cost.

  He sat on the well and Meditated between spamming the spell. Hopefully it would rank up soon too.

  Making a fourth wall, the one he had cast first and not destroyed suddenly collapsed in a pile of bones before melding back to the ground.

  "Ooops, there was a limit of walls wasn't there?"

  Facepalm echoed in the yard. Seventh knew only Fang could make the gesture.

  He turned to face his party member with imperious expression. "Well excuse you, but magic is very complicated and nuanced, and I can't be expected to remember all the rules. This is why we test skills before battle."

  Scratching his head and shifting his body weight from foot to foot, Fang thought the statement for a second or two before giving Seventh reluctant nod.

  A devious smile rose to Seventh's lips. “Since you are so knowing about magic, why not help me test the last one?”

  Fang didn't have enough time to react before Seventh had chanted his spell. “Mantle of Decay.”

  The ratkin disappeared in a swarm of beetles, flies, centipedes and other bugs Seventh didn't recognize. They were slightly see-through and colored mostly in black, yellow, and green.

  The ball of fur and bugs sprouted knives and Fang was furiously slicing air around him. He hissed and retched continuously.

  Seventh grimaced. He would do anything to avoid using this skill on himself. Maybe he could stock up on antidotes?

  Dispelling the spell, Fang appeared in a disheveled state. His fur pointed wildly to every direction and his eyes shone with panic and anger. He stared at Seventh.

  “So... anything to report?”

  A low hiss and a thumb crossing throat was his answer.

  “Better to get a feeling to it now than in a fight,” Seventh defended himself.

  Fang nodded rigorously and pointed at Seventh, expectantly.

  “Noo, no, no, no. Not me! I can just— eh, stay poisoned?”

  The ratkin crossed his arms and raised an eyebrow.

  “Fine! For team cohesion or something like that...” Seventh mumbled and cast the spell.

  His world turned into skittering feeling of bugs on his skin. They got everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

  Shrieking, Seventh fell to the ground while he tried to get the bugs off. He flailed on the ground in panic for multiple seconds before he remembered to dispel the magic.

  The bugs disappeared in colorful puffs of smoke and dispersing mana, and Seventh saw Fang's wide, smug smile.

  Seventh opened his mouth for a sassy retort, but stopped when he noticed a new condition icon on his interface.

  Curiously he mentally selected the icon. It looked like a simplified human head with wiggly waves emanating from it.

  Oh, yeah. The aura skill. In his panic while the bugs tried to breach his tightly shut lips, he might have accidentally activated it.

  It wouldn't have affected the bugs since they weren't alive, but at least he remembered to activate the skill. Its primary function was to... what? Improve undead minions?

  They already had pretty good compliance so Seventh didn't notice any change in them after testing commands, making the ratkin run around and regroup near him.

  He opened a system box, and looked at the last lines of the skill.

  It would basically torment survivors. Like him. Of course it would.

  Seventh closed the box and looked at his small number of minions. He made a small, approving nod.

  "Time to move," he said. “We have a quest to complete and a god to please. Let's go.”