In the morning, I found bandages covering my body.

  Rose must’ve dressed and cleaned my wounds. That was sweet of her.

  “Heal,” I commanded.

  My skin rippled briefly, before a growing pain in the back of my neck forced me to stop.

  {Notice}

  [You have undergone serious head trauma due to an overextension of mental ability.]

  [Using (Second-area Command feature) will cause additional trauma.]

  [Your (Second-area command feature) is disabled]

  I gritted my teeth, swatting the screen away. “Alright. I get the gist of it.”

  Once I crawled out of bed, there was the matter of fresh clothes.

  Since I have a tendency to ruin anything nice I own, I’d made sure to purchase a dozen pairs of white shirts and black jeans. Those were all torn to shreds or soaked in blood by now, meaning I’d have to wear the clothes the union provided.

  Each of those were soft cotton robes, meant to be worn one over the other. They were thin and sparkly, as to reflect sunlight without smothering the player inside. That and they were probably enchanted.

  But they were not clothes meant for fighting. If I sneezed wrong I’d trip over myself.

  That was fine

  I was getting sick of fighting anyway.

  Sunlight flooded in from the window, only exaggerating how stale and dark my room had become.

  I closed the blinds and stepped out. There’d be plenty of fresh air and sun later.

  Some food had been set out on the table, but I wasn’t feeling hungry, so I ignored it. Rose was up and about, smoothing creased laundry.

  I put a hand on the front door.

  She glanced behind her, immediately perking up. “Grind! I didn’t think you’d be so quiet.”

  “Hey Rose. I said. “I’ll be back in a couple days.”

  She planted a hand on my shoulder. “Grind, are you okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t want anything to eat?”

  “No.”

  Rose squeezed the bundle of clothes in her arms. “You’ve been asleep for several days, Grind. Master Reggie showed up, said he wouldn’t be teaching you anymore, and left. What’s happened between you two?”

  “He tried to kill me.”

  “Grind!---”Rose gasped.

  “We worked it out,” I stated. “It’s fine.

  “It is…?” She became suddenly fixated on my expression. “Okay, Grind. You’ll be back soon, won’t you?”

  “Sure.”

  As I turned, a hand pressed against my forehead. Rose moved slowly closer, as if to approach a stray cat. “Could you please stay home? Juniors been missing—”

  “I’ll be fine,” I sighed. “Please, take care of Junior. If any of the union people want to talk with me, say I’ll be back on Thursday.”

  “Thursday was yesterday.”

  “Right,” I said. “Sunday. I’ll be back Sunday.”

  “Grind?” Rose asked. “If you’re taking the train, don’t you need money.”

  I paused. “Oh.”

  She took a card from her pockets, setting it gently in my hand. “I’ve been picking up some quests, so this should be enough.”

  “You have?” I asked. “Thank you.”

  I opened the door and stepped outside.

  “Sir?”

  Rose looked down.

  “Axel isn’t coming back, is he?”

  “No,” I said. “Just Sern.”

  She nodded.

  For a moment, she started saying something, before she lost her nerve. Rose closed the door behind me.

  “Stay safe,” I said. “Please stay safe.“

  And I started walking.

  Some guards stopped me at the train, where I gave them my ID and some of Rose’s money. When I started going past them, one of the officials cleared his throat.

  “Keep an eye out.”

  He pointed to a map, set above the security checkpoint. “There’s been some sort of monster in the tunnels, blowing apart our trains. We’ve blocked off all transit in that area.”

  “You haven’t caught it?” I asked.

  “Not yet,” the official stated. “But it doesn’t seem to be moving much, so we’ll have it exterminated within a couple days.”

  “Now, it shouldn’t go near you, but it is possible.” He handed me a blue card. “If you get into trouble, break this, and help will come.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I boarded a Centiride for the fringes of the second area.

  Master Reggie was a core. He killed people. He was not my friend, so I didn't need to help him.

  That ride was long and restless, so I played around with freezing screens

  While I didn’t come away with any new techniques, I was starting to get an idea of what glitch caused Crapshoveler to react the way he did.

  When I collected him, I solidified his stats, overlaying them with the tutorials reward screen, before trying to grab both of them at the same time.

  The key wasn’t in the screen’s alignment, or where I grabbed them, or how much they overlapped. Instead, it had to do with what the screens were of.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Solidifying a screen prevents it from executing its code. I call this, ‘suppression.’

  By suppressing the reward, the game didn’t know what to give me. By suppressing the shovel, the code that would normally keep it within the tutorial area was disabled.

  Now, with both tutorial screens and crapshoveler screens working properly, his code is freaking out.

  The game has suddenly realized that he is, in fact, not the reward I’m supposed to have, nor an item I should be able to obtain.

  My best guess is that the game forgot what Crapshoveler is, now that it isn’t behaving right, and in the place of its code, other, conflicting code was inputted from everything around it, resulting in a semi-telekinetic shovel capable of crossing over respawns.

  As for immortality suppression, or using a suppression to keep the game from killing you, it isn’t that useful.

  Once a screen is touched, I can keep it suppressed with a tiny amount of focus. This requires that I touch the screen, and I touch it before the code fully executes, which would kill me.

  I am limited in how many screens I can humanly press at a time, and especially how many of those screens I can keep frozen using only my subconscious. If a certain number of screens takes more mental energy than that, I’d lose control during my sleep, and I’d die.

  Currently, I could handle three screens in my subconscious, and about a hundred if I focused.

  Beyond avoiding debuffs, this power can’t actually benefit any of my stats. It’s a purely defensive ability, separate from the rest of my system.

  An unfortunate reality was making itself clear.

  My powers aren’t very good.

  Not in the way I’m using them.

  Currently, they’re the equivalent of window shopping. I have a reach and parry ability, both of which are so underleveled as to be irrelevant. I have a decent harvest ability, but one that only works on extremely powerful monsters, which in turn, requires that I can beat ridiculous powerful monsters. I have the power to slow time, but I’m not strong enough to use it. I have powers that increase my damage output if I already had ridiculous damage types, and I have a resistance that diminished taking damage from that ridiculous damage type.

  Beyond those, I have a powerful mental state and an ability which brings screens into the physical plane, preventing them from executing their code. If I become traumatized, I start behaving inhumanly. How inhuman depends on my mental state, but generally speaking, I can do logical processes a normal person can’t.

  But how do you use any of those powers?

  They’re all so niche.

  I need a consistent source of power, as well as a consistent source of stats. If I want to guarantee the safety of the people closest to me I can’t afford to be taking risks.

  Heads, you double your earnings, tails, you lose everything.

  Maybe it sounds nice if you’re in a pinch, but if you lose everything, including doubled earnings, it would no longer make any sense to choose a risk over a flat but steady source of income. Eventually, no matter how many times you get heads, you will, at some point, get tails.

  Now, this is nothing new.

  Because my abilities are both risky and confusing I chose to focus on raw stats.

  But my stats scale linearly. An increase in strength increases my physical damage. Abilities, however, scale in addition to stats. An ability that increases damage would increase all damage, making the strength I already have more useful. And if I have stats that also boost my damage, such as critical hit damage or a bruiser-type attack bonus, then the damage bonus would be applied an additional time to each source of damage, and would also receive buffs from a damage-boosting ability, resulting in a single upgrade which would exponentially improve my entire setup.

  I need to start from scratch.

  So I pulled open my abilities panel, reading each entry, slower and more carefully than I had before.

  Reaper Harvest was a nice but ultimately pointless skill to improve, as it already required the ability to kill enemies. I could also rule out the Death Merchant class effect, as I still wasn’t able to use it.

  Reach and parry, abilities I’d had since the first week on TetraTera, were too weak to bother with right now. I could make them stronger eventually, once I’d already started winning fights.

  That left—

  My hand froze on the abilities panel.

  There was an ability I didn’t recognize.

  Actually, there were a lot of them.

  {Skills}

  [115/10]

  [Parry I] [Reach II]

  [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I] [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I]

  [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I] [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I]

  [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I] [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I]

  [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I] [Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I]

  [And 103 more items…]

  <[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] … [12]>

  I made quiet mumbled noises, scrolling through the pages.

  Page after page was full of the same ability.

  {Extrapolate Metaphysical Abnormalities I}

  [Brass]

  [During combat, spend mana to generate an aura-based field. This field allows irregular mental activity, such as fear, depression, anger, loneliness, or hostility to manifest into temporary monsterlings (guided missiles) that exhibit these traits. These monsterlings will then detonate on command or after [30] seconds, dealing [Mana] damage multiplied by the rank of this ability.]

  [Help : Aura is the equivalent of space-time dilation on the mental plane. In words suitable for squishy human brains, Aura is the natural effect caused by a human mind on the physical environment. While usually harmless, Aura can be weaponized through a mix of abilities, area effects, and training.]

  Hang on.

  “Help bar : Is the second area command feature an aura related effect?” I asked.

  {Help}

  “Yes”

  Huh.

  I have a hundred and fourteen stacks of the increased aura density bonus. If each gave at least a ten percent increase per stack that’d add up to a collective increase of one thousand, one hundred and forty percent.

  Or about eleven times the power I should have. Which was then multiplied by my emotional state.

  No wonder my commands had so much power behind them.

  How strong would these aura-based fields be?

  First off, I have more than ten abilities.

  You should not be able to have more than ten abilities.

  Second, I have several copies of the exact same ability. Which implies these were gained by repeating the same loot drops over and over, such as during my fight with Dena. Except these are new. And there’s a lot of them.

  Meaning I probably got these from my last big fight, which was with the wraith. Which I then harvested to get the special reward from my class type.

  Meaning, for whatever reason, Reaper Harvest can give a hundred and twelve stacks of the same ability, all at once.

  Come to think of it…

  I opened my inventory to find two things.

  First, I had a lot of money. A lotta lot. Enough that money would never be a concern anytime in the next hundred years. That money was all useless in the second area, but it felt nice to have a lot of it.

  Second, I had a lot of broken wood and iron. Sixty times what my inventory should’ve been able to hold, actually. I could probably sell this and get money that’s actually worth something.

  This ability would be worth looking into.

  My Centiride shuddered, coming to a stop somewhere underground. Unlike most of the other tunnels, this one didn’t have a ramp up into the sand, so I had to take a staircase to the surface.

  Walking up stairs. The hardest part of traversing the desert. Isn’t that funny?

  The edge of the second area was easy to find and once inside, I began feeling stronger.

  {Notice}

  [The magical pressure of this area has decreased.]

  [You will regenerate mana slower]

  [Your stats have been unsuppressed.]

  My shoulders popped and my muscles expanded, growing heavier and heavier as my health ticked upward.

  After spending so long in the second area, it was almost surreal to suddenly remember how strong I actually was.

  Along with figuring out a combo for myself, I should look into stats that offer benefits even when suppressed, such as maximum Hp. There had to be others that provided something.

  When the storm grew thin, I took a slow, deep breath.

  This was going to be okay. I had a plan now.

  I’d get Sern back. Rose would help Junior. We’d be okay.

  // {Notice} //

  Hi! Hope you enjoyed a fantasy story. But as much fun as a fantasy is, there’s things in the real world beyond what writing can fix. That’s where you come in.

  Want to fight human trafficking? Whether you’ve got money or time there are two organizations I wholly recommend.

  Race Day — Thirty

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