Inside my Dreamscape I examined the different Rooms I had created over the months. Most of them were unusable now, as I had let them slowly dissolve. For Toolkit I had tried a lot of variations, I had done different shapes at first like with Breakdown, square, circle, pyramid shaped Rooms. Then I had tried a broader range for their makeup.

I had done a desk, where each drawer was a different tool. I had put the tools on pedestals, I had changed them from being made out of metal to being made of diamonds.

The best efficiency had been a square room with the majority of the interior design being square as well, but with a decent amount of round pieces and even a handful of angular ones. The tools had been each placed in their own sections with a variety of objects signifying their use. Such as screws for a screwdriver. Nails for a hammer. Skin and muscle for a scalpel.

Pulling my attention from my Dreamscape I looked to the notebook in my hands.

-Wit Ideas-

-Increased Efficiency- This will coat anything in my hands with a layer of Intent that will increase the objects effectiveness. A blade will cut easier and a hammer will carry more force. This is of a similar branch to Toolkit, and should be easier to create. However it does not align with my Dream and will have decreased effectiveness.

-Increased Durability- This will simply increase my body’s resiliency and should hopefully help keep me alive. The combat classes have helped me gain some skill in self defense, but I would rather not take damage than give it out. This too does not seem to be in line with my Dream.

-Bio-Breakdown- This is just a version of Breakdown that will work on living organisms. This is the closest in line with my Dream, but might also be dangerous to me as I do not know if it will include me in the Breakdown.

Out of these I was likely to go with either Bio-Breakdown or Increased Durability. I really didn’t want to get ripped apart by a Nightmare, but I was also interested in seeing how Bio-Breakdown would work. We had at least two more months before our final, but it was likely to be more like three and a half based on Melanie’s information.

Something warm and heavy rested itself on my head and I froze. I felt my entire body vibrate as a deep purr ran through my bones.

“Hello Bliss.”

Something dripped from her mouth and landed on my forehead. I had thought it was drool for a moment until I wiped it away and saw the crimson smear on the back of my hand.

I was sat on one of the many benches around the school grounds alone. All of the training rooms were full and the male students were being loud in the dormitory once again. Actually they were always loud, and because of that, benches had become a new place for me to relax in silence.

Bliss’s head lifted off my own and I turned to see her staring down at me. There were spots of blood on her maw, but she looked harmless to me at the moment. Her head was tilted and her eyes dilated, from behind her large body I could see her thick tail swaying across the grass lightly.

Turning she took a few steps into the forest looking back at me and tilting her head in an obvious gesture for me to follow. Danger? Unlikely, Bliss has shown high intelligence and friendliness. She also could have crushed my skull with her teeth without me ever knowing.

I followed behind her, into the forest that she had kicked Elina and I out of not too long ago. There was no trail that the panther followed, as that was not the way of animals, so I had some slight difficulty following her.

It didn’t take us long to get to where Bliss had been leading me. On the floor of the forest was a Nightmare. It looked like… a worm, but only in shape. It had the face of a boar and its long body had a thick fur coat. It’s legs were also hoofed like a normal boar, but it had around a hundred of them. Wait, two, four, six… no ninety-eight, why was it missing a pair?! Was evolution so cruel as to not make it an even hundred?

A boar worm… Nightmares were supposed to be creatures that invoked fear, but it just looked silly to me.

Inefficient, that was what the boar worm was. The legs were too close together and the power they must’ve given the boars charge in no way would make up for the unwieldy torso and extra weight. I saw the torn out throat of the Nightmare boar and the blood trail it had left from where Bliss had dragged it.

Bliss slapped my shin with her tail and I was startled out of my contemplation of the unfortunate Nightmare. She gestured to the corpse with her massive head, then walked a few steps away to lie down nearby.

Obviously Bliss had killed this Nightmare, and it was obviously dead based on the smell, blood, and lack of movement.

That wasn’t odd, Bliss was a giant magic panther, the odd thing is that the giant magic panther had seemingly hunted down a Nightmare for me. Why?

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Could it be an apology? I didn’t think I needed one, Elina’s punch was annoyingly loud and bright. If I had been in Bliss’s… paws, I might have reacted in a similar way. Actually, no, I’d just go further into the forest to where I couldn’t hear Elina’s Firework Punch.

Either way this was amazing, I could dissect a Nightmare, even a stupid looking one. I walked over to Bliss, who raised her head to me, and knelt down.

“Thank you Bliss. This means a lot to me.”

Bliss rubbed her massive head against my cheek. Her fur was very soft. On instinct I raised my hand and scratched the large cat under her chin.

It took me a moment to realize that I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all. With people I always felt on guard, thinking of what their true meanings and intentions were. I was always cautious of bringing unwanted attention, of standing out. Had someone noticed me yawn? Were my steps too loud? Was I walking normally enough? Did Elina actually enjoy my company or was I just the best of a shitty situation? How did Melanie call me in her head? Creepy Kid? Freak? The boy I hope to see fall when walking?

Bliss was intelligent, perhaps as intelligent as a human, but I felt just as relaxed as I would when I was alone.

After Bliss was done rubbing her face against me I stood. The normal tools that I used were still in the barn, but I had Toolkit. Perhaps I should keep the ability after all.

I knelt next to the body of the worm boar that was a third my height and turned it over. At least I tried to, not only did the odd shape of the boar make it difficult, the boar itself was extremely heavy. Even with months of my body being suffused in Intent I could only push it a little.

I channeled intent through my body and shoved the boar, it slowly tilted, and fell over onto its side. Had Bliss really dragged it all the way over here? It had to be a couple thousand pounds at least. That was like dragging a car with no wheels through the forest.

With a brief look into my Dreamscape I summoned a knife from Toolkit. It was a simple curved blade that was used to skin animals. A scalpel’s blade was too thin to properly deal with the coarse fur and thick coat of most animals.

I pressed the blade of the knife into the belly of the boar… and failed to penetrate the skin. It did sink in a little, but stopped. That was… odd. Was this due to the intent that suffused the Nightmares body, or was it a remnant of the Nightmares ability? My own skin had increased in resilience a lot, but a knife was still a knife.

I put more pressure onto the blade and felt it sink deeper into the body, stopping when the feeling in the blade changed, meaning I was hitting something else. I tried to begin the skinning process but it was difficult to cut the tough hide properly.

“The sub-” I cut off.

I had almost started to narrate my findings like I had in the barn. Apparently, it had become a habit. If not for Bliss cat-napping just a few meters away I might have continued.

Pulling the knife out of the boar I held it up in front of me. If a normal blade wasn’t working then I would just need to enhance it. Intent in theory was a very simple power to use, all that mattered was intent. Practice helped guide and control that desire, but the most important thing was what you planned to do.

I wanted my blade to be sharper, more efficient. My pure white Intent seeped into the dagger. It was much easier to put it into an actual object rather than trying to form it from nothing. It was like when I had filled my fist up with Intent, imagining the knife as a dirt pot having water poured into it.

I once again pressed the blade to the underbelly of the boar worm and began to cut. I had never dissected a boar before, but even with my Intent enhanced blade it still had tougher hide than the deer. My cut went all the way down to its torso to its groin, it was female. Instead of skinning it I first decided to look at its internal organs. I knew it had several sets of what would normally be hips for a boar, but wanted to know where its intestines and other such organs were.

It turns out that it had all the normal organs of a boar, just bigger. It’s ribs went further down to the first five sets of legs and its lungs took up half of that part with the heart taking up the other half. The liver took up a large portion of underbelly after the ribs had ended. Then was the massive stomach was was longer than it was wide. The other normal organs were also there, however the kidneys were much lower than they would normally be, as they needed to have close proximity to the bladder.

Most interestingly were the intestines, which went back and forth across the length of the boars body. Because the intestines took up so little space the core muscles around the area were massive and provided a lot of support and power to the boars body.

I still thought the boar would have been a more effective Nightmare if it just had four legs like normal, but perhaps it could do more when alive.

Once I was done looking at its internal organs I decided to properly skin it. Which was an issue. If I skinned it using the method that one would a typical furred animal then I would need to cut down the leg of the creature and around the hoof. The problem was that the boar had ninty-eight feet. Still I would try the normal method first.

The toughness of the hide gave my cuts a less than clean look, which was wildly infuriating, but I made steady progress properly cutting the legs. That was until a rustling from behind me. The noise startled me and my hand slipped, the knife cutting much deeper into the boars leg than I had been hoping. I felt the blade cut through something and groaned.

Opening the slit from the cut I had been making I saw a tendon that was cut clean through. I didn’t have real knowledge on boar anatomy, but I likened it to the Achilles tendon for humans. I knew that there were literally dozens more legs and the single ruined tendon didn’t amount to much, but it bummed me out still.

Looking at the torn out throat of the boar I lamented that I was unable to properly examine that as well. Yeah I could examine the wound, which was awesome, but I wanted to break it down into its working parts, so that it could be used again.

I froze, dagger in hand. A dozen thoughts flashed through my head. The first thing I had created in my Dreamscape, an anatomical diagram of a young boy. Breakdown, and how it got the results that I wanted, but the method was lacking. My scalpel gliding through the skin of a random homeless man.

I knew what I wanted my first Wit to be.