Mary scoffed. “Maybe you should do something 'sides dump all your points in two stats, yeah? Didn't your mum ever tell you to diversify?”

He waved her off. “Yeah, yeah.” But he was smiling. God, he had thought he'd never banter with Mary again.

Ruth rubbed her chin. “Hm... we just need to boost your Capacity up a few more points, right? That shouldn't be too hard. I can still do rune-chains. Maybe I can enchant your armor somehow.”

Josh started to unbuckle his wooden breastplate, even as he shook his head. “Maybe, but I wouldn't be miffed if you don't get it right on your first go.” He tapped the stone amulet he was still wearing. “Stat boosts are a little different from enchantments. They're usually infusions, like what Big D does to make his focuses.”

“Don't call me that,” Darius said tiredly.

“Even if you do manage to do it,” Josh continued, ignoring him. “There's no way it will stack with what I've got. It will have to be better than a one-point boost.”

Ruth was nodding, even as she took his armor and a chisel. “Yeah, yeah. I've got some ideas, though. I don't have the right nouns, but if I use the connectors in the right way I might be able to find a workaround...” She descended into incomprehensible muttering.

Mary was frowning, counting off something on her fingers. “Wait. Your aura reserves five points.”

Josh nodded. “Yeah.” Auras and stances tended to be low-cost. You were supposed to be able to leave them active at all times and still use your normal spells and techniques.

“Your base Capacity is still four right?”

“Sure.” He was dead average in that stat. “Then the talisman boosts me by a point.” He shrugged. “I'm using Ruth's Improved-tier rune, the Power/Capacity one, but it's still just one point to each.”

“Right.” She pointed at him. “But if you crush the stone, you get a two point boost for a few minutes. Right?”

“Sure.” Josh had already thought about that. “But being able to use an aura for sixteen minutes at a time isn't really going to change the game for us, you know?”

“What does your aura do?” Darius asked. He had that intense look on his face, as if he was considering all the possibilities in front of him. “A second advancement usually has something useful.”

“Stonesense Aura. Lets me sense anything I can use for my Craft: Stone skill.”

Mary cocked her head. “I can see some use there, yeah?”

Darius stood up straighter. “Have you tested it?”

Josh shrugged. “Haven't had time.” To be honest, he hadn't been very impressed with the Stonecrafter class in general. He barely had a handful of blueprints, because even stone weapons—a spear with a stone head, arrows, so on—counted as wooden blueprints. Stone armor was worth even less than wooden armor. It was really only useful for building structures, and he hadn't explored that as much as he could.

“You should at least test it,” Darius insisted. “Auras often change a class's entire behavior.”

Mary nodded. “He's got a point. You know Mage Gunners play completely different if they've got Gunner's Focus up.”

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That was true. He had tried playing the class without the aura once. It had proven surprisingly effective, though he had largely been forced to act as a burst-damage sniper instead of a sustain-damage gunner.

“All right, all right.” He reached up to his talisman. “I've got plenty of spares, anyway.” He focused his will, and the hard stone crushed under his hand as easily as chalk. Power flowed through him, and his missing fingers throbbed.

[Temporary buff! You have crushed your Runestone of Power and Capacity (improved). +2 bonus to the Power and Capacity scores for 16 minutes.]

He breathed in the mana of the air. That was probably unnecessary, but it saved him a minute or two waiting for his mana to tick up. Once he was at 6 mana, he activated his Stonesense Aura.

Auras didn't act like normal spells. His Sensitivity score didn't reduce the cost. Instead, it improved the aura itself. Supposedly, every stat improved every technique and spell, physical and magical. Power would make your techniques hit harder, Dexterity would make your spells faster. That was vague and unclear, though. There was no hard breakdown of exactly what stats did for you, outside their active effects. For the most part, people ignored the effects of Strength on spells, and the effects of Flexibility on techniques. It was easier to just split everything into physical and magical, and largely ignore the vague passive effects.

Auras were different. The effect of Sensitivity was very obvious. At level 32, Josh had a Sensitivity score of 36. That meant that his Stonesense Aura was 36 meters. He had known that before he activated it, and known it would be a strong ability.

He hadn't really considered that this would include sensing in all directions.

Josh almost fell over from sheer information overload. He could feel everything around him, all the way to the edge of the pit. He could feel out into the Jungle, the boulders and stone poking up out of the dirt. He could feel down, into the bedrock under just ten or so feet of soil. He could feel the very bones of the earth, and not just that. He could feel tiny spots of power that he thought might be gems. He could feel negative spaces like rifts in the stone, and he didn't know if those were natural gaps in the rock or veins of metal that he could not sense directly.

More than that, though, he had such depth of detail. He instinctively felt which stone was strong, where the faults and flaws were. He thought that we could shatter a boulder with a single strike like this, as if he knew the location of every minuscule defect.

This, he knew, was a side effect of his sky-high Perception. Or maybe another benefit of his high Sensitivity, or both. Someone with a more reasonable stat distribution wouldn't have such a ridiculous reaction.

Finally, it faded. Josh blinked to see all his friends looking down at him, worried expressions on their faces. He had somehow ended up on his back, looking up at the ceiling.

“Wot happened?” he asked. He frowned. “My aura turned off. Why?”

“You ran out of mana,” Ruth said. She looked worried.

Josh frowned. “Wot? How? Did one of you hit me in the head?” Going into negative mana sometimes deactivated auras. Not always, though. The rules were weird.

“Oi, Josh,” Mary said, tone serious. “It's been sixteen minutes. Your buff expired.”

Josh blinked, then checked his status. She was right. Once his mana had dropped back down to four—because he didn't have the passive boost from the talisman anymore either—the aura had ended. He didn't have enough mana to use it at all, much less enough to have a spare point.

“...huh,” Josh said. He was still trying to get his mind around what had just happened. “I think we can use this. Might need to go down into the pit to get best use, though.”

Ruth frowned. “Really? Why?”

“Treasure hunting,” Josh said absently. “Especially if...” He turned his eyes to Darius.

Darius was frowning. “If what?”

“What do you have in your pocket?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You could sense those?” Then his eyes widened, and he dug them out with almost indecent haste.

In his hands were two small red glowing stones. Bloodstones. Which now Josh could sense within thirty-six meters. Including underground, where the Jungle and its bloodstone-eating monsters almost never went.

“Yes,” Darius said, letting out a breath of air. “Yes, I do believe we can do something with this.”