Melmarc woke up with a start.

His mind came alive in a brush of chaos. His bed was too hard. His leg refused to move. His mom still wasn’t back from her last portal deployment. His dad, too.

Panic rose in him with the confusion, followed by terror.

And moving was extremely difficult. He breathed hard and he breathed fast. There was nothing wrong with his breathing. But it was the one thing he had real control over so he made the action as manual and violent as he could.

It gave him an odd sense of control. It was something he could do and he had full mastery over it.

It took him a few breaths before he calmed down. When he was calm, the panic ebbed away as his mind slowly recalled everything.

He’d almost lost himself in that little moment between waking up and coming fully awake when you were still a little too groggy and your brain was having a difficult time putting things together.

Everything came into focus slowly. The portal. The [Damned]. The bugs and critters his skill couldn’t identify. The long hours spent walking and looking for a suitable ruined building to hide in.

As the memories came to him in order, Melmarc’s panic subsided until he was reasonably calm. It was a strange feeling to be calmed by an awareness of the shitty situation he was in.

It’s the knowing, he told himself, still lying down on the hard grassy floor. I hate not knowing.

Now that he had that figured out, he only had to deal with his inability to move.

I really hope it’s sleep paralysis.

He’d had a mild version of it a few times, waking up and being unable to move. Maybe three times in his entire life.

In some places, according to what he’d heard from Delano, there were people who called it sleep demons. Apparently, they believed it happened because while you were asleep an invisible sleep demon made its way to your body and ended up sleeping on top of you.

They were extremely heavy and were the reason you couldn’t move.

While there were a lot of holes in the entire concept, Melmarc wondered if the entire thing was born from some kind of actual truth. Maybe some kind of skill effect or mana fatigue experience during sleep or even a portal monster.

For him, however, he stuck with the answer he knew. When you slept, your brain released some kind of hormone that induced paralysis. From what his dad had told him as a child when he complained about why his body would not want him to move, it was so that he did not end up doing what he wasn’t supposed to do while he was asleep.

“You don’t want to run and jump off a tall building in your sleep and wake up in Ted’s house, do you?” his father had asked.

Melmarc had not wanted to.

Sometimes the hormone lasted a little longer even after waking up. Melmarc could give it sometime, allow it wear out on his own, but there were some things he was stubborn about. Control over his body was one of them.

Since he could breathe, he breathed hard again. It was hard enough to force his chest to rise and fall, to push his chest muscles up and down. It was an old trick. As a child he told himself that it forced his body to move, wearing off the paralysis and reminding it that it was time to move.

He never really knew if it worked. What he knew, however, was that in a matter of moments he was always capable of movement. Today would be no different.

As long as the bugs aren’t the reason I can’t move.

Luckily for him, they were not.

When he was up, he forced himself to a sitting position. He’d just been in the worst place to experience sleep paralysis but refused to dwell on that little bit of information. He needed to get out of this place and get back home.

For that, he needed to get to the tall ruined building that touched the red sun and steal an orb.

And kill a demi-god.

He still couldn’t believe the Void-beast Designation 1…12… 24…

Shit.

…

Melmarc wasn’t sure if he’d woken up late or if the portal didn’t understand the concept of first light. From the moment he opened his eyes, it was as bright as any afternoon.

He peeked out of the ruined building he was in, checked for any type of monster before stepping out. He was glad to find himself alone.

As he strolled down the meadow, keeping his eyes on the growing number of ruined houses around him, he tried something literally new.

Melmarc closed his eyes to focus before opening them back. That had been a stupid move, what was he going to do if a monster snuck up on him while he was focusing.

Why do people even close their eyes when they want to focus? He wondered. It’s not like closing my eyes makes me see inside myself.

Melmarc paused. As a Gifted what were the chances that it wouldn’t. For all he knew it could help him with his skills. There were Gifted that were known to meditate a lot. The [Seer] class was known to be obsessed with meditations.

Delano said they only did it to keep some mysticism about themselves the way mediums did a lot of eye closing. Delano was a conspiracy theorist who hated the idea of the occult so Melmarc figured it was probably his bias talking.

Still, he looked around. The distance from each ruined building to him was significantly much. It would take at least three minutes at a full sprint to reach him. And it wasn’t like he was going to be closing his eyes for that long.

After a thoughtful moment, he reached a decision.

Best not to try anything stupid.

He could try the meditation thing when he got back home. Instead, he focused on the new. Inside the portal, he noticed it oddly.

He could feel [Rings of Saturn]. With [Knowledge is Power] he hadn’t necessarily felt it, it had been more like he’d just known it was there, like someone always told him it was there so he knew. You knew you had lungs because you were told you had lungs.

If I wasn’t told I had lungs what would I think helped me breathe? He asked himself as he approached a ruin.

He almost walked past it simply because he wasn’t ready to have to deal with the [Damned] when he remembered that he was also looking for Naymond.

As for his question, an answer came as a question.

My nose?

It was reasonable, right? It wasn’t like he could feel his lungs the way he could feel his heart beat through his chest. And even though he’d been told he had lungs, he’d never felt his own lungs.

He’d never felt [Knowledge is Power] or [Bless your kindness].

But I’m feeling [Rings of Saturn].

He gave it a little focus as he peered gently into the ruined building. It was massive, and he snuck inside. He made his slow way around it, constantly praying not to run into any [Damned].

The entire ordeal took less than five minutes and he walking out of the ruin faster than he’d walked in. There was no Naymond and there was only one [Damned] sitting on a windowsill or what was supposed to be one. It looked like someone thinking about their life.

As Melmarc strolled on to the next building, he gave his focus to the feeling of [Rings of Saturn].

It was like a heartbeat. It was alive.

No.

Alive wasn’t the right word. It was something, though. Something that could be mistaken for alive. It was…

Animated.

Yes. That was a more fitting word. Just the way you could feel your heart beat, and if you were quiet enough, you could convince yourself that you were hearing it. The skill felt the same.

Melmarc wasn’t surprised that alive was the word that had come to mind. It was inside him and it was moving somehow, not moving around, but just… moving.

It was an odd feeling, if he was being honest, to know that something was just alive as your heart inside you somewhere that wasn’t your heart.

Then he thought of using it just the way he thought of using [Knowledge is Power]. To his terror, nothing happened.

He froze.

Well, don’t panic, he told himself. This is exactly why you’re trying it when there’s no danger. So that you know how to use it when there’s danger.

Despite his own words, he panicked slightly. Everything he knew about skills said that all a Gifted had to do to use them was think about using them.

So what gives?

The world had quite literally forced the skill on him, and now that he had it, it wasn’t going to allow him use it? That was bullshit.

This is bullshit.

Melmarc kicked the ground in mild annoyance. He stopped himself on the second kicking attempt.

Behave yourself, he chided. You’re not a child.

Even if he was, he was in no position to be acting like a child. Melmarc frowned as he resumed his walk. As much as he was in a hurry to find Naymond, he really wasn’t in a hurry to clear the portal.

If he was being honest with himself, and now he was, the reason he was being so cautious wasn’t about being cautious.

Maybe I’m not cut out to be a Delver.

Delvers were relatively powerful and adventurous, capable of a lot of things. Melmarc liked to call it caution but the truth was that he didn’t think he was being cautious.

Maybe he was simply just a scared boy rationalizing his actions of fear as caution.

Here he was, taking his time to look for Naymond. If he really wanted to find the Sage, he knew how to do it quickly. He just needed to run from ruin to ruin—as much as the bugs still attached to him allowed—and spam [Knowledge is Power] in each building.

It minimized a five minutes’ search to a few seconds.

And what if he drew the attention of the [Damned]? Well the [Damned] were everywhere. It was a literal portal, facing monsters was a given.

The truth was that he was stalling. At some point actual professional Delvers would enter the portal and do the actual work. They were equipped for it, trained.

Melmarc lacked the adventurous part of Delving that made a Delver.

He sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. He did it again, then did it once more.

“Are you done?” he asked himself.

He waited, allowed his mind wallow a little longer. When no more depressing thoughts came, he nodded.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“I guess I’m done for now.”

Then he moved on.

When he got to the next ruin, he stood at the entrance where there should’ve once been a wall. The building walls were a charred black, like someone had actually tried to burn it down. He took preparing breaths, heavy and ready.

Then he turned his back on the building, aimed himself in the direction of the nearest ruin, and activated [Knowledge is Power].

The moment it returned to him, he found out Naymond was not inside and there were three [Damned]. He walked away briskly, never looking back.

He used his skills sparingly, and significant time passed as he drew closer to the main building. Hours had gone by and he was mentally fatigued. The boredom tagged with the constant fear of a sudden slip up and one near miss with a company of [Damned], everything was beginning to get to him.

Another thing he learnt from his encounter with the [Damned] this time was that they treated him as if they couldn’t see him. It was possible that despite their eyes, they couldn’t see.

No, that’s incorrect. Melmarc shook his head, remembering the slimy feeling he’d gotten when he’d locked eyes with one of them over the distance.

It was more like they could see, but they didn’t recognize him as an enemy. Maybe they didn’t recognize things as enemies.

But the first batch he’d met had definitely thought of him as an enemy. They’d gone the extra mile of chasing him all the way to the trees.

Why?

Melmarc raised his arm, held it up in front of him. The answer stared right back at him. six critters stared right back at him. Figuratively speaking.

Melmarc could just imagine his bladder giving out if he lifted his hand and found the bugs literally staring at him.

“So they identify whatever these things attach themselves to as enemies,” he mused.

But the ones he’d met today hadn’t attacked him even with the critters still on him. Did the [Damned] and the critters work in individual groups?

Melmarc remembered seeing the bugs fall off the [Damned] before disappearing into the ground on his first day. Maybe that was it, maybe each group of [Damned] had their own bugs that they were connected to somehow.

He looked behind him out of habit as a thought came to him. Just how far was the range of the connection? And how did it work?

Was the first group of [Damned] still looking for him?

With a lacking motivation to keep moving, Melmarc remained seated on the ground. There was a wide space of empty meadow around him that would make it impossible for him to be snuck up on.

Rather than run his mind ragged doing one task, he moved his mind back to one he had abandoned in annoyance earlier today.

He took slow deep breaths and listened. In a matter of moments, he could hear the beating of his heart and with it came the awareness of [Rings of Saturn]. It was there, animated, present. He tried to reach out to it and it felt like learning a new trick.

Melmarc thought of activating the skill but nothing happened, it didn’t budge. He was beginning to wonder if what was going on was because of the nature of the skill granted from contaminated mana.

He really hoped it was, because his second possible reason would because of the only other thing that was different about him between now and when he had his other skills: his designation as an [August Intruder].

His interface had called it an Existential buff and he had questions. He’d always had questions. Like what specifically was an existential buff? Why did his interface consider him as a sapient being when it had once considered him a sentient one? What did Veebee do to him exactly that changed his world buffs and debuff?

Lastly, what did that mean for him now?

If the issue he was having with the skill was because of his new state, then it meant he would have to be going through this entire mess for every skill he learnt.

It sounded like a headache. Melmarc shook his head.

You can’t dwell on the negative when there’s a positive.

Thought it was difficult to see a positive right now.

Well, you’re alive so that’s something.

“And I can do magic,” he muttered. “That’s another thing.”

Those were two things. He was alive, and he was quite practically living two parts of his dream.

He was a Gifted, which was everyone’s dream. And he was inside a portal, even though it was under completely different circumstances from what he wanted.

Too much introspection and not enough skill training.

He channeled his attention back to the vague sense of existence he was getting from [Rings of Saturn]. If he could feel it, he could use it. But he couldn’t use it, could he?

What if there’s an activation requirement?

Melmarc couldn’t remember a Gifted with a skill that had an activation requirement. In fact, he didn’t know any skill that had an activation requirement outside of needing a skill to be in effect before it can be used.

What if it was like [Bless Your Kindness]? Maybe he needed to activate one or more of his skills to meet an activation requirement.

He shook his head at the idea. Wouldn’t his interface have told him about that?

“But that’s assuming that it works like every other skill,” he muttered.

And it didn’t.

Maybe it was like throwing a back flip.

Delano could throw a backflip but only if he had a running start, he’d break his neck doing one from a stationary position. Well, he could throw a backflip from a running start once upon a time. Melmarc couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his friend throw a backflip.

If that was the case, then maybe there was some kind of action that activated it. He could feel it just the way he could feel his heart. And he could control his heart to a certain extent but not with actual mental control like he did to perform actions like raising his hand.

It’s more indirect, he thought. Other actions control it.

For example, if he wanted his heart to beat faster, he overexerted himself.

No.

It was a good example but not the one he was looking for. Breathing. That was it. If he wanted his heart to beat faster, he could do so by breathing faster, and slower breaths meant slower heartbeats.

Then how would it work with a skill?

[Knowledge is Power] had given him points in mental stat and uncle Dorthna claimed that he would need the extra mental strength so that his brain could deal with the recoil of collecting so much information.

Which meant skills gave stats they felt were needed to use them properly. Not perfectly, just properly.

Did that mean all stats gained were simply just side-effects of skills?

That was a curious question.

I wonder if Veebee will know.

That was if he ever met Veebee again considering he couldn’t remember the creature’s designation number. While he couldn’t really blame himself for forgetting it, he felt bad for forgetting.

Veebee had seemed nice enough. In a scary I may or may not eat you in your sleep but I’m still your friend kind of way.

Melmarc shook the thought of Veebee’s open mouth from his mind and refocused his attention on the task at hand.

I can’t believe I’m using a whole day to figure out a skill.

It felt disappointing as he returned to trying to figure out the skill.

[Rings of Saturn] had given him strength and dexterity. Balance, too. It had given him mana but that was a given, the skill was quite literally about attacking with mana.

Melmarc got up.

“So it’s going to be difficult to handle,” he muttered, holding out his hand. “Why do I need the balance? Recoil?”

His mind went back to a night so many years ago, and he frowned at having to remember the thought. How had the Player used the skill? Maybe if he could do the same thing.

He’d charged it around his body and just… fired it.

“Well that’s a bust.”

He definitely couldn’t just command it at will.

“How about throwing?”

Melmarc reached for the sense that felt the skill and swung his arm down like a pitcher. Nothing happened.

No, that wasn’t it. Something happened, it just wasn’t the activation of the skill. He felt the skill stir, but nothing else.

Maybe something different.

Melmarc pulled up the skill description once more.

[Rings of Saturn]

The Gifted wraps a ring of pure raw mana around their body and can attack with it

He would need to gather the mana somehow and wrap it around his body.

Maybe…

He moved his hip, turned his waist as if spinning a hula hoop. The skill stirred more than before.

Oh, God no.

Melmarc didn’t want that. Yet, the more he moved, the more the skill stirred until he could actually feel it moving. It was like raising his heartbeat with every step. Every swing of his hip felt as if he was generating the momentum required to activate the skill.

His sense of achievement was smothered into nonexistence at what it meant.

I don’t want to be the guy swinging doing the hula hoop to use his skill.

And yet, some things were inevitable.

You didn’t always get to pick and choose.

Considering that the skill had also gone out of its way to give him accuracy as a stat, everything was pointing in support of his current action.

He put some force into his hips and turned it quickly.

He had never been more disappointed to see his interface in his life.

[You have used skill Rings of Saturn]

A ring of dull white appeared his waist, swinging around him like an actual hula hoop. It didn’t touch him or make contact with his body. There was enough space between him and the ring to fit his hands.

He didn’t know if that was a good or bad thing. What he wanted to know was how he could attack with it.

The more he twirled, the brighter it grew.

And the heavier it got.

It was like a literal physical thing. It was heavy, weighing him down. He couldn’t hold it up for long. Letting it go was his only option.

He ended his hip training by thrusting it in a specific direction and the ring of mana disconnected from him, shooting off into the distance.

[You have used skill Rings of Saturn]

[Uses remaining: 3/4]

The ring traveled a distance, dimming the farther it went until it disappeared. It was as if the air around had been eating away at it.

The stronger it is, the farther it goes? He wondered.

It was a far cry from what the Player had displayed that night. A very far cry.

But it was something, even if it was an embarrassing something.

“So strength helps with the weight,” he mused. “Accuracy helps since I have to be moving to use it. Agility should be for the movement requirement, so should balance.”

Then what did dexterity do?

Melmarc looked at his hand, the one with the bugs. Dexterity was often related to hands, wasn’t it?

What if…

He raised his hand, then slowly twirled it around, keeping it straight, as if he was trying to mix something, using the hand like a spoon.

The sensation of the skill swirled and a smile touched Melmarc’s lips. He moved his hand faster. When the ring of light appeared around his hand he was excited.

“Yes!”

There would be no hula hooping Delver.

Also, it would be easier to aim and attack. With his hand still spinning, he aimed straight in front of him and swung his hand forward.

The ring shot out in a chaotic tumble, cutting through the air. It went faster than the the previous try, farther too, before fizzling out.

Melmarc pumped a fist in the air before noticing that his hand was smoking. He looked down at it and got his second good news.

His hand wasn’t what was smoking, it was the critters. Slowly, each one’s slackened and they fell off one by one. The pin-prick sensation was completely gone.

Did raw mana give burning damage? He wondered, or did the critters just react to it that way.

Whichever one it was, it turned out to be unimportant. Only two things were important. One, he had an attack skill. Two, he had two more shots before the skill hit its cool down.

He looked down at his single leg with some of the creatures still on it and smiled.

…

The smell of burnt poison—because he had no other way to describe it—filled his nostrils as Naymond stepped over the dead creature.

He looked around at the ruin with a frown.

His suit was a mess, riddled with cuts, and he had blood stains all over it.

“Motherfuckers hit like jackhammers,” he muttered with a frown as he approached the third one standing casually in front of him.

Their skill, if he could even call it a skill, was tricky.

For one thing, the form was a completely thin mess. It was almost as if it was a skill but not one that belonged to the creature.

Then there was the activation time. People’s skills activated along with some movement of their form. That’s why Sage’s were hard to kill by other Gifted. Before your skill activated, there was a delay between the form twitching and the skill activating. The delay wasn’t exponentially long but it was enough for anyone watching.

The delay between the form’s action and the Gifted’s skill activation was a little longer than the healthy knee jerk reaction you get when doctor’s decide to test your reflex at the hospital.

Naymond had used Anji, one of the boy’s renting a room in one of his apartments, as a study once. He was trying to teach the boy how to achieve a faster activation time when he learnt it. A Gifted’s form, reacts the moment a Gifted thinks of the skill in the right form required to activate it.

So every Sage had the time between the moment you think about your skill to the moment the skill actually activates to do something about it.

But the real problem with the creatures he was fighting, from what he could tell, was that their skill was not their own.

The creature, seven feet tall, desiccated with one arm and a baking pan for a hand leaped into the air.

Naymond frowned, then it blitzed through the distance, swinging the pan as if it was swinging a sword.

There was no form telegraphing to tell him that the skill was being activated, and while he could see the form, using [Generous attention] on it was doing nothing.

Naymond dived to the side, wincing as his injuries protested. He avoided the first barrage of attacks as he came to a rolling stop. He hesitated as he got to his feet.

One Mississippi.

Then the creature turned and started a second barrage. The first pan-swing went high and Naymond dived under it, dropping into another roll.

One Mississippi.

The creature went at him again and he jumped. It was a single downward swing and an action as simple as jumping was enough to evade it.

Then Naymond stepped to the side, gave the creature space and it dashed forward with the speed of a thrown baseball and the force of a battering ram.

Just like a video game, he thought.

All the creatures had a designated set of actions. In the last three days each group he’d met either had the same set of actions or something similar.

They weren’t that difficult to avoid once you got the hang of it. The problem was learning them and getting the hang of it.

Naymond kept his eyes peeled, waiting.

The creature turned again. Their eyes locked and its form twitched. Where a Gifted wore their form like a cloak, these creatures had theirs as a single flame the size of a heart on their chest, and it only flickered when they made eye contact with him.

Naymond activated his skill and his interface flashed in front of him.

[You have used skill Generous Attention]

The form wiggled slightly, then did something Naymond had never seen it do since before arriving here. It popped, gone like a popped balloon.

The creature dropped to its knees and fell to the ground.

Then it released a pungent smell. Naymond could only describe it as burning poison.

Finally alone once more, he rested his back against the wall and released a deep and tired sigh.

He had lost his hat at some point and his hair was in his face. His suit wasn’t even worthy of being called a suit anymore, and his body was heavily numb. Every step he took filled him with a sensation of pin-pricks. It was like his body was falling asleep.

He gave it some time and smoke started rising from his suit. The bugs that were attached to him fell from his body and hit the ground.

Naymond looked down at them with a frown. He hated the little critters. They were his least favorite thing about this portal.

And what the hell is taking the Delvers so long to get here.

He looked down at his left leg. It was riddled with the critters all black and small and attached to his pants. He’d tried taking his pants off but it didn’t take. Any piece of clothing they were attached to was not moving an inch.

He was torn between going back in search of the group he’d encountered that had given him that group of critters or going forward.

From all he knew, the latter was a death wish. And since the only method of getting rid of the critters and whatever they were doing to slow him down was by killing the monsters, he really hoped completing the quest was going to kill them. There had been cases of Delvers coming back from portals with one leftover affliction or the other.

Forward it is.

He pushed himself off the wall and winced from the pain. One thing he knew for sure was that if selling your soul to Caldath led to these abominations around him, he sure as hell didn’t want to have anything to do with fighting Caldath.

It was probably some kind of demon. At least the quest only spoke of its orb.

He stumbled out of the ruins and into the dark night, wondering, not for the first time, where Melmarc could possibly be.

And were the fuck are those Delvers?

Naymond stepped out into the cool night and made his way to the large castle on the horizon.

He would continue his search for Melmarc on his way there.

Please be alive, Mr. Lockwood.