Lilith woke up in the back of the cart when she heard something large fall over and make a loud thump out front. She perked her head up and crawled over, only to see the horse lying on its side, its neck slit.

She choked down a gasp, then slowly crawled back.

A man opened up the back of the cart. Lilith whipped her head around and stared straight at him.

“Sebas— mmph!” She tried to scream out as the man put a hand over her mouth, but it was still enough to wake him up.

“Huh? Oh fuck. Bandit?” He asked.

The man nodded. “Don’t do anything stupid. I don’t want to hurt you guys.”

“S— sure. Just take whatever you want.” Sebastian moved over and then pulled Lilith closer, before grimacing at the stuff in his cart.

The man picked up a few items and a certain bag of coins before walking out of the cart, which was when Sebastian climbed over to the horse reins. “F— fuck!” He stifled.

“You’re not getting away before we take everything.” Another man stepped in and grabbed another bunch of items.

“I’m taking this one.” A third guy came in and picked up Lilith.

“Huh?” She blinked.

“Lilith!” Sebastian turned to the third guy. “Hey, you got your stuff. Leave her alone.”

Lilith started kicking and struggling.

The man smirked. “Why? It’s not like any guards are gonna stop us out here.” He pulled out a knife and put it to Lilith’s neck. “Besides, a fox girl like her should fetch a nice price.”

Lilith paled. Price? She would be sold? No way. No way!

She tried to struggle even more, but the man was more than twice her size. Then, she remembered her magic. Was there something her magic could do against him?

She narrowed her eyes and focused. It was a little strange not focusing around her hand, but it was possible. As she moved her focus a bit over the surface of her skin, she could feel everything. The knife, the man, his organs and blood vessels…

She focused on the knife, then decided heating a knife up that was pressed against her throat was a bad idea. Next, she went to the guy’s veins and twisted them until they broke, one by one.

“Huh?” The man dropped the knife, then Lilith, then fell back and started spasming, his arms covered in purple.

“Jake!? What happened?” Another bandit looked at all the pooled blood wherever he had been holding Lilith.

“M— monster!” He slammed his gauntlet covered fist against her, sending her flying and smashing her against the wall of the cart.

Lilith held her stomach. That was the most pain she’d felt in her entire life. She could feel herself about to pass out, but she couldn’t! That guy was about to swing his fist down again.

She rolled away as fast as she could, grabbed his arm with both hands, and used her magic to break veins, and whatever other things were there too.

“Mmmng! Mother fucker!” The bandit swung his other fist. He managed to break a few ribs, but the metal around his wrist burned into his skin and closed in.

He held up his gauntlets and looked between them, sweating. “F— fuck! Fuck!”

Lilith lurched forward and grabbed his neck, then tore apart his carotid artery with her magic.

“What the fuck’s going on over there?” The first bandit started rushing back.

Lilith reached for the knife the man from before dropped.

“Lilith! You’ve done enough! Give me that. I don’t want you getting yourself killed!” Sebastian picked up the knife and peaked out. “Oh shit, spear…”

“Jake? Mark? …shit!” The spearman shoved the spear through the back of the cart. Luckily, Sebastian just barely managed to dodge.

Sebastian pulled Lilith as he scrambled out the other side. He jumped off the front seat without her. “Hey! We can stop this,” Sebastian said. “Just don’t sell us as slaves.” He held up the knife.

“I’ll sell your mother as a slave ya cunt!” he charged.

Luckily, the spearman forgot about Lilith. So, she snuck around the cart as silently as she could, then grabbed the spearman’s leg as he was rushing over. “GHAaa!” He screamed, then turned and stabbed at her, narrowly missing a strike right down the shoulder.

Lilith hopped back and hid behind a wheel before he could do more.

“What the hell was that?” The man pointed his spear back to Sebastian, shifting his weight to his other leg. “You got some kinda monster with ya?”

“There’s only one monster still alive here and it’s right in front of me!” Sebastian hopped back a bit to out range the spearman before throwing the knife… but the handle hit him. “Tch.”

“Ha!” The bandit laughed. “I see you’re not the one that did that to my friends.” He turned back to the cart, scanning it.

Lilith rolled out the other side.

“Oh? You wanna run away? Guess I’m killing this guy then…” He hopped forward, then lunged at Sebastian, but he was a bit slower than before. “Haa… my fucking leg.”

Hearing that, Lilith peaked under the cart and then crawled over as fast as she could. This time, while he was stumbling around, she grabbed his other leg and snapped the vessels before jumping back.

He turned back and stabbed at her a moment after she was gone. “Haa… What did that little bitch do to me?” His legs started spasming and he fell over.

Lilith stumbled back and sat down, then coughed up some blood.

Sebastian ran up to the spearman, stepped on the spear, grabbed the knife, and slit the man’s throat. Then, he ran over to Lilith. “Are you okay?”

“I’ve got a b—” Lilith tried to speak, but a bunch of blood came out instead.

“Shit. Let me get you back to the cart.” He picked her up and carried her inside and set her on a blanket.

“Silk!” Lilith choked out as he hesitated. “Silk! Do you hk—” More blood.

Sebastian stepped in, looked around a bit, then found a bag with some different threads and gave it to her. “Does that work?”

Lilith pulled a few strands out with her magic. They didn’t seem to go through her skin like in the dream though. Maybe she needed thinner thread?

She moved her magic sense around a bit to see what else she could fix. There were quite a few bruises, but more important was her lungs filling up with blood. She wasn’t sure how to fix that, but she moved a bit to get in a more comfortable position to deal with it.

---

Lilith found herself by Wispy again on his lake. She was still lying down though. Her injuries had transferred to her dream world.

“Don’t move, Lilith. It would be bad if your ribs shifted around any more, so keep your breathing slow and regular.”

“Are—” She tried to speak, but no more sound came out.

“Don’t talk. I can hear your thoughts here if you project them.”

Lilith paused, then tried to think as loud as she could. “Aren’t you supposed to appear at the end of my dreams?”

“You don’t need to yell, but yes, I’d rather not interrupt your dreams in most cases. In this case however, letting you move around while sleeping could harm you.” He poked one of her broken ribs with his tendrils. “In fact, you should fix this, now. If you don’t, you will bleed to death just like those bandits, and we’ve wasted enough time already.” The world around her started flashing different bright colors, and the lake above and below filled itself with bright lines and splotches. “Your telekinesis isn’t strong enough on its own. Use your lungs, hands, or whatever else you need to move your ribs back into the right place, and breathe in the threads and then use your telekinesis to seal the holes in your lungs and the surrounding tissue.”

The air and lakes kept flashing even brighter colors and patterns. Something about it was terrifying.

“Now. Wake up!”

---

Sebastian looked around for anything that might help Lilith. The closest thing he had to a healing kit was the thread he already gave her, and that was just for fixing up his own clothes. He didn’t even keep alcohol in his cart!

He ran out of the cart, grabbed the bag of coins the bandits stole as well as the rest of their coins, and ran back, then checked the map. The next city was still a good way away. Even if he did have enough money to take her to a hospital, it was going to be a while.

“Hey, Lilith, can you last a bit longer?” He asked.

No response. She just breathed slowly.

“Shit! Lilith! Now’s not the time to go to sleep!” He ran over and lightly slapped her. “Wake up!”

Her eyes shot open and she looked around before coughing up some more blood.

“One second,” she said, then breathed in deeply and put her hands over her broken ribs.

There were a few sickening crunching sounds as her bones shifted back into place.

Then, she took the silk threads, cut off a few strands, held them to her mouth along with the smallest needle she could find in the kit, and breathed it all in before coughing a bunch. Her body was trying to cough them back out, but she guided them the rest of the way into her lungs with her magic, before making them swim through the air and blood, into the large holes made by the bone, and in and out of the surrounding tissue.

She would push the tissue together from the outside, thread it together, then try to fix some of the larger vessels, and when she ran out of thread, she’d take some more strands and breathe them in again. Finally, she managed to sew the holes in her lungs shut, cough out the needle, and then worked a bit more on setting her ribs correctly.

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

She could feel her consciousness fading, but she decided to check over her lungs a bit more. All that blood wasn’t doing much other than pulling on her repairs now, so she moved it up with her magic and tried to breathe it out. She turned her head and managed to spit out a few fist sized blobs of blood before lying back down.

Sebastian watched all this with a mix of horror and curiosity. It seemed like she somehow knew what she was doing. Her parents apparently taught her some medical stuff. Still, she was turning pale from the loss of blood, and her breathing was becoming more quick and shallow. He remembered working with some mercenaries once, and how they dealt with losing blood like that.

He ran to his drawer and took out as much meat as he could. It was pretty salted to store longer, and pretty chewy, so he took the scissors Lilith was using and cut it into small bits before giving it to her along with some water.

“Here, take this.” He gave her the food.

She took it and practically scarfed it down, before looking for more.

He started quickly cutting off more pieces and gave it all to her. She swallowed another large bite before stopping and looking around with her magic again.

When she searched, she saw a few more drops of blood had leaked into her lungs, so she used her magic to keep the blood near the holes so it would heal faster. Other than that though, there wasn’t much she could do, so she slowly passed out.

Looking at her, Sebastian sighed before walking over to clean up all the blood around her. After a few wipes over the blood she spat out, one of his rags was almost completely red.

“Really hope you make it,” he said, tossing the rag somewhere. There wasn’t much else he could do.

---

This time, she barely remembered her dreams at all, other than some very muted, distant screaming and running. She could somehow still tell that the normal amount of time passed though.

Once again, she was back at the side of that familiar lake, her body still as injured as it was in the waking world, and her breathing shallow.

“Remember,” Wispy said, “Speak with your thoughts.”

There were a million thoughts that came to her, but one came to the forefront. ‘Why did they attack us?’ She asked.

“Merchant carts contain coins and valuable objects, and bandits can take those and sell them for a living. The fact that they killed the horse first means they were fine with killing whoever they came across, because that would strand any merchant in the middle of nowhere.”

'They’d kill us just to steal our money?'

“Just like how an animal would kill just to eat.”

'...does that make me prey?'

“Indeed. To them, you were.”

'But weak, small animals are prey.' She thought back to some of the slimes back home.

“Then you were a weak, small animal to them. Until you fought back.”

Lilith frowned. 'But I don’t want to be a weak animal!' She thought of all the pain she felt recently, and of Sebastian protecting her from that spearman.

“I feel you may be misremembering things,” Wispy said, “But I take it you want to become stronger?”

‘Yeah.’

“In what way?” He asked. “Would you like your body strengthened so weapons don’t hurt you? Would you like to be able to move so you could counter their attacks better? Become quiet so you could sneak up on them like you did?”

Lilith paused to think before mentally shrugging. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to get punched like that or see Sebastian hurt.’

“Are you entrusting me with the details then?” He seemed excited.

‘Sure,’ Lilith thought.

He seemed to grin. “Then, let’s begin.”

Several of his tendrils turned into spirals, showing his various thoughts. “First, you only broke blood vessels. That’s effective if you want to kill, especially since that can often be impossible to feel. But you avoided nerves that would be easier to reach and break, which would immediately disable someone.” One of the spirals opened up to show the man holding her before, but he was transparent this time, and all the nerves from his brain and spine were highlighted. Another one of Wispy’s tendrils reached to the man’s shoulders and legs, pointing to the nerves there. “Rather than killing, you could fully paralyze him in twenty four hits, rather than the fifty or so you needed. And if you aimed for the right nerves, he still wouldn’t be able to tell until it was too late.”

As his tendrils went over each nerve, they snapped, causing an arm or leg they branched into to go limp.

“Sometimes it’s better to go for the kill to end a fight, like with the spearman, who continued fighting with one leg. But if you’re sure you’re safe, paralyzing them can let you question them later. You could find out why the bandits hung out here, and where they got their information.”

‘And… They wouldn’t have had to die.’ She thought regretfully.

“Indeed,” he agreed. “Now.” He reattached the nerves and brought the image of the man closer to her.

She tensed up.

“Oops, don’t want you doing that!” He pulled the man away. “Look, he can’t hurt you, but you can hurt yourself if you tense up like that.”

She relaxed, slowing her breathing back down.

Wispy slowly brought the man closer until she could see his nerves right in front of her. “Now, I want you to try the same thing I did. I’ve highlighted the motor nerves in yellow and the sensory nerves in red. Avoid the sensory nerves.”

She did as he asked. Even though she was injured, her powers were about the same. However the nerves were a bit harder to break than the blood vessels, especially the larger ones. For those, it seemed easier to burn them than to break them.

“Oh, that works too.” Wispy seemed to shrug. “Now, the other shoulder.”

She repeated the nerve breaking with all four limbs, breaking around six nerves for each.

That actually took her a fairly long time if she wanted to hit the right nerves and not random ones, but she didn’t wake up like usual. Would she be staying here longer to make sure she healed? It made sense. So she decided to ask another question.

‘Why does it all come from here?’ She pointed at the man’s head.

“That’s the brain. It’s where many in our past lives would consider their soul to reside. If you modify that, you will be modifying the soul’s access to this reality.”

‘The soul’s access to this reality?’ She repeated.

“With your powers as they are, you could only permanently remove general abilities, like the ability to see faces, to walk, or to speak or understand language. It would be cruel and comparatively useless. Let’s move on.”

‘Oh. Alright.’

“Besides your attacks, another reason you survived the battle was because you managed to sneak up on the spearman. You had mud and grass under your feet and Sebastian was talking, so you were relatively silent. If you had wood or stone beneath you, he may have heard you and swung more times or more accurately.” He opened one of his tendrils and showed an image of Lilith walking with an exaggerated gait, swinging her arms around without a care in the world, making clacking noises each time her feet touched the ground. The spearman turned around and stabbed her, and she exploded.

‘...why did you make me look like an idiot?’

“Why not? Anyway, I hope it’s clear how important stealth is. Even if you sneak fairly well, you need to pay attention to your clothes so they don’t give you away.” He levitated copies of her clothes in front of her. “Your current skirt from school makes a soft scratching noise whenever you move much, or if you brush against anything.” He demonstrated, dragging it along the ground. “It’d be better if it was like the cotton in your shirt.” He tried the same thing with her shirt, and it made much less noise. Then, it moved her wood bottomed shoes in a walking motion along an image of stone ground, making some loud stepping sounds. “Your shoes are the loudest things right now. You’ll need something other than wood to make sure you’re silent. And no, before you ask, you cannot go barefoot in the cities and in the cart like some from your village do when they hunt.” He pulled out some materials, cut some sections out, and placed them on the bottom of the shoes. “A few layers of the right textiles could make it much quieter though.”

‘If I can’t get away with going barefoot, why would I get away with modifying the shoe?’ Lilith asked.

“Because it still looks like a shoe.”

‘So it’s just to blend in?’ She was a bit annoyed. One more thing to lie about.

“The stone that some cities make their roads with conducts heat well. You may freeze or burn your feet if you don’t wear shoes.”

‘Oh.’

“So, keep that in mind whenever you buy clothes. Unless you want everyone to know where you are at all times… and speaking of knowing where things are, if you knew the bandits were behind you, you wouldn’t have been held with a knife to your throat.”

‘Well yeah, but I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.’

“Yet you managed to break that man’s blood vessels when they were all invisible to your eyes.”

‘Yeah, I can use my sense, but I can’t do it very far.’

“That’s why you need to practice. Work on perceiving things at a distance. Close your eyes, and sense.”

With another mental shrug, she did just that. As she lay there she noticed one of Wispy’s tendrils at the edge of her sense, so she followed it as it drifted. Unlike the air, it was made of… she couldn’t tell.

“Try to keep your senses on me.” The tendril started to pull away.

She tried, but as it got further, she felt a dull pain in her, well, everything? ‘Ow!’

“Growing pains. Please try again. We will continue until you’ve exhausted about half your mana.”

She tried again, gritting through the pain as her sense tried to spring back to her. ‘Ow! Owie...’

After a few tries, she thought of something strange. ‘None of your stories from our old world mentioned anything about mana or training like this. How come you’re training me?’

“That’s a good question.” He paused to think as he continued the training, bringing his tendrils up and down as she tried to follow. He looked to the edge of the forest, up to the lake above, then back down.

‘Well?’

“I have no idea.” He shrugged.

---

Lilith woke up covered in cold sweat. She felt a dull, aching pain all over, but she wasn’t sure if that was because of her mana or her body. She opened her eyes to see the inside of the cart, but that made her eyes burn, so she closed them.

She managed to look a few inches away from her body with her mana sense, as far as she could go without it hurting, though the volume she could see was smaller. She could feel the wood below her and how warm it was, so the sun must have been up for a bit. She already knew Sebastian was out of the cart from what she remembered opening her eyes, so it was just her for now.

She looked inside her body next. Her ribs had little bags of tissue around where they broke now, but it still felt like a very soft connection, so she’d need to limit her breathing. Her entire body was practically a large bruise now, so she didn’t want to move anyway.

She moved around some blood and coagulation protein a bit, but after that, there wasn’t much to do, so she just laid there and tried extending her senses again. ‘Ow.’

---

Sebastian came back with some more stew a bit later, and he saw Lilith open her eyes.

“G’morning…” She groaned.

“Morning. I made some food. Can you move?”

“No…”

Sebastian sighed. “Thought so.” He picked up the bowl of stew meant for her and moved over, then picked up a few more items and gently fit them under her head.

Lilith raised an eyebrow and tilted her head a bit at him.

“You gotta eat somehow.” He took a spoonful of and lifted it.

Lilith tried to reach up and grab the spoon, but she felt sharp pains when the muscles pulled at the bones she just healed. She grit her teeth.

“Yeah don’t do that. Just let me feed you.”

She sighed, but kept her mouth open.

Even though it hurt her ribs a bit just to swallow, she still managed to finish the whole soup. Then, Sebastian quickly ate his own bowl and set both down. Next he stepped over some boxes and took the reins to the new horse, which must’ve belonged to the bandits, and rode much faster than before.

---

It still took a few days to get to the next city. Over that time, Lilith turned from purple to a more normal color, and was able to reach her arm out to feed herself. She constantly held her arms over her ribs though. Sebastian worried she might be permanently injured.

Finally, Sebastian tied off the horse in a lot in the city, then reached out a hand to help Lilith. “You can walk, right?”

“Yeah, I think so.” She slowly sat up. “Are we gonna explore the city now?” She brightened as she turned and tried to hop out of the cart, but her body was sluggish.

“No, you’re going to the hospital first to fix your ribs. But after that we’ll explore the edge of Solis.”

“Hospital? Wait, we’re in Solis!?” She gawked.

“Yep! The edge of it. If anyone can help you it should be the healers here. So let’s go.”

Lilith slowly made her way out of the cart with Sebastian’s help, and then they walked to a nearby building.

“Hello!” The receptionist looked up at Sebastian. “Oh my! I’ll uh, put you at the front of the queue.”

“Huh?” He walked up, then realized there was still blood on him from the fight and from trying to help Lilith. “No, I’m fine. Lilith here needs help.”

She looked down at Lilith. “I see. What happened to you guys?”

“Some bandits raided our caravan. They wanted to take her, so we had to fight.”

“I see. Alright, I’ll call the healer to look at Lilith. Feel free to take a seat anywhere. She’s not in immediate danger, right?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Oh, good. I’m still putting her at priority though.”

“Thanks.”