With the two flesh giants killed, I finally took a moment to look over the final System notifications I had gotten during the course of the fight. Some of the more complex notifications, such as skills, I simply hadn’t had time to process in the heat of the moment.

First up was the kill notification for the bone spider.

Slaughter: Assist in killing a warden of bone

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +230, Achievement +0.04

In total, this put me at 1242, Achievement - or, if I factored in the last bits of debt to Felix and the extra I wanted to give him, I was left with -358 Achievement. Honestly, I was surprised that I had come so close to paying off a debt of nearly 4,000 Achievement in only two months. The Market may be filled with dangers, but it was also an incredibly efficient place to farm Achievement once we knew what we were doing. After extinguishing the final giant spider, I would probably be debt free.

I had also, apparently, gotten some Skills I could take from some of my kills. Most notably, I had extinguished a skeletal mage during the fight, which had gotten me a kill against the creature and a new Skill. Amusingly enough, I hadn’t actually gotten a kill on one of the skeletal foot soldiers, the flesh giant, or the spider using water, meaning I hadn’t gotten any Skills from them. Even though I had wiped out massive numbers of skeletal foot soldiers. Either way, I doubted it mattered much. We were about to reincarnate, after all. Not much reason to worry about our in-Market abilities until next time.

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured a skeletal mage for the first time. New Skill created.

Magically capable:

You gain the ability to use minor spells with manifestation essence (this skill creates the laws of reality needed to fuel acid spray and torchblast. It does NOT provide biological compatibility for these spells, or a reserve of manifestation essence).

Manifestation Stat increased by +7.

I looked at the skill, before I shrugged and added it to {Endless Hunger of the Ocean}. It was totally irrelevant - I didn’t have the other things I needed to make use of the skill, and we were going to reincarnate very soon, so the Skill was utterly meaningless. But just in case something went wrong, there was no harm in having it equipped, even if it would be lost the moment we entered the pool of reincarnation again.

I turned to look at my friends again. Sallia’s stomach wound was horrific, and if we were in regular bodies, it probably would have been lethal.

I went ahead and splashed her injury with a bit of water from my dress, before I gave her a little blast of renewal, spending all of the alteration essence I had left, to help close up the wound a bit. It wasn’t much, since I didn’t have much essence to spend right now, but I wanted to make sure that Sallia didn’t die before we reincarnated. It would make things take an extra hour or two, but we had time for that.

Sallia gave me a grateful nod, and I tried to smile at her, before wincing in pain.

My severely burned face did not appreciate being stretched that way.

I tried not to wince in pain, and then turned my attention back to the final soul squatting in the distance. Despite the fact that we had murdered most of its friends, it hadn’t moved - apparently, it was still trying to prevent anyone from sneaking into the pool of reincarnation while the rest of the defenders were occupied. I had to say, the giant bone spiders were much more diligent about patrolling their area than the bone mages and flesh giants had been. This was surprisingly helpful for us, since I was pretty sure one more bone spider at the wrong time would have caused us to die during the fight.

Since it wasn’t rushing over to attack us, the plan I had been thinking of earlier would probably work fine. We could just sit around and wait for my alteration essence to recover, before killing the bone spider in an ambush. I had needed to be careful about conserving my essence during the previous fight, since we had expected a large swarm of enemies to attack us. However, if there was just one enemy, I was more than happy to just blast it to near death using a long range extinguish, and then have everyone else bombard it with attacks afterwards. The creature would probably be half-dead from my extinguish and easy prey for everyone else. I just needed to regenerate a bit. There was no reason to give the creature a chance to fight back.

I turned towards Felix, and tried to talk - only to once again run into serious pain as my attempts at talking aggravated my ruined throat.

Not being able to talk was so limiting!

“Are you… well, not all right…” said Anise, turning towards me and looking at my missing arm, burn scars, and minor acid wounds. “But are you in imminent danger of dying? Do you need anything?”

I gave her a thumbs up with my one remaining arm, before I pointed at my throat and tried to make a 1-armed X.

“Just talking?” asked Anise. “Are you trying to say that everything besides talking is fine?” I gave her another thumbs up. Anise paused for a moment, and then turned towards Sallia. “Sallia, how are your injuries?”

“I’ll live,” said Sallia, wincing. “Hurts like crazy, but nothing serious, I think. Miria, are you sure you’re fine?”

I nodded.

“Got it. 1 sec - Felix, can you make anything like a pen out of your steel manipulation? I know you have that endless origami tool kit now, so if you could just lend Miria a few pages to write on…”

I brightened up at the thought, and Felix quickly gave me something that resembled a knife more than a pen.

“We don’t have any ink, so feel free to just stab out words and letters into the paper,” he said, giving me an apologetic grin. “It’ll have to do.”

Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

It’s more than enough, I wrote. I think I can pay off the rest of my debt to you really soon! Do you think we can sit around and wait for a while?

“I don’t see why not,” said Sallia. “We still have a couple days before we start running into deterioration, I think? Why do you ask?”

I figure we should just extinguish the final spider from afar, I said. No reason to give the spider more chances to hurt us. Just killing it before it has a chance to react is best. I hit it with an extinguish and drop it to half-dead, and then you follow up with one of those shrapnel waves you like? And then Felix and Anise toss in some attacks as well?

“Oh, good. We’re on the same page,” said Sallia. “I’m going to be honest, if we fight another one of these things head on, I’m not confident I would be able to manage it. If it had all of its legs and no curses attached to it, it just moves too fast for me to easily manage. I can keep up, but it’s hard, and its eight limbs are really frustrating to deal with.”

Felix and Anise also nodded. “So we just sit around and wait for Miria to regenerate some essence?” asked Anise.

Felix nodded.

Also, if I get kill credit for the spider, I can pay off the rest of the loan you gave me, Felix! I wrote. That way you can spend it on a few final upgrades for you.

Felix thought about it, before slowly nodding.

“You owe me… what, 1,200 Achievement?” he said.

Yeah. I’m going to give you a little extra as thanks for loaning me some in the first place, too.

“Miria, you don’t have to.”

I want to, I wrote. Right now, Sallia and I have a big advantage. I want you two to catch up. For Anise - Right, Anise, did you get a keyword ability from the fight? We haven’t verified whether we can get Keyword abilities in the Market, so I’m very curious.

“I did!” said Anise. “Not a good one though. It amplifies the strength of force-based magic projectiles I create by a moderate amount at basic grade. It’s cheap, and it only takes up one keyword slot for ‘force,’ but… I don’t know if I want to specialize in force-based magic projectiles in the future. I’d prefer a different keyword. Also, the fact that it only ‘moderately’ improves them makes me think it won’t really be that useful next world, either. And it doesn’t actually give me a magic system of my own to use - it just enhances the items I have equipped right now.” said Anise. “But it does prove that we can get keyword abilities in the Market, even if this one isn’t that impressive.”

I paused, and thought about Anise’s words.

It was good to keep in mind that we could, with absolute certainty, get keyword abilities from the Market. It may not be relevant to me right now, since I was already at the cap of my glut penalty, but I could definitely see that being relevant in the future.

I also looked at Anise. Was it… really a good idea to pass up an opportunity for a keyword ability right now? We only had three lifetimes left, at most, before we needed to fight for more lives. If Anise took this ability, she would have a lot more time to work with.

Then, I shook my head.

If the ability was too useless, even if it was evolved several times, it would probably just be an Achievement sink without useful results.

With that out of the way, we settled down to rest for several hours. Since I was the most injured injured, and Sallia was also resting and keeping her stomach injury from getting worse, Felix kept watch for any new threats wandering into the area. Interestingly enough, there were a few new Skeletons that started heading towards the reincarnation pool now that we had wiped away the defenders. There seemed to be some sort of instinct drawing them towards the area, now that it was left undefended. I had no idea how the skeletons knew the area needed to be defended, but it was certainly food for thought.

Luckily, they were all just normal foot soldiers, so Felix wiped them out pretty easily. Though I did suspect that if we waited around for long enough, more mages and flesh giants would show up.

Finally, I had recovered enough essence for my extinguish.

We headed closer to the pool of reincarnation, alert for a problem or trap the whole way, but… there was nothing. After the massive fight to kill off the other skeletal creatures, it seemed almost anticlimactic to remove the final skeletal spider this way. However, up until the point where I launched an extinguish, breaking down almost half of its life force, and everyone else immediately followed up with their own ranged attacks, the creature didn’t even notice our presence. Under the sudden barrage of magical attacks, the creature simply died instantly.

Slaughter: Kill a warden of bone

Influence: Contributed to the defense of the Market by an [extremely negligible] amount.

Achievement +1,700, Achievement +0.01

With that, my debt to Felix was now fully paid off. We quickly borrowed an (unfortunately empty) cash register near the entrance, and I quickly paid Felix for the Acheivement I had borrowed, as well as the extra bit that I wanted to give him.

I was left with 1,342 Achievement, and no more debt!

Endless Hunger of the Ocean has devoured a Warden of Bone for the first time. New Skill created.

Limbs like Blades:

At the cost of a small amount of essence, your limbs will become hard to visually track and will become as sharp and sturdy as swords.

+20 to Agility

I was pretty impressed with the ability, although it was largely irrelevant right now. I still equipped it for a bit, and was gratified to feel my speed and how well I could control my body suddenly improve by an entire grade.

Since it seemed like a shame not to give Felix the opportunity to spend his Achievement, we made our way to one of the nearest shops we had already cleared out, before Felix used the Achievement he himself had earned from the fight, as well as the rest of my debt, to push his other two mental stats up to +40. Sallia finished moving her manifestation essence from +30 to +40 as well, and then pushed her Willpower up to +30.

Anise bumped her Willpower up to +30 after Sallia described the struggle of being born with below grade 5 Willpower.

I myself spent 800 of my Achievement to boost my Perception to +30 instead of +20. Since the role I wanted in the party was highly reliant on my perception stat allowing me to react quickly and use my abilities on time, I figured that it was a good idea to invest further in the stat, even though I already had several boosts to it. The fight against the spider had opened my eyes to just how deadly extreme speed could be if I didn’t have a good way to handle it.

I dropped back to 542 Achievement as a result.

After that, we were done. During the time we spent hitting up a shop one final time, we had started to feel little bits of decay latch on to the edges of our temporary bodies and start eating them away. It was the first time we had ever experienced decay, and I suspected that the amount of damage and healing we had sustained had caused some sort of issue in our temporary containers.

Either way, it didn’t matter. We were ready to leave.

The four of us headed back to the pool of reincarnation, encountering no issues along the way, and then hopped into the reincarnation pool that we had secured for ourselves, for once not being chased by an angry army.

It was time to start a new journey.