Oliver stood, grabbed the sword up from where it had fallen, and made for the edge of the nest. He wished he could stop and examine its contents further, but there was no time – if he could hear its wings, the harpy was seconds away.

He hurled himself over the nest's edge and very nearly fell to his death. The nest was perched up on the edge of a steep cliff face, and the ground fell into the darkness only a few feet away.

The bottom of the cliff was lost to the fog, and he could see only a fairly steep stone cliff face with a few tufts of grass sticking out here and there. He turned himself about, feeling horribly exposed, and began to clamber down the side of the rock as quickly as he dared.

Moments later he saw a shadow pass by overhead, the shape of which was blocked from his sight by the same fog which had before worked against him and now was perhaps his only means of preservation.

He kept climbing down, the muscles in his arms and legs soon trembling with the exertion. He'd never been much one for rock climbing, and as hard as it was going up, going down was much more difficult.

After several minutes passed by in silence, he judged himself far enough away from the nest that he allowed himself to rest for a brief moment, stopping on a ledge to let his arms and legs recover from the headlong descent.

He began to pick his way down more slowly after a few moments, and after a little while the steep rock face began to ease into a slightly more gentle downward slope with the occasional five or six foot shelf. His exhausted arm and leg muscles thanked him when he paused again, but as darkness fell he saw that he'd soon have to stop for the night, so he pressed on.

The only thing more dangerous than camping by a harpy's nest was trying to descend an unknown cliff face at night. As he descended he kept an eye out for places he could rest and recover that weren't so exposed to the day.

He was forced to continue well past his comfort zone as he was unable to find a stopping place for some time – it was well past dark by the time he found a suitable overhang. Not quite a cave, but enough to keep him protected from casual aerial observation. He wasn't sure if the mist or cloud layer would be there in the morning, and he didn't like his chances much if he were to be so exposed in the bright light of day.

He settled in, mentally preparing himself for another sleepless night full of anxiety. There was precious little he could do to make himself comfortable save for wedge himself into the crevice and place his back against the cold rock wall.

As the sweat dried from his exertions he soon began to feel the chill once more, the evening air and the mist conspiring to rapidly sap the warmth from his body. Fortunately, despite the increased elevation, it wasn't as cold as it had been that night outside the camp after the attack, so he had no fear of hypothermia, just misery.

After the initial terror of the descent had subsided his mind flew back to the experiences he'd had after dismissing his System.

There had been something important he needed to recall, something… images flashed by his brain, things that he'd seen which still he could not comprehend. Many of them had been small magics, or at least so commonplace that none in particular stood out to his recollection.

But some were outlandish even amidst the scenes he'd seen.

A woman with a long dark braid down to her ankles running along the tops of shining white clouds as if they could somehow support her weight, sun shining brightly all around her.

Two old men having tea by night – a perfectly ordinary scene had they not been sitting crosslegged calmly in the air beside a floating tea set high above an enormous city at the juncture of seven rivers, lit by many multicolored lights. A negotiation.

A child of indeterminate gender working in a smithy, face young, but exuding an aura of great age and gravitas. He could not tell what it was working on but it was not made of metal; it was forging some dark shadowy shape that seemed to suck the light from the room.

A warrior dressed head to toe in shining mail, bearing a sword that shone like the sun, bounding along the back of an enormous serpent wound about the peak of a mountain. Even as he watched its head, the size of a cargo ship, struck at the warrior and missed, instead hitting its own side with an impact that triggered multiple avalanches.

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As he focused upon the images, others too he found he could recall. Some were too strange to dwell upon, so he put them out of his mind. Others were of great intensity, struggles on a level he could not seem to perceive.

There were battles that took place not in the physical, but in the mind and the spirit, more than one showdown of two or three people locked in some silent struggle, only for one or two to fall dead after a few moments of feverish intensity. These he observed but did not understand.

He shook himself out of the haze he realized he'd been sinking into as he dwelt upon the time, coming back to his senses. His time as that other being, that strange… unity? was a dangerous thing to ponder.

The game interface he'd been interacting with – had that been the System's means of protecting him from this strange state? A layer to allow him to perceive that information, in a format constructed from his own experiences and spoon fed back to him in a way that he'd be able to perceive without losing his mind?

If so, he'd been foolish to dismiss it, a choice which had nearly cost him his life. Yet, he reminded himself, what choice had he had?

In any case, the images drove home a fact that he hadn't fully internalized. This was a world of magic, and magic ruled over muscle here.

He'd been thinking of things all wrong. His thoughts obscured by the illusion of the game he'd been placing over everything like a blindfold over his eyes.

Now that he'd looked upon the truth and lived, he saw just what a fool he'd been.

Mixed emotions roiled through him as he sat in the night, fear and anxiety, shock and anger, and above all shame at his incapability to adapt to the situation.

Lack of imagination. He'd never make tribune.

But as the night wore on and he processed everything he'd been through and everything he'd seen, he came to a certain kind of peace with his actions so far.

They were the actions of an adult who'd grown up in a very different world, a man who'd come over decades to rely on his judgement and his experience – his intuition.

Back home, he'd been at the top of his game, a good soldier, had never left a man behind. Between his body and his mind, he'd been able to trust his intuition, making risky calls that the vast majority of the time paid off. There was no time for anything else in battle. All the strategy and knowledge in the world couldn't help when bullets were flying. It was down to snap judgements in the moment, based on a lifetime of learned experience.

Well, here, all that experience was so much rubbish. All that he'd learned, he needed to put behind him so that he could start from scratch. And his persistence in viewing the whole thing as a game had prevented him from doing that.

His stubborn, short-sighted adherence to the paradigm he'd grown up in prevented him from adopting the new one: all the strength and experience that had kept him alive on Earth meant little in this world, and in fact were the very things that had nearly killed him multiple times. Perhaps had already killed him, depending on if he could get down from this mountain in one piece.

His mind ran over the numerous near-death experiences he'd had in the past week.

It began with the soldier in the woods where he'd been first captured. He'd tackled him, failed to realize that these soldiers had some means of magically increasing their weight, density, and strength. That should have been enough to cause him to recalculate.

But then he'd failed to take that into account when attacking the two soldiers threatening that couple. Instead of treating them like the magically enhanced super-humans they were, he'd treated them just like he'd have treated a couple of thugs back home, and the result was that he'd nearly been killed again, should have been killed again.

Finally, the harpies – well, that one he just put down to a failure of judgement, as he'd literally just seen a man being picked up and carried away.

A failure of judgement… an image planted itself in his mind's eye, the visions he'd had while being carried to the nest, of his disastrous second tour. The guilt he'd never quite been able to shake. Yes, that too had affected his judgement.

He put that thought in a box again and put it away. That was an old wound that he'd deal with later. And by later, he meant never.

He returned his focus to the mistakes he'd made in the near past. Each of the encounters he'd had was a mistake he'd made by trusting in his body, a trust he could afford to hold no longer.

Being strong and used to coming out on top in fights was, in this place, a disadvantage. His earlier resolve to become some sort of Fighter, thinking that it would increase his durability in the short term, had been a mistake too.

That was a concept that only applied in Dungeons and Dragons, with a bunch of friends at the same level, a pocket healer, and a (usually) friendly dungeon master who only threw monsters at you that you were tough enough to beat.

This world was not a game. And even if it was, he was starting out at level one – level zero, really – compared to the rest of the people and beings around him.

When everything he'd seen in this world could kill him with a sneeze, putting a few levels into getting a little tougher would only prolong his inevitable death. It was not the practical, safe plan he'd initially conceived of it as.

No, it was time for a new strategy.

The best defense was a good offense. He needed something that would not only allow him to survive but allow him to dominate. He needed something that would give him an edge immediately, put a margin between failure and death.

He needed magic.