“Wait, what’s that?”

Right as Leo was about to step through the portal, Rob called out, once again putting their return on hold.

‘What now?’ Slightly annoyed, Leo looked over… and froze.

The ground that formerly gave birth to the last boss of the portal… continued to boil, long after the point where all the remains of the grotesque fiends vanished out of existence.

And against all sense and logic… this boiling was purely magical in nature.

‘Where is this mana coming from?’ Leo thought, taking a step back to the boiling field right as it completed whatever it was cooking beyond the surface.

Thankfully, no massive arm or monster of any kind came out, not this time.

Instead, all of the mana that Leo noticed in the weirdly boiling part of the ground appeared to coalesce into a single, condensed entity, that then materialized into a physical form and shot out of the boiling ground.

As if the grand creator of this world suddenly cut off the gas to the stove, whatever was happening to this innocent ground came to an end, leaving the two stragglers with nothing but a small, slightly dim orb the size of an apple floating right at the perfect height for someone to come and grab it.

“What the hell is this?” Leo muttered, stepping closer to the anomaly while keeping vigilant enough to be able to instantly raise endless shields and barriers of any kind.

Who knew what kind of attack this strange entity could come up with, given the weird fiend this portal world produced mere moments ago?

“Don’t tell me…” This time, it was Rob who spoke as he stared in the general direction of the orb.

“What do you think it is?” Leo asked, standing a mere meter away from the anomaly while slightly lowering his guard.

This physical manifestation of mana… Was nearly as complex as this alien circuit. It consisted of endlessly coiling weaves of instructions and followed the very same logic that Leo saw within the system… but also within the magic created from combining the outputs of various legacy cores of his.

A magic that he only managed to develop thanks to extremely varied experiences from different lifetimes of his and entirely new angles at studying and practicing magic between each of the worlds he saved.

“So that’s how it is…” Rob muttered, only to raise his hand and point… not at the anomalous 0rb, but Leo’s back instead. “You are not using this circuit, right?”

Leo’s face twitched, but by the time he casually turned it over to look at his brother, there was an actual, small smile on his lips.

“I wonder how you figured it out,” Leo commented, only to then roll his eyes and nod his head. “But yeah, I do not. Maybe it’s just a stupid feeling, but I don’t think I can accept it as it is just yet. And after all those years…” Leo shook his head as images of memories of his six lifetimes flashed before his eyes, “I know better than to ignore what my gut tells me.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“I guess that explains how you don’t know what this thing is,” Rob replied, taking a second to approach, only to stand by Leo's side and point at the floating orb. “It says it’s an orb of achievement. Apparently, it allows one to boost one statistic by three points.”

Leo turned to look at his brother before moving his eyes back and inspecting the orb for the second time.

It was still one hell of a mess of densely packaged mana instructions. But now that he knew, more or less, what to look out for, the entire thing appeared a tiny bit less complicated than before.

“It looks like you are right,” Leo muttered a short moment later, once he reached the limit of how much he could see through the orb’s mana weave as he could in the short amount of time.

In reality, he could spend an entire week trying to dissect it into single strands of instructions before taking another month to arrange it back into the orb those strands made up, all for the sake of figuring out how everything connected into one, greater whole.

But right now, with the potential danger to everyone who already went back home…

“Well, there’s no use lingering here. Take it and let's leave.”

With his system broken and out of working order, there was no incentive for Leo to raise his statistics. In fact, judging by what little he managed to learn before his circuit broke…

‘I can gain much more than just three points to each of my statistics as long as I remove my curse. And there is no telling whether that curse would affect my growth or not… Not to mention how it's likely I wouldn’t be able to benefit from it for as long as I keep this circuit from working…’

With those reasons in mind, granting this orb or whatever to Rob appeared like not the most reasonable option, but the only real option they had.

“Are you sure?” Rob asked, giving Leo an uncertain look. “That’s entire three points…”

Rather than commenting on his brother’s doubt, Leo simply leaned his head over to the side before giving Rob a small smirk and then shrugging his shoulders.

“My strength comes not from this alien circuit. And right now, we really don’t have the time for me to just study this thing at my leisure.”

There was a possibility, a hopeful chance that things back home weren’t all that bad. Maybe the portals that appeared all over the world weren’t as drastic as the stuff Leo experienced in his fifth and sixth lifetimes, giving humans some time before breaking open…

But that was all but a chance, no more than a hope Leo had.

A hope that became extremely small once he accounted for how each of his consecutive summonings always came with the increase of difficulty and decrease of mercy the world had on him and its inhabitants.

“Denying any further would be…” Rob muttered, only to shake his head and take just one more step forward before reaching out and grasping at the floating orb with his right hand.

For a moment, the mana orb flashed up, covering the entirety of the plain with a bright hue of blue… before the entire thing vanished into thin air.

Or that’s how it would look to an untrained eye.

‘So that’s what happens when this thing is used…’ Leo thought, watching how the strings of mana that made up the orb suddenly unweaved themselves before surging into his brother and reinforcing all sorts of tiny parts of his circuit.

The manner in which those mana strings imbued themselves into Rob’s circuit was a whole new topic for Leo to diligently study later on… But once again, this wasn’t the right time for him to do so.

“Are you okay?” Leo asked, just to be sure, for there were no hints or valid reasons for him to think the interaction did his brother any harm.

“Yeah,” Rob replied while raising his hand up to his eyes only to then close it up into a fist and open it back up a few times. He then raised his eyes to Leo and nodded his head. “I’m okay. It seems this orb worked exactly how my circuit introduced it.”

Leo breathed a small sigh of relief.

“Good,” the young man nodded his head before decisively turning on his heel and taking a step right as he reached out and grabbed his Rob’s wrist before pulling him ahead, towards the exit point of this portal world. “From now on, though, let’s hurry up,” he requested while already rushing towards the swirling exit.

Yet, just before stepping inside, Leo turned his head over his shoulder and looked at Rob for one, last time.

“I would prefer if you keep silent about what you saw, at least for long enough for the two of us to have some serious talk later on, okay?”