His breath came in bellows, stress making his body react in a more extreme way than merely some shortness of breath would normally trigger. A crash from a large log hitting the ground and pinwheeling away made an angry buzz that sounded like death. It was a reminder that a single hit from a projectile like that would leave him broken and helpless.

Safety was ahead. He turned up the speed, his feet practically flying over the ground. Slick helped him avoid tripping on anything, because that would mean death, too.

Max ran into the cave, not stopping even though he was fairly sure he wasn’t in immediate danger anymore. But being cautious wouldn’t hurt. His heart beat like a jackhammer as he continued forward at breakneck speed and Slick kept helping him avoid falling on his face.

A few moments later, his caution proved wise as a torrent of head-sized stones careened around the tunnel behind him at high velocity. He kept running for a few more minutes, vaulting over the trap that had originally caught him. With a wheeze, he finally stopped in the main chamber of what used to be the feral faun encampment.

He settled into a crude wicker chair that he'd claimed from his fallen enemy's belongings and leaned his head back as he got his breathing back under control. Lavinia appeared with her arms crossed. The spirit looked even more worried than Max was tired. "That didn't go well, did it?" she asked.

"Sure didn't. Nope."

As he thought about the short skirmish he'd just had, his gaze randomly traveled around the cavern. He was glad that he'd put all the extra effort into disposing of all the fawn corpses. It hadn’t been very fun to do, but the alternative would have made the place unlivable.

He'd spent the last week perfecting his Bead Sorcery and practicing swordplay. Now Max could tell it was going to be necessary for every new rank of mana body he achieved to practice in order to reclaim all of his old muscle memory.

Having already mastered multiple disciplines in his former life meant that the refreshers didn't actually take very long. There were perks to building his mana body and one of them was the extreme speed that he was able to train if he needed to.

He turned his attention back to the conversation he knew he needed to have with his spirits. Slick appeared a few feet away and the little spirit crossed their arms in what could only be interpreted as a concerned look. "Don't worry," Max told them, "I'm not going back out there right away. That was not awesome.”

“That was reckless," said Lavinia. “After the second giant joined in you should have run away immediately."

"Yeah, well, mistakes were made," said Max.

"What about when the third giant joined in?" asked Lavinia.

“Well, that was when I ran away, right?” Max shrugged. He didn’t regret sticking around even though it’d been dangerous. He'd gotten a good amount of intel from the encounter. One piece of which being that the giants would actively support each other if they were in danger.

On top of that, they were even more fearsome than he'd originally thought. Each giant was different. Their proportions differed slightly and they were even somewhat different sizes. They could all be unpredictable, too.

One of the giants that Max had just fought wore some sort of crude armor made from huge bones held together with sinew or woven rope.

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But the most distressing thing he'd learned though was how all of them were willing to use impromptu weapons like picking up and hurling trees or even taking a handful of the dirt and rocks around them to throw.

When Max had finally retreated to the caves, the giants had immediately slowed, likely well accustomed to the feral fauns going to ground. But as he’d been running away, from the corner of his eye, Max had seen one of them stoop to pick up a handful of something. He’d intuited what was likely coming next.

Then after experiencing the volume and power of the giant’s throws, he knew why the feral fauns had maintained such a long tunnel before their actual home. Anything closer and it might have been demolished by stone throws of the petulant giants.

Lavinia tapped her ghostly foot. "Whether you go right back out or whether you take a while before fighting again, I sure do hope you have a better plan next time."

"Of course I will," said Max. He chuckled, but quickly sobered and started to think out loud. "The biggest problem is, they're really big and they're also really tough. All of their weak points are too far up on their body for me to reach them without exposing myself too much. Like, if I leave the ground for too long I can't dodge very well and taking a full-on hit from one of those things would probably break every bone in my body. I'm not tough enough yet to tank one."

"So what are you going to do about it?" asked Lavinia.

Max tilted his head back to look at the stony ceiling. He paused, thinking, then said, "I have two possible solutions, and I'm going to try both. The first is to maybe meet another spirit to contract with. As you've said before, it's generally not a good idea to try contracting with more than one spirit per general area. That’s even if I could meet one. It’s usually considered a longshot at best, even in ideal circumstances, and this is a dungeon.

“I wasn't sure if I wanted to try it before here, due to the strange nature of this place. Sometimes intentionally trying to meet spirits can be dangerous, too. To tell the truth, I was actually hoping that I would organically bump into one like I met you, but I know that's probably as rare as getting struck by lightning. But I can use your special spirit summoning method, Lavinia. This area is still sketchy, but the spell makes the odds of succeeding a lot higher."

Lavinia had been about to speak but she closed her mouth and nodded with a frown.

"I have the perfect idea of where to do it, too,” continued Max.

"All right," said Lavinia. "I did notice before that you weren't trying to meet any new spirits here and I kind of figured that was the reason. After all, this is a dark and sinister place with no mana."

"Yeah, well so is the quartet," said Max. His grin held no humor.

"Good point," said the spirit. "So what's the other plan?"

"Well, contracting another spirit is actually plan B, because I don't know if I'm going to meet any, and even if I do, I don't know how useful they'd be. It’s a long shot. In reality, I've gotten extremely lucky with you two already." He nodded at Lavinia and Slick. Lavinia made an embarrassed face and Slick did a backflip.

"So my highest priority plan is to figure out how to create more powerful imprinted beads than I have before."

"I thought you couldn't though," said Lavinia. "Like even if you keep practicing, you just don't have the power necessary. All you can use is what’s inside you, and it takes power to make your beads as-is. You can't make an unlimited amount per day at your current level."

"That's true,but I still have mana units left that I might be able to utilize, and…I can try some things. Like remember the technique I created to pack mana into it mana vault faster? Maybe I can try to do something similar to affect Bead Sorcery, like…break some mana units and then shove that power into a bead."

Lavinia raised an eyebrow. "That sounds extremely risky, dangerous, and probably not a good idea."

"Probably," said Max cheerily. "But risks like that are exactly how I've been able to make every breakthrough in the past. Don't get me wrong, some of them came at a cost and I definitely almost died a few times but…no risk, no reward."

"Max Cunningham, if you kill yourself in this place with a stupid magical science experiment, I'm going to haunt you after death. Even if it takes decades, you could probably dig traps and just kill the damn things that way."

"Fair enough," said Max. “But lets’ try to do it my way first.” Then he stood up, cracked his neck, and stretched his shoulders. "The blood is still pumping and I’m strangely motivated right now. Let's get started."