I kicked off the ground beneath me, leaping high and then pulling myself forward across the stony slope with my arms before leaping once more. Behind me, wyverns converged on where I’d just been.

Finding me missing, these ones didn’t slow their momentum to breathe poison and attack, instead swooping past with talons outstretched and reorienting for another dive.

?—Mana 883/1580, 41% Primeval

?—[Life Pool] 81/100

The wyverns flew faster than I could run or fly. Their [Strength] was likely high enough to pierce me clean through with their talons or jaws, making them potentially lethal. But with my gaze and [Wild Bond], I could see them coming.

On the ground, they had a wide array of offensive capabilities. Chasing me like this, however, their options were more limited. As long as I kept my air envelope around me to spare me from any flybys with their poisonous breath, and as long as I could keep myself out of their talons….

Another wyvern dove for me, opening its wings at the last moment and using its air magic to call a massive wind and gain a sudden burst of speed—but I answered it with my own burst of speed using [Surge of Might], leaping into the air and onto a rock outcropping to continue on my journey up the mountain.

?—Mana 841/1580, 43% Primeval

Good. [Primeval Mana Hide] had left me so much mana regeneration that I was almost able to fly permanently. If I could lean on my physical abilities to evade them, I could slowly winnow away their numbers with lightning bolts.

This was the power of building my skillset for such a broad set of attributes. Even with only a single offensive magical skill, I had options.

Another white cat came for me, and I easily smashed its head apart with my axe, then turned to continue bounding up the mountain with easy strides. My [Air Magick] and [Wild Bond] both helped me to find my footing without [Earth Magick]—anything my gaze couldn’t sense was likely rock or earth.

I reached the mist-layer, my eyes useless in its near-blinding light. There were six wyverns chasing me by the time I did, and I spent almost as much time dodging their breath and talons as I did climbing the mountain. It was no matter, however: I wasn’t really trying to climb, just to get away from them without getting so far from their habitat that I ended the convergence.

The mana in the air grew even more dense, and I could feel it being absorbed by my [Primeval Mana Hide]. It wasn’t the time for lighting bolts, however—not yet. Instead I kept moving across the slope below me, waiting until another wyvern dived before I leapt away and took flight, pulling myself up and then rushing almost straight upward in an effort to clear the cloud.

There had been more elementals in the other mist layer, and I had no interest in spending any time in this one and potentially gaining the attentions of unwanted enemies. Still, as I rose through the cloud and soared past my group of pursuing wyverns, I focused on my gaze, waiting….

I saw what I’d feared in the form of a solid spike of compact air rushing toward me through the cloud. The luminous mist rippled as it approached, and I pulled my sail tight just as it struck me with the force of a charging boar and sent me spinning through the air.

An air elemental. Not an intelligent one, and not a hostile one, either: it had just been seeing if I wanted to play.

I shut my eyes, stopped myself from spinning using my own [Air Magick], then put out my sail and began rising through the cloud again, dismayed by the necessary waste of mana. I kept my focus on my gaze, watching for another one of them… but none found me before I broke free of the mists and caught sight of the landscape above them.

The mountain’s peak rose ahead of me, the caldera at its tip frosted with a small ring of snow. Behind it, fading into the mists, lay several more mountains, each taller than this one.

And several more kilometers above it, unbelievably, was another layer of luminescent mist, this one bright like the one below me.

“Incredible,” I said, swooping down to land on the rocky terrain. There were hardly any plants, now, and from the air I could see the scattered nests of wyverns, each built from half-dissolved stumps of trees and animal bones, dark tangles as wide as barns.

?—Mana 531/1580

“Hah!” I cried even as two new wyverns dove for me and the others began to rise out of the mists behind me. They were getting slower, the wyverns, and I’d suspected they might: they needed to use their [Air Magick] to gain altitude quickly, and they simply didn’t have the mana or the mana replenishment to chase me up the mountain forever.

I took full advantage of this fact to strike at the two new additions to my pursuers, fighting them much like I had their relatives below. I dodged the first, distracted it with minor lightning, hewed off its head as the second came in for the kill, distracted that one with minor lightning, put my axe through its skull and yanked it clear in a shower of bone and gore….

+ 12,875 Essence, [Boon]

+ 11,596 Essence, [Boon]

Then I was off again, the other wyverns too numerous for me to stop for. But I’d spent little more than 100 mana on their fellows, and despite riding the occasional gust of air up a cliff face or across a field of gravel, my mana was replenishing quickly.

Two more cats came for me, one of them throwing frost shards while the other simply pounced, trailing fog, but neither their claws or frost magic was threatening to me. I evaded the first to rush forward and behead the second, trailing a line of mana that I ignited a moment later, distracting the last cat enough to burst its head before leaping back out of the way of another of my entourage of wyverns.

I queried again when I was close to the snow:

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?—Mana 1055/1580, 51% Primeval

?—Life Pool [61/100]

?—Surge Pool [68/100]

Then, familiar with their movements, I unspooled another 700 mana into the air, carefully ending the line in the spot that I knew would catch their head if I loosed my lightning bolt at just the right time.

The wyvern dove. I called the lightning, and the mountaintop echoed its fierce, thunderous crack as the wyvern’s head burst open, its skull broken and its brain becoming little more than a hissing gout of smoke and steam as its corpse fell limply down the mountainside.

+ 11,557 Essence, [Boon]

The wyverns all let out cries in response to the lightning, and as a few more of them joined the fray, I turned and began to run up the slope of the mountain once more, turning once I reached the boundary of the snow, not wanting to fight on ground that would be treacherous now that I didn’t have [Frost Magick] to secure my footing.

Ahead of me I spied a large depression in the stone where snow bordered rock, and I made for it as I evaded the wyverns, leaping up onto a precipice to look down into the strange formation.

A portion of the frozen caldera had fallen in, but only in places, as if collapsed from beneath by a great, tunneling creature. Pillars of stone still rose fifty feet above the massive, fragmented slabs beneath them. Snow and ice was built up in their crevices and along the the steep sides of the field of stone.

It was perfect.

I could rise through the air faster than they could, and I could use the many cracks and ledges to climb the cliffs and pillars without spending mana. Now that I’d reached as high as I could climb, I needed good terrain to fight in—and I knew I’d find no better than this.

I leapt down into the tiny canyon, slowing my fall a little with a blanket of air, then waited until the wyverns had all dived after me to climb the largest jutting pillar of rock with a series of leaps, pulls, and short burst of flight.

I crested the top of the stone pillar just as a hulk of a new wyvern, the largest I’d seen, slammed to the stone in front of me. It reared up, poison already dripping from the corners of its mouth.

I knew that I didn’t want to give up this high ground, didn’t have room to dodge back the way I normally did, certainly not against a creature so large whose breath would stretch far….

I howled, surging forward and thrusting with the upward spike of my axe to pierce it above the breast, yanking the axe free and thrusting again. The wyvern howled, its wings coming down to steady its weight as it backed up to snap at me with its jaws.

I surged [Strength] and lashed out with my axe, cutting its mouth with a heavy blow that sent teeth flying in a bloody spray. It reeled, but my axe flashed as it snapped forward again, cleaving most of its lower mandible away. A broken hiss escaped its mouth, and two more downward swings of my axe ate away the front of its face as if I were furiously hacking at a tree stump. At last I plunged the axe-tip through the hole in its skull between its eyes, then ripped it free and spun to face the rising horde beneath me.

+ 14,633 Essence, [Boon]

Your level limit has increased to 24!

I howled, ecstatic with bloodlust, my voice joined by the cries of the wyverns coming to meet me, the blood of their greatest pooling around my bare feet even as my skin burned and smoked with what little acid it had released.

You spend 11,000 Essence to gain 1 level! You are now level 24 / 24.

You gain 1 [Bestow 14]

You spend 1 [Bestow 14] to add 14 to your [Source]. Your [Source] is now 172.

Then I leapt from the edge of the pillar, pulling my sail tight to my body so that I fell, aiming for one of the lowest wyverns, guiding my fall with small bursts of air so that I landed point-first on the wyvern’s head, cracking its skull to pierce through to the brain beneath, then rolling off its back as the momentum of my fall continued.

Again I used air magic to ensure I landed well, rolling and coming up in a crouch to leap away from the wyverns above as they adjusted the course of their flight.

I made for another outcropping of stone, determined to make them gain and lose altitude as much as I could, depleting their mana and robbing them of the surges of speed that kept me constantly evading. As I ran, I queried:

?—Mana 1231/1720, 35% Primeval

I deemed it was enough, so I struck one of the wyverns from the air as it came toward me, then leapt up onto the next stone edifice.

I fought on and on. They dove, I dodged. I climbed, they rose, and I leapt and cut them from the air. They breathed their poisonous breath, I hurled my lethal bolts of skull-shattering lightning. The motions of their wings dispersed their poison across the floor of the valley, but I pushed the worst of it away from me and simply bore the rest: I was immune to poison, and the itching acid on my skin was heavily muted by my high [Aegis].

As we fought, I kept looking for other animals. The distance from this mountain to the swamp was more than five kilometers. If any other creatures were drawn by the primeval resonance, they’d have to climb the mountain to reach me. Even once they got here, they’d still have to fear any wyverns that hadn’t answered the call. The birds of the forest were the most likely to show, but they were also the wyverns’ natural prey.

Instead it was only the white cats, and not many of them—I guessed they were better adapted to the higher peaks, with more snow atop them. If one of them had come for me at just the right moment, it might have thrown off a much-needed evasion and left me vulnerable to the wyverns. But that moment was a half-second among so many, it was little surprise to me that the oncoming cats meant nothing, were trivially easy to kill.

Soon I stood atop one of the stone outcroppings—and I stood alone. The last of them nothing but a headless corpse that lay before me, gushing blood from its severed neck. I leaned on my axe, grinning.

The convergence had brought just over twenty wyverns. What did that mean for the population in the area? On Aranar, it would mean two hundred—a huge number for a mountain this size.

What I knew that it meant was powerful skill keys. I’d let Hassina decide how they were distributed. It was my right to take any that I thought I needed to do my work, and of course she’d treat my recommendations as orders, for now. But I had claimed twenty-five rank 2 boons, and eight of them could make [Air 2] skill keys. Almost all of the remainder could make [Sight 2]—keys that would let our telepaths and wildhearts communicate at long distances.

Soon my people would be hunting and scouting. Only [Mind] or [Change] cores were as valuable for that task as these.

I absorbed mana from the air around me until I was full, then took flight, heading for the snowy peak. I reached the lip of the caldera in short order, looking inside to see a wyvern nest had been made on an island in the center of a small, frozen lake.

Its occupant was even bigger than the largest I’d killed in the convergence, but not by much. Palefang had indeed kept the summit clear of anything that grew too strong to threaten him.

It shrieked as it saw me, then spread its wings and rose into the air, flying toward me.

I struck it from the sky with a bolt of lightning that cost more than a thousand mana.

It crashed into the ice a moment later, its head a smoking ruin.

+ 16,238 Essence, [Boon]

I didn’t descend into the caldera. Instead I flew to highest part of the mountain and perched there, looking out at a sea of bright cloud beneath me, broken only by a few distant peaks.

Then I pulled out my pipes, extended my gaze into the air around me, and began to play.