"With the advent of The System, the medical field has changed drastically. Now injuries that would have taken weeks of recovery and attentive care are healed naturally in days by those with high enough stats and things that were once impossible like regrowing limbs are now not only within reach, but also fairly common among high-levelled healers."

- Angela "Deathsbane" Cortez, Renowned Healer.

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Slowly coming to with throbbing pains throughout my body and a blurry view of the cave that we'd made our home, I let out a low groan as I remembered where I was and what happened. As I gathered my thoughts I heard footsteps echo out in response to my groan and my quickly recovering vision showed me that everyone but Jason had rushed over to my downed body.

"Look who's up, how are you feeling?"(Leo)

"Like shit, why is it that I am always the one who gets injured."(Mason)

"Because you're an overconfident dumbass."(Leo)

"Fair."(Mason)

Saying so I slowly tried to move parts of my body while I readjusted my head so that I could assess my condition, and thankfully other than just soreness the only parts of my body that actively hurt was my head and leg. Just thinking about my leg reminded me of the fear of seeing the body of the crystalmit as it clacked its jaws while its leg tore into my leg slowly crushing it, feeling the skin and muscle tear bit by bit as everything else was a blurry mess, the taste of blood in my mouth as I lay there weaponless and alone, the-

*SMACK*

Forcefully slapping my cheeks to end that train of thought and ignoring the pain that the movement caused me as well as the looks of Jackson and Leo, I cautiously reached a hand to the back of my head, letting out a sigh of relief when all I felt was a bump hidden beneath hair matted with dried blood and an accompanying spike of pain.

"How long was I out?"(Mason)

"It's been about a day, none of us wanted to go into the dungeon until we knew you were good but Jason is hunting some more turkeys for food right now."(Leo)

"We waited for a while in the dungeon but when you didn't wake up we took you back to the cave."(Jackson)

Somewhat surprised that I had been out for a whole day I slowly looked towards my leg that was currently wrapped in a bloody torn sleeve, Slowly unwrapping the crusty bit of clothing and gritting my teeth at the pain, I saw a mostly circular indent in my leg that while mostly scabbed over was still a very gruesome to look at. Wrapping the cloth over my leg once more as I took a deep breath to hold back the gag that I felt emerging when I tried wiggling all my toes and thankfully succeeded.

"Well, not as bad as I was expecting honestly, at the time I thought the fucker pierced through my whole leg."(Mason)

"Plus it doesn't look infected, so that's a plus."(Leo)

"Shit, didn't even think about that, you think they put bacteria and stuff here?"(Mason)

"Huh, didn't even consider that they wouldn't, but now that I think about it I haven't seen anything rot since we've been here and we don't exactly store our food in ideal conditions."(Leo)

Our conversation about the bacteria, or possible lack thereof, of the magical world we were shunted to got interrupted by an exclamation by an incredulous Jackson.

"H-how can you all be so calm? This is the second time you've almost died, and even the first time you just shrugged it off with a joke, hell you even said you wanted to explore MORE of how the world has changed! Not just you, but even Leo and Jason don't seem nearly as worried or scared as anyone reasonably should be!"

Seemingly summoned by the mention of his name, it was at this moment that Jason walked in with 5 turkeys in tow and a missing left sleeve.

"What's this that I'm not scared of? Also if you keep passing out Ima start calling you sleeping beauty, or maybe sleeping ugly, for accuracy."(Jason)

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"That's exactly my point! Until a minute ago we weren't even sure if he would wake up, and even now we don't know how long it will take him to heal if he ever does, but you are treating it like he took a nap for christ sakes!"(Jackson)

Letting out a sigh, I grabbed my still bent, if less so than I originally thought, staff that was beside me when I woke up and exerted all of my willpower to force myself to stand with it as a crutch, letting out a single long groan as I did so to the surprised looks of everyone present.

"Because the alternative is death, or quite possibly worse. Lets say we give in to our fear and trek back to the clearing we spawned where food is plentiful and the monsters are weak and few, no doubt we would make it through the rest of the tutorial with no injuries, but then we will be dropped into a world that is bigger than the one we left and full of monsters who are under no obligation to stay in designated areas based on their strength. Even ignoring the monsters, with all government and infrastructure effectively gone, it's only a matter of time before some high level psychopath comes along dreaming of world domination, or some edgy kid whose parents never told him no decides to kill you for looking at him wrong, or just some jackass that wants to see the world burn, or who the fuck knows what else comes along, and when that happens I refuse to go down easy, so I'll go into the dungeon and fight monsters that only one person in our party is actually effective against, I'll ignore the pain from my injuries that would have killed or crippled me two weeks ago, and I'll continue to do so because while I am scared of what could happen to me if I do, i am terrified of what will happen if I don't. So I'll make jokes about how I almost died, and then I will move on because when it really comes down to it, I don't have a choice. Now I am going to go to the lake and clean as much of my blood as possible while seeing what my near death got me."(Mason)

Saying my piece I hobbled to the lake, leaving a stunned Jackson and an understanding Leo and Jason behind. As I slowly lowered myself into the ice cold water and let the current run over me I looked at the messages that I didn't get to read before passing out.

Congratulations, you have defeated a level 8 Crystalmit x2 and gained 600 EXP

Congratulations, you have levelled up! You have 6 free points to assign

All that for a single level, hopefully they at least dropped some good loot, but my dramatic exit didn't give me any time to ask. Assigning five points into endurance to hopefully speed up my healing and prevent future injuries and putting the last point into intelligence to make it and my wisdom balanced I closed out of the menu and let out a brief defeated sigh before focusing on cleaning myself up, as I had gone into the lake still wearing my clothes since they were more or less crusted on to me with blood the first thing I did was strip, my brief soak having gotten rid of most of the surface crustiness. After taking off the makeshift bandage that was made from Jason's shirt I could feel the cold water go into the wound and give me a second of bliss as it numbed the wound until a stray current brushed it the wrong way and brought back the pain. As I continued to wash both my body and my clothes, having laid my underwear on a rock to dry so I wouldn't be naked when I got out, I thought about my injuries and how they would impact the near and far future. Firstly, I could basically discount the head injury as the headache and bump were already fading, plus if it was serious there wasn't much I could do about it anyway, secondly I knew I could walk and make basic movements given I had my staff based on the fact that I made it to the lake and am not currently drowning. However, it took me about three times as long to get here and I was far from agile, so any fighting would have to be done with me in the back. Looking a bit farther into the future, I actually had a decent bit of hope that my leg would heal with nothing worse than a scar given its current state, but in the event that it is worse than I think I need to get better at fighting from a range, though even without an injury forcing me to I have been neglecting training my control of my lightning and not even using the bolts that I had practiced so much since I had assumed that just because the shells were resistant to lightning that their bodies would be too, which was very dumb in hindsight.

With my body and clothes as clean as they were gonna get and my brooding over for now, I got out of the lake and hung my clothes on a nearby branch and decided to use the time that they were drying to try out a new idea of mine that I had while brooding. You see, the actual bodies of the crystalmits didn't seem particularly resistant to anything, all their defence was in their shell, and while I wasn't confident in being able to land a lightning bolt on the small parts of their exposed body I might have a way around that. So far, I have barely exerted any actual control of my lightning besides basic aiming, and even that I relied on the properties of lightning to actually hit anything, but against the crystalmits that only works against me, so I needed something new that was also simple enough for me to use. The idea was inspired by my most recent near death experience and amounted to covering the ground in ideally a solid net of lightning and then once the crystalmits step on it use the connection to bypass their shell and kill them.

Unfortunately due to either lack of skill or too low of attunement trying to keep the lightning stable and in one place/pattern was incredibly difficult and cost a prohibitive amount of mana as the half-second or so I was able to keep it up took out two-thirds of my mana and made my headache come back. Nevertheless, I hadn't given up on my idea yet and changed my focus to short bursts of lightning that would skitter over the ground and not go into it immediately, which I managed to do about once for a foot and a half before I ran out of mana and headed back to camp. When I got back the general air was still somewhat tense, if less so than when I left and my appearance caused everyone to stop what they were doing and converge on the cave mouth where I was.

"Good, you're back we talked while you were gone but we waited for you to make a decision."(Leo)

"A decision about what?"(Mason)

"The dungeon mostly, while none of us want to abandon it we need to decide what safety precautions to take when we go back to make sure that yesterday's events don't repeat themselves."(Leo)

"Speaking of yesterday, did we get any loot from those crystalmits?"(Mason)

"Oh, yea we did here catch."(Jason)

saying so he tossed a purple-ish crystal towards me that was shaped vaguely like an elongated teardrop and was about 6 inches long, but before I could inspect it with the system Leo spoke up again with a serious look in his eyes.

"Stop deflecting, we aren't planning on leaving you behind so we will need to decide how we are going to proceed with you being injured and even once you do get healed we should have some solid safety rules."(Leo)

"Fine, why don't you tell me what you guys decided while I was gone first."(Mason)

"Firstly we are clearly not able to fight those level eights so we won't go back there until everyone is at that level and you are fully healed before proceeding any deeper, as for the assumed miniboss we will not attempt that until we are all level ten, as for the main boss we will wait until we can reliably and fairly easily take out the miniboss."(Leo)

Seeing nothing wrong with those guidelines, and relieved that they weren't going to try and keep me out of the dungeon, I agreed to the terms without any argument.