Fine, yes, another section of Dungeon more or less solo-cleared. Louse had helped, tangibly, but it was nothing I couldn't have cleared alone. Still, where I had previously been kind of academically thinking man I should look up information on these dungeon biomes before I enter, now that academic interest had turned into, fuck this, I'm going to look this shit up next time. The Caesars had been bad, but the fucking titanic death marionette was the last straw. I had no idea what kind of horrible monstrosity might be waiting, next time. Not being able to proudly say I went in blind simply didn't matter compared to not fucking doing that again.

Of course, I'd had that thought before, and yet here I was again. We'll see.

My lousy mood was made only more lousy when Jenna was waiting by the entrance to the town with, I kid you not, paper and pencil. She was clearly doing something else, because she was sitting on a stool and must have been there for hours, but she didn't miss our entrance or wait even a moment to spring on me.

"I have questions," she said suddenly, jumping up from her chair and moving forward. "I need to know what you know about skills and self-made--"

"No." I turned and pointed a finger at her, putting enough force in my voice that I could swear I felt it with my telekinetic sense--it wasn't loud, exactly, but there seemed to be something to it, but I put it instantly out of mind, and after a moment thought I must have imagined it. "I am miserable and hurting and need to lay down and we can talk later."

"I--" she paused, and looked confused, and I didn't care. I moved past her and headed straight for the inn.

"Do you want food?" asked Louise, matching my stride easily. "I mean, uh, do you want me to grab something now or when you wake up? Because you seem--"

I rubbed my head and tried to figure out an answer to that question, but what immediately sprang to mind was that more than food, I wanted to lay in bed with Louise and sulk until I passed out. "Later."

"Okay. I'm gonna go get--"

I couldn't--didn't want to--stop myself from reaching out and taking Louise's hand. "Later... please?"

I wasn't looking, exactly, though my new sense skill did tell me in all too much detail the change in posture that swept over Louise before she stepped closer to me, squeezed my hand, and said, "Okay."

The the next hour went exactly the way I needed it to, and that's all I could ask.

I felt a lot better eight hours or so later. I sent messages to Mel telling her I'd meet with them all at their convenience, to Jenna apologizing, and to Harry to let him know I'd be leaving soonish. Louise offered me a plate of fried eggs and about half a plate of damn fine bacon, and we talked a little about what we'd gone through, as much just to wrap our heads around the crazy life we led as anything.

And then we went to meet Mel's group in the tavern. They weren't drinking, at least not now. Jenna also had her paper and pencil out, and strangely, so did Mel. Was that a Dungeoneer trick or something? Was there some reason not to use a smartphone? I didn't bother asking.

"Can I presume you beat the Marionette to death with its own limbs?" asked Mel with a wry smile that I just kind of blindly assumed hid a bunch of jealousy.

"Hell no," I said, not bothering to hide the fact that it bothered me. I tried to put a humorous spin on it, adding what I hoped was a sarcastic edge to my voice, even though that spin was more or less the truth. "I had a headache. Can't topple titans with a headache. Next time I come through, I'll be sure to kill it a good ten times in a row to make up for it."

Mel snorted, but seemed relieved to know that I wasn't that fucking overpowered. I decided not to mention the Caesars.

"How did the thing with the Fairy go?" asked Will, fidgeting with a bit of finger food but not actually eating it--fried cheese sticks, I thought. They might have been fish sticks or something, but the smell was wrong for that.

"Well..." I shrugged. "It worked, but for the first time since becoming a Dungeoneer it felt really truly painful. Like... you know how all the pain is kind of dulled and you can just get through things most of the time? Not that, and inside my head."

There were some winces around the table, and Robert, the tank, chewed his lip for a moment before speaking. "So what's the benefit?"

"A bunch of things. I... well, look, I don't feel like keeping secrets, right now, but don't spread this too far, I think," I demurred, "...she lives in the part of me where some of the System stuff is. She helped me do something with skills I was only doing by feel, before, and it's a lot easier. She can also kind of steal information from NPCs, sometimes. From what we were told, that's actually a thing we're supposed to be able to do in order to..." what should I even say about the 'why are the dungeons here' question? Harry and Kamau implied it was secret, but never told me to keep it away from others. "...do some more advanced stuff later."

Some looks were exchanged. Louise looked at me, clearly questioning my choice not to tell them everything, but she didn't seem upset.

"So do you have any insights on how we can get stronger?" Mel leaned forward, her posture more eager than her face. I got the impression, somehow, that they were all eager to learn whatever they could before I disappeared again to who knows where, like they'd never see me again.

That was... well... entirely possible, I guess. It was a big world, and I was likely going to be busy with something or other for the next six months, while they'd go their own way. In terms of putting together a team to beat Bo, I'd never even considered them, dreaming instead of finding a group of like-minded overpowered battle nuts, any of whom would probably put their team to shame, as I... kind of had done myself.

Yeah, now that you put it like that, I bet they're all looking at this like we're some kind of master, right? And maybe you have something to teach 'em, but it's hard to know exactly what.

I sighed and rubbed my forehead. "I don't know. The big thing I have with my telekinesis, which Merry--that's the fairy's name, by the way--helps me with, is I basically... reach into a skill, and control it directly. At some point, and I don't know if it's level or growth rank, but it seems to open up and let you do that. But even once it's possible, I couldn't describe how you do it. I got there by... well, the first time, I was basically ready to go out in a blaze of glory, but I survived. One of those full adrenaline, pull out all the stops things, you know? And every time after that, I was trying to reconnect with the feeling I had back then."

"But with Merry, I don't have to find that emotional place in order to do it." I mentally nudged Merry, and could tell immediately when I had that full access to the skill. With it, and with a little extra concentration, I picked up everyone sitting at the table, chairs and all, plus the table itself, and held us all up for a moment. Predictably, most people freaked out at least a little from that, although Jenna, Mel, and Robert all seemed like they were trying to study me, or my use of telekinesis, or something, even despite being suddenly in an awkward spot. "Which is a freaking good thing, because those emotions are not fucking healthy."

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"So actually using the skill has nothing to do with being desperate or ...whatever?" Robert, while he was talking, kind of poked around to see if he could feel the threads of telekinesis I was using, and didn't seem to find any, partly because I had to move them around as his weight shifted. I decided after a moment to put everyone back down, since several of them were clearly uncomfortable, but he and Jenna, at least, seemed disappointed.

I just shook my head. "The experimentation, at the time, was risky and stupid, but once you have the trick, that's its own separate thing. And maybe the experimentation was only possible because I was... you know... before." I shook my head, still amazed that I was supposed to not be ashamed of my past, now. It really didn't make sense. To me, 'psychic' was still a dirty word, and maybe it always would be. "But without being able to explain it or show it to someone, how could I teach it to people?"

"At least try," urged Jenna. "This is too cool of a thing for it to be completely hidden, right? There has to be a way for us to figure it out."

"I don't..." I sighed. "It's like... there's this point that you may not even be aware of which is where your concentration and focus is. If you're starting at something, it's there; if you're focusing on your legs or arms, or fingers or anything else, it may spread out. If you put your focus on the skill itself, on the thing you mentally touch when you activate the skill, you might be able to move your focus back from that point towards the skill itself... or something?"

Jenna produced a tiny flame at her fingertips, a minor ability tied to a Skill that, from what I recall when I used Skill Sage on her, she had in mid-A-rank a while ago. Robert did the same with a tiny force barrier, and Will pulled out an arrow and focused on it. Although it was hard to study what they were doing inside their heads, I thought Jenna and Will both had puzzled frowns on their faces after a few minutes, while Robert was struggling with no apparent success.

I was just starting to say something along the lines of "It's okay if you can't get it right away" when virtually everything around us suddenly caught on fire.

It wasn't an attack, exactly. Jenna just went from producing a little bit of fire to... producing entirely too much. I was caught too off guard to really process what happened, but in retrospect, I could kind of see her flailing around with the fire itself for a long moment before finding a way to turn it off. In that long moment, when nobody was quite sure how long it was going to last, the fire wasn't just large--it was both large and moving all over the place, infinite fuel pouring out from nowhere, big reddish ethereal walls splashing off of everything.

Now, we were all reasonably high level, nobody was going to die from a little bit of fire damage, but that didn't stop people from freaking the fuck out.

"JESUS CHRIST, Jenna," snapped Will a few moments after it was obvious the ability had been deactivated. He had shoved himself away from the table to avoid it, tipping his chair back, but caught himself on the table with his boots so he wouldn't fall. "A little warning next time!"

Robert, of course, being the shield tank of the group, had put up a wall as soon as he registered the threat, which was still a second or two too late. He was also closest to Jenna, and therefore had some scorched hair, although I was pretty sure that as a Dungeoneer, that would repair itself. His eyes were wide, I thought with fear, and he immediately started looking around, as though the source couldn't possibly have been Jenna, or possibly making sure nobody else (out of zero other people in the tavern) was hurt.

On the other side of Jenna was Louise, who had thrown up her hands to protect her face and head. She was also clearly on a sudden adrenaline high, but simply started channeling healing magic on anyone who needed it. I was next to her, of course, and while I was spooked, I wasn't hurt. Will was on my other wide, then the assassin and Mel.

Mel, of all of them, took a deep breath and found a calmer, more rational part of herself inside before she started talking.

"Clearly when we experiment with this in the future, we need to take some precautions," she said, at once sounding diplomatic and also very clearly needling Jenna. "But... it looks like you did it... right?"

Jenna had briefly, in that moment, extended her hand as though to thrust the fire away from herself, and now she was staring at her hand, as though the hand itself was involved, which I'm sure it wasn't. From the slightly off look in her eyes, I thought she must have been focused deep inside, but after a moment, she suddenly turned in her seat, got up, pointed her hand at the corner of the tavern, and let loose another flamethrower-esque burst of ignited fuel.

I didn't like her eyes, but I thought I understood them.

She switched hands after only a moment, and with some amount of focus, tried to do the same with another spell, but it clearly failed. Judging by the hand motions, she tried another couple times before switching to something lightning-based.

This one, again, she managed to both activate and enhance, and a wiggling pencil-thin beam of blinding blue started to arc, one that sometimes, according to my telekinetic sense, was much thicker.

"I can do it," she said, and I heard something in her voice, something... off.

So I got up and came up next to her. Somehow, immediately, she became jumpy, and she stared at me, as though not understanding why I would be there.

"It hurts, doesn't it?" I figured that was an opener that might snap her out of it.

She... paused, looked down at her hands again. "It stings," she admitted, and I knew she wasn't talking about her hands. "But it's worth it."

"It hurts because it's damaging you." I didn't know that, but as soon as I saw it in her instead of myself, the pattern made sense. She became different immediately after succeeding. Merry had said that the vent released something inside, and it seemed to make me edgy when I used it, even now--irritable, erratic, maybe even a little confused. Was it toxic? Maybe, opined the fairy, but she didn't say more. "Calm down a moment. Take a breath."

Jenna did, breathing deeply like she was thirsty for the air. She nodded after a moment. "You're right, I don't get it, but... it's definitely... wrong, right? There's something that's not right about it."

"Yeah." I paused and scratched my head.

"But it's so worth it."

"Take it slow," I offered again, raising my hands in front of me in what I hoped was a placating gesture. "There's a lot still to learn, and we can keep in touch, but there's no need to rush through it. When I... well, back then, when I first did that, I drowned myself in the skill and burned myself out. You have time. If it's really damaging something..." I frowned, thinking about the things I'd done with my broken mind during Merry's... birth? And the stat increases that followed, but after a moment, I just shook my head. "...I'm sure you'll heal stronger, but I think it has to heal naturally, or possibly gaining experience helps. Potions sure as hell don't fix it, or at least none I've tried."

"Why would experience help?"

"I genuinely have no idea," I answered, though I thought that perhaps, if I found people who knew more about this Cultivation stuff, they might. "It's helping repair some of the internal damage from when I got Merry, though."

"I think we should break for a while," said Louise. She didn't sound like she was insisting, but I'm not sure she would insist, even if she thought she should. "Jerry, did you want to tell them about...?"

"Oh, yeah." I'd told Louise not to bring it up, since it would distract from any other conversation, but maybe now was right time for that distraction. I had Merry shuffle around some more skill Growth Points and purchased an unlabeled entry that we knew unlocked the ability to use Skill Sage on others. "I can do the Skill Sage stuff, now. The unlocking things with points thing, I mean. It's still pretty limited, but..."

"Me first!" Robert jumped out of his chair and hurried forward. "I want to see if my skill with the Energy Barrier has gone up, and I did some research on what you can buy with the points. I should be able to make a larger shield..."

I smiled politely and grabbed a chair. Jenna would take a little time to calm down, and this should let the rest take their minds off it for a bit. And besides, it would help them, and... and I guess, I felt strongly that I should pay them back for treating me like I was a normal person, at least for a while.

People didn't tend to do that, after all. Mostly, before, the ones that knew me didn't like me, and the ones that didn't know me could only see me as an outsider. Now, as things went on, I guess more people would have more reasons for seeing me as weird, an outsider, or otherwise 'special'. My life just kept going in that direction, even as the world itself just kept seeming weirder and weirder around us all. And what could I do? Go back to being normal? That sounded like a terrible idea, even assuming the world doesn't actually need me for this bound fairy thing or whatever. If my life sometimes seemed like a joke, normal people were the butt of it--they were the ones who knew nothing about all the confusing and insane secrets that were all around them.

So I had to cherish the people who were actually decent to me, especially when they seemed more or less sane. If I didn't have them... well, things would only get worse, I thought.