I moved back away from the camp to get some privacy, this was not going to be a fast, quiet endeavour. The fetid soil was moist but not saturated, so I could make a hole well enough. If I lay down for too long, I might get wet, but other than that, it was a fine hole.

Easily a four out of ten.

I suppose there was no way it would be my best work, considering I had one arm and did not want to use a skill and cause myself any more pain than I needed.

It was decently far from the camp and in the middle of the brush, but I still gathered some material, curling it up as best as I could. When that didn’t work so well, before I started, I wrapped it around the handle of my, or I guess Anna’s, shovel to give it some more give before I bit down.

I am so going to need to clean the hells out of this shovel before I put it back, it is so dirty it’s unimaginable. I might just need to find a new one for her and stow this one somewhere until I get all the gunk out of the wood…

Maybe I should have thought of picking up stuff before I headed out. I should have. Gods, except for Death, why am I such a dunce?

The gods sadly, or maybe luckily, did not reply. I don’t know what I would have done if one of them did, but my day definitely would have gotten more complicated.

I began to manipulate the mana in my body to round out the disruptive mana but quickly came to a sudden, unexpected, and rather distressing finding. I had been checking my mana periodically to ensure nothing happened since I used so much, but I had been comparing the two values.

When I went to check now and see how much I had to work with, I found that I had not gained but lost mana.

I had gone from around half to a quarter. I had used some mana, but not nearly enough to burn through some 500 points of it.

And I had no gods damn clue where the hell it had gone.

“One thing at a time. Ok, I’m going to start now,” I told Selly.

She nodded and held on, I bit down, and ignoring my mana reserves, I started rubbing at them.

To say it smarted would be an understatement. Rounding out the sharp fragments of mana with my mana would be like rounding out fragmented bone using my own muscles. It also gave feedback from both ends. The sharp mana cut me, and rounding it out was like rubbing off my fingers. A double whammy of a uniquely horrible sensation I wish I had never felt.

Each moment, however, I made progress, rounding out the sharpest parts, slowly but surely, the sharp pain of the mana turned into a dull invasive presence, like the rock in my sandals, only inside of me in an additional horrible and unique sensation that expanded my horizons and got added to the list of things I hate.

After Rounding it out, smoothing all the myriad spots, I could have left them. The mana that had been rubbed off slowly merged back into my body’s background mana, flowing into my muscles, sinews, bones and fat, not that I could properly distinguish those very well, they were blobby bits of slightly different feeling mana inside my body. Figuring out the different fleshy bits was like trying to figure out the names of three shades of red by eye. Bones were a bit easier, they were slightly different, but they were also similar, like red but with a brownish bit to it.

Instead, I started to continue to round them out, taking short breathing breaks. Eventually, I took the shovel haft from my mouth, the leaves were in shreds, bits of them stuck in my teeth, but the mana was small enough that I could just muscle through the pain without shouting.

I smoothed them out, sanding them away until they were the size of glass beads, then I broke them. They disintegrated, and I finally got relief from the constant presence.

It was like I could breathe again, the heady relief of it masked the presence of the arrows and wounds of my body. It was a high to fight the ages, my body started to release tension I didn’t realize I had been holding.

“Selliban, I think your advice was too good. I feel amazing. I’m liable to act unwisely.”

She snorted, “That’s just the lack of pain, twil’ pass soon enough yeh silly git. You should probably start with the arrows, my skill is draining me less right now than before because you’re in less pain. Come on, we’ve been here for some time. Pick up the pace.”

I nodded, almost groggily. I grabbed up the grass and pre-chewed two bits, then shaped them a bit. Then, gingerly, I held the arrow and tried to wiggle it out. My body did not like that, but the moment it started going, it got easier, the rush slowly slowing to a crawl. Once I got them out, I pressed the grass in and got onto the second, then I filled my mouth with the last of the grass and simply coaxed the life energy out of it as best as I could in an attempt to speed the healing.

Actively tampering with the release of mana felt odd to my body. It was itchy, warm and pins and needles all simultaneously.

I checked the hodgepodge of mana and the grasses nature mana, and as it started to fill in, I tugged the grass out, bit by bit, until the life mana lost its flare, and it slowed back down.

Notably, focusing on it for the first time, I figured out something about Life mana. When it gave other manas energy, like those in my muscles, it changed, but it changed into a mana type I hadn’t seen before.

A mana type I was familiar with.

[Death Magic Affinity] told me exactly what it was. It turned into a tiny bit of Death Mana.

I pondered over it, plucking at the mana to move it around.

On instinct, I moved it from where it was to a place where it should be, my mana pool. There were dozens of little bits of it inside me from all the grass that I had used, so I balled it all up and wiggled the ball of it in at once.

I didn’t know what leaving it in my body would do if anything, but I figured waste not, want not. My mana pool was already low enough that I was a bit worried.

When I tossed it in. However, something odd happened. I noticed it interacting with something I couldn’t see, and when it did, it mixed into it, mixing it and slowly filling up my mana pool.

For a moment, I thought it was making mana out of nothing, but it wasn’t, it was just changing what was already there, something that was all around me that I couldn’t sense properly. Watching it, I figured out why I couldn’t see it, it was like the darkness of a starless sky. The world of mana I saw with [Magi], viewed alone, was different amounts of light and dark and colour, the light was mana, the dark areas between the mana and the colour the type. The dark mana, tenebra, or whatever the proper name was, was so dark it had faded into the background of the lights, where it drained in the energy of the mana around it, diming and contracting it.

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The Death mana changed that, forcing it to release some of its stored mana, and with it, it expanded slightly, filling up past where it had been initially. The Death mana, for a lack of words, killed the dark magic that I couldn’t see.

I tried to encourage the Death mana to stick around and convert more, but it slowly changed to the base mana types that my reserve carried mostly greens, browns and whites of the plants, land and air.

I had been, without realizing it, sucking it up into myself, and I had no idea how to get rid of it.

I adjusted the grass as I stared off into space. And as I waited for it to heal as much as it could, I played around with it. The first ball had gotten me a good bit, but scattering in a bunch was even better. Once I had recovered my mana to a relatively okay level, I started scattering the death mana throughout my body, dragging it around like a fishing net.

That, too, had a surprising effect, at least if Selly’s squeak of relief was anything to go by.

“What are yeh doing? I know you’re doing something with your thousand-pace stare,” she asked, genuine curiosity in her voice.

“I’m just dragging death mana around inside my body. Can you tell me what’s going on? Is your skill draining you less or more?”

She looked at me for a moment, mouth open, gaping at me.

“How in all the courts does dragging death mana, which sounds rather ominous by the by, miss I’m not undead, make my skill cost less? If anything, it should be increasing it, shouldn’t it?” she asked, disbelief stacked so thickly in her tone it had a nigh tangible feel.

I, for a moment, went to find a jibe or emotion like I had been doing for a while, but it wasn’t there.

Ever since I had been running around deeper in the forest, I had been more on edge. Paranoia, fear, anger, doubt, and even sensation-wise with my pain. The horrible cold and pain in my wounds edged me to give up.

“Selly, could you drop your skill for a moment?” I asked her.

“You sure?”

“I think I can work for a bit without it, I just want to check quickly, you deserve a break.”

“Here goes,” she told me, dropping it. The sensation of all of my wounds came right back, along with new pains I had not been aware of.

“Ahh, Ahh, ok, still in pain, ahh, but it’s not as bad as it was earlier,” I told her, letting out little pants of pain finding their way out of me on reflex.

Notably, the rock in my sandals was causing me problems. That and the cold were both of an equivalent level of pain where the death mana wove through my body.

I reached down and got my sandals clear so they at least wouldn’t get worse. But I couldn’t easily get rid of all the bad mana stuff floating around inside me. I didn’t have enough death mana to get rid of it, and it was increasing, seeping into me from the ground.

I got the most relief from my legs, where there was a suspicious amount of dark space.

It didn’t hurt, it just made everything worse, taking me off balance and messing with me in small ways I hadn’t been aware of.

There wasn’t much I could do, but hope it didn’t cause adverse effects. After all, any captive who had been here longer must be far worse off than I was, and getting anyone out alongside the Sprite queen was my objective.

“Rest up a bit Selliban, I’ll need your help when we go in, but I can handle it right now,” I told her.

She looked a little droopy but never showed if she needed to stop or was tired. Or if she did, she did it in a way that I couldn’t understand, some sort of non-verbal tick, like a Kobold's ears.

“Aye, I could use a short nap, I suppose. Just don’t tell my queen. Yeh?” she asked me quietly.

“No worry, rest up,” I told her quietly.

She climbed up onto my head and then stopped moving, a quiet mewing snore picking up soon after.

And for once, I took my own advice and rested up too. The grass ran out of life mana eventually, though there was a little in the soil from my [Wellspring of Renewal], which helped isolate me from the corruption present in the ground a little. Unfortunately, if I used the Death mana it made, I would just open myself up to more corruption, limiting me to only the mana from the grass.

Every bit helped, I supposed.

Why couldn’t I see the Tenebra? I was fairly sure it was just another type of mana, even Anna’s understanding led to that it was mana that was stuck somewhere. And I could sense Mana. So, I should be able to sense it. Instead, I could only sense its presence by how it interacted with other mana.

It seemed to sap away at it, sucking it away, which made it get darker and contract. It was insidious in a way.

From what I could gather, it was like mana had different levels of energy, like a person. If it was high energy, it was like a happy person, they lived their best life and did their best. It went from that to low energy, like a person in mourning, depressed at everything, curled up into a ball on its bed, and taking up less space in a room. The type of pain that brought the mood down in a room.

It was kind of like that, only they could bring the mood down so bad it made other people depressed. Could you do the opposite? Could you just slam a ton of high-energy mana in to bring the mood back? Could you make the dark mana light again? Or was it only Death Mana that could do it? And if so… Why? It would, at the very least, ruin my metaphor, but it would also be a strange thing to be hinged upon.

Life made other colours more vibrant and gave up its light to others, if death was the opposite of life… did it work in reverse? It didn’t seem to do that to most types of mana, it didn’t suck the life from the earth, or air, or plants, just the dark tenebra mana.

It didn’t make sense to me; I couldn’t see a pattern here, and I had the feeling there was one, which meant that I was missing something.

I was missing a part or a few of this puzzle. Missing parts and a full education on mana. I wonder if Anna would be okay with stepping up my teaching and maybe showing me a few books on it to expand my understanding.

That was for later, though.

I needed a plan, too, and that was something that was a little more pressing.

It was near the water, but the banks seem to have been raised. I could probably dig under the encampment walls, but I would need a way out of here, too. If there was anyone else around, and I needed to bring them out, a hole wouldn’t be enough. They would give chase. And if the person’s most hypothetical were in a similar state to mine, with foul taint in their body to weaken them, or worse, had way too much from constant exposure, they would have a hard time running. Add in possible starvation and wounds, and they would be dead meat. Anyone that wasn’t child-sized or smaller would be a walking corpse.

So how did I bring them out?

A hole could get me in and out, but to get away, I would need something like a cart or, with the water, I supposed a boat. Unfortunately, there hadn’t been any I could see, and I doubted they just had a whole barge just sitting in the lake with a sign reading, ‘Please steal and ride away with our captives.’

There was also the dam, which I wanted to get rid of. That would be easy enough, or it should be, all I needed to do was weaken one side and let the water hurtle the wood barricade down the river. It might cause a little damage, but this was all recent, it wouldn’t be a thousand-year flood, just a little damage and maybe some missing boats if they weren’t tied down well. I would say halting an increasingly damaging force that would kill a whole lot of people outweighed a little damage easily, I wasn’t going to even contemplate the opposite, it would achieve nothing and waste an opportunity to push back the forces arrayed against the people of the valley.

To top it off, I had to think about how I might handle undead and or a [Necromancer].

I waited and pondered, taking deep breaths, trying to piece together a picture from the disparate pieces I had.

My mind whirled in my head, like the bodies of all of my wise ancestors spinning in their graves.

The dam would have to go last. It would be inherently obvious and alert everything that we were here. I would have to be safe first.

Could I go over the dam? Pack the dirt down and go across, then break it?

That would certainly leave me safe from pursuit, at least for a while. The Gremlins would have to go around the lake or through the river after it calmed down.

It wouldn’t guarantee anything but give me a good headstart. The only problem was, could others get back?

I could keep both of my choices open, that would be the smart answer. Bust the dam if It was just the queen and run back to new moarn. But what would I do if there were more than just the three of us? I could break the dam, but they wouldn’t be able to keep up with me, the likelihood that they would be caught was significantly higher, assuming they could make it.

I could do something similar to what I do inside if any prisoners are secure. I can eliminate undead when they are ready to leave, and I could try and kill any mages I see first, scout a little and try and end as many as I can before ditching and running off if they were in danger.

If I could just figure out how to get them out of here, I could better define my plan.

“If only there were a boat, or a big piece of wood, or… or-” I said, talking to myself while Selly snored, mew, mewing to herself.

My little kobold brain, with its different disparate pieces, suddenly snapped into focus, each part filling in an answer that left me speechless.

I had a plan on how to get everything together, I just had to hope that it wasn’t a very poor idea.

After all, I really didn’t want to drown anyone with one of my hair-brained schemes.