Jason surveyed the ingredients in front of him. As usual, everything he had looked familiar, but none of it was quite right. Trying to cook on Ličio was like trying to cook in a dream. Instead of onions, he had a savory almost onion-y fruit from a tree with purple leaves. But it wasn’t just the trees that were purple; most vegetation they’d seen here was purple. All the leafy greens he tried to convince his party to eat weren’t actually green. It just felt wrong telling someone they had to eat their purples.

Shaking his head, he tossed the last little bit of his not-onion fruit into the shell he was using as a pot tonight. He was pretty happy they’d come across this beast earlier today. Trying to make a meal when you had nothing to cook it in was a nightmare. Their first day out in the wild they’d had to roast food over an open fire. Getting things evenly cooked that way was a major challenge for the inexperienced.

Tossing everything into boiling water, on the other hand, was an easy proposition. He stirred the concoction that he was going to call a soup, whether it deserved it or not. Satisfied it was coming along, he glanced around the camp.

Like the soup, he wasn’t sure if it really deserved to be called a camp. The Guides had given their [Guidance] to [Users] for the first few Skill levels, but neither of them had chosen a Skill that helped with roughing it in an alien landscape. Frankly, he didn’t think there would be many who would pick such a Skill this early.

You can hardly blame them. When you can choose actual magic, why would anyone choose basic life Skills? Sanjay is already coming around to my [Cooking], so I wouldn’t be surprised if they become common choices for third or fourth Skills.

They had a simple shelter in a cave mouth that they’d had to climb a little to get to. Mostly they’d taken shelter here to stay out of the rain, but the elevation should keep most predators away. Their belongings were scattered about; the identical bags they’d been given after finishing the introduction to Ličio, as well as the bits and bobs they’d picked up so far. Food, odd plants and rocks, and the body of the dead… shelled thing.

“Hey Sanj, what did you say this guy was called?”

Sanjay grunted, cracking an eye open from his meditative pose. “A Vezh. You can just use [Inspect] for that. Now stop talking to me, I’m trying to feel my mana.”

Jason nodded, and went back to tending the soup, humming quietly to himself as he did. Not too much longer, as the Vezh meat finished cooking through, Sanjay snapped.

“AGHH! How am I supposed to use this stupid stuff?” He leveled a finger at Jason. “Those ‘Guides’ and their ‘Administrator’ are either lying, or seriously misguided. Those scam artists gave us [Guidance] that’s supposed to show how to use the first few levels of our Skills, right?” Jason just nodded, scooping some soup into a smaller version of the shell he was cooking with.

Sanjay pointed angrily toward his head. “All this ‘[Guidance]’ is telling me is that I should ‘reach into the depths of my soul and guide the energy there’, but there’s nothing! If souls are real, I’m sure I have one, but both conventional wisdom and the stupid instructions for this Skill say humans CAN’T. DO. MAGIC.” He took a deep breath, bringing the anger down to a simmer.

“But the Guides and their Administrator say that the entire reason we’re here is because humanity accepted some magical invitation, which is obviously wrong. So, either they don’t know what’s going on and have less control over the System than they’d like us to believe, or they lied and kidnapped our entire species for… something.” He deflated along with his argument.

“Mhmm,” Jason said, handing over a ‘bowl’ of soup. “And don’t forget the dolphins and elephants. The Guides looked real confused about them.”

Sanjay sighed, sinking onto a rocky outcrop in the cave with his bowl. “Yeah. Yeah, they did. Which, I suppose, is a point towards them not being intentionally malicious.” He sighed again, putting a hand over his eyes. He took a breath. “I’m sorry for the outburst. It’s just– It’s all so fucked, man. We’re at work one moment, then we’re standing on some alien planet with all of humanity, packed in like sardines, and some dickbags who clearly have no idea what’s going on shuttle everyone off to other planets. AND THEN, they tell us we have to go fight for our lives and clear some fucking [Dungeons]? To ‘make the planet habitable again’? Like, how the hell is that our problem?”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Jason patted him on the back. “It’s unfair. It’s unjust, but it happened, and we can’t change that. All we can do is get through it, and hope we come out the other side okay.”

Sanjay nodded, lip quivering. “I know. I know.”

They ate the rest of the meal in silence. It was not an uncomfortable silence, but a cathartic one. With emotions spent and aired, they recovered from the struggles of the day.

As they cleaned up, Jason looked over at his comrade. “So, you didn’t feel any mana at all?”

Sanjay wobbled his hand. “I felt mana outside my body, but none in it.”

“And you can’t use that at all?”

“Well… The [Guidance] says [Mana Manipulation] is for taking the mana in your body and using it out of your body. If I look at the Skill itself…”

[Mana Manipulation]

Bend mana to your will. Bend the world to your mana.

“...It doesn’t say I can’t use it. But [Guidance] doesn’t tell me how to, so I guess I’ll just have to figure it out myself.”

“That’s the spirit!”

Sanjay flopped on his back, staring up at the cave ceiling as the rain pounded outside. “How do you think Frank is doing? What kind of planet do you think he ended up on?”

Jason flopped beside him. “He’s probably fine. I always thought he was fairly resourceful. And, who knows? Maybe he ended up somewhere friendly, like Earth.”

Frank hefted the sledgehammer, wondering how lethal it would be when he was done with it. While it wasn’t included in the riot gear he’d been tasked with experimenting on, it was still something the Vanguard might find usable when he was done with it, so it was all good.

Probably.

He set it down on his workstation, eyeing it critically as he rehydrated the deer blood. With just a bit of water it was thick and sluggish, which would likely work better for his purposes. As he looked at the hammer, deer blood singing through his Skill to be used, he considered how to approach this enchantment.

A sledgehammer fundamentally had one purpose; hit things really really hard. He could write in ‘impact’, like he’d done with the baseball bat at the meeting, but that didn’t feel quite right. It was grounds he’d already tread before and it lacked… impact.

What he needed now was something a little grander, something that would really shock and awe.

He tilted his head. Shock…

Along the side of the hammer head, he wrote in bold letters: ‘SHOCKWAVE’.

Something felt different about this enchantment. Like it had more meaning. The blood shimmered as he finished writing, and then it burnt, dissipating into smoke like the failures had before. Unlike the failures, however, the word was left imprinted into the side of the head.

Excitedly, he took the hammer out to the parking lot that had quickly been designated for testing after Frank’s ‘electric’ experiment had startled everyone. Here, a few workers were still setting up random crates and metal barrels for targets.

Frank chose one of the barrels, and swung at it with all the might he could muster. As the hammer made contact, he saw the word ‘SHOCKWAVE’ briefly flash with light before he felt it. From the point of impact, a shockwave burst out, caving in the majority of the barrel, knocking over its neighbor, and wrenching the hammer out of Frank's hands. It flipped backwards over his head, and landed on the ground a few feet away.

He stared at, hands aching from the force. “It has recoil.”