The atmosphere of the group changed instantly. Everyone was suddenly alert, their auras now dangerously sharp, like a blade that had just been drawn from its scabbard.

“We got incoming,” Vyra said again. “A Breaker Bear from the front. It's caught our scent; we'll have to fight.”

“A Breaker Bear you sae? That'll be a tough'un,” Thora said, and the group seemed to come to twice the level of alertness they were at and rapidly began throwing around ideas for tactics and possible ambush strategies.

As they were engaged, Tear turned to me. “Didn't you...?” she asked.

“Yes, a pair.”

“In 5 seconds...?”

“It was 2!” I complained in mock outrage.

“Huh. Maybe you are slightly capable,” Tear said thoughtfully.

“What does that mean you cheeky brat?” I demanded irritably, flicking one of her cat ears.

She made complaining noises at me and jumped out of flick range, as Lupia moved in closer to me.

“What are you doing?” I asked curiously.

“I heard that you sold two Breaker Bears to the butcher,” she said in way of an answer.

“So next to me's the safest place huh?” I chuckled.

What felt like moments later, a loud crashing and tearing could be heard form deeper in the forest. The adventurer group stopped mid discussion and separated slightly.

“Breaker indeed,” I muttered.

The large bear monster smashed its way through a bush and ran straight into a blinding light spell and an arrow. It roared with pain and reared as the projectile struck it in the eye, blinding it.

“Tsk,” Liz clicked in annoyance, “I was hoping that would kill it, now it's going to be hard.”

As its remaining vision was still clearing, Dranner and Vyra struck at it with their buster blade and daggers respectively, Vyra leaping in from its blind side, Stone stepping forward to take the still tremendous force of its wild swings with his tower shield, his clawed feet being driven into the mossy ground. Thora hang back, preparing to heal anyone who was injured, his mace in one hand. Liz rapidly drew back her bow and unleashed another shot at the Bear, the arrow zipping past Stone’s head into its open maw, followed moments later by Janet casting a blue bolt of energy, the energy crackling down the arrow shaft and causing smoke to pour out from between its teeth.

“They're quite good at this,” I commented to Lupia as I leant against a tree, both my hands behind my back, still playing with my yoyo. The wolfkin examiner was keeping a keen eye on the fight while making notes in a little notebook, her quarterstaff leaning on her shoulder.

Tear was watching bright eyed but carefully, ready to take cover behind me if things went wrong. She was also keeping one hand on her knife, though she didn't seem to be aware it was there; instincts as an ex-street urchin I supposed.

As I watched the adventurers fight I began to notice something odd: the adventurers were using their lifeforce and mana in a way I hadn’t thought of before. The knowledge the God of Reincarnation had given me of course included how to manipulate my own mana flows, but when it came to manipulating lifeforce, the bodily energy determined by the amount of health one had, I only had the barest understanding, only that required to reduce the intensity of the flows to retract my aura to the point it was at now.

“Hmmm…” I hummed pensively to myself, turning my attention back to the fight, specifically watching for how the adventurers used their mana and lifeforce.

Janet… wasn’t really doing anything special, just pouring mana into her magic, though I wondered how she was casting such a variety using just one staff. “Note to self: find out about magic later”.

Liz seemed to be using both mana and lifeforce; lifeforce to strengthen herself when drawing back on her power, and mana to infuse the arrow itself. That was interesting, lifeforce didn’t seem able to be projected unless there was a direct connection to the body.

Dranner and Stone were using just lifeforce to enhance their sword and swings, and shield and body respectively.

Vyra… Vyra was the most interesting of the lot. Each dark grey hand was gripping a dagger each, pure lifeforce being channelled into one, but the other was being charged with both lifeforce and mana… “Is that a magic weapon?” I murmured to myself, and was very surprised when Lupia replied.

“Probably.” One of the pair of erect wolf ears flicked between me and the battle. “I’ve yet to meet a dark elf who doesn’t have at least one.”

“Uh, thanks.” The ear flicked back to focus on the battle while I focused inside myself. Following a lifeforce channel from where it originated at my heart, down my arm, to my fist, which I clenched then relaxed. I then tried to imitate what I’d sensed the adventurers do. Gradually the flow down that channel increased, the lifeforce emerging from the channel to flow around my muscles. I clenched my fist again. The improvement in strength was shocking, despite me only pushing a little lifeforce in. I let the lifeforce channel return to normal, slowly clenching and unclenching my fist as it did so.

For my next experiment, I pushed both my mana and lifeforce out through my other hand into my yoyo, which seemed to perk up, responding more quickly to my directions and spinning faster. I wouldn’t know just how great the effect would be without trying it on something, but I could tell it was definitely more dangerous than before. A quick glance internally told me that I was supplying only a fraction of what I had available. My introspection was halted by the smell of burning wood and I quickly realised that the magical effect of my armour was also affected by the mana moving through it; it had heated up and was now burning a handprint into the tree I was leaning on.

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I hurriedly pulled my mana back and stuffed my hand into my pocket, complete with the yoyo's string, which didn't affect its motion in the least. I left the lifeforce flowing into my armour, noting that it strengthened it without causing it to heat up. It seemed that mana triggered the magical effects on items whereas lifeforce strengthened them and the one wielding them.

I turned my attention back to the fight just in time to see Vyra’s magical dagger slash through the Breaker Bear’s throat, followed up by Dranner who took its head off with a mighty sweep of his buster blade.

“He ramped up the lifeforce he was putting through his sword to do that,” I quietly noted.

Lupia glanced at me. “You can sense that?”

“Yeah, can you not?”

Whatever she said was lost as the headless Bear finally collapsed to the ground.

“What?”

“Nevermind.”

I shrugged, directing the yoyo to roll up my arm and flick off the tree trunk onto my head, where it started spinning on the spot, then called out to the panting party. “Yo, great job!”

“Says the man who did nothing,” spat Dranner.

Stone gave him a look. “Him doing nothhhing is thhhe purpossse of thhhisss tessst,” he reminded him.

I nodded at his words, the large yoyo still not falling off. “He's right you know. Also, what are you going to do about that?” I indicated towards the forest, from which came a loud hiss. A giant serpent slithered out, and was immediately stabbed through the head by Vyra.

“Sorted,” he said.

“Nevermind then,” I grinned at him.

I was nice and offered to store their kills in my inventory, but it turned out Janet had an Item Box, and so they were placed in there instead. I guess that was where they were keeping some of their equipment, such as tents, since I didn't see them on them. Once that was done, we continued on towards the tower.

We ran into rather a lot of monsters, lots of them dangerous, but Liz and Vyra detected almost all of them before they reached the adventurer party, so they had some time to prepare. The exception was a tunnelling mole-like monster that tried to bite Stone's heavily armoured leg off, and was permanently dissuaded from trying again by means of a smashing a tower shield on its face. The small amount of damage that had managed to be dealt through the metal was quickly healed by Thora however, so it was no problem at all.

During all these encounters, I, the casual yoyoist, sat back and watched together with the note-taking Lupia and the starry-eyed Tear.

Eventually we came to a small rise in the forest, and through the trees I spotted my tower in the distance.

“Oh, there it is!” I called, and the party looked round.

Lupia frowned. “We're still quite far away, are you sure it's your tower?” she questioned doubtfully, straining to see it.

“Yup,” I replied, pointing through the trees at the distant dark spike on the horizon.

Lupia looked through the branches to where I was pointing and her mouth fell open. “When did you say you built that?” she asked weakly.

“Umm, 9 days ago,” I said, ticking off days on my fingers, “then I spent the next day filling in the floors, then have been adding to the floors when they've become necessary.” “I really need to take a break, slow down a bit,” I added in my mind.

Even Tear looked shocked. “You built the entire tower 9 days ago?!” she cried.

“Look, I build stuff quickly,” I said defensively, “and it’s not up to scratch just yet.”

“That’s not up to your standard?! What is, the Capital Palace of Arivin?!”

“Anyway, it's still several kilometres of monster infested forest away, so let's carry on shall we?” I hurriedly deflected the subject, and everyone seemed to refocus.

“Aye, we should take more care tae not get distracted,” Thora agreed, and Janet nodded.

“Onward,” she said, once again proving she was a woman of many words.

We continued battling our way deeper into the Beast Forest, the monsters becoming stronger the further we got, the adventurers taking longer to defeat them and taking more and more light injuries with each fight, all of which promptly healed by Thora. He didn’t seem to be using either mana or lifeforce to do it, so I resolved to ask him when I got a chance.

A wide variety of monsters attacked the party, including a Morosaur, which had appeared in my Bestiary due to trying to eat me when unconscious and being blown up by my Solar Shield. It was not dissimilar to what you’d get if you took a ‘velociraptor’ from Jurassic Park, slathered it in glue and dropped it into a box labelled ‘assorted plumage’, then gave it the derpiest expression you could find. It was kinda cute… if you ignored its decidedly deadly looking curved claws.

After dispatching it, and after Janet burned down the patches of blood-sucking grass, the party halted for a brief rest in a small clearing, and I handed out food to Tear and Lupia. As we ate, I caught snatches of the conversation between the adventurers.

The rough gist was that they hadn’t met any particularly intelligent or cunning monster, which worried them since that was usually a sign that there’s something really strong in the area projecting an aura that’s scaring everything off.

I was intrigued; I thought I was one of, if not the, strongest beings in this area of the forest (though I wanted to explore to either confirm I was, or to rectify the situation if I wasn’t), and anything that could be dangerous enough to be a threat to me would likely be a rare monster and would show up on the Lifeform Analyser built into my Cell Phone, so I wondered what- “Oh. It’s me.”

We set off again, and just as we were about to leave the clearing, Vyra abruptly halted and knelt.

“Just as we were talking about the lack of intelligent monsters,” he sighed, gently brushing a leaf to one side, revealing what looked like a big dog’s paw print. He then brushed away the leaves behind it, revealing a long shallow scrape along the ground. “Wind Wolf. Shit.”

He stood, and walked along the direction of the scrape for a good 5 metres before crouching and brushing the leaves away to reveal an identical print. “Hmm… long stride. Scouting for prey. But, thankfully, it’s not recent. Two, no, three? Three days old. They may still be in the area.”

“Go, quickly,” Janet suggested.

Vyra nodded in response. “And don’t let your guard down.”

Liz's chatting practically halted after that as she devoted more and more of her attention to her surroundings; as a ranger she was one of the two detector members of the party, so her focus was essential.

I didn’t know what Wind Wolves were, I had never killed one and neither had Karma, so it wasn’t in my Bestiary, but from how the group had reacted I could tell they were dangerous.

As we went deeper into the Beast Forest, the trees became thicker and larger, and the brief glimpses we had had of my tower decreased further and further.

Eventually, we came out into the clearing around my tower and stared up at it. The tension in the group drained away almost as though a stone had been lifted from round their necks.

“What's it made out of?” wondered Liz.

“It's obsidian lassie,” Thora answered for me, “though it looks unlike any I've seen before, and a ridiculous amoont of it too.”

“It'sss like it eatsss the light,” Stone said in awe.

“Like an abyss,” Lupia agreed in a murmur.

“Hey, that's quite a cool name: 'The Abyss Tower',” I said epically, spreading my hands. “I like it.”