~~~Stanley~~~

Non-Class Skill Evolved: Soul Awareness (Epic) - Level 25 (Intermediate)

Error! Anomaly Detected! Analyzing.

Oh, come on! Now what?

Soul Awareness cannot be applied to a singular individual within the Twin-Soul. Solution applied. All involved parties gain Soul Awareness. Skill progression speed will be reduced and balanced.

That's… actually, that's great! Stanley wished he could see Lee's reaction. He would be...

Soul Awareness rebalance has begun...

The world changed.

Stanley found himself surrounded by an infinite sea of darkness. Directly in front of him was a horrifying, beautiful, misshapen orb.

It wasn't a perfect sphere. Not even a good one. Looking at it reminded him of a yin-yang symbol, but three-dimensional and not black and white. And not a yin-yang symbol. It was beautiful, and... it was ruined. Nate was right.

He wanted to cry, but he couldn't seem to find the thoughts to describe why or even what he was seeing.

It was a beautiful, fragile dish that was shattered and then glued back together so badly that it was no longer functional.

It was his favorite, warmest blanket, torn to rags and then stitched into a useless lump.

It was laughter. But rather than a happy, joyous sound, it was the laugh of someone who had just lost everything they loved and only laughed now because tears would be a pale mockery of their pain.

He could see places where something was missing, where pieces had been cut out. He saw other places where some of the missing pieces had been stitched back on where they shouldn't be, patching even more horrible mutilations.

I did this. Stanley knew the truth in that moment, and he sobbed as he looked at what he had done.

"We did this," said another voice. "We chose life over death."

Was it even worth it? Stanley thought in a bitter response and turned away from his ruined soul to stare into the infinite void around him. Even the void was soothing compared to that horror...

"You tell me," the other voice said gently.

Wait, that voice... Stanley looked back hesitantly, disbelieving. Lee?

He could see his brother before him, sort of. There was something looking out from his soul.

"Come in and see what we did," the thing said.

Stanley knew 'it' was his brother, but it was an indescribable thing at the same time. A piece of his soul... or a reflection from somewhere far away... a thought given form in a place beyond the physical world.

He moved his attention—or consciousness—inside the wreckage of his soul and stopped.

Everything here was without defining form or discerning features. Except for one thing.

It was worth it.

He smiled at the vague form of his brother and at the clearly discernible little black pug sitting next to him in a tiny yet perfectly preserved little shelter at the center of their soul. He looked around the space and nodded. It was definitely worth it.

"Yes," Lee said, his voice dimmer. "I'm building a home over here for when you get back, Stan."

I'm trying, Stanley thought. I'm trying so hard...

"No big rush," Lee replied casually, a smile carrying through his words despite the lack of a face. "I can see you're in a bit of a rough spot." He looked behind Stanley. "It'll just give me more time to spruce up the place."

Stanley looked behind himself and out into the void. It wasn't dark now.

It was a field of stars glittering in the night sky. Only... not stars. It was a field of souls.

He saw Zeke in the distance, that golden soul standing out as a unique light amongst the rest. It was also the only one that stood out plainly past the much brighter souls surrounding him.

The souls of bats and a sea of undead below... I won't let them stop me, Lee. I'll come home.

"Naturally," Lee replied, his voice even more distant now as Stanley finally looked past his twin. He saw more souls there. Humans. A lot of humans. They surrounded Lee... but they didn't feel hostile. They were protective... loving.

Soul Awareness rebalance is complete.

"Be seeing you." Lee started fading back into the images behind him, but crouched as Caffeine whined at him. "I missed you too, Caff."

Lee rubbed Caffeine’s head as Stanley thought vehemently toward his brother, I Will come home!

"I know." Then Lee was gone.

Stanley was alone with Caffeine. Mostly.

It felt like the sensation of his brother had gotten stronger. Now there was a window, and he could hear his brother talking on the other side. Not loud enough to understand what he said, but enough to know he was there and okay.

He looked down at the pug. You're a good boy, Caff. The pug’s tail wagged rapidly, but he didn't get up or move around. He sat still, directly on top of the blinding crack that ran through their soul in here.

Bits of light sparked and jumped from the crack, but what looked like Caffeine’s shadow moved after each one. It pounced on them and pushed the light back into the crack or ate the sizzling sparks before they could land on their soul.

Stanley smiled as he faded out of the tiny shelter that Caffeine was guarding inside his ruined... inside their almost ruined soul.

Then he was back in the real world, with a wiggling pug on his lap and a tongue in his face. He knew only moments had passed in there, but it felt like so much more.

Talking to Lee and seeing that he was okay... despite everything that had happened. Seeing all those people looking out for him... The skill was totally fucking worth it! Stanley could feel tears running down his face. We'll be okay, Lee. I'll make it back! Somehow...

He stroked Caffeine as he calmed down and took in his new skill.

It was already quite dark in the office, but he closed his eyes anyway and focused on the new sensation inside him. It wasn't like before. He wasn't in that soul place, but he could still see and feel the surrounding stars. The souls.

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He didn't see them all this time, only those directly nearby, but it changed as he focused. More souls flickered into view below and further above.

Above, they mostly felt lazy and asleep. But below were a lot of... Danger? Hungry! Feed! Most likely, the bats.

Stanley kept focusing, and more lights flickered in at the edges of his awareness. Danger? Hungry. Sound? Angry. Kill! Kill! Kill! Sleep. Feed?

The bubble of his awareness kept expanding as more and more sensations came to him, until the cacophony of information became overwhelming. He pulled back... looked away... looked outward again. That was it.

He pulled his focus away from his soul, where the bombarding information was coming from, and opened his eyes to the slightly different darkness of the office. He was gasping for breath in the foul air as he touched the pug lying in his lap, his hand digging into the fur and grounding himself after that cacophony.

The skill was drastically different from Soul Sight. Not only that, but it felt like he was getting far more actionable information from the surrounding souls. He couldn't see the glows anymore, not without focusing on his own soul, but he could... feel them.

There was an active component to the skill, but a passive one as well. Even without focusing, he still got something. A sensation that grew... louder the closer the soul was.

Speaking of which, he felt a sense of interest... and growing alertness. Sound! Hungry! Sound! Danger? Sound! Hungry! It wasn't really in words. It was just feelings, or not even that. It was a faint impression of a feeling. Of intent. And it was coming from the bat right outside the office.

It was making chirping and clicking noises as it nosed at the crack beneath the door. So Stanley reached out and rattled something on the far side of the former office space. The curious bat charged away with the rest of them.

The clicking faded somewhat, but not completely, as Stanley floated up from the floor. He was smiling as he went. So much better than before. The random colors and smells of his Soul Sight had been practically useless for anything more than knowing a soul was there, but this... this had potential.

He swept his mind through the open air around the outside of the building, on his floor, plus a few above and below. Nothing. The floor he was on now was still thick with bats after the skeleton had killed a bunch earlier, so he wasn't worried about having a shield if another attack came. A small mercy.

Stanley doubted it had given up. It honestly surprised him that the skeleton hadn't simply wiped out the lair already. It couldn't be that hard for a D-grade. Not when it could ignore his power like it had... Stanley could wipe this place out, given enough time. Like, say, five minutes if he didn't mind a debuff...

Never mind the fact that it could probably destroy the entire building if it wanted to...

But if it wasn't coming in after him, could he just rank up in here? E-grade might give him enough of an edge to at least escape. Or was it waiting for him to try that? He'd be helpless... and it would be all up to Caffeine.

That thought hurt. The thought of Caffeine fighting alone against that monster while Stanley just lay there unconscious... It was a terrible idea. But what else could he do? Watch Caffeine fight and die, anyway?

There was only one problem with his plan. He still needed cores, and he'd lost the ones he was carrying in the fighting. Probably when he bounced off the street...

Well, two problems. Because he was going from hungry to starving, and his bag of food was probably in the street too. His arm was regenerating quickly, and that was going to make his hunger an issue sooner rather than later.

Of course, there was plenty of meat in here. Stanley grabbed one bat on the far side of the open cubicle area. They were about the same size as Caffeine, and he felt a little bad about what he had to do. Sorry, Sky Doggo. He snapped its neck.

The bat exploded.

Stanley felt it disintegrate into bloody bits within his mental grip. What the... Would he have to eat bat soup?

He heard screeching, and a quick focus on his Soul Awareness showed more than a few bats coming from above and below to join the already riled up ones on this floor. Danger! Attack! Feed! Danger! Attack! Feed!

Is it the sound of the explosion or any sound?

It was while watching for any bats trying to get into his room that Stanley realized he'd seen no bat cores—not up here and not downstairs. The explosions? No... can they do that?

Clever, if on purpose. Who would hunt a monster that doesn't drop a core? Much less one that blows up when you kill it... It was also extremely annoying if you needed those damn cores!

Things were getting a little too hectic on his floor, so Stanley reached out to the one below for his follow up experiments. He started by cutting off a bat's head and throwing it away to see which half exploded.

The head exploded... and he realized his new Soul Awareness actually came with a downside. He couldn't see if a core appeared through the floor. He could feel the souls down there and could feel one fade when the bat died, but picking out something like a core was a little beyond the skill's capabilities.

So he ripped up the unexploded body for meat and dragged it upstairs through the air duct. He created a distraction to get the meat into his room by killing another bat on his floor while peeking out the door to see what happened with his own eyes.

Stanley had to hold back the swarming bats from his kill, but confirmed the head exploding also deleted the core. They're fucking cheating!

Then he had to kill a handful of bats lower down to draw attention away from the floor he was hiding on. He shoved raw bat meat down his throat while doing so, and he really hoped his insane digestion would hold up. Weren't bats resistant to disease by being full of diseases? He read or heard something about that somewhere, and it fit with them hunting the undead when nothing else did.

They looked okay. No patchy fur or nasty skin... Hell, the little ones were actually cute—too bad they needed to die.

He repeated the hunting tactic while interspersing eating with meditation to lower his debuff. The heads always exploded, even when he Cut them into tiny pieces. Some kind of failsafe trigger...

Debuff Removed: [Cerebral Fatigue]

His next test involved something he'd only briefly considered before, but something that should be possible. Because he was pretty sure he'd done something similar to the attacking humans when charging into Nate's base...

Stop

It was very similar to the way he moved himself around. Before with Psionic Charge, and now with Mind Over Matter, he could ignore g-forces while accelerating and decelerating. He had to be, or his brain would probably be mush already. Beyond that, he didn't know how it worked and didn't care.

Now he did the opposite thing to a bat by forcing it to move nowhere at all. It obliged his demand, and he made it keep obliging.

The drain on his mind was heavy, so he quickly twisted off the bat's head... which felt very weird when he was simultaneously telling it that it could not move. It got a lot easier to hold afterward. Then he waited a little... bit... longer...

Luckily, it worked how he'd hoped, and a core fell from the frozen head. The living bats swarmed after it, as enthusiastically as they'd attacked the undead downstairs.

Stanley dropped the head, which immediately exploded, though at a lesser intensity than the others had. Presumably because of the missing core.

Half the bats kept after the core, but the others all opened their mouths and practically inhaled the explosion... Stanley felt something when they did that.

Is it the mana? Are they eating it? He never noticed mana before, not when it wasn't already in a spell, but now it felt like his Soul Awareness was pinging off whatever was happening nearby. He could feel something... moving. Flowing. It wasn't soul energy; he knew that much, but there was definitely some kind of energy moving out there.

It wasn't a brand new phenomenon. Ever since Lee's evolution, he could have sworn his soul sight was seeing something new, but that feeling was amplified after it became soul awareness... What did you do, Lee?

Stanley assumed they were eating the mana. It fit with what he'd seen downstairs, and he also assumed that his own lack of mana was the reason they didn't swarm him like they did the undead. Not that he let them see him.

His theory gained strength when they chased the core around the room, even after he flew it behind walls and other furniture. They were relentless... so he repeated the exercise and killed them like he had the last.

Stop

Cut

Debuff: [Cerebral Fatigue](14:59)

The effort to stop and kill so many at once earned him a debuff. But a short one. Then he took the cores and fled through the air ducts to the next floor above, ahead of the incoming swarm drawn to the explosions.

There, he snuck into another center office and then killed a few more bats outside the room. Just enough to draw more attention to his floor. Enough to put as many bats as he could between himself and the outside.

In his hands, he had what he needed to evolve. Assuming he could get away with it and wouldn't wake up to find a skeleton eating him.

Or he could keep hunting in here and try to finish fortifying his vitality...

Yeah right! He was a total idiot for even trying to fortify! He should have ranked up immediately. Who knew what his attributes would be by now if he hadn't gotten greedy?! He might not even be in this mess...

I'm sorry, Caff. Please don't die on me... Better yet, just let me die and go find your friends... Except he knew Caffeine would never run away. Caffeine would fight to the death before he let Stanley die. I'll be quick!

+1 Dexterity

+1 Dexterity

All Base Attributes have reached the E-grade Threshold.

Evolution to E-grade has begun.