Though the day was fading and my body still ached, I had no desire to stop working. I felt restless like I had just slammed three espresso shots on an empty stomach.

I was immediately consumed by curious gazes when I entered the training space. It seems like my snap at Donny was no secret. With the constant looks shooting my way, I decided to bite the bullet and find someplace more private.

Flying out of the training space, I settled on the edge of the cleared area next to the quickly crumbling ruins of an unlucky duplex. The red brick of the building was cracking and falling apart, and the wood paneling was peeling. I could even see places where softly glowing grass poked through the foundation.

Idly I wondered how the ranch house was doing. There were many memories there, and the idea of the place falling to pieces like the building before me filled me with a burst of melancholy.

Forcing my imagination to the side, I sat down on a large chunk of limestone peeking out of the earth and pulled up my skill sheet.

Skills: v1.0.2

Proficiency

Effect

General Skills (2/2)

Identify

1/20

Gives user information. Amount and clarity based on identify level. Shows only basic information

Cartography

1/30

Ability to draw and create accurate maps.

Race Skills (3/3)

Stormborn

2/30

Increases the effectiveness of strength, constitution, and wisdom when in stormy conditions (+6%). Grants enhanced regeneration when touching water (+60%). Gain mana from enemy storm attacks. (+12% mana steal)

Storm Cloak

2/30

Your strikes contain the might of storms. You can use mana to fuel powerful physical attacks by cloaking tools with mana.

Electroreceptivity

2/20

You gain a 6th sense to sense electricity in a range of 10ft around you. Grows more powerful with use

Combat Skills (1/1)

Novice Swordsmanship

6/10

Basic swordsmanship techniques and skills

Magic Skills (1/1)

Novice Storm Magic

1/30

Chaos Aligned. Control the power of storms.

Archetype Skills (3/3)

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Born to Roam

5/100

Skill growth is increased while exploring new places alone (+5%)

First 1!

1/1

You were the first person to be upgraded. Absorbing ambient mana from kills is easier.

Eyes on the Road

1/5

You are born to travel. You have a supernatural ability to wind up where you want to be and senses strong enough to keep you out of trouble.

Taking in all of the information, I sighed.

My skill growth and improvement was slow going, and I knew I could be doing better. Specifically, I needed to work on grinding Born to Roam while simultaneously working on my magic. It was too late to leave anywhere today, but tomorrow, I would explore, map, and identify everything around the camp to the best of my ability.

Looking closer at my status, I saw that I was still at 60 out of 60 mana. I regenerated almost that whole amount every hour; it stood to reason that I was doing something wrong during training if I wasn’t edging near the bottom of my mana pool.

Storm Cloak was a devastatingly powerful skill, and I could only imagine how powerful it would be at higher levels. I should have had it active at all times during training to maximize my mana usage. It would be better if I could figure out how to use my Novice Storm Magic and drain my mana even faster. Hopefully, my intelligence and wisdom would increase by exercising my magic equivalent of muscles.

With a tentative training plan prepared, all I needed to do was figure out how to use magic. It wasn’t like using my racial skills. Storm Cloak triggered whenever I thought of it, like flipping a switch on and off. The magic skill felt more… feelings-driven.

I suspected that using the magic skill was closer to learning how to use another limb than learning how to use a tool. Doing what I could to activate the skill, I held out my right hand. My goal was to summon a ball of storm to my palm. First, I focused on the skill in my list to see if I could activate anything.

Then, I tried visualizing what I wanted. After that, I tried shouting out the name of the skill. I even tried getting the skill working by jump-starting it with Storm Cloak.

Nothing worked. I wondered if my time would be better spent asking an expert for help, so mentally, I tried to nudge Luna.

Luna, do you have any hints on how this works?

After waiting a few minutes in silence, I realized that she wouldn’t respond. I was on my own. Was she even paying attention? Did she have to pay attention? I had no idea how it worked for her.

With an annoyed huff, I turned my thoughts back inward. I thought it might be a good idea to start with the basics.

What was I? I was a monster. Monsters had cores; that was how they got stronger.

But where was my core? I remembered the warm feeling centered on my heart when I killed my first monster, and my core level increased.

Focusing on my heart, I sensed just a wisp of… something. A warmth.

Was that mana?

I tried to move the warmth from my heart and push it to my outstretched hand. Sure enough, the energy flowed through my body. When it reached my palm, I noticed a slight crackle of lightning beneath my cloudy skin.

Now that the energy was sitting beneath the skin of my hand, I just needed to project it outward. Staring intently, I mentally pushed, forcing the warmth out of my skin into my hand. Immediately, with the sensation of a dam being breached, storm magic flooded from my palm. It erupted like a fog, coalescing into a tightly spinning sphere hovering a few inches from my fingers.

I gasped as I felt a deep sense of internal loss. The small orb of energy had taken 15 mana to conjure, a full quarter of my pool. Doing what I could to ignore the sensation, I took in the beautiful energy I had conjured.

Storm magic looked nothing like I had expected. It was a blue and black iridescent fog crackling with lightning and blowing with wind. It was like a small hurricane sitting in my palm. Sustaining the ball of energy took constant mental effort, and after only a minute, I felt drained, like I had been studying for hours.

Wanting to get rid of the ball, I experimented a little. With a shrug, I chucked the ball into the woods, wondering what it would do if it hit something. The result was outside of my expectations.

The baseball-sized sphere of storm mana hit a tree, immediately expanding into a ball three feet in diameter. The globe crackled with power before flashing with a burst of white light and the sound of a thunderclap. Once it was gone and the forest had returned to silence, I saw that the tree I had hit was collapsed on the ground, the sphere of power deleting everything from the world.

I approached where the ball had detonated, smelling ozone and burned wood. The very atmosphere seemed to tingle. Interestingly, the sensation made me comfortable and relaxed. Intuitively, I understood that this was the effect of chaos-aligned magic. I couldn’t help but smile.

Despite the weirdness, being able to throw spinning balls of storm that vaporized trees was pretty dang cool. I spent the next hour burning through my mana reserves, trying to make other shapes with the storm energy. I quickly found that anything static, like forming the storm magic into a straight line, would almost instantly collapse.

When it rotated, however, like a tornado or a hurricane, the storm would continue spinning, keeping its momentum even after it left my direct control. The energy was most useful formed into lances and balls, the only difference between them being the speed of the projectile and the shape of the hole they left in whatever they hit.

The spheres expanded into large balls, shaving away whatever they hit, while the lances formed tighter cylinders of destruction. Considering their mana cost, I didn’t think these attacks would be a mainstay of my fighting style, but having a readily available ranged attack with high power would be helpful.

As my mana finally hit zero, I headed back to camp with a grin on my face. I was already looking forward to tomorrow.