Another long stone needle launched with telekinetic force into a dummy, this time not letting himself get distracted, focusing wholly on the target, the needle, and the path. The self-hypnosis kept his mind here and now, instead of wandering to the problems he was training to fight.

There was nothing else. There couldn’t be. If he was to complete his goal he had to focus. The needle missed, but by less.

He soon realized he could influence its path if he never actually let go of the projectile with his telekinesis, pushing instead of throwing. It took a little work, but in a few minutes, he had it. Not necessarily down pat, he had to learn to control velocity; it didn’t matter too much how hard the needle hit, he could only nail soft spots with it anyway.

He had accounted for this on the dummies, marking the soft spots he was familiar with. On humans it was easy. The others were less so.

A few of his throws were finally beginning to stick in the soft bits, even when he changed targets from time to time to make sure he wasn’t working on muscle memory. He even hit the eyes once, and it was at least mostly on purpose. The needles always missed if he tried to be smooth and curve them to a new target after apparently targeting a different dummy, though.

Ah, wait. He had an idea.

He drafted the design in his head. It was simple. A ball of rock, pierced in many places with needles. Then, inside that, a layer of sand, which he’d also found to be easy to make. Inside of that was the tackiest, stickiest clay he could make.

Testing this on a wall, he found it broke just like he wanted. Then he tried to crush it himself in mid-air a few different ways, but it was only when he looked beyond telekinesis that he had his answer.

Earth manipulation.

It was weaker than his telekinesis by a fair margin, but experimentation showed it was plenty capable of popping the rock when it pulled back on the bomb in opposition to his telekinesis.

The needles, sand, and clay sprayed out, albeit not very hard.

It worked! Just like he wanted. He couldn’t make it do anything quite yet, but that was simply a question of acceleration.

With this, he could probably scare off most of the creatures so far.

A mouth full of needles and a throat full of sand and choking clay would almost certainly make even that snake think twice about eating this sprite.

He grinned, getting excited again. He could finally defend himself!

A phantom pain touched his thigh, chest, and both shoulders. This trick would be of little value against things so tough and nimble as the bird. The needles would never pierce its armored feathers or even its hard-scaled feet. The odds of hitting its face with the clay or sand would be low; he’d have to predict the right trajectory beforehand, and the bird started guessing his movements well before he started guessing theirs.

Shit, he really was outclassed here. Every trick he came up with would be countered by something.

Eyes squeezed shut.

Five in. Seven out.

Focus, there’s yet more to do.

Bringing his mind back to the moment with self-hypnosis, he focused. Death did not come for him here, not now. Time to put the needle to target.

He was right about the bird, but that got him thinking. What really took himthe bird down wasn’t any force he could muster at the time, but instead the blunt trauma of the snake. It was stunned, then wrapped, then crush-

Shit. He still remembered what it was like feeling what the bird felt, having its own sense of proprioception, the feeling of its limbs.

Focus. A glance at his stats showed his was way, way down. Guess that explained all the stupid flashbacks. He… didn’t really want to find out what happened when that ran out. The trick seemed to bring it back though. Not a lot, but some. He repeated it a few more times.

He needed to be able to create blunt force. He had to be careful, though. That could be more lethal than he wanted.

Back to drafting. When he was younger, he took boxing for exercise; the moves and techniques would certainly not be too useful with arms so small and weak as his own. But something he learned DID help. People thought the gloves softened the blows and protected the opponent. This was only partially true. It spread out the force, doing less surface damage. It was “prettier”. But it did significantly more internal damage; the fact is, bare-knuckle boxing had much, much lower rates of brain damage.

So he made a cast of his knuckles and sharpened the knuckles, concentrating force.

Forming it freely in the air next time, he launched it at a target. It rocked in place. Only a little, but that wasn’t too surprising. They shattered on impact, but they still delivered the force somewhat adequately. Rounding out the shape should do similar, but hit harder.

His hypothesis was correct. Good.

Practicing throwing his ranged punches, he generated the stone and flung it. The aerodynamics were different compared to the stone shaped exactly like his fist. He’d have to be careful to mind that while throwing them.

There seemed to be a strange pulling, burning sensation with this trick, though. It was almost like bad acid reflux, like he was trying to pull something up from inside of him that just wasn’t there. That’s fine. Focus. You’ll find out when you get it down.

Generate, fling, note, adjust. Generate, fling, note, adjust.

Generate, fling… Nothing.

What? Curious. Why didn’t it…

Blinking in surprise, he looked around. There were dozens upon dozens of intact needles in the soft parts of his dummies, and easily hundreds of needles worth of broken remnants. At least a dozen bombs.

Ah. That would do it.

As his broke, a wave of violent nausea rose over him like a tsunami. If he’d eaten anything, he’d have puked as he fell to a kneel, the world rocking under him like the deck of a ship. His head pulsed like a dubstep concert with a bass fetish.

What the hell was going on?

Checking his stats and grateful the screen seemed to stabilize itself for him, he found that out of sixty-one he had… twelve.

The pulling he felt was more literal than it seemed. He was drawing out of a near-empty well. Digging deeper than, clearly, people in this world were meant to.

He technically had sixty-one , but there were consequences to getting too low. He just hadn’t noticed.

That was convenient.

What wasn’t convenient was taking to the air. His body was sluggish and unresponsive, not doing exactly what he wanted.

Alright, fine. Maybe he couldn’t fly with his wings. But he still had telekinesis. There must have been an individual sub-skill for self-telekinesis, though, because it was way harder than anything else for the amount of force involved. Even jerking the needles around mid-air was easier, but that was probably because of the he started with.

Right. Time to go upstairs and sit down. He could work on… taking notes, perhaps. The day had borne many discoveries, and he always thought better when he journaled it all down. He’d created a pencil earlier; making something with the simple property of a thin layer rubbing off on stuff wasn’t too hard. He really just needed to make it soft enough.

Or perhaps he could draw. That was a skill that even here he’d find valuable. He’d probably want to learn to draw with his telekinesis. It would eventually be more nimble than his hands, and it frankly seemed like a great way to work on the sub-skill. Not to mention it’d be way easier than maintaining a straight line while flying.

Not like he could do that from here! Time to go then. No distractions this time.

This headache made it hard to think, but he had been using telekinesis as naturally as his own limbs since the start; no doubt a trait of sprites, he saw another using it earlier. Besides, that drew that from , and he could always replenish that with .

So he lifted himself or tried to… until the headache throbbed especially hard, picking up the tempo. What? He restored his plenty earlier!

Looking at his stats, he saw that his was way, way lower than before. It had dropped at least fifty points. Nine out of one hundred and fifty-one.

Could the boost from be temporary? Did it end when the hypnotic command broke?

Ah. Perhaps being this low wasn’t actually okay, like he said earlier.

Another snap. Another layer of broken.

The pain was all but making his vision pulse at this point. This was easily worse than the worst bouts of caffeine withdrawal after he had to give it up for the worrying arrhythmia it was causing. Worse than any migraine or flu. Attempting another instance of didn’t work; he just couldn’t focus enough for it.

Well, perhaps he’d just sleep here then.