Her eyes raked down a page covered in passages that her brain refused to interpret nor ascribe meaning to, and she hissed in frustration, pressing her palms into her eyes.

She tried again.

Words turned to syllables before her tired eyes, syllables turned to letters, letters turned to meaningless symbols. She couldn’t read a single word.

She tried again.

With great effort and grit, she got herself to read the paragraph, at the speed of a snail, but correctly. And the moment her eyes landed on the final dot, she realized that she had no idea or recollection of what she had just read. A pure, empty blankness.

“Recite the page for me. Or at least that paragraph you’ve been looking at for the past hour.” Her mother instructed, a thin veneer of calmness in her voice that couldn’t hide the overwhelming weight of disappointment in her gaze. She grit her teeth, struggling to withhold a childish tantrum.

“I can’t.” She grit out, resisting the urge to sob.

How many hours had it been? Seventeen? A full day?

All she knew was that her brain refused to function anymore. Her studying for the past four hours had been utterly meaningless, and still, she was forced to continue.

“I see. And you have not gained any [Skill] so far, correct?” Her mother coldly asked, less of a question and more of an accusation.

“No.” She answered for the fiftieth time.

“Again.”

“No.” She growled, her eyes and fists clenched shut.

“... Look at me.” Her mother said, her voice calm, yet sharp and dangerous like the edge of a drawn blade. Emhreeil tensed and gulped, before gritting her teeth, her anger far outweighing her caution for a moment. She turned to her mother with eyes that refused to focus, narrowed in a glare.

A pulsing agony that covered half her face, and her sudden change in view, were the things that made her shocked mind understand what happened, the sound of the slap still echoing down the hallway. Tears ran down her face as her teeth gnashed.

“I was not asking. Again.”

She snapped back into the land of the living with a gasp in her throat and a strange-sounding snarl in her ear, the beast’s fur bristling under her fingers.

And she felt that its attention was on her, somehow, so she didn’t move, nor breathe, shocked out of any kind of rest.

The strange snarl quickly died down, and the beast chuffed, its fur settling down.

A light, barely perceptible sting accompanied the pounding headache in her mind, and she idly realized she was crying. Stupid nightmares.

Her groggy mind slowly realized that she was probably making noise in her sleep, as she couldn’t find any other reason for the beast to be growling at her. The sudden kick of adrenaline helped startle her body and mind into activity, at least, and despite feeling like she could barely even think, much less make any sort of decent decision, she focused on that background process of her mind dedicated to the System, and her progress revealed itself.

She had wallowed in self-pity and self-loathing enough. She had to focus on getting out of this shithole first, however unlikely.

You have progressed on your Path.

[Infuser] Level 8 → Level 12

Available Attribute Points: 4

Attributes:

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +0 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +1 )

Perception ( +0 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +4 )

Soul ( +2 )

Impressive as it was to gain four entire levels in a single fight, she couldn’t find it in herself to be impressed or even happy about it. She quickly threw her points according to her current situation, and moved on.

Endurance ( +3 )

Perception ( +2 )

Or would have, had she not been momentarily stunned by how much better she felt by adding two points into Endurance. Aches lessened, the squirming of her insides became less prominent in her mind, the shivering cold of hunger in her gut lessened, and the uncomfortable heat became a little more bearable as a surge of energy rushed through her. It felt like her limbs were made of timber rather than weak flesh as her heart swelled with blood and vitality.

Even her mind cleared up, if only a little.

The sensations from Perception's upgrade were empowered, sounds became louder and easier to tell the direction of, scents became annoyingly easy to notice. Yet, much like she’d overheard from conversations, it didn’t feel attention-grabbing, nor overwhelming.

She focused back on the letters in front of her as soon as she was done noting the various, but small, improvements.

-Acquired Skills:

You have gained the Skill [Tough Skin - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Infection Resistance - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Disease Resistance - Level 1]

-[Infection Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1 → Level 2

-[Disease Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 1 → Level 2

-[Sparkburst] has Leveled Up. Level 13 → Level 16

-[Haste] has Leveled Up. Level 10 → Level 14

-[Pain Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 14 → Level 18

-[Poison Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 8 → Level 9

-[Mana Tank] has Leveled Up. Level 1 → Level 2

-[Mana Conduit] has Leveled Up. Level 1 → Level 3

-Acquired Traits:

Enduring (1 / 5): You have felt the chill of death multiple times, and survived. You are slightly tougher.

The System unfortunately told her what she’d known and been fearful of admitting, in the form of giving her two resistance Skills. She had an infection.

Honestly, she’d be more surprised if she didn’t have one, or multiple. During that chaotic mess of fighting, her broken hand had been used as a chewing toy for the worthless fucking vermin-

Her train of thought stopped for a moment as she took a moment to parse her surprise. That thought was a little… sudden. She couldn’t say it wasn’t genuine, but even in her own mind, she rarely thought of anything or anyone with such intense hatred, sans her parents.

She remembered her earlier dream of her parents and the fleeting thought of burning them, and as a thought experiment, imagined a cage full of rodents being tossed into an open fire.

The amount of savage glee she felt at the thought, was, frankly, a little terrifying.

She couldn’t even care about her deteriorating mental state, however, not right now. She instead focused back to the steady, pulsing pain in her right arm. With much difficulty and strained grunting, she managed to bring it up next to her head, using her working arm to poke and prod it.

There were multiple spots where new wounds and bites were made, and despite their small overall damage, the problem was in the very, very obvious infection. If the throbbing waves of pain in her arm were enough to punch through a Level eighteen [Pain Resistance], she knew she’d probably be screaming in pain if she lowered the Skill’s ‘power’.

Gingerly, she poked and felt around the skin, the mental image in her mind growing more vivid and more dire by the second. The skin felt like it was overlaid atop a furnace rather than her flesh, hot to the point of concern. And around each bite mark, big and small, was a far more concerning numbness, a certain wetness and toughness to the injury that couldn’t be justified by congealed blood.

Infection was often the first step, occurring when filth or disease entered one’s body and began to spread. Disease occurred when the body was damaged — as a result of the infection — and signs and symptoms of an illness appeared.

Which meant that [Infection Resistance] was a lost cause by now, she was already infected. The Skill would hardly help her. All she had to deal with this problem was [Disease Resistance] and her own body’s natural resistances, whatever they were.

Even if she knew what had to be done, it was difficult to visualize, much less seriously consider. And there were so many things that could go wrong.

While the beast could cut iron somehow, she didn’t know if she could get it to cut her arm off, not without sight and unable to make it understand her. At worst, she might even make it think that she was inviting it to eat her, absurd as that sounded.

She also didn’t know if she’d be able to bear the pain of cauterizing it either, despite her Skill almost tripling her pain tolerance.

What she did know was that at this point, her right arm was disposable.

So she could experiment as she wanted, really. It was inflamed from the constant agitation of her broken bones, full of filth and infected. Sooner or later, it would kill her.

The least she could do was put the damn thing to use before she got rid of it, one way or another.

The problem was that she had no idea what to experiment with. She’d long since forgotten all her hare-brained ideas, speculations, and random bouts of inspiration when it came to magic, beaten out of her by quill and fist.

Her thoughts wandered to the single common point all mages had, which was a minor form of telemancy, moving things with their mana.

And an idea began to form.

She gingerly moved some mana out of the exit point in her palm, feeling it appear like a thin coating around her arm.

“Like a potentially teleporting, intangible, immaterial gas. That isn’t affected by air, gravity, or most natural laws. Quite simple, really.”

She remembered those words clearly, and struggled not to snort. Her teachers had rarely indulged her undying curiosity of magic, as they had been instructed not to by her parents, but when they did… it was both enlightening and baffling.

She gripped the sleeve of mana with her mind, and began pressing. She knew that the break was in her forearm, roughly, but she wanted to see if she could get a more accurate spotting of the issue.

A poke at her elbow sent a spike of pain a little above the joint, so she gingerly poked there too. She felt neither a shift, nor a grind of bone, so she mentally noted that to be a fracture at worst.

She pressed a little higher, and felt a much more violent spike of pain, followed by insistent pulses of the feeling all along the path of her limb. A poke a little bit above the previous one made her shoulders tighten and jaw clench, as the pain was accompanied by the extremely uncomfortable sensation of broken bone parts grinding against one another.

And then she got another idea.

The thin coat of mana around her arm tightened, thickened. And with careful, careful precision, she pressed down gently along her forearm, in a firm cylindrical shape. Then she shifted, to move her hand just a bit, a cautious press of mana keeping the bone set.

Of course, the mana splint was far from perfect. It was very mentally taxing to keep it going, to keep the pressure rigid and consistent, and despite her best efforts to control the mana properly to minimize energy bleed, even a small splint like this was draining her mana a little faster than she could generate it, even as she used [Mana Conduit] as soon as it was available, constantly.

It wasn’t quite as delicate as some of the common exercises for mana control, like spinning a pen in place, rolling it, or spinning it in all of its axis without dropping it or launching it at herself, but the wider scope made it harder for her mind to focus on all of it at once.

Still, it was something.

In a moment of freefall, or perhaps while getting dragged, it could help save her legs, at least, even if the arm wasn’t salvageable.

Telemancy was a strange but common form of magic. Inefficient in how much mana it burned to move things, with a very high degree of control needed to be used offensively, and easily disrupted by other mages. It was considered more of a show of mastery and a good way to train rather than something genuinely useful in any offensive capacity, regardless of Skills.

Considering ‘kinetic’ implied someone who was locked into their inherent magic type, and ‘mancy’ meant that it was learned magic, there was a lot of debate on whether it should even be classified as a ‘-mancy’, when even the most untrained of mages could make a pen slide across a table with mana, for example.

The ‘kinetics’... A telemancer to a telekinetic was the difference between a kitchen knife and a greatsword in terms of danger. The control and power that one gained by being born with inherent magic, was nigh impossible to match, even if it restricted them from using any other type of magic.

If only she’d been born a telekinetic she wouldn’t be mentally ranting just to pass the time. She’d be delving into the dungeon and tearing apart iron golems like they were made of paper.

With a shift of her hips, which had been hurting less and less, surprisingly, — and were probably not broken because of that — her attention was drawn to the stifling tightness of her pants and iron greaves.

The latter was actually good, as the knee-length iron had kept her lower legs relatively safe from jostling. It wasn’t exactly a splint but it was tight enough to let the bones heal, albeit slowly, as long as she didn’t contract the muscles that made her feet move.

The former however, was simply because her pants were burnt, pretty badly too. They were made of thick, threaded wool, so while they offered great protection from cuts and stabs, they burned pretty easily.

In some spots, she could even feel the humid air meet her skin, which was definitely not good.

In the heat of the moment, it wasn’t like she had any other option to get the damn rats off her. She just hadn’t realized how strong [Sparkburst] had been getting lately.

At the first couple levels, she distinctly remembered how it would only light a paper on fire two out of three times, usually just tearing it up into lightly smoking bits of paper with the microexplosions of the sparks.

The progress was a balm on her soul, even if it cost her the protection of her leggings.

She sighed, a low, croaky sound, and continued applying the telekinetic splint on her arm, adding a repulsion field around it, just strong enough to have it float off the ground a little.

Mostly because she felt like a repulsion field would be extremely effective in breaking any strong shocks before they snapped her bones back out of place.

With any luck, she might even get a Skill to make this stuff easier, but the System was a cruel, unpredictable, and impossible to figure out little bastard, as evidenced by the fact she spent literal years without getting a single one of the Skills that would make life easier for her, while some people got Skills by doing something once or twice.

Some people got skills about telemancy after spinning a pen for a couple minutes while others just never gained it. There was a loose understanding of ‘desire’ and ‘struggle’ being the two foremost things that decided on what the system gave someone and how quickly they leveled it, but it was all conjecture and speculation.

Whatever the justifications The Scions gave for why the Eye and the stupid System it had made were the way they were, she was never not going to be resentful that she never got a single medical or studying related Skill, even though she knew damn well that she genuinely wanted them, at least at the time.

She could almost hear some snooty priest recite the whole ‘The Eye knows us better than we know ourselves’ spiel. It kind of pissed her off.

Deciding not to waste her mana, she lessened the repulsion field and softened the grip of mana around her arm, using just enough mana to keep the exercise going for as long as possible while keeping herself topped up.

She didn’t know if her body had a limit on how much mana it could store in its circuits, but she felt like she had about half again her normal mana capacity at the moment.

And now to just… keep practising, with the vague hope that the beast will continue to cart her around.

Yep.

Just keep going...

…

Gods, she was so bored.

It felt absurd to say that she was bored in her situation, but now that she was somewhat awake, the only thing she had to focus on was the telemancy splint that she'd fashioned for herself. It was rather tempting to make the beast say some stupid stuff just to pass the time, maybe relieve some stress through the humorous absurdity of such things, but it seemed to be very grouchy at the moment, so she opted not to bother it any more.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad.com, you are reading stolen content from a free site that runs no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google "RoyalRoad Fleabag" and you'll get to my story on the site it was meant to be hosted on.)