There are two main sources of skill shards: Dungeons and beasts. The former only yields the kinds of shards it is composed of and exploring them is extremely dangerous. Even the strongest of mortal mages, in the face of a Dungeon will turn into a helpless ant – an ant with strong jaws and potent toxin, sure, but in the end, still an ant. Dungeon delving is a high risk, high reward proposition – one that doesn’t go well most of the time.

The second source is where most skill shards come from. Unlike the humanoid races, beasts aren’t born with a high degree of sentience, but in return, they have formidable bodies and the inborn ability to condense skill shards as they grow and develop. Depending on the species and even the individual, the shards condensed are different.

When a beast dies, its shards remain. Scavenging, hunting and even domesticating beasts are all methods employed to collect their shards. As only the elite among the species can generate mana and only a small fraction of them can condense shards, the production cost is quite high. But this method has risking one’s life in a Dungeon beat in terms of safety and stability.

In his previous life, if there was one person Sand was willing to acknowledge as his friend, then it would be him. The scrawny young man he’d rescued from the mansion of the first orc chieftain that he’d slain.

“Sand wyrms are r-really interesting creatures you know?”

Book had a staccato stutter that made him look like a gasping fish whenever he got caught on a word. Book – because he’d been in charge of the library in the chieftain’s manor, and like Sand, he’d kept the simplistic name to remind himself of his roots.

“They have s-so many uses… they’re like a factory. All you need to do is to s-somehow manage feed them and you’ll profit all your life.”

In his time as a slave, he had managed to teach himself how to read and write – an achievement for which Sand respected him greatly. He was only a red mage, that too at the most initial of stages. His talent wasn’t something to write home about either. He had touched magic by the barest of margins. But that had been enough to raise his value in the eyes of the orcs.

Compounded by the rare skill shard he was assigned – Catalogue, he had managed to make his way into the chieftain’s manor and subsequently his library. At first, Sand kept Book around so that he could learn how to read and write. Later, he kept him around for the wealth of knowledge he had accumulated during his stint as the chieftain’s librarian.

And afterwards, Sand kept the scrawny young man, who had lost both of his legs below the knee, because somewhere down the line, he had become a friend.

“How did you manage to learn the letters so fast with nobody to teach you?” Sand had asked him once.

“W-well, it’s because I am s-super smart!” he had replied with a smug grin. “My shard Catalogues stuff." He had explained more seriously. "It helps me make lists of things that I can easily reference later. The chieftain used my skill to h-help him locate books in the library but I secretly used it to learn the language.”

“How?”

“You know how stuff is written exactly the way it’s sp-spoken? I just used my shard to Catalogue the most frequently used syllables and compared them to the most frequently used marking in the books – then the second most frequent and so on. Soon, I was r-reading like I’d been doing it all my life.”

Impressed by his ingenuity, Sand had never underestimated a shard again. There was no strongest skill, only the strongest skill user.

Book loved sharing his knowledge. “You know?” was his pet phrase. A preamble he used before he began to ramble on and on about some obscure topic.

“You’ll never find a wyrm on its own, or at least, not too far from its colony. You know why? I-i-it’s because they aren’t a colony but a single creature. The term wyrm ‘queen’ is wrong. It’d be more correct to call them wyrm ‘mother’. They split parts of themselves off and those ‘children’ are the smaller wyrms you see. These offspring perform various functions depending on the situation." He had lectured Sand enthusiastically while waving his arms about animatedly, threatening to disbalance himself and fall off the chair he was sitting on. "The w-wyrms are blind you know? They can only sense metallic substances that might be nearby. Other than that, they can't see or hear. They just don’t have the organs for it. So, some of these offspring condense a Third Eye shard and are able to see with its help. They are the ones that scout for danger and warn the mother by sharing their vision with her through their bonded shards.”

He had continued, “Other than the scouts, t-there are the diggers that have shards specialized for tunnelling through rock. Then there are the shields with defensive shards and in some colonies, they have developed skills that allow them to escape easier – say, the Sandstorm shard. As for attack, despite how ferocious they look, wyrms rarely develop in that direction. Offensive shards are a huge drain on mana and anyway, the diggers with their Steel Tooth shards can double as attackers in a pinch. After all, one can't afford to be wasteful in the desert.”

According to Book, the wyrms lived their lives searching the desert for veins of metallic ore to feed upon. The higher the quality of the metal, the faster the queen would grow and the more offspring she could split off, expanding the colony. Another unique feature of the wyrm colony was their adaptability. The composition of the colony could easily be altered. For example, if they reached a region of hard rock where the diggers became more important than the defenders, the queen would eat the useless wyrms and spawn more diggers instead.

The reason the smaller wyrms were so obedient, willingly waltzing into the queen’s mouth, was the presence of the Mother and Child shards. The wyrm queen had the Mother shard which could split off Child shards that embedded themselves into her offspring giving her the ability to command them and even, in conjunction with their other shards, share their senses.

Another advantage of the wyrms was that most of the metal they consumed was merely a catalyst for their growth. The gangue was their actual food. Thus, their excrement was rich in the purified metal. Wyrm-purified metal just needed a few more rounds of smelting before it was commercially usable. Thus, to the owner of a wyrm colony, provided they had enough ore to supply the creatures’ ravenous appetites, it was an endless source of wealth in the form of purified metal and skill shards. The wyrm colony and the silver mine, when these two had come together, they had resulted in the explosive growth of the Silveros family.

And now, laid before Sand was an opportunity to gain a shard. But for that, he needed to slay one of the Tier 1 wyrms that populated the sand pit below. He had a miniscule amount of mana; his body hadn’t fully recovered yet, and he was only ten years old. Most importantly, he had no offensive shards. A sword? A spear? A whip? Neglecting if he would even be able to use weapons sized for adult hands, unless they were magical artefacts with shards embedded in them, with his current strength he wouldn't even be able to pierce the tough hide of the wyrms if they stood still and let him chop away at them.

He had no choice though. It wasn’t like Torak Silveros was asking them for their opinion.

Suddenly, the smiling orc grasped at something in the air and Crooked exclaimed in surprise and fear as a huge, translucent, phantom hand grasped him, pinning his arms to his sides. Despite his struggles, he couldn't even budge the fingers of the fist. “L-lord. Forgive me. Let me go! Please!” he entreated desperately as Torak observed him with a happy expression on his face.

As Crooked kept begging for mercy, his smile slowly faded and his gaze grew icy. He spoke softly, his voice cutting through Crooked’s noisy wails like a sharp knife, silencing him. “I’m giving you a gift. A chance for a maggot like you to walk on land instead of wallowing in the filth. Are you rejecting me?”

Stranded in the phantom hand’s grasp, Crooked clenched his teeth and shivered. His face covered with snot and tears, he didn’t dare say yes. His eyes roved wildly in search of an outlet before they fell on Sand. Ruthlessness flashed past in his eyes before he blurted out, “Lord! How dare this lowly one accept your gift? My talent is too low to deserve such an honour. Lord, Sand is definitely more talented than me. He has more mana even though he was heavily wounded and we started training at the same time. He is much more suitable.”

“Oh?” Torak’s smile returned as suddenly as it had vanished and he turned to Kreg inquisitively.

“Sir, it’s true. When I got ‘im, he was a scrawny little thing that had been whipped within an inch of ‘is life. And now look at ‘im.” Kreg informed him respectfully.

Torak regarded Sand with a thoughtful smile. “Interesting. Kreg, the right leg will do. Below the knee.” The muscular orc nodded and walked up to the Crooked, snapping a silver cuff on his right leg, just below his knee. With a wave of Torak’s hand, the phantom hand lifted Crooked and tossed him over the balcony.

Screaming and flailing in the air, he slammed onto the sand below, the impact driving all the air out of his lungs. Protected by the soft sand from injury, he quickly struggled to his feet, fidgeting as he observed the ground on all sides of him with a deathly pale face.

A sword cut through the air, sinking into the sand and quivering an inch from his foot, shocking him out of his haze of fear.

Up on the balcony, Torak pulled a lever and with a grating rumble, a wooden cage rose out of the sand, boxing him in. Sand identified the origin of the dark, twisting wood that made up the cage as ironbark, a very sturdy mortal tree. Going by the lustre of the wood, it had come from a tier 3 plant, so, even if the queen herself attacked, it would be able to withstand the impact.

‘Why prepare such extravagant arrangements for mere slave mages? Is it just for his amusement? Unlikely. Anyone who has reached his degree of success wouldn't squander their time and money like this. Even if he is screening slaves for the Arena of Sin, it shouldn't be to this degree. It appears as though the fighting in the arena is much more significant than I previously thought.’ Sand pondered with narrowed eyes.

He shot a look at the fuzzy phantom of four hands floating behind Torak. ‘A Phantom Hand shard. Quite rare and very versatile. Only four hands… it’s at Tier 3. At Tier 4, the number of hands will double and at Tier 5, it will double again. It’s quite the tricky skill. It can either become solid and be manipulated remotely to attack or it can phase through an opponent’s defences and directly attack the mind. Depending on his other skills, he can even attach an attribute to the hands. Used well, it can simultaneously take care of attack or defence. I’ll need to prepare something to counter it…’ he analysed.

While he had been lost in thought, a wyrm, attracted by the band of silver on Crooked’s leg, had forced itself through the narrow opening on one wall of the cage which had promptly shut behind it, locking it in with Crooked.

Crooked backed away from the wyrm, pointing his sword at it with a shaky hand. “Stay away!” he yelled at it, randomly swinging the sword around in an attempt to scare it off. The wyrm’s head bobbed as it advanced on him, following the motion of the sword as it gnashed its multitude of teeth, creating a spine-chilling rustling.

Crooked’s back touched the cage behind him, blocking his path of retreat. Before he could react, the wyrm lunged and snatched the sword out of his hand, swallowing it down. With a horrified scream, Crooked tried to escape but he found that he had backed himself into a corner. Desperate, he tried to squeeze out through the narrow gaps between the bars and when that failed, he leapt up and grabbed the bars of the cage, trying to climb out, only to slide down as he couldn't get a grip on the polished bars.

Having swallowed down the sword, the wyrm turned its attention to the band of silver on Crooked’s leg. With a mighty chomp, it bit the leg off right below the knee as Crooked tried to clamber out of the cage yet again. Losing his grip on the bars, he slumped on the ground, convulsing silently, his body going into shock from the pain. Blood spurted out of his truncated limb, painting flowers of red on the sand. Stiffening, he lost consciousness.

Blood spattered out of the wyrm’s mouth as its razor-sharp teeth ground the limb into bloody paste. Spitting it out, it only swallowed down the silver cuff before slithering off to explore the rest of the cage without paying any attention to the unconscious slave.

With a tranquil smile, Torak grasped in the air again. The phantom hand appeared near Crooked and picked him up out of the cage. Dangling limply from the massive fingers, his heart pumped his blood out of him in spurts as he was dumped unceremoniously onto the balcony.

Sand gazed at the bloody form with cold detachment. The smell of blood bringing back memories of long years of battle.

‘How familiar…’

This was the fate of those who failed the orcs’ test to become a gladiator. Human mages that didn’t need to fight were deliberately marked by some sort of disability. The medic’s blindness, Book’s legs, Crooked’s limb – the price of their failure. A deterrent against escape.

Pointing at Crooked’s stump distantly with his index finger, Torak pressed down. One of the phantom hands shot out and mimicked his movement. The tip of its finger glowed white-hot upon contact with the stump. With a sizzling sound, the stump was cauterized.

Crooked’s eyes flew open, a tortured scream ripping its way out of his throat. When Torak withdrew the hand, his eyes rolled up in his head and he crashed back into the merciful embrace of darkness. The acrid stench of burnt flesh overspread the balcony.

Turning to Sand, Torak ordered Kreg to cuff him. Following his directive, Kreg snapped a silver cuff on Sand’s left forearm, jostling his arm roughly in the process.

Torak was just about to pick him up with his phantom hand when “Sword,” said Sand suddenly, bringing him up short. It was the first time the boy had opened his mouth since they’d met.

“What?”

“I want a sword, a sharp one.”

After staring at him in surprise, Torak burst out into laughter. “That can be easily arranged. At least you have some fight in you unlike that spiritless thing over there.”

Reaching into a barrel of assorted weapons, he pulled out a sword and tossed it to Sand. Catching it, Sand didn’t wait for Torak to push him off, jumping off the balcony and into the cage by himself.

The wyrm, that was searching for a way out of the cage, turned towards Sand the moment it detected the presence of the silver cuff on his arm. Unsheathing the sword, Sand checked the edge. ‘A little blunt but it’ll have to do…’

Taking a deep breath, he grabbed one of the bars of the cage with his left hand, clenched his teeth and chopped down on his forearm above the cuff. Warm blood spattered his face and his mind blanked momentarily as the blade cut halfway through his arm and got stuck in his bone.

He teetered on the verge of unconsciousness as the ache ravaged his mind. He could hear the wyrm approaching from behind him. With a guttural roar, he powered through the pain and increased the pressure on the sword, finally severing the entire arm. Grabbing the arm, he dived to the side at the last moment, causing the wyrm to slam against the walls of the cage.

Bringing the arm up to his mouth, he bit down on the silver cuff and tugged it off. Spitting it out onto the ground, he moved aside, lying in wait for the beast. The wyrm could only sense metals, so it could only ‘see’ the cuff and the sword. Now he had to bet, he had to bet that the instead of the sword, it would go for the cuff. Even if it went for the sword, he could just discard it and then there would be a stalemate where he wouldn't be able to harm it while it wouldn't be able to sense him. Given that he was able to stanch his bleeding arm of course.

Thankfully, the wyrm had been bred on a diet of silver ore and the cuff was much more lucrative to it. Just as it surged past him to get to the cuff, he leapt on its back and stabbed its head with the sword, accurately aiming for the weak spot on its forehead where the third eye was supposed to grow.

The sword impaled its brain, killing it instantaneously. Crashing onto the ground, its corpse drew a furrow in the sand with its momentum, the impact knocking Sand off its back. He flopped limply in the air, unconscious even before his body hit the ground.