On a whim, I decided to move some amber mana to the area where I had suffered the worst injuries from the previous fights. Maybe it would heal my wounds? I didn’t know how this exactly was supposed to work, but just flooding the area of the injury with the amber mana might already do some good. At least, it was worth a shot.

Alas, nothing changed.

Perhaps I needed some intent or mental image of what I wanted to happen? So far, the only time I had achieved any effect at all, was when I had forced the mana into a specific shape or provided some intent or purpose to it, so that seemed a reasonable assumption.

This time, as I pushed the amber mana into the injured parts of my body, I imagined it closing the open wound and speed up the healing process. And, while we were at it, I imagined the mana removing foreign objects from my flesh, such as the remains of the spiderlings, the roots, and dirt from the claws and teeth of the giant bat.

Initially, there was some resistance to the mana flow, but then I could feel a warmth spreading through the injuries on my body and the amber mana rapidly diminished until it was all gone.

Maybe it would have been smarter to keep some amber mana back in reserve, but once the healing process had started, I didn’t dare stop in the middle, lest it undid all the healing I had managed to accomplish. Not that the amber mana I had sufficed to close all of my wounds, far from it. But at least it muted the pain, and I could feel a bit of tightness in the injured areas as if there were some newly healed wounds.

Unfortunately, the somewhat undirected flow of amber mana didn’t remove any of the foreign substances from my flesh. Which meant… that I had to get that stuff out of there.

Somehow.

I had some more time now that I had amber mana - whenever the flesh would get inflamed, I could simply remove the infection with my amber mana. I had really lucked out there. But even so, that was not a long-term solution. Eventually, I needed to get rid of the source of the inflammation and rather sooner than later.

But first, I needed to rest. My arms and legs were trembling from exertion, and I had a hard time forming coherent thoughts.

I would have loved to find a nice hiding spot, but there was no way I could run around and search for one. I was completely spent. And it was not only the physical exertion after four years of being wheel-chair bound… no, forcing the mana into images had been mentally extremely taxing.

The only thing I managed was to scoot away from the dead bodies, in case they were going to attract predators or dangerous scavengers before I collapsed with my back against the smooth cave wall.

“Just a few moments of sitting,” I mumbled to myself in utter exhaustion, waiting for my heart rate to normalize. “Just a minute or two.”

----------------------------------------------------

I woke up with a throbbing head, sore throat, and the feeling of bile in my mouth. I tried to spit but couldn’t get enough saliva in the mouth to even do that.

Water. I needed water.

And food.

My muscles were cramping from over-exertion, and I could barely suppress a groan of pain.

But I was alive, and none of my injuries seemed life-threatening any longer. So what was some pain in comparison to that? No pain, no gain or something like that. Certainly, amber mana had increased my chance for survival tremendously.

Curious to see what changes my body had gone through, I called up the status sheet.

Name

Daniel Hollander

Rank

Initiate 1

Title:

Mental Bastion, First Initiate

Strength:

4 [+1]

Intuitive Reasoning:

14

Mana

Free

Current

Potential

Agility:

5

Complex Reasoning:

17

Silver

0

10

10

Speed:

3

Emotional Intelligence:

9

Black

5

11

11

Dexterity:

4

Perception:

13

Amber

0

10

10

Endurance:

5 [+1]

Spatial Awareness:

21

Vitality:

7

Willpower:

21

Available characteristic points: 5

Spells

Mana Vision

Level 8 [+1]

Twilight Vision

Level 1

Minor Healing

Level 1 [+1]

Available spell points: 0

Skills

Mental Ward

Level 1

Mental Fortitude

Level 3 [+1]

Multitasking

Level 2

Internal Mana Manipulation

Level 2 [+1]

Meditation

Level 1

Available skill points: 0

And there it was… the mana. Of course, I had known that I had amber mana, but to see it in my stats sheet felt somehow sweet. I couldn’t help but grin a bit.

I had also gained some additional black mana from killing those bats, but it seemed somehow little. The first bat I had bashed to a pulp had given me two black mana… and I was sure that I had killed at least another four bats, if not five. Did that mean that there were diminishing returns to killing subsequent monsters of the same type? Or a first monster bonus? Or something else at play? If given a chance, I would have to check into the stats immediately after I killed the next bat. That type of information was perhaps of minor relevance right now but would be hugely important in the long run.

Thoughts of leveling into some superhuman monster slayer crossed my mind before the next cramp in my legs brought me right back to reality.

Shit. I was so fucking dehydrated. Maybe I should drink the blood of the bat or the… no, not the spider. I couldn’t even think about doing that. Gross.

But either way, I would need a new giant bat for that. The one from the last fight was probably all filled with spores or some other crap.

Trying to take my mind of those revolting thoughts, I quickly scanned the rest of the stats sheet, noticing that I had gained a new spell – Minor Healing. Which was huge, if not unexpected.

Time to get up and try to get out of here… the faster I managed that, the less likely that I had to play a vampire and suck some creature’s blood. Wasn’t blood even poisonous for a person, at least in larger quantities? My memory was a bit hazy on that one, but I was not too excited about experimenting with my life on the line.

With a groan and plenty of curses, I lifted myself to my legs and slowly stumbled along the walls, direction spider web. I fervently hoped that there had been only one spider there, the one that was now dead.

Were spiders solitary? I had no fucking clue. In fantasy stories, they usually came in large nests, so my imagination had the whole cave crawling with them.

Thinking about eight-legged shapes flitting around in the darkness, spinning webs to entrap me, caused my heart to thump wildly in my chest. Cold sweat covered my forehead and soaked through my torn t-shirt, and I had to exert all my willpower to keep on moving.

I don’t know for how long I struggled through the darkness, jumping at the slightest sound or movement, but it felt like an eternity. All the while, I could feel myself getting weaker. While I had rested earlier and even napped, it had not been a restful sleep, and my injuries were far from fully healed.

Near catatonic, I only noticed the hole in the ground the split-second before I fell in. In my defense, I was relying on my Mana Vision spell to see things that were there – a hole is the absence of anything, and it just didn’t register in my tired brain before it was too late. Waving my arms wildly to find any purchase, I slid down a steep slope of dirt, pebbles, and probably batshit. After a few scary seconds, I ended up laying on my back in what looked like a tunnel. I had not passed out, no broken bones, no open wounds, almost anticlimactic. But I took it.

Taking a closer look, I realized that what I had assumed to be a tunnel was actually more like a hallway - there were tiles on the floor, and the walls and ceiling were way too even to be natural. Obviously, I couldn’t see any color, but even with Mana Vision, it was clear that there were some patterns or ornamentations on the walls and the floor.

Slowly, I pushed myself back to my knees, and from there, holding on to the wall, I managed to get up onto my legs. Slowly, wincing at every other step, I stumbled along the wall in the one direction that was available.

After what felt like an eternity, but probably was only a few hundred feet, I came to a 4-way intersection. I looked into each direction, trying to figure out which one to take.

Wait, air draft. Wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? Light a flame and see in which direction it would flicker. Good thought, but I had no flame. If I had, I would have eaten glorious bat shashlik already. Plus, I already knew that there was an exit where I had come from, just not one that was usable for me.

After staring into each tunnel waiting for inspiration to hit, I finally decided randomly to go to the right. Always go to the right, so you don’t get lost, or whatever. Only that I had no idea where I was in the first place, so it didn’t really matter. I shuffled into the right tunnel and shortly after came to a sharp corner, which was when I first heard the noises.

And then I noticed the heavenly smell. Food!

Immediately, my stomach started growling.

Eagerly, I stumbled around the corner and almost ran face-first into a barrier. At first, my brain couldn’t comprehend what it was facing, but then I realized that I was standing in front of a solid door. A small gap at the bottom let through a tiny sliver of golden light.

My first instinct was to bang at the door and call for help.

I was desperate for water and food, and a safe place to rest and all that might just be behind that door. But then I thought about the bikers and how they had just dumped me into a ravine in the wilderness – fellow humans, but without a shred of decency and compassion.

And there was no guarantee that it would be humans behind that door. This was a different world… maybe there were indeed zombies somewhere. I shivered slightly at the thought.

Feeling like a peeping tom, I kneeled and pressed my eye against the huge keyhole.

And I was sure glad that I had decided to be cautious. I saw a big room, at least 8 by 8 yards, with boxes and barrels stacked on top of each other on one side, and what looked like a kitchen, replete with pots, knives, and other utensils on the opposite wall. And there was the source of the delicious smell – a couple of giant bats were turning on spits over a fire pit, fat slowly drizzling down into the flames.

Involuntarily, I licked my lips as I stared at the deliciously smelling meat. Who knew, that bat meat could have such an aroma…

But then a grunting noise distracted me from my singular focus on the food, and I noticed, partially hidden behind the crates, a smallish humanoid creature, albeit with gray skin, mottled with a green tinge and a strangely elongated, pig-like snout. And it turned out that there was more than one. As I a watched, another three or four of them, they were hard to tell apart, appeared from behind the crates to do… something, before returning to their original spot.

What the heck? Mutated people with dwarfism? Or perhaps humanoid pigs? Going with fantasy lore, they looked very much like… goblins or kobolds. Different books described them differently, so I was just going to stick to goblins.

Goblins…

Really?

I pinched myself, and then rubbed my eyes, which made me realize that I had seen perfectly fine without Mana Vision. In fact, it was almost as bright as in a well-lit room in a modern American home, despite there being no windows.

I took another look through the keyhole and now noticed that there was a massive chandelier hanging from the ceiling, with a bunch of crystals glowing in a soft white light that provided plenty of illumination for the fair-sized room.

And the goblins were still there. So it was not a bad dream, after all.

But I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, I reminded myself. Maybe they were nice little goblins… I chuckled quietly at the thought. Fat chance that they were friendly. So far, everything I had encountered in this new world was murderous, even some stinking mushrooms had tried to kill me.

And, true to the trend, the goblins confirmed their fantasy reputation quickly – as I watched on, I saw several vicious fights break out without any obvious reason. And it wasn’t just some scuffles either. No, those were fights to the death.