Liz approached the beetle again, examining its fallen form.

The thing’s beady black eyes seemed to glare at her, and it slammed a limb onto the ground, attempting to stand back up. But, like the past dozen times, the action proved useless.

Her rope had held.

And now that she had the voidspawn detained, she wanted to try something.

The high of her new discovery was still coursing in the back of her mind, and as she had been thinking about ways to take down the beetle, another thought had occurred.

“If I can manipulate my own metabolic energy… what would happen if I tried to manipulate someone else’s?”

She placed a hand on the beetle’s bound leg.

“Scree?”

“Ugh, dammit.”

Even with her hand directly on top of the creature’s flesh, she could barely send her senses inside.

All she could sense was a vague outline of the voidspawn’s powerful muscles, the energy held within them straining to release as it struggled against its bonds.

If she could tap into that power…

Using the same technique that she had used on her own body, she pulled.

“Scree!” The Colossal Beetle stubbornly resisted her internal assault, thrashing in panic. It clearly didn’t appreciate her trying to steal its metabolic energy.

“Fine then. If you won’t come easy, then I guess I’ll just have to take it by force.”

She gripped the beetle’s leg once more, but this time she wasn’t just pulling. She demanded the energy be released, forcing upon the flesh the full force of her will. Like the command of a king, her spirit surged into the beetle, taking control and extracting…

A bare wisp, which dissipated before she could even draw it in.

She let out a breath, wincing. Her spirit felt sore, as if she had overexerted it like any of her physical muscles.

Well, she supposed that she couldn’t expect for all her theories to work the way that she wanted to. It would have been too easy, just placing a hand on her enemies and draining them of all their strength.

She stepped away and went back to the branch where she had deposited her backpack. Then, checking around her, she grabbed a fist-sized stone and thrust it into her bag.

“Yeah… this should work.”

After making sure that everything was in place, she started ascending the tree.

After all, she had an E-ranked voidspawn just sitting there, and she wasn’t going to let those credits go to waste.

The trek through the plant’s hardened limbs strained her untrained body, but there wasn’t any reason she couldn’t take breaks. Better to rest for a couple minutes than waste more healing energy to get up there quicker.

Breaths heavy and her pride slightly bruised, she scaled up to a branch about midway up the tree and set her eyes upon a particularly large fruit. Even only halfway up, she was already far above the surrounding forest, and a peek down sent a shudder through her spine.

No use worrying about that, though. She was confident in her step.

“Now, how do I get you down?”

She knocked on the fruit, and sure enough, it was solid metal. The stem attaching it to the branch was relatively thin, but sturdy enough to support the enormous weight of its burden.

The lighter came out again, and she ran them flame over the stem for a solid couple of minutes. The blue aura might greatly increase her strength, but she held no illusions as to being able to smash through metal unaided.

By heating the stem up, though, she was making her job far easier.

Using the stone she had acquired, she furiously banged the stem, gradually denting the now-malleable substance until it seemed to be only holding on by sheer luck. Then, with a satisfied grin, she knocked the fruit downwards.

Like a cannonball, the metallic sphere shot towards the beetle, accelerating faster and faster with each passing second. The Colossal Beetle didn’t pay it any attention.

Liz snorted. The beetle might have had some of the toughest armor she had ever seen, but even it couldn’t ignore the physics of the situation.

For a split second, nothing could be heard as the improvised weapon swished down towards its target.

“SCREEE!”

Crack.

The creature stilled, a gaping crater blown straight into its carapace.

Credits Earned: 212 Title Gained: Giantslayer

Awarded for singlehandedly defeating a voidspawn a letter-rank higher than you

+5% Affinity in Strength, +10% Affinity in Dexterity

Your Affinity for Dexterity has surpassed human limits

Liz gaped. With just a single kill, her credits had more than doubled. That was the equivalent of 20 normal F-ranked voidspawn, gained from a single creature. More than that, though, she grew giddy at the sight of her title.

That must have been what A was talking about. A way to gain back her talent, little by little. Her Affinity for Dexterity was now abnormally high, and she wondered just how much of a difference such a change would make.

Status.

Status - Elizabeth Sayler Titles: Marked, Giantslayer Threat Level: E- Marks: Mark of the Healer* Credits: 389 Strength: 6(8) / 34% Dexterity: 9(18) / 102% Spiritual Strength: 14 / 85% Endurance: 10(12) / 33% Perception: 10 / 55% Spiritual Capacity: 13 / 73% Constitution: 8 / 30% Cognition: 16 / 83% Spiritual Regeneration: N/A

It had all integrated as it should have. She didn’t know how to get more Titles, but she was still giddy at the prospects. Maybe, if she found the right combination of Titles, she could even restore herself back to her former talent.

That was a thought for another day, though. It looked like her revelation had also pushed her into the E ranks, which said good things about her survivability. Her blue aura definitely felt stronger than before, and she supposed that no longer needing to rely on food for healing had a large part in the advancement.

She climbed back down the tree and looked around. The Colossal Beetle had already dissolved by this point, leaving behind nothing but… a small hammer?

“What the heck?”

Liz approached it, and a System screen popped up in her vision.

The Void rewards your ingenuity. Item: Breaker Allows the user to manipulate its volume and density. Material strength is directly linked to the user’s spirit.

“Whoah…”

The weapon was made of a sleek green material, its hilt wrapped in black and its head gilded with golden trimmings. She reached out to it, and something clicked within her spirit. The sense that had come with her Mark expanded to the weapon, and she grinned, running her spirit through it as if it were her own body.

“That’s fucking awesome!”

A legendary weapon, directly linked to her spirit? She hadn’t seen anything similar in the Shop, and she was willing to bet that this would have cost more than the credits contained in a dozen Colossal Beetles.

Or maybe things like this were commonplace on this new Earth, and she was just overreacting. Whatever the case, she was eager to test it out.

Currently, the hammer was about the size of a carpenter’s tool, with a shaft two hands long and a straight rectangular head only as wide as two fingers. It was surely dangerous, but

She flexed her spirit, and the head expanded, nearly doubling in size. Then, it shrunk to the size of a finger, reminding her far more of an icepick than any sort of hammer. And, all the while, it remained the exact same weight.

That was so cool.

And she had only just scratched the surface. By manipulating the volume, she could concentrate all of her force into an incredibly small point, making her strikes less like hammer blows and more like bullet-wounds.

That could be achieved by other means, though. That was probably why swords existed, and she had once seen a reenactor use a hammer that slowly thinned into a spike.

So, while something like that was useful, it certainly wasn’t mind-boggling.

But a weapon that blatantly ignored the law of conservation of mass? That could prove to be truly devastating.

And that wasn't even considering her new, deeper understanding of her Mark. Her new blue aura felt a hundred times smoother than it had previously, and for a few brief moments, she had been the strongest she had been in her life.

And without needing to eat in order to achieve that state, she could use it far more liberally. She hadn't felt anything from that brief usage, and it had given her so much energy that she still had some to spare.

So what if she went all-out?

There couldn't have been more than twenty miles between her and the city of Ashley now. At her peak, she could have crossed that distance in a day.

And with this aura, maybe she could go even faster.

She laughed, heading over the where she had left her teacup. "Oh, and I hope that some ants get in my way this time."

She gripped her new hammer, giving it a few test swings.

"I could always use some more credits."