Kyle woke up the next morning to Sarah hugging him from behind. They actually had two beds in the room, but they always ended up sleeping together. Sarah had her arms around Kyle’s stomach, and seemed to notice him stirring as she gave him a light squeeze. Kyle grabbed her hands as they lay there, neither one talking.

Them lying in bed together had become a normal occurrence in the mornings. Sarah and Kyle had been sleeping together every night since Kyle had gotten back, and while it was new that they started the night in the same bed, them ending the night in the same one had started a long time ago.

Kyle and Sarah had actually been dating before Sarah’s mom and brother died. Sarah had never called it that, but she never corrected Kyle when he told people she was his girlfriend. They were fairly young then, and had fooled around with kissing and even made it to second base. Their relationship dramatically shifted with Sarah losing her family members. They still often held hands in public, but while they were closer than ever and Sarah heavily depended on Kyle for support there was also a line between them that neither one talked about or crossed.

Sarah was not really one to talk about her feelings, and Kyle realized that what Sarah needed was someone she could rely on no matter what, so all talk of dating and kissing and the like was never brought up. She had turned to Kyle for support, and he would support her no matter what. In the three days after the accident when Sarah wouldn’t leave Kyle’s room she spent most of the time physically clinging to him for support. He was able to convince her to leave and start going back to school after three days, but for months after that whenever Sarah couldn’t sleep she would sneak into Kyle room and into his bed.

She stopped doing it as much as she started to heal, but neither one was willing to change their relationship and it only got worse when the Change happened. Kyle had been working up his courage to ask Sarah to go to a school dance, not as a friend, but as his date. He had everything planned out, from how he would ask her to what he would wear while doing so. He had vowed that nothing short of divine intervention would stop him, and then the world Changed and his dad died.

Then Kyle was the one seeking support from Sarah. Sarah had basically moved into Kyle’s room the week after his dad’s death as he couldn’t sleep without her there. But that was a long time ago, and Kyle had been forced to sleep on his own for two years now. He had long accepted past events, and was ready to move forward.

Kyle knew he would have to be the one to initiate that change, but it was hard to imagine anything other than just lying in bed like this, deriving solace from each other’s presence. He had made plans while he was away. He knew they couldn’t pretend their relationship would stay the same forever. Kyle wanted more, and he was pretty sure Sarah did as well based on the lascivious looks she would sometimes give him.

But change was scary. They had both lost people, and despite their closeness that fear of losing the other kept them that last small distance apart. Neither one could even think about what would happen if they were to close that remaining distance only to end up alone. They would be broken beyond repair. But those were worries for another day, and for now they both lay there, too scared to do anything more and usher in the change those actions would bring.

“We should get up. It’s probably mid-morning already. If we wait too much longer breakfast will be cold.”

Kyle made no move to follow his own advice.

“Just ten more minutes,” Sarah murmured, as she buried her face in the nape of Kyle’s neck and squeezed him tighter.

Ten minutes turned into half an hour, and when they finally got up, showered, and came down Lisa was already making lunch.

“The two of you sure took your time. Walt was even up before you. He and Li left to go train over an hour ago.”

Sarah didn’t hesitate to throw Kyle under the bus.

“I blame Kyle. He shouldn’t even need to sleep with all his survival skills. But he goes off and fights one measly little battle and then sleeps like the dead and I just didn’t have the heart to wake him.”

Truthfully Kyle didn’t really need to sleep last night, as with his skills staying awake for a week straight was no problem. It was hard to break old habits though, and most people who had skills that allowed them to get less sleep still rested most of the night if their situation allowed it. Humanity was slowly learning that they were still human, and it took a lot of adjusting to fully utilize skills that went against their base instincts.

Kyle staunchly ignored Sarah. “Aunt Lisa what did you do with all the skill crystals I left here?”

“I’m still looking them over. There are a few in there that might be good for people to use instead of you trading them in for merit points. Are you sure you don’t want any of them? There are some pretty good skills in there.”

Kyle just shook his head. “I either have better ones or I already tried to learn the skill and it wasn’t compatible with the ones I already have.”

Lisa raised her eyebrows at the fact the Kyle had more skill crystals stored away. There had been some really good ones in the pile he dumped out before, including a taunting skill that Lisa was hoping Walt would be able to learn.

“If you think those skill crystals are only the dregs I’ll be interested to see what else you have.” Lisa then turned to address Sarah. “Have you thought about what you want to do with the ten combination crystals Kyle gave you?

Sarah stopped her failing attempts at braiding Kyle’s hair, which was really too short, and put on a serious expression.

“I have. I think you’re right and I should use them all to combine my original skill with my tier two one. I think the potential power gain from combining the skills is worth losing out on getting some random combinations.”

Sarah only had one tier two skill, but it was extremely powerful and suited her perfectly. She was mostly focused on speed and her tier two skill gave her that in spades. It had two parts. First, it passively allowed the air surrounding her to increase her movement speed up to one percent per skill level. Secondly, it allowed her to spend mana to increase her speed. It even had two options to do so. One being increasing her speed by a static additional ten percent for two hundred mana per minute with no cooldown time and the other a sustained gain with an increasing mana cost. Once she activated it she would gain ten percent more speed every thirty seconds with the mana cost doubling every thirty seconds, starting at two hundred mana. So two hundred mana for thirty seconds of another ten percent speed, then four hundred mana for thirty seconds of another twenty percent speed etc. That second option had a few hour cooldown time though.

“Well then what are you waiting for,” Lisa said. “The sooner you combine the skills the sooner you can start leveling the new one. They are both at max level right?”

“Yeah they are. I’ll go get the crystals now.”

Sarah gave Kyle’s hand a quick squeeze before dashing back upstairs and coming down with the jewelry box containing the crystals. Kyle watched as Sarah reverently took out the crystals and absorbed them one by one. He was aware his view on combination points was quite skewed, but it was still kind of funny to see Sarah so in awe of a resource that Kyle found rather plentiful.

Part of that was also had to do with his time in the secret training area. There were two main gains from secret training areas. The main one was the titles. Most of the secret training areas gave at least one title crystal, and the first person to clear it would receive Gaia’s Blessing. Titles were incredibly rare and powerful, and greed over a title crystals was even enough to overcome the effects of Part of Humanity and cause conflict. The second main gain was combination crystals, which were much more common and often given as rewards for clearing certain areas. Kyle actually had a few more in his dimensional pocket that he hadn’t decided what to do with yet.

There was a drawback other than the danger though. There simply wasn’t a huge variety of skill crystals, and they often were not incredibly powerful unless given as rewards for clearing stages, and even then they might be incompatible or useless to whoever received them. And to clear a secret training area you often had to learn a wide variety of skills as well, which could negatively impact someone’s growth.

It was a huge advantage to be able to trade for skills using merit points, as you could make sure you got a useful skill and one that you could actually learn. Kyle only had access to the skills that were dropped in the secret training area, and he was excited to finally be able to learn new skills without worrying about whether they were compatible or not. One of the rewards he had received for clearing a stage was a skill that could multiply his mana pool by one hundred. But it was incompatible with him, so he couldn’t learn it to combine with his other skills.

Sarah seemed to stare off into space for a thirty seconds or so after absorbing the crystals. Kyle and Lisa waited on the results. Combining skills never gave a result that was worse than the two skills by themselves, but by combining skills with inherent synergy you could get much better results. When Sarah’s eyes regained focus she immediately jumped up and picked Kyle up off of his chair and spun him around.

“Thank you so so much! I was worried that choosing to use all ten points at once was wrong, but now I understand why people do it. You can get some super OP kickass skills!”

“Why don’t you put Kyle down and tell us what you got,” Lisa said as she took a second to step away from her cooking.

Sarah spun Kyle around one more time before she set him down and showed them her new skill.

Name: Greater Air Assisted Physical Speed, tier two

Effect: The very air around the user bends to their will in increasing their physical speed. The user is treated as having an effective speed from their physical power equal to three times their physical power. The user gains three physical power per level of this skill. The user is able to spend two hundred mana to increase their speed by ten percent for one minute. Each consecutive use of that speed increase buff can cost double the mana and add another ten percent to the speed increase.

Kyle thought the skill looked fantastic, especially for Sarah. With the title she had the skill basically tripled her physical power. Sarah only had less than eight hundred base physical power, so before she had only been slightly above Kyle’s hugely inflated stats. Now she was way above the curve, with an effective physical power over two thousand.

Lisa took a few seconds to think it over before she gave her verdict.

“The skill is definitely powerful. I think it was the right choice. Going from a time two to a times three modifier for your physical power is huge, and this way you are also assured of getting more stat points from leveling another tier two skill.”

Sarah and Lisa then launched into a discussion about skill builds that went way over Kyle’s head. He was very out of the loop regarding skills, and it seemed that Humanity had really done some number crunching while he was gone. Kyle couldn’t even remember the last time he had done any real math, and was not sure he could figure out how to either with the internet gone.

Lisa then asked Kyle and Sarah to go pick Mickey up from his play date while she finished up lunch. It was a short walk over, but it was immensely pleasurable for Kyle to just walk hand in hand with Sarah and pretend that they were a normal couple with normal problems. Luckily the mental skills he had picked up had made him able to survive his time alone in the dungeon, but he had still yearned for a heartwarming scene like this where he could just relax and pretend everything was fine. Walking next to Sarah could make him forget he was an orphan and Humanity was trapped in a giant dungeon with hordes of monsters hungering for their flesh and enemies of Gaia potentially out to get them.

When they picked Mickey up his friend’s mom said that he seemed a little tired, so they should let Lisa know that he might want to take a nap after lunch. It was only about a fifteen minute walk back home, but less than five minutes into the walk Mickey was too tired to walk anymore.

“Kyle I don’t wanna walk. Carry me! Up! Up!”

“Okay little buddy, up you go.”

“Yaaaaaaaaaay!”

Kyle lifted Mickey onto his shoulders. Seeing this, Sarah made a joking remark, “Why are you only carrying Mickey? What about me?”

Kyle knew Sarah was joking, but Mickey didn’t.

“Yeah Kyle, why don’t you carry Sarah too?”

Not one to miss an opportunity, Sarah quickly latched on to Mickey’s thoughtless words.

“Yeah Kyle, even Mickey thinks you should carry me. Are you going to let us both down?”

Kyle was at a loss, how exactly would he carry both of them? He eventually caved under the pressure, and he ended up walking the rest of the way back carrying Sarah piggyback style, with Mickey then perched on her shoulders, which he enjoyed immensely. What would have once been considered a feat of balance and strength was thankfully made trivial with Kyle’s new constitution.

The lunch cooked by his aunt was superb as always, and Kyle once more swore off going solo ever again unless he picked up a gourmet cooking skill. Eating food with loved ones just made it all that much better. Kyle was going to go and check his rewards for the battle in the afternoon, but his aunt wanted to come along and Mickey had to take a nap first, so the trip was delayed.

Kyle, Sarah, and Lisa ended up playing a few rounds of Bananagrams while Mickey took his nap. It was a game where you used letter tiles to create words like in Scrabble, but each player had their own board and the words could be switched around whenever you got new tiles. This was one of the few games that Kyle could consistently beat Sarah at, which was why he liked playing it. Unfortunately it was not just the two of them playing, and Lisa ended up winning most of the rounds. Kyle did win more than Sarah though, much to her annoyance. It took a lot for her to admit Kyle was better than her at anything.

After Mickey woke up the four of them left to go to the main trade center, which was the building where most of the skill crystal trading was done. It was the only place where people could search for not only certain types of skills but also ones they were able to learn. Kyle also took some of the skill crystals his aunt had already sorted to sell if he needed more merit points.

There wasn’t a huge line when the group got to the trade center, and after less than twenty minutes of waiting, which was a fairly average wait time, Kyle and co approached a counter.

“Hi, how can I assist you today?” The man behind the counter was a middle-aged man with Larry on his nametag.

“Hi, I was hoping to check my merit points after the battle yesterday at the second tier city and process my request,” Kyle replied.

“Certainly sir, let me just see your ID.”

Larry took Kyle’s ID and did a quick search on a computer-like piece of magitech.

“Let’s see, it looks like you have over 20,000 merit points. Seems like you contributed quite a bit to the defense of the second tier city. Now, you said you wanted a mana pool enhancing skill, correct?”

Seeing Kyle’s nod, Larry then made a quick list of the mana skills Kyle could learn. Lisa and Sarah helped Kyle with looking over the skills. Mickey liked the one called Super Really Big Mana Pool, even though the skill wasn’t actually that great as it only increased his pool by a static amount.

While the group thought it over, Kyle asked if Larry could process some skill crystals and enhancement crystals. Getting confirmation that it was possible, Kyle then dumped a huge number of skill crystals and enhancement crystals behind the counter, which almost buried poor Larry. He had to request assistance to deal with the sheer volume.

They ended up taking over two hours, as Kyle also shopped around for a few other kinds of skills since he had so many points. He ended up getting a few other skills to learn later, like some better AOE ones, and two mana pool enhancing skills. One of the mana pool skills wasn’t super amazing, as it only multiplied his mana pool by five, but the other one he had high hopes for.

It was called Extradimensional Mana Regeneration, and wasn’t technically even a mana pool enhancing skill. It allowed the user to store mana in an extradimensional pool with a conversion rate of 1,000 to 1, and that mana could then supplement your regular regeneration when you wanted it to at a rate of ten times the level of the skill per five minutes. The skill was kind of crappy, but Kyle was hoping he could combine it with the mana pool enhancing skill he already had for an amazing result. Lisa had theorized that since you could use the skill to theoretically store infinite mana, it should work well when combined to increase his mana pool.

Kyle felt a bit sorry for Larry at this point, as they had taken up a fair bit of his time. They had to pay for it with merit points though, and it was Larry’s job to help people so Kyle didn’t dwell on it. There was still one more thing that he wanted to take care of while he was still here, and that was the skill crystals he had saved up for his own use. They were all powerful or useful in some way, but most of them were probably not compatible with him and Kyle wanted to get the ones he could not use sorted out.

There were over seventy skill crystals Kyle had saved, and he ended up being able to learn twenty-nine of them, including one he forgot he had stashed away. Kyle was eternally grateful he only had Larry make a list of which one he could use and not their effects. At first he was confused when Larry checked a skill, winked at him, and put it into the pile he could learn. Kyle then flushed a deep red as he remembered what skill it must have been.

Sarah was a little ways off playing with Mickey, which Kyle was extremely grateful for as she would definitely have asked about his reaction, which Lisa thankfully ignored. The skill that Larry had identified was called Enhanced Sexual Pleasing Technique. Kyle had stashed it away when he was feeling particularly lonely in the secret training area. Despite his embarrassment over the skill, he still stored it back away in his pocket dimension. He wasn’t planning on staying celibate forever, and even if that was a line he and Sarah weren’t willing to cross yet, he was confident it would be crossed eventually.