I fight within myself while following the healer to the back of the village.

One side of me wants to hit him for not going to meet us halfway or even seeming to take this seriously. But the other side knows that Alex may need more help. Even if he doesn’t need more healing, it would take weeks to recover even with a constant stream of health fruits. With Ludmar’s help, however, in two days he should be as good as new.

I put the duality within my heart to the background and wait for what he wanted to tell me.

“Look, I get it, you are all fighting and the village but I don’t have to treat anyone. How much or how I charge it is my business. So are we going to have a problem?”

“If for the next three months you treat everyone that comes to you with serious injuries with the seriousness they serve, no, we won’t have a problem.”

He stares at me slightly taken aback.

“I just saved his life and you are arguing with me?”

“Given that you could have done a lot more and is asking for payment upfront knowing who I’m. That is just wrong, and it’s stupid. It’s not like you even had cause to suspect I wouldn't pay and there were other people you had to heal. You just delayed for no reason and if that had cost Alex his life…” I ball my fist until my knuckles turn white.

“You are all the same.” He mumbles and I see in his eyes that he just gave up on something as he walks off.

I take a minute to gather myself and write down as much as I can from everything that I learned about his healing powers.

Coming back, I find Greg and one of the doctors in front of our ‘hospital’. I don’t quite recall the doctor’s name, but right this second that seems so unimportant.

“His powers are too useful. He is just beginning but we have yet to hear of any rumor of someone else capable of healing.”

“But what would it be someone like that? Couldn’t it be one of you guys, you even have the medical knowledge to use it properly?”

“I’m pretty sure he just didn’t tell anyone about it, but he has at least some medical training. He may be a mob doctor, from a war zone or something. He always sees the worse in people.” Says the doctor.

Thinking over his last words to me, that actually tracks. But with Alex a good portion of the way back to normal, at least I can relax for now. We don’t have to worry about him anymore.

“Nash, let’s go, Charlie was calling us.”

“Why?”

“We had enough on our mind on the way back so he didn’t say anything, but there is news.”

“Good news I hope.”

“I doubt it, he didn’t sound very happy.”

We leave the doctor behind attending to the other 4 people with minor bruises and scratches. All of the injuries were almost healed after the couple of hours since our last encounter with the beast, but no sense in not treating them.

Getting to the command center we enter and find everyone already there.

Seeing me arrive, Charlie starts:

“Quick recap for everyone: The beast passed through the second detection line on the way back seemingly heading for the HLZ.”

Seeing that, I lift my hand and Charlie lets me get a word in.

“I didn't pay much attention at the time, but I could feel a pulling force on the Wolfkin. So it does have a time limit, in another hour or two it would have to turn around back to the HLZ.”

“That is good to know. Also, another beast left the HLZ on the extreme south nearly exactly 6 hours after the Wolfkin started heading in our direction. We don’t have any more information on it, but it should be only a couple of hours from the villages and we send a dozen Missives through the merchant to the closest villages. Hopefully, they listen to us and take appropriate precautions.”

He pauses and lets the information sink in before Richard speaks.

“Well, at least we can hope that the beasts won’t run into anyone or any village before it has to go back to the HLZ. If the Wolfkin’s heading was any indication they don’t know where the villages are, just general directions.”

“We can hope.” Says Charlie. “Though that is not confirmed, from some of the information on Nash’s book about how the system handles a few of these things and what we gathered from various other sources, it is looking increasingly likely that every six hours a Mob will escape from the HLZ.”

One of the soldiers who accompanied us says:

“We are screwed if we want to confront them. Even Greg, our highest level at 96 is still far too weak to stand toe to toe with the beasts.”

Merlin volunteers: “And its capability to disperse any mana not directly wielded and the injures it can exert when we do precludes most strategies we could try.”

“How soon could you hit level 100?” Charlie asks Greg.

“The next attack on the village should provide me enough Exp. Fighting wolves or the Medium Level Zone beasts give good experience, but enough for 4 levels will take a while.”

“When is the attack coming?” I ask. “It’s been over three weeks since the last one.”

“We don’t know, that may be some change that could be a part of what is happening with the HLZ.”

“It would be too easy if you could just hit level 100 and find out what made them so much stronger all of the sudden.”

“There is probably something, but that is not from where I guess their power come comes. They… feel like much smarter beasts, didn’t anybody wonder why levels didn’t seem to matter too much when fighting the Low and Medium level Beasts. Even the mammoth that attacked the village we handled easily enough. I think that the beasts on the other side are ‘real ones’.” I say.

“That’s an interesting theory.” Says one of the most experienced scouts, here to relay information to them afterward.

“It’s just a theory, but it tracks.” Says Merlin. “I wondered about that since the first day. What better way to make sure we are unprepared to fight real monsters than to give us a bunch of weak facsimiles of our real enemies.”

Charlie who until this moment was pensive and interested takes a deep breath.

“Yes all very interesting discussion, but we need to decide what we are going to do. Because just going out again and hoping nobody else dies is not an option.”

Everyone shuts up looking at each other and willing an answer. There is none as we continue to hear noises from the other side of the village. Because even the ruffling of clothes and everyone’s breaths ae stop.

Great, now nobody knows what to do.

That is how we break up the meeting, with everyone thinking about what to do.

Walking out, I look at the dark sky trying to think what exactly I should be doing.

I head for the training spot where I had taken to increase my stats and start one more round. This time, focusing on something else. The very basis for my main class: perception.

Let’s see if I can’t increase it a little bit more.

The routine this time doesn’t involve enormous physical stresses or something of the sort. Instead, it relies on toys with very fast movement as I try to see for the briefest of moments which symbols they have on their faces or to determine the source sounds around me with my eyes closed and no perception field.

I try different methods even resorting to identifying plants from their smell or touch.

For each physical stat, Richard had come up with a training method that could increase them in relatively short order. With me as a guinea pig perhaps he would even be able to take his experimentation to another level.

The session goes smoothly even if Richard is not here to guide me. After a little over an hour, I leave with another point on my perception stat and the biggest grin I can conjure up. As I’m almost turning the corner, I look back and think of the combat that happened against the beast.

I need to take my game to another level.

Not just being decent at combat, but to use all my advantages in my favor. Perhaps not quite the most effective way of fighting, especially as I wasn’t looking to compromise on my decisions, but improving my capabilities against a single high-level enemy was in order. With the inner world, I had a tremendous advantage.

My idea of growing formations beforehand and laying them out in short order would work if we knew the enemy was coming to us and we had at least a minute or three to set up, but with the enemy in motion or the half a dozen other restrictions, the fact I was effectively tied to one spot sounded like a glaring weakness.

I had some ideas running through the back of my mind, so I note all of them down and began to eliminate the ones that would be awesome but were unfeasible. I rank them in effectiveness, ease and expected time of development.

Half an hour later I start another experimentation session.

I grow the roots in the shape of a fireball formation, with a maximum mana capacity of about 1 mana. The result is closer to a candle flame than a fireball, but at least it was hot enough to burn and though the injury would be no larger than a cigarette's butt burn, it was technically an attack.

With a small portal opened just on the edge, I shot the fireball and as I expected, nothing happens. That is, nothing happens on the outside. On the inside, the juju bean sized fireball splashes against the portal like it hit an invisible mana shield.

I continue by growing larger and larger formations, all of them for fireballs, and with the few in the inner world left, make a progression.

I shoot the increasingly large fireballs, until all the formations in the inner world, with a little urging and direct control, form a gigantic fireball. An attack that pulls 5000 mana from the batteries heading straight to the larger 2-meter wide portal to the inner world.

The fire splashes the portal and fades and I can not feel even the warmth from the fire while outside.

Twenty minutes and I pretty much confirm initial my suspicious. Not even Merlin shooting a thousand magma balls could cross the barrier. It was worth a try because if that had succeeded, my next step would be easy.

Too bad the ‘barrier’ probably has all kinds of restrictions and won’t be helpful if I try to use it as a defense. Because if I could, it would be an effective defense against even stronger attacks. I didn't feel even the slightest strain on the inner world even after the largest fireball I could conjure without a lot more preparation. It felt like the restriction came from the system, not anything dependent on me.

Still, I continue testing. This time from the outside in with a few palm sized disk formations in hand to fire them at a portal paying attention to shoot in the direction of a deserted spot and constantly checking there are no rabbits in the testing area. The fireballs travel inside and scorch the patch of dirt that I run my experiments on.

No strain, no sudden options and I think that it could be an option to open portals as defenses, though if for some reason the system decides to change how they work I could be screwed. Also opening anything large instantly during of combat is beyond me.

Next, I start running all the other tests I can think of, Water, Wind, Earth. Shooting physical materials in the most varied methods that I could think of.

I knew that I could shoot the seeds out without a problem, but could I shoot ‘runic bullets’ or something similar? It would be expensive, but in the right circumstances, it might be worth it. I could always go for throwing a hunk of metal without explosives, something the system had taken from us, but the speeds we needed to make effective projective weapons were out of reach for now.

Next, I start on trying to test if I can have runic designs partially inside the inner world and stil have it working. To test that, I make a long wooden rod that shoots fire from its very tip.

I slightly poke it out, with just a single rune exposed, the fire rune with mana coming from the other one end to the other.

I feel the man traveling through it, but as soon as it passes the Portal, it fizzles out, like I was dealing with an incomplete runic formation. I poke the fire stick further and further out, to no avail.

Test after test goes with me failing to get even a hint of success, but I keep going, knowing that there must be something. Soon however one last idea comes to mind, I don’t need to make the parts outside the inner world be the same as the ones inside. I could split them in two before the system had a chance to throw a wrench in the works.

Pulling on all my skills, from runic language, nature connection, and nature manipulation until mana manipulation. In long practiced actions, I mold roots and make a staff with runes using the same principles that Merlin had developed to split engravings in half and allow both sides to work at a distance from one another.

After a few minutes, I poke two inches of the staff out of the inner world in a clearly marked line in the staff and send the mana through hoping for something to occur.

The results are not disappointing.