Lance thrashed and screamed as the world tore his body open, stuck a hard physical core into him and threaded new channels through his form before slamming it all shut, forcibly healing him. It all happened in less than ten seconds, but the pain was excruciating.

When it was finally over, Lance was curled over on the ground, his friends staring at him. Yanesh leaned over with tissue paper, wiping at blood that had pooled around his mouth and bathed Lance in another healing spell, allowing him to struggle upright and fix his bitten tongue and lip.

“What was that?” Keeley said, shocked.

“You bought the Mana Upgrades didn’t you?” Yanesh said, fearfully. “That looked painful.”

“It was,” Lance grated out. “And only Core and Meridian. Didn’t have enough money for the rest.”

“Right… so start slow?” Yanesh muttered, biting his lip.

“I’d recommend that,” Lance touched his head, the pain fading but the new nugget of information on how to utilize his new upgrade for Create Object in there. So strange, but he’d take it. Like he had expected, it seemed to be two different options and a quick test showed that they both could work one after the other.

The arrows he created were different too. The one from the upgrade was slightly larger, blockier and longer than he preferred. It would mean extending a little further than he was comfortable with, but not impossible. The fletching was also strangely dark too and on feeling them, felt more plasticy and unnatural than the feathered ones he created himself. Of course, his own arrows were a little less refined, with a degree of warping along the core and the fletching, as well as a blunter tip.

“Bought Create Arrow then.” Yanesh plucked the upgrade arrow from Lance without asking, twisting it around and staring at it. “Looks similar at least. I bet it’d fire just as well, if it’s a bit heavier.”

“Probably,” Lance answered absently. He was a little distracted, for he was noticing a strange and different feeling in his body. It had been present, now that he thought about it, all the time since he had woken but it was only now that he recognized it.

Mostly because it was flowing through him, into different portions of his body, even as the feeling – sort of like running your hand through lukewarm water but inside one’s body – started from his lungs, his back, his head and kept moving to the core in his body. Just beneath his diaphgram actually, if he had to guess at its location.

The moment that water – energy, Mana – reached what he assumed was the Core, it left again, as though he had turned on a tap at the bottom of a tub. In one way, out the other. It just kept moving, to his extremities and head before dispersing. Outwards. Into… something.

It was leaving his body, but not him, it seemed. Almost like… an aura? Was it dispersing into his aura?

“Penny for your thoughts? Or hell, I think I have a fiver…” Neil said.

Lance quickly explained what he was feeling, what he thought might be happening. “So, I think the Core basically stores Mana, this energy that powers our abilities normally. Not sure what the Meridian does yet, but I think it might be helping me get more Mana? Disperse it? Anyway, it then goes into my aura I assume where it charges whatever it is that makes the rest of this work.”

“Huh,” Sarah said. “So you think I just keep mine charged all the time?”

“Maybe. Maybe active and passive upgrades are different. Not sure,” Lance said. “Either way, this definitely is decreasing the cooldown factor.”

“You saw a drop in your cooldown timer?” Yanesh asked excitedly.

Matt leaned in too, away from where Sarah and Keeley had returned to talking. “I could really use a faster Backstab.”

“Yup.”

“Nice!” Yanesh fell silent, his eyes glazing over as he stared at his own Shop screen. Lance snorted, leaving him to it as he forced himself to stand and stretch. Moving seemed to help with the pain which was important.

He kept an eye – a brain? – on the feeling in his body, tracking how it flowed through him and gave him strength. He sort of regretted creating the arrows now, wanting to test out his Create Object option more but for now, he tapped into his not often used Mana Manipulation option.

That had always felt strange to him, like it had come from his body. Now that he was with a Core, he thought it might be a little true; but only because he never had a Meridian before. It seemed that creating things pulled from this invisible aura of energy into his body to be channeled. Now, with a Meridian that seemed to work faster, while his body drained external Mana at the same time to dump into his aura.

Question was, if the aura surrounded him right now; where was this Mana coming from? His initial thoughts had been that it was his surroundings, but focusing deeper, that seemed wrong. It was external to his body but it wasn’t the aura.

A secondary dimension that was next to theirs?

That… made sense. After all, the dungeons were secondary dimensions too. So…

“Shit.”

“What?” The entire team stood up, grabbing weapons and looking around. “Where?”

That’s the thing about the quiet curse in a tense environment. The loud screams, the shouts of agony or pain or fear or frustration – those were understandable. Almost natural.

The quiet curse, the one that was whispered as though being louder would make the calamity come faster. That was what scared the wary. The survivors.

“I think we’re breaking the world,” Lance replied.