The first problem appeared almost immediately — Derivan found that he couldn't move.

He wasn't as worried about it as he thought he should have been, though he stopped mid-walk and that caused his friends to look at him with concern and alarm.

The second problem took a moment to appear, and it was in the spate of notifications that immediately appeared to him.

Unable to find item .

Unable to find skill .

Rerolling rewards...

Item and skill tables are larger than expected. Results may be undefined. Contact an administrator if you have any concerns.

Insufficient energy available to generate your rewards. You may be incapacitated while rewards are generated.

Generating rewards...

Part of the problem here was that Derivan didn't really have a way to communicate that he was okay. He saw his friends panicking slightly, glancing back towards the main group of people that were moving — the delvers were looking over in concern, given the party had stopped in place.

"I can't get a foothold on anything to block," Misa said, frustrated. "It's not an attack."

"He doesn't have health, but I don't sense anything wrong with him that I can heal, either." Sev's voice was worried.

"His mana circulation..." Vex paused, sounding thoughtful, and peered a little closer at Derivan. His eyes glowed a bit as he poured more mana into the skill. "It's being pulled somewhere. It's pulling mana away from the runes that enchant his armor; that's why he can't move. I don't know if I can just stop it. It might hurt him."

"Where's the mana going?" Misa asked.

"I'm trying to trace it now," Vex said. "It doesn't look like it goes anywhere, it just drains off into nothing... which doesn't make any sense."

Derivan paused at that. Was it going off into nothing?

The Shift stat was still relatively new, but his understanding of it had grown tremendously. He was, if anything, a little bit concerned about what it did — it seemed to weaken space around him, allowing him to shift between places. Unsurprising, he supposed, considering he'd obtained it when Histre performed a planeshift.

He'd used it subconsciously a couple of times, even. The first activation had been when Misa had blocked the attack that was headed for the delvers, essentially teleporting through the dungeon barrier; the second when he'd pushed through the dungeon barrier himself, together with Sev and Vex; and the third time had simply eased the transition slightly when he'd been brought into the bonus room.

Now he used it in a slightly different way — he simply felt at the space around him. There was definitely something strange about it that he hadn't noticed until he'd directed his attention right at it. He felt the way the system was pulling at his mana, and the way that mana sank into...

... a hole in space. A weakening in space?

It took a small application of Shift to bring that part of space back into alignment with the rest of reality.

"Oh!" Vex said, sounding surprised, then glanced contemplatively at Derivan. "I think he's alright. He did something... I can see where the mana's going, now. Uh... it's going to your pocket."

Misa blinked. "My pocke— Oh." She made the connection about the same time the others did, her eyes widening slightly.

The rewards chose that moment to finish processing.

Congratulations on completing The Village's Last Defense>! Here are your rewards:

Item: [Flame of the #######]

Skill: [###### Night]

Derivan jerked forward as his ability to move was suddenly returned to him, startling Vex, who was closest to him and let out a little yelp as he flinched backwards. The armor reached out to catch his friend before he could fall, chuckling lightly.

"Thank you for keeping an eye on me," he said sincerely. He glanced back at his notifications. The skill settled neatly into his status as he focused on it, and the item...

Out of the system box, a warm, amber-colored crystal appeared, landing in an outstretched hand. Where the light glanced off of it, the light moved, shifting and flickering like it belonged to a living flame; when he rotated it in his hand, it almost seemed to flare, like a fire that had been fed with oxygen. Just as quickly, though, the illusion faded.

Derivan didn't know what to make of it. They'd have to get it properly appraised; his attempts to pull up a box on the item just gave him more errors. And the skill...

[###### Night] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]

...didn't have a particularly helpful description.

He shared them both anyway, causing all of them to raise skeptical eyebrows at the box.

"Do you want to try using the skill?" Misa asked with a frown. Derivan shook his head.

"Maybe later. Away from others, except perhaps those that might be able to mitigate the effects of the skill, should something go wrong." The armor looked briefly uncomfortable. "I would like to ask the Guildmaster for assistance in this, if possible. Perhaps she would have a means of identifying what the skill does."

"That might be for the best," Sev agreed.

"What about..." Misa gestured a little bit to her pocket, referencing the way mana had been flowing between Derivan and the reality anchor in her pocket. "Is there a link there?"

"There was a notification about insufficient energy," Derivan offered.

"So the anchors power the system in some way?" Vex said with a frown. "Maybe?"

"That's the best we've got for now," Sev frowned. "A lot of implications with that, but maybe we'll bring it to the Guildmaster and see if she can make sense of it. Or to Kestel, if he's... okay."

The four of them fell silent for a moment. Sev glanced worriedly over at where Kestel was being kept — the researchers were still tending over him, and there was always one of the delvers hovering nearby at any given time. Everyone was worried, and no one had been able to get Kestel to talk about what was on his status screen yet; no one knew what status effect he might have.

"Perhaps Vex can receive his rewards next?" Derivan suggested after a moment of silence. Better to have a distraction, he thought. He glanced to Misa, who looked only briefly put out before she was once again excited by the prospect of new skills to abuse.

"Yeah, go ahead, Vex. I wanna see what you get," she said with a grin. Vex nodded, reaching out to the notification —

Derivan had briefly prepared for the lizardkin to drop, in case the same thing happened to him, but thankfully that didn't seem to happen. Vex instead received his rewards immediately; a strange, gnarled root appeared in his hand, and at the same time he glanced into the air as his status updated. He sent a copy of the new skill he had out to the three of them a moment later.

[Delineate] [Active Skill] [Grade: 1]

Designate a desired location for use.

"It's not very specific," Vex said with a frown. "Same category of skills as [Classify], I think, but hard to say until I test it out. I'm guessing the rarity means it's more useful than it appears."

"[Classify] is as well," Misa said. Her eyes were practically gleaming. "We can definitely find some uses for this."

"You're next, Misa," Sev said.

"I know," Misa said, grinning, and then reached out to tap her own notification. She shared the resulting box almost immediately, wanting to read the skill at the same time as the others — in fact, she nearly dropped the sword that appeared in her hand as she gestured, having forgotten that [The Blade Arcane] was supposed to be part of her rewards. "Whoa!"

"Is that sword... made of arcane mana?" Vex peered at it, vaguely concerned.

"The blade is, anyway," Misa said, waving it around. The hilt was a complicated thing of silver metal, twisting in on itself before coiling outward to form the edges of the hilt; it was very prettily designed, though it didn't particularly look easy to craft. There were gaps in the metal that made it look like a single piece of silver had been bent and coiled into itself, rather than molded into the shape.

The blade itself was made of dense arcane mana, just as the name suggested. It was a light-red energy that shimmered in the air as she waved it around. "This thing isn't going to explode if it's hit by certain types of mana, is it?" Misa frowned. "Like what happened in the room?"

"And with the Aberrant," Sev added, glancing to Vex.

"It... shouldn't?" Vex frowned, looking carefully over the sword. "I'm pretty sure it won't. Enchanted items have to be useful, and this thing would be useless if it exploded at the touch of the slightest bit of mana. I mean, except in very limited ways."

"Perhaps we should test it with a less harmful type of mana," Derivan suggested. "Just in case."

"We can," Vex said, considering. "It doesn't react with ambient mana, which tracks with how arcane mana tends to work; there's a triggering threshold it needs to cross to trigger. So if I generate a mass of light mana..."

The wizard stepped forward, holding a ball of light in his hands; Misa held the blade out to him, and gently touched the ball against the tip of the sword.

Nothing happened.

Nothing obvious, anyway. Misa's mouth formed an 'o', and she blinked twice. "It's prompting me to see if I want to change the blade type," she finally said. She gestured slightly, pushing the blade forward, and the orb of light vanished from Vex's hand; at the same time, the blade of arcane mana shifted into a light-yellow hue, with shimmers of arcane-red in the mix.

"And I can turn it off whenever I want..." Misa grinned. "This'll be useful. We should still get it fully appraised, though, in case we're missing anything. As for the skill..."

Misa glanced at the notification box and frowned. "It's processing that one," she reported. "You guys see that too?"

"Yup," Sev agreed. Vex and Derivan both nodded.

"Is the system just having a slow day or something?" Misa said a little skeptically, staring at the box.

"If the system is tied to the anchors," Vex said thoughtfully. "Then... maybe? We've just kicked out whatever anchor it usually relies on and replaced it with this one, which the first anchor created in the first place."

"That's going to get confusing to think about," Misa muttered. "That anchor made this anchor, and then this anchor siphoned back from that one..."

As she was speaking, the skill finished processing, and all copies of the box updated at the same time.

Due to actions taken before receiving the skill [Heart and Home], the original version of the skill is corrupted and cannot be received.

However, a synergy has been detected between [Heart and Home] and item [X-51 RE##### AN####].

Synergy has been processed, and a new Unique skill has been awarded.

[An Anchor of Heart and Home] [Passive and Active Skill] [Grade: Max]

Cost: 10 units of

Home is where the heart is, and for you, the line has been blurred between these two things. You carry a piece of your home with you, just as your home will always carry a piece of you.

The passive effect of this skill is retroactive and permanent.