In hindsight, Derivan reflected, the result of what he'd done was perhaps something he could have anticipated.

He'd spent a little more time trying to understand his stats, in the week they had spent waiting and then traveling towards Elyra. He'd been trying to understand how it was that he acquired new stats, and why he hadn't gained any since gathering Shift; there was the chance that he'd simply hit his limit, but that didn't seem likely.

Yet there was so little in common with how he'd gained each of them. The only thing he could really say was a common factor was that he was involved, which wasn't helpful. In four out of five cases, someone else had been involved in the acquisition of a stat; the problem there was that Physical Empathy was an outlier. He'd gained that one seemingly at random, when he'd been trying to interpret the feelings of his friends.

He'd always had trouble understanding the breadth of the emotional reactions the others had, and he'd simply wanted to try to understand, and then... new stat.

But the actual mechanism almost certainly wasn't that simple. He'd made attempts at gaining other stats since then, but he'd gained nothing beyond the five he already had so far.

Slime. Magic. Physical Empathy. Golden Geas. Shift.

An odd array of stats, to be sure, and a difficult one to create... a 'build' around. Slime was still growing, and he suspected there was no upper limit to the stat; moreover, he had discovered that there was an ability to absorb ambient mana attached to it, just as Vex had described. That ability got better as the stat grew, but the amount of mana he needed to draw in to overcharge his mana pool increased, too.

He'd talked the math out with Vex, who had plotted out a graph, and they had both eventually concluded that it was probably not a good use of his time to sit for centuries in a field absorbing ambient mana just to grow his Slime stat. (Vex had certainly seemed inspired, though, and started talking about how slimes had 'cores' that grew over time, and how having a core to study as it grew might revolutionize slime farming, at which point Derivan had to remind the wizard that they were not, in fact, out to farm slimes.)

The lecture had been amusing and enthralling to listen to, though, even if Derivan hadn't understood most of it. He had understood he would probably gain and grow this 'slime core' himself, if he kept growing the stat, but had no interest in doing so to that extent. If it happened over time, so be it.

Magic... was a stat he was still learning about, and here and now it seemed especially relevant. It gave him an insight into the whims of mana, perhaps? It guided him, allowing him to work with mana in a way that didn't belong to the system — which was odd, given the stat was provided by the system to begin with. But it was his best guess, and the stat was hardly part of the system's normal function.

Physical Empathy was his stat, and the one he used the most. It bridged the gap that made it difficult for him to understand others. It had been invaluable, and had only continued to grow as he used it; the number sat at a comfortable 51, now.

He'd more or less resolved not to use Golden Geas as much as possible, not liking the autonomy it took away from others.

Shift... had something to do with... disparate wavelengths of reality, as best as he understood it. He suspected that what it did was it brought him more in tune with those disparate wavelengths, and grew the more he interacted with reality outside its baseline. It was growing now, he could feel, albeit only by decimal points; this entire place was Shifted, very slightly, as a result of the bonus room's contents spilling into the world.

And that — that right there — that was something he should have paid attention to. Not that the place was Shifted, no, but all the times he had encountered Shifted reality. He'd never really thought about it.

But now that he did? Except for the planeshifted, every instance of Shifted reality they had encountered had been imposed by the system.

Dungeon boundaries existed because the dungeons themselves existed in a Shifted space, one or two wavelengths above the baseline; that was the reason he had needed Shift to break in, and how he had aided Misa in blocking the attack on the delvers within the dungeon, albeit inadvertently. The bonus room that Misa's village had once been in had been several wavelengths above that. The Serpent of the Night, the Overseer in which Aurum had been trapped — that had been many wavelengths away, but the boundaries had weakened when they had injured it, and he had been able to rip his way through the rest of those layers of reality until they found themselves within.

Even the gods weren't above the system, as they had learned not so long ago, and so the fact that they had their own planes... there was something there. Perhaps it wasn't that the gods had their own planes of power, like many religious scholars assumed. Perhaps they were simply trapped in their own planes. Histre had implied as such, even, when the angel had mentioned a 'cost' that Aurum had had to pay to send them down.

The reality anchor they owned, the one hidden within Misa's skills — that was Shifted away, too, which was the reason he'd needed to shift the mana input into visibility for them to see it.

These 'wavelengths of reality', or layers, or whatever they truly were — they seemed to be a tool mainly used by the system. Something it used to keep some things apart, and other things together; Derivan was concerned, just slightly, about the extent to which that was true. He would learn more as the stat grew, he suspected.

But that meant, first of all, that the stat was far more important than he assumed, and that he needed to find a way to train it that wasn't simply spending more time in shifted reality.

Second of all — and perhaps more importantly — in hindsight, he really should have known what those intruders likely were before he Shifted them into visibility. He'd simply never put it all together until now.

The words floated in the air; the only boxes they saw here besides their own. They flickered, like they weren't supposed to exist; the text warped and changed every half-second, broken letters barely spelling out a name.

"What the fuck," Sev said. His hand was gripped tight on his staff, and he was tense. Vex's tail was stiff, and he had retreated slightly, automatically keeping enough distance to throw a fireball, even if he couldn't use one here. Misa stepped in front of him, and her aura flickered black with [Guard Stance].

Derivan could only grip his sword and gently pull Vex to his side. He'd learned new spells, but no new skills had been offered to him by the system, and magic here was unreliable unless he used the new methods he had found — and that took him time.

Time they didn't have, here. Time that needed to be bought. Time he wasn't sure could be bought, because every one of them felt it.

That feeling of wrongness blanketing the air.

Something is wrong.

It wasn't a thought of his own. It wasn't an instinct imposed upon him by the system, a feeling he remembered from what felt like a lifetime ago. It wasn't a guess.

It was a feeling from the mana. Fear, anxiety, anger. A hint of resonance with a memory from a world that never existed, as far as it was concerned.

Derivan could see that Vex had felt the same thing, too; the lizardkin stiffened and his eyes narrowed even more than they already had, and now the worry in his face became something more real.

Yet... there was a fierce protectiveness in his expression that hadn't been there before.

Derivan felt a surge of some foreign emotion he didn't understand; admiration, perhaps, for Vex's love for magic.

And then the System Patchers spotted them.

The names were easy enough to read, despite the garbled and changing text. What was less easy to handle was what they looked like. Perhaps that was one of the reasons they were Shifted away at all, instead of being allowed to work in the open; the very sight of them would, Derivan imagined, scare off anyone that saw them.

They were vaguely insectoid, in the sense that they had a carapace. But that carapace was the strange system-blue of the boxes they so often had, and that was where any similarity to any living creature quickly ended. Every one of the Patchers were an amalgam of limbs. And every one of them was different, too — some had five thin, sticklike arms, waving out in an array that mocked the general concept of anatomy, and others had three bulky ones that would not have seemed out of place flexing for attention in a tavern.

Others had more. Five, nine, eleven; always odd and asymmetrical. There were five of these System Patchers in total, and Derivan had pulled all five of them out of reality like a fool; part of him wondered if he could shove them back, but already he could feel resistance pooling in that part of his soul.

Shift was a stat, which made it a part of him. But it was like what Derivan imagined a muscle was like, for organic species; he had pulled it too hard, and now it would take time to recover before he could push that hard once again.

"I cannot send them back yet," Derivan informed, his voice tense. "I apologize."

"We need to see what we're dealing with anyway," Sev said grimly. "Pulling them all is better than getting ambushed."

"I've just been waiting for a fuckin' challenge," Misa grinned, baring her teeth.

"I... can't help," Vex said, and there was a slight tremble in his voice that made a part of Derivan tighten in turn. He shifted so that he, too, was slightly in front of Vex, positioned to guard him.

Vex held out his dagger anyway, because of course he did. His skills with a dagger were reasonable, and Vex didn't like being useless.

And then they waited. The air was tense, and charged with electricity; no one else was around, because the mana slivers were kept in a derelict-looking warehouse guarded by dozens of security spells right at the edge of the city.

The System Patchers regarded them curiously, at first. Derivan could only read that emotional context because of Physical Empathy; the stat helped him skip all the steps he would have needed to learn how to read a new people, a new species. They weren't necessarily hostile.

And yet all his instincts screamed at him to be careful, that there was danger. And the others clearly felt the same way.

Which was a good thing, too, because the Patchers rushed at them all at once — though strangely, even then, they didn't seem hostile. They simply...

"They think we are a problem to fix," Derivan said. His words echoed strangely in all the extra empty space in the warehouse, and the Patchers kept moving.

They weren't fast. They moved with a strange, loping gait, bodies twisting and contorting so the hands and limbs could make contact with the ground.

And then, when they were closer, they screamed.

All at the same time, a keening, chittering sound emerged from them, one ripple bouncing into the next and joining together until it turned into a solid wave that resonated not only with the air, but with the baseline wavelengths of reality.

That air around them shifted, impossibly. Stone and dirt changed at random where the wave connected, turning to grass, then fire, then sea, and then something dark and wrong —

Misa flinched first, seeing what the skill did. And then her face set, and she blocked.

It took all her branched timelines to do it, too. It was visible, just as much as the strain on her was; she looked like she was laid over on top of herself, differing versions all straining against the same attack, each offering a different guard, a different counter. She struggled, and Derivan was forced to reach out with a smaller use of Shift, compressing that attack down onto a single wavelength, and the block resolved with Misa looking only a little worse for wear.

The attack snapped back onto the Patchers, that outward ripple collapsing inwards into five separate impacts that knocked them back. Misa didn't seem to care.

"These aren't fucking level 37," she growled instead. Her face was paler than usual.

"They're attacking using the system's mechanisms," Vex said, the flesh beneath his scales pale. His eyes flashed with his traditional color of his [Mana Sight], though Derivan had no idea what his friend was doing. This didn't seem to be a matter of mana. "We can't — we can't fight with system skills. Bad idea."

"That block was taking something out of me," Misa agreed. There was a certain anxiety set into her shoulders, now. "I think Derivan stopped it. But that was—"

She shook her head and cut herself off.

Derivan stepped forward, because now seemed like the time, and Misa had bought him the time; whatever had happened with the block and Shift, the Patchers seemed disoriented, rolling on the floor in a disjointed jumble of limbs.

Mana flowed into his gauntlet just like it had before, and he drew the same glyph he had before.

If the system wasn't an option...

Maybe magic could be.