I grinned as the echoes of my final [Lightning Shock] faded, the charred remains of my eighth acid moth falling from the air. Why had I wasted so much time swinging crude metal implements around when I could simply rearrange reality with pure force of will? Yes, I was limited by the System for now, restricted to specific 'official' spells, but it wouldn't be long before I was fully restored. My old power renewed. Why had I been so scared of it? When I could snuff out the life of the Enshrouded as easily as I had the black knight, what reason would I have to be afraid? It was they who should be afraid of me. All I needed to do was remember.

  ... Wait.

  I caught myself, but not quite in time. Still, I was lucky to get away with a mere three. I'd intended to dump fifty points into Memory. Damn... That had not been good.

  As I panted—more from the effort of not doing anything than the earlier fighting, given that a large part of me was loudly insisting that I was being an utter coward—I considered that I could, perhaps, sometimes be a little on the impulsive side.

  Just a little. On the odd occasion.

  Occasions such as a couple of days after unlock day, when I'd realised that higher Skill stages gave more experience, and dumped a bunch of skill points into [Farming] without considering the consequences. I'd convinced myself that as long as I didn't evolve it to [Adept Farming], no-one would notice. In retrospect, that had been rather silly. So had a few other things I'd done since.

  Deliberately attracting a monster horde wasn't necessarily silly, as long as I could deal with the consequences. The problem was that I hadn't realised quite how many of the bloody caterpillars were around. The monsters may have had zero coordination, but when a dozen of them spat acid at once, the sheer quantity of the stuff made dodging a nightmare regardless. I was lucky for their two shot limit, or I'd have been completely overwhelmed. As it was, I'd needed to use [Lightning Shock] liberally to take out the monsters at range, which had attracted yet more monsters, requiring more lightning.

  And as my lightning rolled out, the experience had rolled in. Two levels from an hour of fighting, and I was already over halfway toward the next. Alas, the sudden levelling, combined with shifting my fighting style into something that 'Robin' had no experience with but the Seeker apparently approved of, had triggered a small bout of existential confusion. Apparently, I was going to need to be very careful as my level increased.

  I didn't even want to imagine what might happen when my Memory reached the point I should earn [Eidetic II].

  I hadn't even consumed half of my Stamina or Mana. The fact that I'd gone over a hundred stat points invested into Strength rankled a little, but not as badly as that Mana total. Why couldn't it be one point higher? I could only boost it in steps of five, so there was no way to make it a nice, round one thousand.

  Actually, according to the guild library, there was a Mark at one thousand for both Mana and Stamina. The other Stats had their second at two-hundred-and-fifty. Given how many free stat points I had per level now that I'd passed the second growth milestone, I could grab two new Marks.

  It seemed unfair that Mana and Stamina required ten times the points for these Marks despite only having a five times points multiplier, but it wasn't as if the Marks had huge effects, so I hadn't been missing out on much.

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  The effect of burden switched from 'slightly reduced' to 'reduced', but that hardly mattered: I wasn't at all burdened. I didn't even have a backpack. Ignoring physical defences was more interesting, but again it was just a minor effect, and I didn't know exactly what constituted a 'physical defence'. Armour—man made and natural—would certainly qualify, but what if a monster was simply too big for my dagger to penetrate its hide? That would be a physical defence, of a sort, but would the Mark really help? How would it help? Letting my dagger penetrate more easily wouldn't aid anything. It would need to make my dagger longer, or the hide thinner.

  At least [Mystical I] had a clear, well-defined effect. Maybe. Presumably spells counted as Skills for its purpose, but how did it handle rounding? Five percent of ten wasn't even one, so would the Mark simply not do anything when using [Stab]?

  I almost had the stat points to grab [Enduring I], too, for a thousand points of Stamina. I was, alas, three short. Or two, really, given that I'd put one more point into Mana than I needed to, just to round off the number of invested points. If only I'd been a split second quicker at stopping myself spending points on Memory. It was a pity I couldn't quite get it: it was likely I'd need to run away from things a fair amount while in the Jungle of Braccus, and the effect would be helpful for that. A five percent reduction in the Stamina cost of physical exertion.

  It was another concrete number, but not one that actually meant much, because Stamina costs were ill-defined to begin with. It wasn't as if sprinting cost a fixed amount of Stamina per second. And did it apply before or after recovery? I could walk without expending Stamina, for example, but if I'd already spent half of it, then it would recover quicker if I rested than if I continued walking. Would the five percent mean it recovered quicker while walking?

  Monster ecology, specifics of the System, there was a lot of stuff I simply didn't know. Did anyone? Were there more books in the library I'd missed that explained this stuff? Had no-one looked it up? Did no-one care?

  Another roar from the forest distracted me from my musings, and this time, a hint from Reasoning suggested that I pay attention. The background of roaring had never stopped, so what was different about that one?

  ... It was louder.

  A quick poke of my Memory revealed that some of the noises had been getting progressively closer, and it finally occurred to me that if I could hear the roaring, whatever was making the noises could probably hear my [Lightning Shock]. Just because there were no bigger monsters hanging out right on the outskirts of the jungle didn't mean that they couldn't move there, should something attract their attention.

  Should I run? Maybe not. This was another opportunity: I wasn't going to get through the entire jungle without bumping into the bigger monsters within, and fighting one here—where I had a safe direction available in which I could run for my life—seemed like a good idea. I'd read the bestiary from cover to cover several times over, but that didn't substitute for actual experience.

  The roar sounded again, this time the volume almost ear-splitting. The canopies rustled as trees swayed, trunks big enough that it would take four of me to wrap my arms around bending like wheat in a heavy wind. And then a monster forced its way out from between them.

  "Fuck," I said, completely involuntarily.

  It wasn't the biggest monster I'd seen, an accolade that belonged to the elder treant, but I hadn't needed to deal with all of that monster. Just a lower section of trunk, roots, and the lower branches. It was literally rooted in place, and everything more than a few metres above the ground could be ignored.

  This one was over five metres tall, and I couldn't ignore any of it. Every limb ended in claws. The tail was so thick and heavy that a slap from it would doubtless shatter every bone in my body. The head's primary purpose seemed to be a vehicle to transport teeth. The skin was brown and thick, patterned in a way that looked kinda like scales, although the way it wrinkled and folded at least made it clear it wasn't coated in actual armoured plates. A small mercy, but not much of one: given its size, attacking with a dagger would inflict little more than pinpricks.

  Its eyes fixed on me, a pair of slitted pupils the size of my hands focusing on my face. The pupils contracted, the footsteps of the monster ceasing. The mouth opened.

  There was no sound. Not just from the monster, but from anywhere. One moment, I could hear the background noise of the jungle, and the next there was nothing. My vision blurred, but not enough to miss the monster once again stepping forward, straight toward me.

  "..." I shouted, unable to hear my own voice as I desperately pointed my hand at the incoming dinosaur. Trying to point my hand. Nothing was moving right, and why was the world suddenly slanted?

  A bolt of lightning leapt from my outstretched hand, missing the monster despite the size of the target. Then I felt the impact of the ground against my side.

  "..." I swore. Whether I was actually making any noise, I couldn't say: I still couldn't hear a thing.

  With the monster's giant legs, it was only a few strides away. The mouth opened. On the bright side, my blurred vision left me unable to see the individual teeth.

  Downside: I was about to get eaten.

  "..." I yelled again, invoking another [Lightning Shock]. From my more stable position, flat on the ground, and with the monster looming right over me, I managed not to miss. The world flashed white. Whether the magic actually slowed down the monster, I didn't know. I'd just need to act assuming that it did, because if it hadn't, I was moments away from death and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I drew a healing potion from my storage ring and downed the thing, thankfully without a jaw clamping shut on me in the meantime, so the monster must have been stunned for at least a handful of seconds. With my weird incoordination, I only got half of the potion into my mouth, and only half of that down the correct tube. The portion that went down the wrong tube left me coughing and spluttering, but I didn't have time to deal with it, desperately climbing to my feet and immediately diving to the ground again as a claw sliced downward, gouging into the soil and sending clods of dirt into the air.

  The potion worked quickly, and sound once again entered my life. Not correct sound—all I could hear was loud static, over which was superimposed the rapid thumping of my heart—but it was sound nonetheless. With it came back my vision and sense of balance.

  New downside: I could see every individual tooth in excruciating detail, right down to the little rivulets of saliva running down each one. An amount of detail that was only visible because the teeth were only a meter away.

  Not having time to get up, I desperately rolled as the mouth clamped shut, the sharp teeth drawing blood as they scraped my arm, but thankfully not succeeding in a full bite.

  "Lightning Shock!" I screamed, launching another bolt of lightning into the monsters face.

  I felt rather than heard the thud as the beast was forced only a single step back despite the point-blank spell. I felt my own face burn, the proximity of the magical impact as dangerous to me as the monster.

  This was silly. All the thing needed to do was roar again, once more destroying my sense of balance, and then claw me before I had the chance to drink a potion. Or even if I did have time, I only had two left! It could outlast me easily.

  How could I get out of this mess?

  Run away? No. From what I'd seen, it wasn't faster than me when I was going at a full sprint, but it could send me sprawling with a roar. I wouldn't be able to get away.

  Spend my remaining skill and stat points? What on? Memory, in an attempt to bring past-me back, in the hopes he'd know what to do? No, even if that 'worked', the plan was nothing more than an elaborate suicide. There would be no ring to chop off my finger to lower my Memory back to safe levels. 'I' would die and be replaced by something far worse than this monster.

  Would Constitution help me tank its roar? Would Dexterity and Processing let me engage in close combat? Neither seemed likely.

  And the skill points... I could buy the Path of Lightning Mage, upgrading my magic. I could use the fourth and final skill crystal I'd brought with me—[Heal]—which would help to resolve my limited potion supply. But either of those paths would be mana intensive, and suddenly the fact that I'd 'only' used half of my reserves seemed a lot less optimal.

  ... But combining a few of those options, even if they wouldn't let me win, at least might let me run away.

  Ceding victory to the B-rank monster, I fled back up the mountain, spending my mana like water to heal the damage as the thing roared at my retreating back.

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