How far can a sin stretch into the future? You’re right. Forever say the gods. Damn you Exeter.

  -“Ruminations” Emperor Garifax

  Verneaus holds tight to his nerves by gripping tightly his pant leg. The grass-covered earth, this ruined forest, shakes as he sits against the tree, the warm glow of his personal shield around him. Orange and pink needles rain down from the tree above, spots of shadow pressed to the dome of amber light around him. Another quake runs through the earth, more needles fall, and Verneus’ world gets a little darker.

  A monstrous crash resounds from the trees to the right. Vearneus’ eyes bulge inside the dome, his hands grip tighter, and he strains to control his breathing. It is impossible. He gasps air between his teeth and stares down at the ground and his legs through sweat-streaked eyes, the world an indistinct blur of his brown hair and the forest floor. His heart beats like a drum against his ribs, its tempo picking up, pushing his labored breathing to match it. Verneaus grips the enchanted silk robe that was thrown at him just a few hours before, his fingers feeling the organ in his chest thump through his skin. An observer might think the man at prayer, but he was simply holding on with everything in his might to keep from passing out.

  The shaking behind him fell still. When? He couldn’t even guess. The realization sent a shiver snaking his spine, the cold creep of dread clawing at him. The expected moment when a hundred monsters would swarm out, stumble over his hiding spot, and rip him limb from limb, never came. Slowly, the dread slipped away, allowing a sliver of courage to peek through. Verneaus seized that courage like a lifeline. He was here to see to a job. He needed it to just stay sane.

  With more effort than he would like to admit, he pulled his hand from his chest and let it rest on the pouch at his side, the treasure he was to keep safe. It still took him another two minutes to push himself up to stand, leaning against the tree like a crutch. The silence continued through the wood, and there were only two ways it could have gone. If he chose wrong now, someone would probably die.

  Verneaus lifted his hand, pressing the ring on his middle finger to the amber shield, willing it to dissipate. A shower of needles fall around him, the sudden movement almost scaring him into reactivating the shield. He held out, taking a breath and daring to look around the tree.

  Ahead of him, a moonlight glade spread out for two hundred feet, a vacant lot near the town surrounded by trees with orange and pink needles hanging from their limbs that almost seems to glow. A small creek runs through the center of the glade, the splinters of a mill and water wheel still lingering on the northern side. Hundreds of them, insects of a monstrous size, lay unmoving throughout the glade on a bed of white and yellow flowers. In the light of the full moon casting down from above, the green ichor of the dismembered monsters seems almost to glow.

  In the center of the glade, atop a field of corpses made from red beetles the size of entire wagons, the only thing living in the glade turns its attention his way. He mistook it for a woman when they met a few days before, but how could it be?

  The thing in the shape of a woman turns to look at him; its blood-red trail of hair, dark and slick with its blood, supports a crown of shining gold. It still wears clothes beneath the blood and ichor, but most it would be polite to refer to as rags. Two massive wings of red scales spread wide from its back, casting a shadow over the clearing where wounding holes aren’t torn into the fabric of the appendages. A swarm of dark sand buzzes around it like a halo of hornets, every movement vibrating the air. The worst of it is the creature’s eyes, both so alien, both so wrong.

  It stares down at Verneaus from atop its pile of treasure, a wide smile on its mouth as it watches him with that predator's gaze. It does not even look down as it tears a black fang as big around as Verneaus’ arm from its torso, a rush of blood following and being closed by healing flesh in just a few moments.

  Verneaus hates these monsters trying to pass themselves off as normal people. Too many had come to his town in the last few days.

  Smile through the pain. Easier said than done.

  I shake in a hollow breath, trying to show the scared man down on the forest floor that everything is fine. My healing points bottom out and it feels like a blade tickles my heart. It is all I can do not to scream as I toss away the fang that spider monster had gifted to me and take a wobbling step forward, pulling my jacket closed around me.

  Another outfit ruined. Losing the heavy armor had been the right decision when I made it. Making the full use of my incredible speed attribute has been for the best, and it isn’t as if I am strong enough to lug around heavy equipment at my top speeds. The benefit of the heavy material just doesn’t match the detriments, but one good thing was that I didn’t have to worry about having my clothes ruined after every fight. Well, that had actually been an issue in the past wasn’t it? I need better equipment.

  Falling back onto the shell of one of the red beetles, I focus on my breathing, trying to take some kind of active hand in getting my body to heal faster. A small hole between my ribs still cries a trail of blood, my high recovery working overtime to fix the issue. No matter how much recovery I have, blood loss still leaves me dizzy and feeling so weak.

  My wings vanish and the flying orbit of black sand comes raining down. Most of the sand returns to my vault, but I pull some aside to fill empty boxes, the bits of the sand containing foreign mana. I only need three boxes this time, only one of those looking like it might contain enough mana for me to gain an affix from. That done, I store the boxes as the shaking man makes a hesitant approach through the blood-splattered flowers.

  I don’t need to close my eyes to focus, but the Verneaus seems to jump whenever I look at him, so I do. He looks around the field of dead bugs, stepping lightly to avoid getting ichor on his boots. I wish him luck in that.

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  In the darkness of my mind, my attention turns to the pool of power inside that Galea represents as Healing Points. My connection to the pool of magic is tenuous; I have only discovered it even existed in the last few days of near-constant fighting, feeling it for the first time, four days after discovering the vast reservoir of energy that is my mana sitting in my chest in the same space as my soul cage.

  The healing magic rests just beneath my lungs, and it feels just now more vacant than an empty cave, just the barest trickle of power being squeezed in an instant before vanishing into my body, racing to where it is needed. I track the path of the energy, seeing it race a line through my body toward the injury on my side. The line is tiny, made of paths that branch like veins and carry this healing magic to all parts of me.

  With my full attention on the network of branching pathways and the vacant hollow at my core, I tell Galea to allocate a free point to vitality. There, I see the moment the power solidifies in my soul. It isn’t just the metaphysical hollow in my core that grows in size as a splash of power is pushed inside, but all the narrow passages of the vein-like network. The change is miniscule, but seeing it as it happens gives me an insight.

  For the next ten minutes, as my body works to heal itself, I have Galea put twenty-nine more points into my vitality, each allocation coming with a tiny expansion until the whole of the hollow and the network are a third better than they were just a few minutes before. The more I observe the changes, the more I realize that it is not just their capacity that improves, but my ability to detect them, as if the resolution of my focus is increasing.

  The feeling is novel. When I discovered the mana network just a few days ago, I was able to peer at it as if it were a wireframe of crystal standing before me. My connection with it is more keen, the level of detail so much greater. Oddly, the veins that carry energy spread out through my body in similar vein-like networks, but are completely distinct from one another as far as I can tell.

  I am still looking to find a third network, one that carries the energy Galea represents as stamina, but I’ve met with no success. Both the discoveries of my mana and healing networks came as my body was working to replenish them. Unfortunately for me, I have not come close to depleting my stamina reservoir in months. I don’t even know what I would need to do to go low on stamina.

  Allocating more attention to vitality might be a good idea. My experiments with the healing magic over the last few days and the fights against seemingly unending hordes of monsters have made a few things clear to me. Namely, a massive recovery does not make up for a lack in vitality. Recovery seems to increase the efficacy of my healing points and the rate at which they recover, but it is vitality that controls the quantity that I can hold at a time.

  As I am now, I have enough healing magic waiting in my body to shrug off at least two major injuries, my ungodly levels of recovery letting me recover from wounds that might be mortal for others. After that, however, my recovery seems to matter for very little. My body won’t recover without first making more healing magic.

  I add investing in more vitality to my list of short-term goals along with getting better equipment that won’t be ruined every time I am stabbed through by some random monster. As I stand and hug my jacket close, the garment the only piece of clothing still in good shape, the man in the glade spooks and almost falls over.

  “Are you alright, my lady?” he asks.

  I stare past him, not wanting to make him uncomfortable with my eyes more than I need to. How could anyone expect more from the man, he is already doing an admirable job for a person without power. He spent his whole life in the town where he was born, working hard to become the best cooper the town ever saw, and when monsters started attacking the countryside out of nowhere, he stepped up. I can admire that and look past the trembling of his hands and the sweat soaking his clothes. He was made to make barrels; I am the one made to kill monsters.

  “You still have the sack,” I say, holding my hand out. I grimace down at my palm, the ugly green blood of the monsters around the clearing sticking to my skin, drying. A flash of fire races over my hand, the green flames burning the blood away in an instant, revealing clean and unblemished skin after subsiding. Looking up, I find Verneaus with his hand outstretched, a bag hanging from his fingers, and a look of terror on his face.

  Fire might have been a bad idea. I just didn’t want to get the bag dirty.

  I open the bag, finding the rings and bracelets inside. They all glow with power underneath my gaze, all of them storage items. Reluctantly, I begin to put them onto my left hand one by one.

  The operation so far has been a mixed bag. Since the force of magicians that is now known as the 4th army arrived in Maidenlake, I have been treated more as an asset for the operation than a fighter. For the most part, I have been tasked with moving from battlefield to battlefield, cleaning up after the rest of the army as we work to solidify the territory around the city as being under our control. I visit a good half-dozen battlefields like this one a day, scooping up all the good before needing to move off again.

  By Illigar’s command, I am not to engage in combat unless doing so will save life or property. Considering the huge amount of wealth that I am carrying around, that is probably a good command, but a difficult one to follow. Not that I have broken it yet. Sure, the mill might have been destroyed by this horde of monsters by the time that I found it, but that water wheel is still intact. A girl from a small village knows just how valuable those are better than anyone.

  I sneer at the jewelry once it is on my arm, feeling so unjustly untrusted. The high-tier enchantments on the storage items seem to supersede anything I have, even my vault. Worst, I can only put items into them and take nothing out. It is as if Illigar doesn’t trust me to uphold my part of our agreement.

  “Are you ready?” I ask Verneaus.

  The man swallows, nodding to me. I only ask because he seems to somehow be able to sense when I spread out my aura. For someone without any essentia or any source of magic that I am aware of, that is quite the feat.

  An aura of red and gold spreads out from me in a flood, racing away and burrowing into the forest around the glade in an instant. Information assaults my mind, so much at once that I almost fall over and have to steady myself on a beetle, soaking my clean hand once more in green ichor. I pay it little mind, focusing on taking in all of the sensations pounding into my brain. Every time I bear this pain, it gets a little easier the next time. Likely, there is some better way to train with my soul presence, some trick that a master might give a pupil, but this works for me. Pain and I are on decent terms these days; we haven’t been far enough apart to be enemies for a while.

  My chest expands with a long inhale, my mind settling and spreading out to encompass the glade. One hundred and sixteen dead monsters, not a single left alive anywhere. The manipulation of my magic is simple, almost absent any effort. The bodies explode into pink mist, trailing and arcing through the air as the clouds race toward me–a considerable cut of my mana vanishing at the same time. I exalt, feeling the power wash into me, almost as if I breathe it in as it races and disappears into the storage items I wear.

  I open my eyes, and Galea already waiting with my inventory window open. All of the boxes are the same as they had been before, the storage items on my arm having stolen all of the materials away from me. But, there is one thing that has changed. At the top of the window, the number representing my gold has taken another jump.

  I can’t help but smile as I look at the new, bigger number. Illigar doesn’t know that I can turn dead monsters into money directly, and his storage items don’t stop me from gaining all of that for myself. There doesn’t seem to be a reason to make him aware of that fact.

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