It couldn’t say that its decision to learn about mana and human speech was entirely thought out, but it was working fairly well.

Its original plan was to learn human speech and then use it to ask questions to the human about how she uses the mana, but it realized quickly that such a thing was not going to be happening any time soon. The human was also stunted because of her blindness, so even if she wanted to, it would be hard to ascribe meaning to the sounds she was teaching it. She couldn’t exactly point at things she couldn’t see.

It was still good practise for when it found another human, or if it could find her again in the future so they could continue after her kin came. She had a unique scent, like all humans did, and despite it being buried under a couple layers of filth, after being around her for so long, it was difficult not to become familiar with it.

It was an oddly fresh scent. Like air, cleaner than it had ever breathed, mixed with a myriad of sprinkles of different smells it had no description for. So, if she was nearby, it could probably track her down.

Additionally, while it had thought that the language barrier would stump any and all progress with its understanding of ‘mana’, that had been far from the case. Simply watching her moving mana around was an interesting sight.

It was difficult, extremely difficult, but after giving her another helping of rodent blood, at around the fourth day’s mark, it managed to be able to sense her mana before it went outside of her body. And the way she moved it was extremely odd.

It was very… physical. The mana moved up and down her body, as if following the path of her bones, with the exception of the times it would just leak out of her palm.

Its attempt to do the same, was a complete failure. It simply couldn’t grasp onto the mana. It was like air. It could direct it, push it out, but it couldn’t grasp and move it with precision whatsoever. When it activated [Echoes of Oblivion], it was a little easier to direct the mana, and as soon as it exited its body it automatically turned into the puffs of darkness. When it turned off the Skill, the mana became both harder to move and direct, and seemed to do absolutely nothing, simply vanishing from its perception into the open air.

At some point, it had decided to close its eyes, its head resting on its paws as it sat by the girl’s side, messing around with its mana to the best of its ability. Which meant that it was struggling to do anything besides meaninglessly expel it.

It just felt like it was missing something, and it didn’t know what.

Having grown both tired and annoyed at its lack of progress after another half-hour of doing this, it simply relaxed, emptying its mind of thoughts. It still kept a mild amount of attention aimed at the human’s direction just in case she did something suspicious, as it hadn’t forgotten about her attempt to sneak attack it.

Resting on purpose just felt strange. Whenever it rested before, it was either because of need or because it couldn’t do anything else. So the experience of just resting because it could and wanted to… It was extremely satisfying, fulfilling. It felt like a quantifiable improvement.

Minutes passed, and eventually, it fell into a short nap, noting that [Mana Perception] had gone up to Level nine, while [Mana Manipulation] had remained stuck at Level three. Which made sense, but that stagnation rather soured the taste of progression it had gained in its other skill.

To its surprise, [Echoes of Oblivion] had gone up to Level two, which was nice, but only a tiny improvement in how easy it was to use. It did note something interesting, however. It could see through the inky mist, like looking through a glass with dark churning waters on the other side. It was a bit difficult to see properly, but it was more than possible.

Which was a very convenient fix to the still-present problem of its glowing eyes. It couldn’t cover itself with the darkness, nor properly keep it in place, but it could make the mist float above its snout and hide its eyes for a couple seconds at a time. Of course, the amount of mana it had inside itself was utterly pathetic, so it could only do so for a couple seconds before taking a break of another couple seconds to recuperate, a process that became increasingly slower the more the wolf did it within a short span of time.

It peeked an eye open to stare at the human, feeling all the mana in her hand and comparing it to its own.

It felt like comparing a pebble to a boulder.

Frustrating. Mana was just frustrating.

It had no particular issue with patience up until now, but after spending another hour trying and failing to get a proper grasp of its mana, it growled in agitation, and stomped its way down the stairs to release some frustration into a hapless rodent or two.

She let out a guttural groan of relief once the beast walked out of hearing range.

For a moment, she thought it was angry at her. But now that it was gone, this was as good a time as any to try.

All the mana she had painstakingly gathered in her hand over the course of hours, forcefully extracted from her core until it was barren and dry, before repeating the process whenever it filled back up, was ready to be poured into a spell.

She was near certain that she was hurting herself with what she was doing. If the searing agony in her hand wasn’t enough of a clue, the feeling of her mana circuits straining and stretching like a thread about to snap, absolutely was.

But she would take that risk, because she didn’t want to spend a minute more in this loop of maddening absurdity she was stuck in. What came after she was outside of the pit was a towering problem that she was going to ignore until the time came when she could no longer do so.

Stretching her hand above her head to feel for the railing, she trailed her fingers up the grimy iron to the top, and mentally tried to reconstruct the pit and the staircase’s positioning, aiming her hand accordingly to send the spell in a direction where it wouldn’t impact a wall. And with a mental thought and a strain of the mind where she shoved a veritable ocean of mana into the spell, a supercharged [Illumina] shot out of her hand like a white colored flare.

The feeling of her overstretched, abused circuits emptying themselves made her bite her lip until she tasted copper with a choked out groan, simultaneously feeling like someone was punching needles through her flesh and bones and like someone was holding her hand over an open fire.

After flexing her fingers a few times and realizing that no amount of physical stretching would get that pain to go away, she resigned herself to waiting for the sensation to pass, dropping her hand to lay limp by her side.

Without having a connection to her, the [Illumina] spell would quickly burn out, but its blinding brightness should, at the very least, draw some attention. A bit of an empty hope, but it was all she had. Even if nobody cared enough to rescue her, which she expected, they should have come to fix the staircase by now.

After having to endure the humiliating experience of having to piss herself, coupled with a pounding headache, hunger pangs, her squirming guts, what she assumed was a fever, and a feeling akin to someone having stuffed her head full of dry cotton, she felt like she was on the verge between sobbing and laughing, between choosing to struggle and giving up on the notion of help and just frying her brains with an overcharged [Sparkburst] to just be done with it.

It felt odd to admit, but the abomination’s presence was something she craved at this point. She was still a bit scared of the beast, but it was the only form of life she’d been around for weeks that hadn’t abused or hurt her in one way or another, her teammates included.

Sure, the beast was the reason she’d lost her footing in the first place, but it was her teammates who’d sentenced her to death, something she inwardly knew from the moment the job had gone awry but was too panicked to properly recognize. The iron safety door was too heavy to be quickly lifted, and that was if their minder allowed them to open it in the first place, which was unlikely.

Some bitter part of her wished that the beast hadn’t granted her teammates the mercy of a quick death, and had let them get torn to shreds by the rodents like they deserved, but that wish felt like the entrance to a rabbit hole she didn’t want to go down.

What she really wanted was a warm, soft bed, and a hot bowl of soup.

How many days had it been by now? Where the hell was everyone? Had they written her off as dead in the guild records? Such questions plagued her mind constantly whenever she wasn’t practising, but now that she was completely dry of mana, she had nothing to distract herself with.

A dreadful doubt that maybe nobody would come to help kept creeping into her mind and she struggled to keep the thought away from the forefront of her mind. An effort that was proving to be in vain, and thus she decided to open her System screen to distract herself.

And she almost choked on her own spit when the System screen opened and a tide of words flooded her mind.

You have progressed on your Path.

[Infuser] Level 7 → Level 8

Available Attribute Points: 1

Strength ( +0 )

Speed ( +0 )

Dexterity ( +0 )

Endurance ( +0 )

Perception ( +0 )

Resolve ( +1 )

Intelligence ( +4 )

Soul ( +2 )

-Acquired Skills:

You have gained the Skill [Mana Tank - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Mana Conduit - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Iron Stomach - Level 1]

You have gained the Skill [Soul Perception - Level 1]

-[Poison Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 4 → Level 7

-[Pain Resistance] has Leveled Up. Level 12 → Level 14

-[Illumina] has Leveled Up. Level 6 → Level 8

-[Sparkburst] has Leveled Up. Level 12 → Level 13

-[Haste] has Leveled Up. Level 9 → Level 10

-[Mana Perception] has Leveled Up. Level 15 → Level 16

-[Mana Manipulation] has Leveled Up. Level 9 → Level 11

-Acquired Traits:

Blood Drinker (1 / 2): You have sustained yourself on nothing but blood for multiple days, and have taken your first step towards the path of vampirism. Drinking the blood of others is more palatable and nutritious, and gives you a temporary boost to all Attributes. Duration and Attribute boost strength depends on the amount of blood you have consumed and its quality.

She could only sit in stunned silence as she watched the System’s updates scroll past her mind's eye.

After an entire twenty years of living, she’d only gained a few skills she genuinely wanted, and the moment she turned her back on her family, she’d discarded all the ones she didn’t want. To see such progress, so quickly, was not something she’d been expecting.

Additionally, the skills were all things she’d never even heard of before.

The System sometimes gave more or less information on skills for no seeming reason, and as she mentally questioned what each of them did, she only got any concrete information about [Iron Stomach] and [Soul Perception], which were already rather self-explanatory names.

She activated [Mana Tank], and…

Nothing happened.

“What…?” She murmured to herself, furrowing her eyebrows in confusion.

Just to be sure, she deactivated and activated it again, noting that it was a sort of ‘passive’ skill that could be toggled on and off rather than a skill that was used once and had a cooldown.

Even after waiting a couple minutes, she noticed absolutely zero difference in anything, so she left the Skill on and instead focused on her mana in preparation of checking her other skill. [Mana Conduit] activated with a thought, and she gasped in delighted surprise as she felt her soul pulse with power, feeding her core with mana at almost triple its normal speed.

She started counting the seconds as they passed by, and noted that the Skill stopped working after a flat thirty seconds.

Then she started counting the seconds to see what its cooldown was, and after exactly two minutes, she felt it become available again.

She activated it again, just to replenish her mana, even if she had absolutely no plans of abusing her circuits any more than she already had for the day, and decided to hold onto the Attribute point she had for later since she couldn’t decide on where to put it.

With that out of the way, she read the Blood Drinker trait once more, and felt her breath stop. Not catch, nor hitch, she simply stopped breathing.

Vampirism.

Of course.

How did I not think of that?! She inwardly screamed as she reminded herself to keep breathing, feeling the nascent flutters of hope pick up in her chest while a tiny, hopeful smile curled her lips.

Vampires could basically heal anything by drinking blood! Of course, there were severe drawbacks, moral and technical ones, as well as the path to becoming a vampire being a rather vague and secretive one, but the trait had given her both a clue and an idea.

The church of the Six-Eyed Crow.

If any place in the Dungeon hid a vampire within its halls, it would be that! Her recollections of her religious studies were a vague blurry mess, but she remembered that there was a strong connection with the church and vampirism, even if she didn’t quite remember the reason.

Vampires were extremely rare, extremely secretive and extremely withdrawn, so finding one to help her change would be really difficult, but if… if she just begged, offered whatever she had to the church and pleaded, did anything they asked of her, it wasn’t too far-fetched a hope that they could put her in contact with a vampire who could turn her.

And she would be able to fix herself. She knew that the drawbacks to becoming a vampire were as immense as the advantages, even if she didn’t know what they were, but anything would be better than shambling from place to place, hoping that someone would be kind enough to give her their unwanted scrap to eat until she died of disease and exposure.

With that crushing weight of uncertainty no longer sitting on her chest, she felt like she could breathe the putrid air just a bit easier. She had a plan, a concrete course of action to take when she got out of this god-forsaken pit.

If, a corner of her consciousness corrected, and the smile wilted away as quickly as it came.

Right.

Suddenly, she was wishing the beast would come back up already.

There was just something so cathartic about violence.

The amount of rats hovering and clambering up from the mounds of trash were even more numerous than they were before the incident with the staircase, so it had no shortage of food and entertainment, even if it continued being relatively cautious about the process.

One tiny chuff, one scrape of a nail, and it would quickly bait whatever rodent had seen it into the shadow of the staircase, where it would promptly shred it apart, then stalk back towards the feasting vermin and repeat.

It even decided to get a little more confident and creative, and had managed to make rat-hunting an even easier task than it already was. Why would it exhaust itself by slamming the rodent around the floor, when it could simply throw the rat onto its side, rake its canines through basically any part of its body, and then walk back and watch it die without lifting a paw?

Whether it was through the spine or the abdomen, it was all equally effective. Sure, it took a bit longer for a rodent to die when it was shuffling and dragging itself towards the wolf with its intestines trailing behind it, or twitching on the floor unable to get its limbs to work, rather than having its skull smashed into the floor once or twice, but the wolf didn’t particularly care about how quick a kill was, only that it died.

At least when it came to things other than humans.

It wasn’t like rats gave it pets and food every once in a while, so they could suffer, it didn't really care.

Overall, it was a relaxing hunt, with a good haul of seven whole rodents to consume and add to its stockpile, with one saved for the human.

The blinding burst of white light that shot out of the pit however, straight from where the wolf had left the human, was a less welcome sight than its pile of game, and it could only stare at it with a sense of indecision as it quickly faded out of existence.

It wasn’t going to stop the human from signalling for help, but it was tempted to. It felt like it was just on the cusp of understanding how the mana thing worked, and it doubted it could stumble onto an opportunity like this again.

It decided that it was done pouring out its frustrations on the rats, so it quickly dragged the bodies up onto the first floor of the staircase one at a time, just to be out of sight from the hordes of squeaking vermin.

It could eat while in sight of a threat, but it didn’t particularly want to.

After eating seven of the rodents, it trotted back up the stairs to feed the human some blood again, the final rat dangling off its jaws.

For some reason, the human reacted to the feeding with far less disgust than the previous times, and after eating the shredded remains of the rodent, it settled to sit by her side on its stomach, extending a paw to poke her in the side with a chuff.

The human sighed, a tired sound.

“... Discombobulate?”

It tilted its head, ears standing straight as it separated the sound into different, smaller parts in its mind.

Yeah, that sound was going to be really hard. Maybe a bit too hard. It chuffed and poked her in the side again, hoping for a different one.

“God fucking damn it…” She breathed out, and the wolf tilted its head.

That one was doable.

Yet when it started practising, the human started making strange snorting sounds, which escalated into loud, rapid bark-yipping noises, her one functioning hand clenched around her convulsing stomach as she eventually started wheezing for breath.

Even then, she continued making that weird sound, completely uncaring to her own oxygen needs.

It growled in annoyance, poking her harder on the side of her waist to be quiet, but for some reason, that only made her wheeze harder and redouble her noises, so with a huff of annoyance, it got up and walked down the staircase to practise somewhere where it could actually hear the sounds its own mouth was making.

“W-Wait, no! I’m s-s-sorry, I won’t l-laugh! C-Come bhhhhhack!” She wheezed out behind the wolf as it walked around the bend, out of sight.

What even was that cacophony supposed to convey? Some sort of happy bark-yip sound? Why was the human happy over the wolf practising human sounds all of a sudden, but when it first started she absolutely reeked of fear?

Humans just didn’t make any sense.

-

(If you are reading this story on any website that isn’t RoyalRoad.com, you are reading stolen content from a free site that runs no intrusive or obnoxious advertisements. Just google "RoyalRoad Fleabag" and you'll get to my story on the site it was meant to be hosted on.)