With the advent of magic, technology had taken a back seat. People still used it of course, but if you used a magic skill while holding your phone, chances are it would fry the phone unless it was a Nokia or something. The internet was still a prime place to share information though, and so when Kyle checked his social media by habit when he woke up, he saw the news story that was plastering headlines.

The government had released an announcement regarding skills. Someone had learned fifty skills, and when they tried to learn another one, they were unable to. Fifty skills was apparently the limit. It was not all bad news though, as you could still learn new skills once you had fifty, you just had to replace and forget an old skill to learn the new one. All progress would be lost on the old skill and you could never relearn it, so you could not mix and match skills whenever you wanted to.

Most of the comments were surprised about the fact that someone had fifty skills, after all the average person still only had their starting skill. Kyle was a little bit surprised about the person reaching fifty skills, but it was not completely unreasonable. He was not at all surprised about the skill limit though. After all, there were passive skills that you could stack indefinitely, so if you could have infinite skills it would get kind of silly. Walt could be running around with five hundred passives that gave him a bonus to block which didn’t seem to fit in with the effectiveness of leveling skills and most skills not stacking.

Kyle finally got out of bed as today was the day he and his group were going to try challenging the kobold dungeon after their three days of training and, once again, Kyle had slept poorly the night before a second level dungeon run.

The reason was slightly different this time around. Kyle was salty. Kyle liked spamming his Mana Bolt skill, but he had not been able to stop thinking about what it would be like if it did not have a cast time. When he saw Rapid Air Bullet, he got his wish.

Except he didn’t. When Rapid Air Bullet said it didn’t have a cast time, Kyle was picturing instantly materializing a wave of hundreds of bullets to strafe his enemies with. Instead, he had to actively cast the skill to use it, and he could only do that ten times in a second.

He had immediately gone online to do some research and found that this problem was not limited to him. Rapid Air Bullet seemed to be the most common no cast time skill and others had already taken to the internet to post their ire.

Among people who had the spell, ten seemed to be the soft limit for casting skills in one second. Some people were able to able to go up to thirteen, and some could only reach eight. Someone had posted a comment that said once they had increased their physical power they were able to cast one more per second. They believed physical power also increased things like brain processing power by a slight amount, and this had enabled them to cast the skill and additional time.

That was currently no use to Kyle, but he did come across one piece of helpful advice. When most people used a skill, especially one to fire a projectile, they used some sort of physical visualization aid. When Kyle shot his skills, he held out his arm and made a finger gun. Sarah thought he looked dumb, but it helped Kyle to aims his skills better.

The post that Kyle read was about someone who had the same experience, but then had an interesting thought. ‘If I can fire ten skills from one of my arms, why can’t I do it from both of my arms at the same time?’ It turned out that you could indeed fire skills off with both arms. People had theorized that it was more of a mental block that stopped you from firing off more skills than an actual one, and this just seemed to confirm that hypothesis.

This method doubled the rate of fire for no cast time skills. Of course, Kyle had then taken it a step further.

He had taken his shoes and socks off, laid on the ground on his back with both his hands and feet in the air, and tried to fire skills from both his hands and feet at the same time. It didn’t work.

Kyle was extremely glad that people no longer carried their phones with them. Sarah was rolling on the floor with laughter at Kyle’s attempt, which she thought made him look like a constipated turtle, and she kept lamenting that she had not gotten a recording of it.

Kyle decided to put off seeing if he could fire skills from his dick until Sarah was on another continent.

While Rapid Air Bullet was still Kyle’s most powerful spell for DPS, he was still hoping for more from it. It didn’t help that he had wasted three hours last night trying to level it from level thirty to thirty-one with no success. A quick internet search later revealed that level thirty seemed to be a soft cap for skills. They went above that, but you needed to do more than just use the skill on repeat to make them do so.

The party was vastly more powerful than their first level two dungeon dive so Kyle decided to focus on more important things than lacking some extra power with his skill. The dungeon was still dangerous, and they needed to focus.

The main reason Kyle felt a lot safer now was because of the party’s increased health. Thinking back on the dungeon run, the most dangerous spot was not actually the boss battle. It was the first ambush where Li almost got jumped on by a panther.

Neither Kyle, nor Walt, nor Li had been able to react to the panther, and had Sarah not intercepted it midair, Li could have been toast. While the panther only dealt an average of twenty damage with its attacks so theoretically Li’s five armor she had been wearing would have kept her safe, it likely would have done more with its pouncing damage factored in. And even if she had not died from one attack, who is to say Sarah could have killed it before it could get a second attack off?

We should be much safer with our increased health now. Not even the kobold shamans can one hit Li, and she has the least health amongst all of us. I was complacent with my shield skill. Carl always used to talk about all the ambushes he ran into in the dungeon. We were probably lucky we ran into all the kobolds gathered in one spot. Otherwise they might have ambushed us from the trees and caught us off guard.

That was then, and this was now, and Kyle was someone who refused to make the same mistake twice. He was just hoping that the next time he made a mistake in the future it would not be quite so life threatening.

As had become normal when they needed to wake up by a certain time, once Kyle failed at waking Walt up Sarah stepped in and a few kicks later Walt was up and they were on their way.

During breakfast Li and Kyle were discussing whether having more magic power made your skill level faster, when Walt suddenly slammed his hand on the table and said in a loud voice, “What is up with this ungodly good food!?”

One of the people at the table behind theirs turned around to answer Walt.

“You don’t know man?” the guy said. “The head cook in the cafeteria had the Ungodly Good Cooking skill. As long as she is involved with making the food it is ungodly good.”

Walt just stared dumbfounded at the guy who answered him. Seeing Walt’s expression, Kyle, Li, and Sarah all burst out laughing.

“Ungodly Good Cooking skill,” Walt mumbled under his breath. “Of course it is. It’s obvious. Stupid me for asking.”

“We all didn’t know,” Kyle reassured Walt. “I was starting to wonder myself why the food was always so ungodly good.”

“I knew,” Sarah replied. “My dad told me. I was hoping Kyle would break first and ask about it, but alas, the fates are cruel.”

Kyle was thankful that whatever Sarah’s plot was, it was now ruined. While Kyle and Sarah got along great, Kyle was not a masochist without any self-esteem, and sometimes Sarah’s practical jokes went a little too far.

After breakfast on their way over to pick up their gear for the kobold dungeon, Li started lamenting over not knowing what kind of skills she wanted to get.

“You guys have it easy,” Li said. “Walt is clearly a tank, and the two of you can DPS fairly well, while Kyle’s shield skill also makes him good at buffing people.”

After considering her statement regarding Sarah, Li amended her thoughts.

“Actually saying you can only DPS fairly well doesn’t do it justice. You’re like a goddess of the battlefield, a winged harbinger of victory, a seraph of unvanquished authority! And here I am stuck as a CC bot.”

“Well our ‘I’m just a CC bot’ is going to win us the tournament,” Sarah confidently said. “Taking two people out of the action at once will practically guarantee us the win. Then you can just ride my wings of ‘unvanquished authority’ to victory.”

“Why don’t you try and get some sort of chain lightning spell?” Kyle said offhandedly. “I think Thomas’s chain lightning spell is only single target. You could then use that to abuse Dual Target. Anything with a single target would work really. I don’t have a high damage spell right now and there are some monsters that I could barely even scratch because my individual spell damage is not enough. You are also already increasing your magic power so maybe any nuke would work.”

Li adopted the thinker pose and very obviously thought it over. She then came over and attempted to put her arm around Kyle’s shoulder, but because of the height difference ended up kind of awkwardly patting his back.

Not perturbed in the slightest, Li said, “You just might have something there, Kyle, ol’ buddy, ol’ pal. You have now graduated from a turtle to a tortoise,” referring to Kyle’s attempt at four limbed casting.

“Um, what’s the difference?” Kyle nervously asked.

“It means you have successfully evolved from an ocean dwelling crustacean,” Sarah chimed in with a smirk.

“I don’t know,” said Walt, joining the fun. “We might be giving him too much credit. I heard the Galapagos tortoises have been repopulating at a fantastic rate. A tortoise might be too raised up if you know what I mean.”

Walt waggled his eyebrows suggestively while Sarah and Li failed to keep a straight face.

Kyle just ignored them all.

Ten minutes later they were once more in front of the kobold dungeon, although this time hopefully more prepared. Kyle felt more prepared at least.

The process of entering a dungeon had long become rote, and while Kyle was still impressed by the rainforest around him when he entered, it was time to get hunting.

The group adopted the same formation they had used their first time entering the dungeon, with Sarah, Walt, Li, and then Kyle.

Kyle made sure to keep an eye above right from the start. But while looking at the canopy above them was incredibly beautiful, what with its branches covered in twisting flowering vines, it seemed to be all for naught. No attacks came their way, and instead their only company was the omnipresent slow fall of rain through the mist.

When they stumbled upon a safe zone Sarah called for an early lunch.

They slowly gathered into a circle while Kyle distributed the food in his pack.

“Is it just me,” Kyle said, “Or is it more eerie when we are not being attacked?”

“Yeah, the silence is kind of oppressing,” Walt added. “It’s kind of like a ghost town.”

“Then we just have to make some noise,” Li as she then burst into song. “The hills are alive...”

Sarah quickly joined Li in song much to Kyle’s chagrin. Li’s singing was actually quite good. Maybe not professional level, but Kyle was impressed none the less. Sarah’s singing on the other hand was… questionable. It did not help that she attempted to eat and sing at the same time.

The two of them eventually convinced Walt to join in. They all tried to convince Kyle to join too, but he was having none of it. Kyle remembered when Sarah had convinced him to sing a song about all the unmarried women. That was one online video the world could do without.

The singing did do its job to liven up the mood, and a little while later the group made its way out of the safe zone to continue their search for kobolds.

The pressure the group was feeling slowly came back as they continued their search. Kyle was silently praying for something to attack them. He wanted to break the silence, but was almost too afraid to do so for fear of raising flags. Kyle had heard about some horror movie-esk dungeons, and if he came across a well in the middle of the forest he was high tailing it out of there.

An attack eventually came, but not in the way the group was expecting.

They were mostly keeping their attention focused upwards, so they all noticed when they saw a flash of what looked like magic somewhere out of sight in the canopy above. Perhaps their attention was focused a bit too much upwards, as the magic they saw activated a trap and our plucky group of four heroes soon found themselves falling twenty feet or so into a hole.

That falling distance was nothing to them so they weren’t injured, but it did cause quite a shock.

Kyle qualified this as an unexpected and potentially dangerous situation so as soon as he recovered he started casting a two hundred mana shield on himself, then Sarah, then Li, and just as he was about to cast one on Walt, he received a fireball to the face.

“It’s an ambush!” Sarah shouted. “They are up above us in the trees!”

No shit Sherlock, Kyle thought. I thought that fireball was just their way of saying hi based on cultural differences. Good thing that’s all cleared up now.

Up above them Kyle could make out three groups of four kobolds and another group of three to make a total of fifteen kobolds. Not a large number but their largest DPS source was also currently in a pit while the enemies with eighty of so feet above them.

Wait a second, why is my shield at so low? I was only hit once. I should not be below a hundred shield strength.

Deciding that now was the time for action, not thought, Kyle raised his hands and started pumping out Rapid Air Bullets to strafe his enemies.

Except instead of all the kobolds now being corpses, none of their shields had even broken. And before Kyle was able to continue his strafing fire, he was knocked over by another fireball.

What the fuck, where did my shield go?

Kyle’s shield had disappeared and his health had dropped by six points.

“Li and Kyle get behind Walt,” Sarah shouted. “It looks like the kobolds set up joint casting, so their skills will be much stronger!”

By this time Sarah’s Mana Blades had appeared and she prepared to engage the enemy. She ran, jumped off one wall of the pit, jumped off the other side, and was soon above the lip as if she was some Kung Fu action hero.

And then she wasn’t above the pit when a fireball caught her midair and blew her back down.

Kyle recast a mana shield on himself and moved with Li where Walt could cover them.

Sarah quickly got up.

“Okay, new plan,” she said. “It looks like the kobolds have two people shielding and two people casting a fireball. The group of three most likely contains their leader. Li, you go through one by one and CC one of the kobolds using a shield to disable it and then Kyle with kill them with his air bullets. Start with the group of three.”

Once everyone calmed down and got into position everything went smoothly. Li used her Shadow Suppression on one of the kobolds maintaining a shield and then Kyle filled them full of bullet holes. It seemed that without their leader they were not willing to change their strategy, so one by one the groups were eliminated.

Kyle was reminded once more of the fact that despite them having abilities and stats like a game, this was real life. It didn’t matter if you had the most OP skills ever if you didn’t have the presence of mind to use them while fireballs were hitting your face. Sarah’s dad had told them that the kobolds had the ability to combine their skills and create more powerful synergistic effects, but Kyle had forgotten after their run last time when it was their group doing the ambushing.

Without fireballs flying from above it was trivial to escape the pit. They commiserated after looting the kobolds corpses as no skill or enhancement crystals had dropped. The groups mood was generally lighter now that they knew that they were not the only ones in the forest, and they soon moved on to look for more ambushes to spring, this time keeping an eye both above and below.

They finally met other monsters in the form of a giant chinchilla family, with a mother and four babies. Kyle finally made the connection that there might not have been many kobolds around because of the giant chinchillas, who seemed to be enemies of the kobolds rather than just prey.

After that battle they found nothing else until Sarah called a halt at a safe zone for dinner. The night passed peacefully and Kyle had managed to fall asleep fairly soon, although he still woke up early.

The next day passed in much the same manner as the first. There were no battles before lunch, but after lunch they seemed to finally find where most of the kobolds were hiding as they sprung five ambushes before they called it a day.

The group finally had a lead for the start of their third day in the dungeon and that lead soon produced results. A few hours into the morning and two ambushes and a giant chinchilla attack later they found themselves in the canopy scouting out the kobold shamans and their guards.

Last time the kobold shamans had been protected by the fact that they had their own kobold horde. Now, the shamans, and the glowing stone they guarded, were protected by numerous traps.

Seemingly as a bait to lure and catch giant chinchillas, the two shamans and their guards had set up camp in a clearing in the forest. The kobolds were capable of setting up two kinds of traps. One was the pitfall trap that they had first encountered, and the second was an explosive fire trap that acted as a sort of landmine, although the trap would not go off automatically and had to be activated.

The traps surrounding the shamans were of the latter variety.

Li was actually the one who came up with their plan of attack.

Walt and Kyle would approach the clearing from one side and attract the attention of the shamans and their guards. Kyle would bombard the shamans with his Rapid Air Bullets and hopefully draw their focus onto him, while Walt would block their magic and the attacks of the guards if they came over.

The traps could not activate by themselves so without the shamans to activate them the path forward should be safe and Sarah would carry Li on her back while using her ridiculous speed to get Li in range of the shamans. Then Li would CC them, Sarah and Kyle would kill them, and they would mop up the guards.

The plan worked almost too well. It took less than a minute to pull off and left no one in any real danger.

“I vote we use Li’s plans from now on,” Kyle said after they finished off the guards.

“Seconded,” agreed Walt. “Sarah’s plans all seem to revolve around her blindly running in and killing the enemies.”

“But I like my plans,” Sarah pouted as Li patted her on the back in a ‘there there’ manner. “There is nothing wrong with running in and killing things.”

“Sure,” Kyle said. “Nothing wrong until you can’t kill the things and instead the things kill you.”

The mood was much lighter than their win last time, and they all decided to eat and early lunch in the dungeon before leaving. Now that they had completed their goal they could relax a little, as if they needed to make a quick escape they could just smash the glowing blue stone.

They decided to go with the same plan as last time with Sarah identifying the skill crystals and them then distributing the loot in their dorm. They had acquired a total of five skill crystals, thirty-five enhancement crystals, one escape crystal, and a little over three hundred points in mana crystals.

Just as they were assembling to divide up the loot and start the skill crystal big reveal, Walt brought his phone over with a serious expression on his face.

“You guys might want to see this,” Walt said. “Someone started a ranking for the school where people can post their stats and see whose is highest. Look at the stats of the guy in first.”

Name: Gray Merrill

Health: 600

Mana: 420

Physical power: 20

Magic power: 38