Crosse started at Mike's yelp, hopping to his feet and looking around, to see what might have caused his sudden outcry.

Mike just glared down at his arm. Life is not a game, Life is not a game, he repeated in his head. These are real people with real problems. Even though those problems do greatly resemble a town in need of help from 3-6 level 1-3 adventurers. In response to that, he felt another pain on his arm, that he could only describe as a slap on the wrist.

He yelped again, causing Crosse to look down at him seriously, "Is something wrong?" he asked, looking Mike over.

Mike looked up at Crosse, moving his hand to his shoulder to try and imply that it was aching. "Sorry, just a little bit of pain from my injuries," Mike lied.

Crosse sighed in relief and sat back down. "You should eat your food and get some more sleep, your wounds need time to recover, your shoulder shouldn't be too much of a problem by morning, but we need to get you to Inasholme by tomorrow, that cut on your head needs proper healing."

Mike blinked. "Healing as in magical healing?" he asked for clarification.

Crosse nodded. "I told you we had a High Elf at the Village, we don't bother her much but for wounds like that she usually isn't too bothered by healing them. Especially for the hunters," Crosse explained.

Mike made a hesitant expression, "I haven't had good experiences with High Elves, as you know, what if she tells the others where I am?" What if she told their god? Is what Mike was really worried about.

Crosse shrugged, "It's pretty unlikely, she doesn't approve of that kind of experimentation or manipulation as a rule, and she doesn't interact with the greater community of their kind much at all, only sending a letter to the Empire to tell them she's alive every year or so, I don't know why."

"You've said she doesn't interact much with your villagers, but you seem to know quite a bit about her?" Mike asked.

Interestingly, Crosse blushed, “you should finish your meat, you need it to help replace all that blood you lost. I’ll wake you in five hours for your watch.” Mike just raised his eyebrows at Crosse and smirked a little. He had gotten upset at Crosse for the interrogation, so he wouldn’t press.

They finished their meals in silence. Afterwards, Mike lay back on his jacket again, wanting to sleep, a task which had never come easily to him and certainly wasn’t made easier by a sore right shoulder and a gash on the left side of his scalp.

He eventually managed to drift off though, thinking of his bed back home.

***

Mike was woken by Crosse’s hand on his shoulder, his eyes blinked open to the fuzzy form of Crosse above him and he rapidly started blinking them to clear his vision. After his vision was clear he started to process other things, like that it was still dark, almost pitch dark.

Why was he awake again, oh right, the watch. He groggily pushed himself to a sitting position with his left hand, then got a burst of happiness for actually being able to do that, making the numbers go up and all was great, feeling the actual benefits of them was better.

“You awake enough to keep watch?” Crosse asked clearly.

Mike took a second to rub his eyes, he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You wouldn’t happen to have some water would you?” Mike asked, wanting to wash the sleep taste from his mouth.

Crosse nodded and walked around to his pack, he grabbed something from inside and tossed it towards him. Mike barely caught the dark object feeling its smooth softness and weight as he did. Mike blinked down at the object as his eyes still adapted to the darkness. It didn’t take long as he had just been asleep and there wasn’t anything around to break his night vision.

A water skin, that’s what Crosse had tossed him. Well of course he had. Mike looked over to Crosse to see him already lying down on his folded up jacket, his chest rising and falling at a slow steady rhythm, lucky bastard, Mike wished he could fall asleep like that.

Now Mike was alone in the darkness, he looked up to the sky and found it mostly obscured by the leaves of the enormous trees, branches covered in metal leaves coming together in a canopy that glittered even in this darkness, he pulled the cork out of the hardened mouth of the water skin and drained some into his mouth, swishing it around before swallowing.

Mike wanted to create a light as he had done in the darkness of his cell, but when he flicked on his mana sight he saw no light mana, no, the entire forest was layered in a coating of Dark mana, filling the space as the Light mana had back in the dungeon.

If actual darkness drew Dark mana like this, why had the cells and the whole dungeon, been full of Light mana? Was it something the High elves had done? Probably, for now, Mike had no way to know. He did have some things to think about though.

Was he going to go back to this Inasholme with Crosse? It sounded like they needed help, and maybe the AI would reward him for doing that sought of thing, It didn’t like him to think of his life as a game, but it did give him game like abilities and mechanics that heavily influenced his life.

Though from what the AI had explained it didn’t seem like the core aspects of his abilities were unique to him, like EXP and Levels. It seemed like what the AI was doing was parsing that information and presenting it to him in a way that he would understand.

He glanced at Crosse again, seeing that he hadn’t moved he willed the AI to make his notification window appear, curious about something.

You have received the Quest:

Quest Log

Quest Description

Quest Objective

Quest Rewards

A village in distress!

The Village of Inasholme has noticed increased Spirit Beast activity in its surroundings, causing the villagers to fear for their lives and send out their hunters to deal with the threat before it grows too much to deal with.

Investigate the area around Inasholme to find the cause of the increased monster activity

???

You have unlocked the Mental Skill:

Cooking

Mental aspect Level up!

You have gained 2 distributable Mental stats.

Congratulations!

You have levelled up!

You have gained 2 distributable General Points

Name

Mike Sven

Age

22

Sex

Male

Height

180cm

Weight

58.2kg

Wizard Level

1

Wizard EXP

60%

Average Level

3

Physical Statistics

0

Level

3

Exp

90%

Strength (STR)

10

(+/-)

Endurance (END)

10

(+/-)

Agility (AGI)

10

(+/-)

Dexterity (DEX)

10

(+/-)

Mental Statistics

2

Level

2

Exp

5%

Intelligence (INT)

15

(+/-)

Wisdom (WIS)

11

(+/-)

Perception (PER)

9

(+/-)

Willpower (WIL)

10

(+/-)

Magic Statistics

0

Level

4

Exp

10%

Affinity (AFI)

16

(+/-)

Attunement (ATU)

9

(+/-)

Control (CON)

11

(+/-)

Resistance (RES)

6

(+/-)

General Points

2

So he had been given a Quest! What had it been slapping him on the wrist for then? and why hadn’t he gotten a notification for the level up? He directed the question towards the AI.

The Purpose of the Notification prompts with Sensory Illusion is to communicate to you your progress at a time when using a Minor Illusion window would either reveal the existence and abilities of the AI or would cause more distraction than necessary. Certain situations have been deemed inappropriate for these silent notifications as well: Combat and Dialogue. Though the Lines of the tattoo will still change to display the notification icon (🔔) and the number of pending notifications.

So it wouldn’t tell him that he had Leveled up during a conversation, but it would slap him on the wrist for thinking outside its bounds of acceptability. Brilliant. Well at least he had levelled up, now he had more points to spend. He did what he had wanted to do but decided against for the GP earlier, he put them into Attunement.

For the mental stats, he decided to put them into Perception, because he was supposed to be on the watch, right? More perception couldn’t hurt, though he didn’t think he would again for a while, Intelligence seemed like it was a core wizard stat so future points would likely go there.

He closed his windows after that and sat down beside the ring of loose stones that had contained the fire earlier that night, he turned on Mana sight to see if there were any foreign sources of mana around like the jaguar had made back at the facility.

He sat there with his attention and alertness up for a while, longer than he expected to before he got bored. Mike had lived in the information age, a time where the idea of sitting around and doing nothing for hours was almost anathema, instead, encouraging continuous stimulus and finding ways creative ways to make things do the sitting and watching for you, so Mike thought about Magic.

Could he use magic to alert him if something came to threaten him? At the thought, he felt something in the Dark mana surrounding him, a twinge at the edge of his senses. He stood up and looked around himself, seeing nothing had changed physically.

Had his sense reacted to that thought? Could he use Dark Magic to alert him to threats? It happened again, the Dark mana was… reacting for some reason it reacted to something but Mike couldn’t puzzle it out from the tiny twinge of a reaction. He had an Idea.

Mike opened his Skills window with a thought towards the AI.

Spoiler: Spoiler

Skills

Equipped

Governing Stats

Mastery

Level

Physical Skills

Skill Slots

✓

2

Knife FIghting

✓

AGI/DEX

Amateur

3

Mental Skills

Skill Slots

2

Language

✓

INT/WIS

Novice

11

Acting

✓

WIS/WIL

Novice

11

Arcane Logic

INT/WIS

Amateur

1

Cooking

PER/DEX

Amateur

1

Magic Skills

Skill Slots

2

Mana Sight

✓

ATU/PER

Amateur

2

Light Magic

AFI/CON

Amateur

4

Light Magic Resistance

RES/AFI

Amateur

1

Dark Magic

✓

AFI/CON

Amateur

2

Dark Magic Resistance

RES/AFI

Amateur

1

Arcane Magic

AFI/CON

Amateur

1

There was a lot of it, not as much as in the Gems that he could still sense in his jacket pocket, but enough to fill one of them, almost 300 mana within the range of his attunement sense.Mike moved the checkmark from Acting to Arcane logic. It was supposed to “allow him to intuit the rules that mana follows” maybe that would help here. He was instantly aware of the amount of Dark mana in his surrounding three metres, a metre more than before.

Mike felt like he could get more accurate, but that he didn’t quite understand the algorithms that were being done passively in his head enough to get there yet, they were factoring in details of the mana that he didn’t understand.

That wasn’t the part of the skill that he was most interested in right now though. He once again thought of using the dark mana to detect when someone was looking at him, he didn’t feel the twinge that time so he made the thought more specific, thinking about using the dark mana to detect when someone hostile was looking at him.

This time it reacted, and Mike felt his Arcane Logic latch onto the reaction, Hostility, was Dark mana somehow linked with hostility? Another reaction though weaker. Mike couldn’t read them enough so he reached out with his Control and ran it through the surrounding Dark mana, He requested it to enter his control this time instead of seizing it as he had from the gems in the battle, giving him almost 40 Dark mana under his control.

It worked better, the Dark mana manifesting into the mortal realm under his control, forming a cloud around him of spots of pure darkness. Now Mike experimented again, thinking of hostility, but not directing the mana to do anything, it reacted, much more now that he was controlling it, it did have something to do with hostility, but that wasn’t all of it.

Mike wondered if feeling actual hostility would give him a better result then simply thinking about it as an abstract. So he tried to feel it, thinking about what he was hostile towards. The High Elves were the first thing that came to mind, they had kept him locked in a cell in a coma for months, trying to pry his memories out of his soul, for what purpose?

At that he felt the Dark mana react more strongly, it was… Sympathetic to his hostility? Not in the way that people were sympathetic, but in the way Magic was sympathetic. A very small part of Dark mana was hostility, like illumination and colour were part of what Light mana was.

So he channelled that asking it to stay, to tell him if anything hostile towards him could see him. He felt like it could do more, that if he had enough Dark mana he could make it tell him if anyone anywhere felt hostility towards him, but he was far from being able to do something like that.

The Dark mana shifted, all of it moving inwards towards his head, briefly obstructing his vision in a way that mana in the Aether never did. Then it was gone and the Notification window shifted to show something new.

You have created the spell:

Spells

Mastery Level

Requirements

Mana Cost

Cast Time

Duration

Description

Hostile Awareness

Novice

Dark Magic - Amateur

30 Dark mana

instantaneous

12 hours or after a total of 10 alerts

Create a ward of Dark magic that exists in your mind that will alert you if something or someone with hostile intent towards you currently has a line of sight on you or is within your line of sight.

Yes! The spell had worked, Mike could feel it still, a tight ball of mana just at the edge of his thoughts, ready to bring attention to itself the second something hostile gave him their direct attention.

Well, that would handle his watch. He looked towards his still open Skills window, he had an option now, did he want to keep trying Dark magic or put some effort into something more interesting? And possibly more worthwhile. He looked to his Skills window and moved the checkmark from Dark Magic into Arcane Magic.