Due to James’s [Chaotic Healing], Helios had been healed and empowered to the point he was able to keep the agent at bay while James and Lunaris defeated the neophytes.

The neophytes were gone now, but the situation was far from over.

Even though Helios had managed to stall the agent, he hardly did any damage to him. Helios was the one who had been forced to be on the defensive.

It was a big accomplishment and tactical advantage to have gotten rid of the neophytes. But in exchange, James had spent every ounce of mana he had left. He couldn’t even sacrifice his health anymore since he had sacrificed so many times.

“Helios, keep stalling him while I heal James!” Lunaris shouted.

“I’ve got this, don’t worry.” Helios replied. He couldn’t beat the agent, but he sure could tank for his friends.

Helios broke the belt that was keeping James tethered to him and let Lunaris take him.

Lunaris began healing James, who had almost drifted off to sleep countless times. But he was constantly fighting it. He could feel eternity calling, but he had two reasons to live, and he couldn’t abandon them.

This time around, the healing wasn’t from a distance. Lunaris was directly touching him, increasing the potency of the healing. As soon as he felt her hands, James felt some strength coming back to him. Not much, but enough for his eyelids to not feel as heavy anymore, and the whispers he wasn’t sure were real to finally disappear. Shortly after, he was even able to open his working eye and look around.

“Thank you, Lunaris. What would we do without you?” James smiled.

“Hush now. Save your strength and relax for the few seconds that we can afford it. The battle still rages on.”

As Lunaris said that, James heard a huge explosion. He looked back and saw Helios holding up his big shield, the agent relentlessly blasting him with blades and waves of Darkness.

The agent was trying to throw them at the currently vulnerable James, but Helios wouldn’t let anything pass by him. He was throwing himself towards the attacks that would have reached James, blocking them as much as possible with his shield, and even his own body.

While the effects of James’s buff were still present on Helios, James knew that he couldn’t keep taking that kind of damage. He had to shape up and join Helios as soon as possible.

But he was still weak, drained. He couldn’t remember if he had reached the daily potion limit yet, since he downed several at a time during battle, but he risked it and drank another mana potion.

Luckily, he didn’t suffer potion sickness this time around, but that was definitely the last potion he could have drunk that day. And he didn’t recover nearly enough mana to fight the agent.

But then Denmac joined Lunaris in healing him.

“You can heal too?” James asked.

“It’s not my specialty, but at this point in the fight I can’t be useful to you guys anymore. I’ll only be useful once the guy is dead, so we can see what he knows through my divinations. So just make sure you beat him for me, ok?”

Denmac helped Lunaris heal James for a few seconds, until he felt that James’s situation was improving. But there was something much more important than healing that had to be addressed.

Probing James’s body with his mana, he felt how drained he was. But he also sensed how deep James’s mana pool was. It was like nothing he had ever seen before, the strength and deepness, even the quality of his mana was exquisite.

That’s when Denmac realized what he had to do.

“Lunaris can’t do this cause she’s our healer. But since my contributions to the fight are over, I know of another way I can help.”

The next moment, James felt a huge wave of mana rush into him.

If it had been anybody else, this amount of foreign mana would have been downright poisonous. But James’s body seemed to be nourished in an instant, even the color of his cheeks suddenly looked much healthier.

Denmac’s mana seemed to have kickstarted James’s own mana recovery, which went into overdrive trying to dilute and absorb Denmac’s mana.

“Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this.” Denmac said.

James’s mana was devouring Denmac’s, even forcefully ripping it out of him. It wasn’t only absorbing it without difficulty or damage to James, but it was even transforming it into James’s native mana in real time!

The agent seemed to have noticed the fluctuations in mana. Another set of explosions were heard, but Helios blocked them all.

James wanted to rush to his side and help him, but he knew that every second of recovery made him much so much stronger. If they were to beat this animal, they had to be as strong as possible.

With Lunaris healing him and Denmac transferring his mana into him at a rate that left him pale, James was recovering at light speed. The agent was frantically sending blasts to interrupt the process, but Helios wasn’t letting anything through.

Denmac didn’t have a small mana pool, but James’s was downright insane. It didn’t take long for James to consume every single ounce of Denmac’s mana.

James had recovered a lot, and usually this would have been more than enough to deal with most enemies. But they were fighting the agent, they both knew he needed a whole lot more.

Even though he felt drained, because he literally was drained, Denmac smiled.

“Thank Helios for this.”

Denmac pulled out the exquisite wine bottle Helios had given him and downed it all. The density of the enchanted wine was much too great for a single usage, but extraordinary situations required extraordinary solutions.

James couldn’t extract any mana from the wine directly, but for Denmac it was a treasure trove. And he would transfer all that treasure to James.

As soon as he sipped from the wine, Denmac’s mana exploded, refilling almost instantly. But he kept drinking, and his mana reserves kept building up so much that his body felt like it would explode.

“James, drain my mana!” Denmac shouted.

James didn’t have to be asked twice. He put his hand on Denmac’s shoulder and started absorbing mana even faster than before.

But Denmac kept drinking the wine, and his mana was recovering even faster than James could drain it. James had to put his other hand on Denmac and drain as hard as he could.

The agent was furiously launching spells, bombarding relentlessly to the point the mere leftover aura from the spells was making it hard to breathe.

But James forced himself to focus on draining the mana. If he wanted to help Helios, the best thing he could do was to power up as much as possible. He didn’t allow his mind to think about Helios’s current state.

Denmac soon managed to drink the whole battle. At first, it felt like he would literally explode. But that feeling didn’t last long, because James was ferociously devouring all the mana as fast as he could.

Surprisingly, they stopped hearing the explosions. The agent seemed to have stopped attacking altogether.

The drastic change in the situation was worrying, it would worry anyone with a brain. Helios clearly hadn’t been winning, so why would the agent stop?

But James was smiling nonetheless.

No matter what the agent was planning, he felt ready to deal with it.

He managed to drain every ounce of mana Denmac had to offer. The bottle of wine that could’ve been consumed by him for months was used up just like that. But it was all worth it.

Along with Lunaris’s constant healing, James had finally recovered. He felt even stronger than before. In fact, he felt much stronger than it should’ve been possible. It couldn’t have been from the mana alone.

His smile became even bigger. He didn’t even have to check to know what had happened.

[You have reached level 157]

Killing so many neophytes was bound to give him a lot of xp. But he didn’t expect quite that much. Skipping so many levels at this point was downright insane. Not only was each level supposed to be much harder to acquire, but it also made one much stronger. And James could now feel every ounce of that strength. The mana flowing through his body made him feel like another person. It was smoother, deeper, more powerful. He could even feel the traces of chaos magic stirring wildly deep within his soul.

Lunaris smiled, happy not only for James’s progress, but also for the fact that it was so timely.

But Denmac was speechless. He knew that James had only been in this world for less than a year. Getting from level 1 to level 157 in just a few months was unheard of. And he also killed nearly a dozen agents! Neophytes or not, it had just dawned on him how crazy that was. Just who was this monster?

James stood up and clenched his one fist. Even though the attacks on Helios had stopped, he could feel the Darkness stirring in the direction of the agent. But he wasn’t afraid. No matter what that agent had in store for them, he would deal with it. He’d protect his friends at all costs. He’d protect this world at all costs.