I couldn’t decide if I liked or hated my new companion. Surviving the tower taught me to always be aware of my surroundings. Responding to a new noise or movement has become almost second nature to me. For some reason my shadow thought it would be hilarious to prank me by playing on that alertness.

From the corner of my eye something grabbed my attention. Thinking it might be a hostile creature I turned and prepared for an attack. I felt anger surge inside me as I look upon a sparking twig. The sound of laughter and the words “Made you look” cried out from my shadow.

With an annoyed look I decided to order my shadow for the first time and sent him to scout in front of me. I couldn’t get over his prank and thought revenge would be the best medicine. I was glad to see it annoyed him just as much as it annoyed me.

We continued our magical game of ‘made you look’ for a while until we gave up any semblance of stealth and just made everything around us sparkle as we moved forwards. The spell levelled up twice and I gained another point of intelligence. Fortunately, you couldn’t lose stats from doing dumb things as I’m sure my wisdom would have dropped from this childish game in the middle of a spider and bandit filled forest.

After an hour or so we stumbled onto a bandit camp. This one looked similar to the one we ran into before with wooden housing built next to, around and into trees with wooden ropeways connecting everything together.

There were a few scouts surrounding the camp and they were quickly taken out by my shadow. I gained experience for my shadow’s kills even if I did not deal any damage to them myself. I let my shadow do most of the work and enjoyed just watching him dispatching the small hoard of bandits that approached us.

My shadow could move fast, almost to a blur. Watching him bounce around off walls, flipping over bandits and summoning all kinds of weapons to either throw or swing around made melee look fun. I almost wanted to join in. Almost. Until I remembered that I’m playing mage.

I did however start to notice something strange about my shadow. His moves, while fast and acrobatic, were amateurish. There was no grace or sophistication to his moves, and if he wasn’t so blindingly fast he would have been hit on multiple occasions.

After we cleared out the bandits in the area, he came over to stand next to me. I looked at him critically wondering why he lacked my perfected move set. He did not have a spec of blood on him and his defined muscles could be clearly seen behind the fabric of his clothes. His beard looked to be a mess and I lifted my hand up to feel my own.

“What?” he asked and then a moment later flexed, showing off his muscled bicep. “Impressed by my overpowering strength?”

“Your overwhelming lack of skill more like. What’s wrong with you? I thought you had all my knowledge and experience.”

“What do you mean? Did you not see me absolutely destroy every bandit around here?”

“I did but you moved like a child that only recently learned how to swing a stick.” Admittedly it was not that bad, but my shadow was clearly lacking.

He looked towards me with a furrowed brow. After a moment his eyes widened. “You are jealous!”

I brought my hand up to my face. This guy is an idiot. I guess there was only one way to get through to him. “Fine, lets spar then.”

My shadow let out a laugh. “What’s this? The mage wants to spar?”

“This is different, this is research.”

Grinning he looked me over. “Fine. Just don’t cry when you are brushing out the dust from your beard.”

We both conjured a long sword and before starting tested a few things. It looked like his conjured weapons could hit me but were unable to cut my skin, on the other hand my weapon had no issue cutting his. Seemed that although my shadow was not able to cause me any harm, I was able to harm my shadow. I had to keep that in mind when throwing my spells close to him.

We got into position and stood a metre apart.

My shadow grinned towards me. “I’ll let you have the first move.”

I dashed forwards and even though my shadow had higher stats then myself I was able to easily disarm him within a few moves and had my sword at his throat before three seconds had passed.

+1 to Sword One-handed Skill rank.

“What? This is bullshit. You clearly cheated!” My shadow complained. He summoned another sword and readied himself. “Again.”

This time he attacked, and just like before I was able to disarm him. This time I managed to flip him onto the floor due to his sloppy footwork.

+1 to Sword One-handed Skill rank.

Grinning down at my shadow I couldn’t help but rub it in. “You suck.”

He performed a kip up, flipping himself from his back onto his feet and looked at me with a confused expression. “What’s going on? I’m you, but better. How can you so easily defeat me?”

I’m pretty sure I knew the reason why. “I believe that even though you contain my knowledge and experience, you also contain my skills and spells. Including and limited by their rank.”

My shadow hummed while nodding. “I understand now… It’s all your fault.”

“My fault?”

He posed and dramatically pointed a finger towards me. “Your damned obsession with magic and refusing to fight with your body! It’s because of your refusal to do what you are best at that I am like this.”

Scratching the back of my head I replied. “Maybe, but if you are a copy of me, why do you like engaging in melee combat so much, aren’t you just as excited about having access to mana as I am?”

“Well yeah, but there is a fundamental difference between you and me.”

“Oh, and what’s that?”

He made another pose, standing up straight with his chin held high and to the side while placing his hands on his waist. “I am the magic.”

While his words were impressive, they were ruined by his stupid posing.

“And everything I do” He gave me a smug grin “is magical.”

“Damn, do you have to ruin everything? I almost thought you were cool for a second.”

“Try to remember you are basically talking to yourself right now.”

“Doesn’t change the fact you suck.”

My shadow stopped his ridiculous stance, and a serious look overcame his face. “Well. You need to fix it.”

“Fix what?”

“Gain more ranks in your combat skills!”

“I’m a mage, why should I?”

My shadow started pacing back and forth, walking around bandit corpses. He stopped and grinned towards me. “Because if you don’t, your very first summon will be much weaker than what it should be.”

I went to retort but couldn’t find a reply. He was right and he knew it. “Damn you.”

“Aha! You agree then.”

Sighing I turned, saving myself from seeing his dumb victory pose, and looted the nearby bandit corpses. The tower here made it quite convenient to loot slain creatures. There was always a small pouch on their bodies that could be collected, instead of having to rummage through their clothes or worse, cutting into them. My shadow followed my example and started grabbing the small bags. He threw them to the middle of the bandit camp, creating a small pile.

“I gained two ranks in swords a moment ago. Did you also see an increase?”

My shadow frowned. “Nope. I guess you would have to resummon me to see the increase.”

“Makes sense kind of. I mean you are a materialization of myself at that moment.”

The bandits started respawning, appearing out of nowhere from out of their wooden shacks or from treetops to attack us. I let my shadow do most of the work and only launched the occasional spearbolt. I’m not sure if they were low level or I had just outgrown this place because I still had not gained a level after we cleared the place for the second time. We did however find a mazer hole that led to the next floor. At least, I assumed that’s where it went

Pulling out a chair and table from a nearby building I decided to use it to go through the loot that had started to pile up. I summoned a campfire nearby so I could recover my health and mana a bit faster.

Most of the loot turned out to be just coin but here and there were the occasional bit of leather armour or iron forged weapon. I made sure to use appraisal on everything I came across. I took the coin but left everything else. They looked to be too heavy to carry around and I did not have much use for weapons since I could just summon any that I needed. I did manage to find a shirt and pair of pants made from a soft cloth that I placed into my storage.

Movement distracted me from the loot, and I watched as my shadow moved from one flex pose to another.

“Could you stop that?” I knew I could just order my shadow around but for some reason did not feel comfortable with outright restricting him from doing something.

“Sorry, its just nice having a body.”

“Aren’t you a copy of me?”

He grinned “What, like a shadow copy? A shadow skill? Hmm what’s another word for skill?”

“Can we just ignore that and not go down that path?”

Chuckling he replied “Fair. To answer your previous question. Yes and no. It’s strange. I contain your knowledge and experience but when I dwell on it, its like I’m watching you from third person. I am your shadow materialized after all. I’m both you and not you. Makes sense?”

I thought about his words and after a moment he continued. “It’s like I have always been with you, watching you while also knowing your thoughts.”

“Wait. So that means…”

“That I watched you all those times you thought you were alone, away from the others? Yup.” He chuckled at the look of horror on my face. “No shame… Everyone does it.”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“You really should have taken up Lilly’s offer when she walked in on you” he coughed lightly and continued “She was clearly interested. Didn’t you spend a lot of time fantasizing about just that before dying? Meeting a beautiful elven woman that would...” He laughed for a second. “I remember that one video you watched that one time with the-”

“Shut up! Don’t say anything more.” Any compunctions I might have had about not giving my shadow a restricting order quickly vanished. I just sat there with the palm of my hand over my face as I remembered the encounter with Lilly. She really was beautiful and seemed very willing at that moment but there was a reason why I never accepted her offer.

“You were there, right? You know why I couldn’t.”

My shadow did not reply and just nodded. Remembering I just told him not to talk I mentally rescinded the order. “Besides that was the past. We’re… I am here now.”

My shadow pulled over another chair and sat across from me. “True. Who knew elves could be so… baby crazy.”

I gave a shudder. “She must have been desperate or crazy to want to birth a child inside that tower. They would have known only darkness and fear. I would hate to learn how a person might view the world.”

“True. Compared to that place. This tower is a paradise.”

He picked up a few daggers and rested his feet on the table and started juggling. “Miko is cute.” He kept an eye on me as he continued to juggle “And Yui is quite the beauty too.”

I gave a chuckle as I threw another leather armour piece to the growing pile next to me. “Really? They are just children.”

“Bah, what is a few years when you can live to be over five hundred here.” He tossed the knives high into the air, giving him time to stand up before catching them. “I wonder how old Jace’s wife is.” He then threw a knife at a bandit that appeared from the building next to us.

After clearing the bandit den for the third time I finally received the message I was waiting for.

Level up!

3 attribute points gained

Sleep or meditation required.

I cheered in joy “Woot, level up!” and placed all three points into intelligence.

My shadow laughed “Congrats. You will have to resummon me after gaining that spell. Don’t even think about showing it off in front of me.”

“I should probably do that anyway. I have not seen the skill rank up once, no matter how much experience you have provided. Don’t want your rank to remain at level 0. Mind watching over me while I meditate?”

“Fine but do it inside so you can’t get attacked outside my range.” My shadow may act the fool, but it turns out he was more than just a handsome face. I decided to meditate in the larger wooden building that held the mazer hole. There was one room there that only had a single bandit spawn, which should make things a bit easier for my shadow.

Just as I got into a comfortable position and started focusing inwards, I was interrupted.

“Wait. Someone is outside and I don’t mean a bandit.” He had moved to the side of the window and was peeking out from the edge. Joining him from the opposite side I carefully peered out.

A group of elves had just walked into the bandit camp and were looking around at the bodies and summoned weapons thrown about.

One of them picked up a discarded summoned axe and spoke aloud. “This must be him. Ven did say he could summon weapons with his mana.” The elves were all wearing brown and green cloaks and had leather armour underneath. The one in front had his hood lowered, showing off his blond hair, while the others all had their hoods up, hiding their faces.

I gave a sigh and whispered “Damnit, couldn’t they have waited just a few hours.”

My shadow nodded to me from the other side of the window. “I know. They have no respect for aspiring casters. Who is Ven? That name sounds familiar.”

I guess they must have heard us as a volley of arrows was suddenly slamming into the room and the outside wall around the window. I turned to look at the room and saw that they had actually killed a bandit that just respawned behind us.

I could hear the sound of more arrows being released and risked peeking out the window again. Bandits were respawning quickly around them. Each bandit took about twenty or so minutes to respawn after they were killed and since my shadow and I killed them so quickly, they were quickly appearing to swarm the group of elves.

They had no issue with the bandits and were able to dispatch the tower spawn as quickly as they appeared. They must be way over levelled for this floor to be able to slay the bandits that quickly. My shadow looked to me and raised an eyebrow. “I wonder how much experience elves give.”

While shaking my head, I replied. “let’s try and get some answers before we resort to that.”

“Sure, do you want to go talk to them or shall I?”

“I’ll go, hide in my shadow for now.”

My shadow nodded and stepped closer before descending into my shadow.