We were halfway to Fort Frontier when Anna addressed the elephant in the room. “So...what did you do, Lheticus? Was that seriously your Innate Trait?”

I nodded, as my only answer. “What kind of insane Trait could let you do that? I mean, to me it looked like you actually derived a pseudo-spell from Lesser Immolate!”

I wasn’t the only one who turned to stare at her at this. Everyone else did too. “What in the Tower is a ‘pseudo spell?’ ” said Arvallei.

“Even I’ve never heard of this,” said Bruzigan.

“Hardly anyone has,” said Anna, “but I know of them from an old bedtime story about how my family first rose to prominence. How our founder was an enthusiast of experimenting with the Tower’s magic. His big breakthrough came when he found a way to intensify the mana of a Lesser spell.

The Tower called what he’d done a ‘pseudo spell’ and gave him a Creation achievement for it. From that moment, it was as though he could do things with his spells that no one else could. He used that to gain wealth and AP, from the Tower, from Area 1, and from the Constant Competition, and with his power and political savvy he forged connections and gained resources to form a faction that stood among the Area’s giants.

Of course, that was thousands of years ago. Now we are, or I should probably say they are, just another ‘noble family’ of the federation. Given how I turned out, I have to think pettiness and shortsightedness of the founder’s successors had to have played a role in that.”

Mewi gave me a sidelong look. I returned it. “I didn’t receive any Tower notifications, so it must not have fully been this pseudo spell thing. But it might be worth further exploration and experimenting once we clear this Floor’s mission.”

“I can definitely get behind that,” said Anna, and that seemed to be all that was to be said on it.

All too soon, all six of us were buried in work helping Fort Frontier prepare for the monster tide. Commanding soldiers for defense was one thing that we’d trained on in our preparations, so we were able to show those chops and contribute more than being living WMDs.

Of course, we’d also gone over what it would be like when the monster tide arrived. But the simulations did NOT do this part justice. Things like the constant howls, snarls, and cries of fury, and various unpleasant smells, I’d expected.

What the virtual realm apparently simply could not convey was the physical effect the sheer rage the Monster Lord induced in each and every life form bearing down on the fortress had. Even before any of them were a kilometer from the outer walls, there wasn’t a soldier in the place who didn’t feel it in the very air we breathed like a miasma.

When it hit me, something none of us had counted on happened. Probably, it was because rage and I had an above-average working relationship. It was as though the rage as a physical thing entered me, as though it had found a new host. I’d be damned, and rather more literally than that phrase is usually used, if it actually took me over, but for the first time since the coliseum simulation I’d concocted, it was taking enormous effort to contain it even for the moment, to avoid lashing out immediately at those around me.

Even normal everyday rage couldn’t be suppressed forever. The fury now in me was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I felt like I would literally explode before long. It needed an outlet. It needed release.

There was only one viable course of action.

As luck would have it, my path to leap from an outer battlement took me very close to Bruzigan. For a brief instant, I noticed that his mouth was moving, but I was already beyond even the slightest level of speech comprehension.

I leapt into the throng, the ocean of monsters that for now was still being held back by the town’s Mage Cannons. Dimly, I noticed that the monsters weren’t just charging toward the source of life they sensed, or possibly smelled. It was happening slowly, very few monsters were being killed this way, but they were slowly tearing each other or even themselves apart.

Well, I was more than happy to help them with that. And I had metric tons of help to give them. Not all my experiments in the virtual world involved the Power of Imagination. One in particular was to test the more obvious use of the large pile of Stamina I was building by it being one of the two physical Attributes that I emphasized. Fighting endless enemies as hard as I could until I couldn’t even move.

My record was just a few minutes over 20 hours. However, my mana, even augmented by an external pack with 100,000 points, couldn’t last nearly that long. However, Bruzigan had recognized that a situation might arise where I’d need to fight that long, and so had decided to have me trained in the use of a melee weapon as a backup.

It was true that since I didn’t have a Physical class, I couldn’t do anything special with it. In the eyes of the Tower, me using it didn’t even count as equipping it. But equipping a weapon wasn’t required to use it, it just meant that I couldn’t use any Tower Skills, Skill Books to learn Tower Skills, or skill books related to their general use. Any caster class could still learn to use a physical weapon the old-fashioned way, and with over 50 Strength, or hell, even with just 20 Strength, I could at least lift and pretend to wield any weapon that wouldn’t be totally pointless for me to pick up in the first place.

Of course, even 20 months wasn’t nearly enough to make me some kind of master of the halberd I now took out of spatial storage. And of course, over those 20 months there were other things we had needed to do, so not all that time could be dedicated to it. But Ri’legh had made a study of not only the sword, the weapon people traditionally thought of as “blademasters” using, but virtually every weapon with a sharp edge was one he could use with at least good proficiency. With him plus Bruzigan to teach me as well as the resources of the virtual world, I had at least gotten far enough in training that I could be fully confident about not hitting myself with the weapon. And while I had to fight, I still hadn’t lost all my reason.

So, it was a good thing I was up against monsters as opposed to intelligent, skilled opponents. Even those species with reasoning capacities well beyond instinct, like goblins or gremlins, were in no position to use them thanks to the very same miasma of rage that drove me into them.

I don’t know how long I fought like that, but I know it wasn’t nearly as long as I’d been slinging spells around, when the crimson fog in my head suddenly, finally, lifted. What...happened? Shit, that’s right, stage 2 of the monster tide!