The rest of the cycle started to pass quietly, almost uneventfully. David finally reprogrammed the waiter-bots, bringing them into the security network alongside their humanoid counterparts. With his mechanical sentinels patrolling the perimeter, he turned to the next task—assembling crystal cores.

  He couldn’t automate the whole process yet; each calibration required a monster’s corpse for learning routines. The limitation was annoying—but it gave him pauses between long grinding sessions. Seven hundred… eight hundred… his inner count blurred into monotony.

  [You have improved your magical core: Rank D? → D]

  “Damn,” he muttered. “It’s taking more and more to level these up. Still… what else do I have to do?”

  Then he remembered the new skill—[Multicast]. The thought alone made him grin. He raised both hands, focused, and let twin streams of lightning surge skyward. It worked.

  “How many full charges would it take to rank up my mana?” he wondered aloud. The answer, apparently, was a lot. He fired bolt after bolt—two-handed, akimbo style—sometimes switching to other elements for variety. Each blast left a faint ozone trace in the air, each flash dimmed his reserves a little more.

  When his mana finally bottomed out. He quickly headed towards the pile of crystals, from which he moved away so as not to damage them with his spells and began to recharge.

  An hour and twelve recharges later, the notification finally flashed across his interface:

  [Multicast 2 → 3]

  David exhaled sharply, wiping sweat from his forehead. “That took longer than I thought,” he muttered. “But no way around it.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to feel the edges of the upgraded ability. The power pulsed beneath his skin—denser, livelier. He raised his hands and focused, preparing to channel three streams of lightning at once. But then he paused, staring at his palms.

  Two hands.

  He frowned. “Right… and where’s the third one supposed to come from?”

  His gaze slid down toward his leg. “No way,” he murmured, shaking his head. There had to be a better solution. Running barefoot across the battlefield wasn’t exactly a strategy—and even if it was, how was he supposed to shoot from his feet?

  For a fleeting moment, an image flashed in his mind: himself lying flat on a skateboard, firing lightning in all directions, using recoil to propel himself like some deranged human rocket. The thought made him snort with laughter.

  “Yeah, no. Definitely not the kind of build I’m going for,” he said aloud, shaking the image away. Still, the problem lingered—if [Multicast] could channel three bolts, then he’d have to find a way to use them all. Preferably one that didn’t involve spontaneous skate-based flight.

  David stood still for a moment, lost in thought. Maybe the problem wasn’t his aim or his mana flow—it was the reliance on his hands. What if he could cast without them? The idea seemed ridiculous enough to work.

  He clasped his hands behind his back and focused. He imagined the crackle of energy, the tingle of mana gathering, the bright spark of release. A faint prickle ran across his face. Then—zap!—tiny arcs of electricity leapt from the tip of his nose.

  “Oh, great,” David muttered. “Just what I needed—nose lightning.”

  Maybe, he reasoned, the law of the spell needed a focus point, something visible and aligned to his intent. With his hands hidden and his eyes on his own face, his nose had apparently volunteered for the job.

  Determined to understand, he pushed his [Mana Perception] to the limit. The world dimmed as streams of glowing blue energy filled his vision. He extended his hands and studied the flow of mana during a normal cast—there, at the center, a knot of condensed energy before the lightning burst forth. The law took shape there, not in his flesh but through his focus.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “Alright, got it,” he murmured. He shut his eyes and tried again, channeling everything without using his hands.

  A sharp crack! filled the air. Pain and heat followed. Smoke curled upward.

  David looked down and groaned. His pants were smoldering.

  “Oh, come on—not again!”

  After dousing the smoldering fabric of his pants, David took a deep breath and decided to try a different approach. He closed his eyes, stretched one hand forward, and began to channel lightning. The familiar crackle filled the air, humming in tune with his pulse. Then, carefully, he started pulling his hand back—trying to leave the focal point of the spell hanging in midair.

  It resisted him. The energy clung stubbornly to his palm like a magnetic thread. David clenched his teeth. The task was far trickier than he’d imagined. The lightning refused to exist without his touch.

  He extended his other hand, attempting to “catch” the focus and pull it away. On the third, fourth, and fifth tries, the energy sputtered out like a candle in the wind. But then—finally—on the sixth attempt, it worked. The electric knot leapt from one hand to the other, arcing through the air between them.

  David grinned, sweat beading on his forehead. He began tossing the lightning sphere back and forth, each transfer smoother than the last. With every pass, he willed the core of the spell to linger longer in the air. The glow steadied, crackling faintly, suspended in the air.

  And then—it stayed.

  [Ability Unlocked]

  He opened his eyes wide, staring at the floating sphere of lightning before him.

  Opening his status, he saw a new ability:

  Unbound Focus (Lvl. 1)

  A satisfied smile tugged at his lips.

  David decided to test his earlier failure again. He extended both hands and fired twin streams of lightning, then focused his will to form a third, hovering spark directly in front of him. The effort almost succeeded—the bolt coalesced, but its strength wavered outside his body. The arc skimmed the rooftop, scorching it and shattering a pair of floodlights in a sharp burst of glass.

  "Not ideal," he muttered, wincing at the smell of burnt metal. "Alright, maybe something easier to control."

  He descended to a nearby bathroom and turned on a faucet. With practiced precision, he conjured three orbs of water—two hovering above his palms and one floating before his face. Each sphere rippled and trembled under his concentration.

  He attempted to form a fourth, but the new orb refused to stabilize. The other three began to quiver, threatening to collapse entirely. A few deep breaths later, he tried again. Twice more the experiment ended in failure—but on the third try, something shifted.

  [New Attribute Learned: Major Law of Water]

  David blinked. “Right… I’d forgotten I even had the minor one,” he murmured.

  With the newfound attunement, his control sharpened. The water spheres grew steadier and easier to maintain. When he once more reached for the elusive fourth orb, the others held longer before faltering.

  Then, on his seventh attempt, a pulse resonated through him.

  [Unbound Focus 1 → 2]

  David exhaled slowly, watching the fourth orb, which appeared above the sink, and then flew up to the third one, which was in front of him

  After a few more dozen rounds of experimenting with the spheres, David finally managed to push his skill to the third level. With [Unbound Focus 3] and the use of both hands, he could now control up to five spells at once—even cast them behind his back. His accuracy, once unreliable, was steadily improving with each level.

  After recharging his core—all the crystal cores were now collected by robots on the roof—David decided he deserved a little reward. He set out for the city, planning to revisit the supermarket where he had once tested remote robot control. This time, he left the bots behind. Only the larger hounds were spawning now, and he was far stronger than before.

  The car hummed quietly along the empty street, the afternoon light glinting off its windshield. As he turned a corner, movement caught his eye—one of the oversized dogs emerged from an alleyway ahead. His hand instinctively brushed against the holster of his Desert Eagle—then he stopped, a grin tugging at his lips.

  He focused. Right behind the windshield, a spear of ice began to form. It was trickier than usual—the focal point was farther than what he was used to—but the construct held. The spear snapped forward with a sharp hiss, slicing through the air and striking the beast squarely in the chest. The creature dropped instantly, lifeless before it hit the ground.

  Parking by the entrance, David cut the engine and stepped out of the car. He had barely taken a few steps toward the sliding doors when a massive hound lunged at him from the shadows. Instinct kicked in—his hand shot up, crackling with energy. A bolt of lightning tore through the air, slamming into the beast mid-leap. The creature’s body convulsed, then went limp—but its momentum carried it forward.

  Without hesitation, David flicked his other hand toward the supermarket entrance. The heavy metal door wrenched off its hinges with a shriek and crashed into the airborne corpse, flinging it sideways in a tangle of limbs and smoke. He couldn’t help but laugh. The same kind of beast had torn him apart in the first iteration. Now, it barely qualified as an inconvenience.

  He stepped over the remains and entered the dark supermarket. Shelves full of all kinds of products stretched out before him.

  "Law of Darkness... huh," he murmured to himself, realizing his vision had adapted a bit more than humanly possible.

  Then he grabbed a shopping basket and, as if there was no apocalypse outside the store, he went wandering through the aisles of the store in search of something tasty.