Chapter 15

  Michael woke up to a text from Old Dave.

  “I need you to pick someone up from the airport tomorrow.” The text said, “it’s the woman in the photo. She knows you are to pick her up. Take her to the pawn shop and leave. If she tries to make conversation, be sharp, smart and discreet. To her, you are just the driver and bodyguard.”

  Michael got to the Nashville International Airport pickup area without much trouble, as he was getting used to long drives alone on the road. This time, he chose to listen to a podcast about health and the immune system, trying to learn some new stuff that could be useful to grow his healing skill.

  Soon, however, he realized that the surface level knowledge was never going to be enough. If he ever found a way to boost his mental skills to truly superhuman levels, then he could peruse medical textbooks and all sorts of things to improve his skills, but for now his college days had proven that he was not very good at academic things.

  Then the woman emerged from the airport, the podcast was paused, and Michael approached her with what he hoped was a confident stride. She was stunningly beautiful for a middle-aged woman, tanned skin and Mediterranean features, impeccably dressed.

  “Oh, ciao, are you the guy Old Dave sent? He did tell me to expect a rather handsome young man,” she said, winking at him.

  “I uh…” he stammered, flushing, “yes, it is me.”

  The woman giggled. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it, sorry,” she giggled again, “seeing you all imbarazzato like that. Well, a woman has to have fun, the flight was so long and boring! I’m Carmela, by the way.”

  He took the offered hand. “I’m Michael.”

  “Lovely name,” she said as Michael took her luggage. He started hauling it towards the truck, loading it under a tarp in the back. “Is that our mighty ride?” Carmela asked with another giggle.

  “Ah, well,” Michael said, trying not to stammer as he thought something up, “you know Dave, right? He didn’t want to be too conspicuous.”

  “Capisco bene, everyone has their problems…” she said with a knowing smile, as if she knew something that made total sense to her. “We do need to be discreet. The good old times when we could drive sports cars and bathe in luxury in the open are over. And the old tim-ers,” she said, strange accent making her draw out the r’s, “they are not going to like the operation I’m about to do. Well, that’s way above your pay grade, isn’t it, bello?”

  He helped her up to the passenger seat, since she claimed to be unused to the tall American cars, and they drove off. As Old Dave had warned, she was eager to make conversation, and Michael had to steer the conversation away from sensitive topics, or things he knew nothing about.

  It was clear that Old Dave was dealing with dangerous people. Italians, it looked like, and not the tourist sort. Michael had many questions, but bit his tongue and did as ordered. If there was something the dungeon had taught him, it was patience. Sometimes. There were some situations where it seemed to have had the complete opposite effect instead.

  “I’ve only been working with Old Dave for a short time but he takes care of me, ma’am.” Michael said, answering a question, “he offered me a hand when I was down on hard times.”

  He made it sound like Dave and him were old time friends instead of having met mere days before.

  Carmela’s eyes lit up. “Oh! So, you are his errand boy now, I see,” she said flippantly, “you look like un bravo guaglione, I can see why he decided to help you. He’s a softie like that. Well, sometimes. Actually, almost never, but… you know.”

  Michael nodded. He didn’t know.

  “We’re here,” he said, before getting out of the truck and opening the door for her.

  Carmela giggled at that, “you’re spoiling me. Sciupafemmine, eh?”

  “I don’t know what you said,” he replied, a bit out of his depth, before helping her with the luggage.

  “Nothing offensive, I swear,” she winked at him. “I can take it from here. I’ll put a good word with Old Dave, don’t worry. The service has been,” she looked at him up and down, like a predator eyeing a juicy cut of meat, “magnificent. Perhaps next time I’ll ask for you again.”

  With that, she turned around and walked into the pawn shop, her impossibly high heels not hampering her in the slightest. Michael realized, not for the first time, how out of his depth he had been with that woman. He really hoped he wouldn’t have to see her again, not for a while at least.

  Wanting to clear his head, and since it was still early, Michael decided to push it and try to do another dungeon delve.

  He could have gone back home: his money troubles were taken care of, assuming Old Dave kept giving him jobs, and there wasn’t anything pressing to do. But his house was nothing more than a moldy two-rooms he rented so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the streets, a far cry from the warmth of a place he could call his own.

  He would rather fight monsters and gain new magic.

  The hiking and dungeon gear was already in his truck—he always brought it with him just in case—and he could buy food and water at the diner on the way there.

  He was at the dungeon entrance by 5 in the afternoon, drenched in sweat, but the summer days were long and he didn’t have to worry about the sun setting before he was back at the truck. Nor did he have to worry about how long he spent inside the dungeon. Every delve lasted for exactly ten real-world minutes no matter what he did, so he would be out at 5:10PM and could walk the three-hour hike back to the truck in daylight and twilight bright enough to see.

  The familiar sight of mana gushing out of the dungeon greeted him after he crested a hill. It was a sight he didn’t think he would get bored of any time soon.

  Then the awe on his face was replaced by a frown. The affected area, it had expanded again. Not only that, but there seemed to be a shimmer to the air that he could see with his mana sense, as if where the mana from the dungeon touched, something about reality was subtly changed.

  For a moment, it seemed as if he was seeing double, a reflection of the real world—distorted and strange—superimposed upon the mundane rocks and trees that had always been there for all to see. But then it was gone, and he couldn’t manage to see it again.

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  Breathing in a deep breath of mana-rich air, he entered the first room of the dungeon, coming face to face with a goblin boss.

  It wasn’t anything unexpected, after last time. The dance began, and Michael used the opportunity to train his skills against a stronger foe. For this fight he chose to only use his fists, [Presence] and [Distortion Field] in bubble form, forgoing the damaged shield. He tried to draw the fight for as long as he could, but injuries were slowly but surely accumulating on the goblin’s body, and it finally succumbed to its many broken bones after a couple hours.

  Michael’s flaming fists had been a disappointment, largely useless in the fight, while he found that [Distortion Field] could very well be used offensively. The rest of the dungeon was cleared as quickly as possible, as to reap as many rewards as Michael could from it, and he ended up with 160 coins in total, and a common skill stone.

  It had been a while since he had seen a skill stone.

  He gripped the little thing, letting the magical window appear in his field of vision.

  “Huh, interesting.” It seemed that the dungeon had observed how he wasn’t using a shield anymore, and was offering to reset [Distortion Field] back to level two, losing the [Shield Bash] but keeping the other abilities. All this with the promise that it would be much easier to level the skill back up again as well.

  He narrowed his eyes, scanning the room in search of a foreign presence. If the dungeon’s voice was there with him, he found no trace of it with his senses, magical or mundane. Eventually he started to accept the possibility that perhaps the offer was not a trap, and started to consider whether to use the reset or not.

  The prospect of being able to modify skills was nothing to scoff at. Especially since Michael had an inkling that, much like he managed to learn skills without skill stones, modifying or evolving them could also be done without the stones. At least for common and uncommon skills, with the difficulty increasing exponentially with every rarity tier until it was all but impossible to do it without the aid of the dungeon.

  He used the offered reset, feeling something leave his being. A sense of loss came upon him, but was soon suppressed by a foreign force coming from the reset stone. Without it, he realized, it would have been agonizing. Perhaps even crippling.

  Trying the new version of the skill out, the bubble didn’t feel any different than it was before. However, he couldn’t apply it to a shield anymore. It would take a while to adapt his fighting style, but at least he had solved his damaged shield problem.

  With the boss room cleared and the loot collected, it was now time to train. He chose to start with the flaming fists, since they were the hardest skill to integrate in his fighting style. They were expensive and did damage over time, reducing their usefulness by a lot.

  He had ideas, though. He practiced grapples and punches: the grapples to maximize the flames’ potential, while the punches had to be timed perfectly with a brief activation of the skill, his hands bursting into flames at the last moment to blind enemies and add even more damage to his strikes.

  He went through some karate forms and some shadow boxing where he fought imaginary enemies. Little by little he got the hang of it.

  Then he moved onto grapples and holds, which were harder without a real target to test them out on, but also offered the greatest window of time to burn his enemies. They were the riskier moves for sure, a failed grapple would expose him to immense danger, but if he kept the distortion bubble ready in case he messed up, it could be a powerful tool.

  The last item on the list was training his healing skill, keeping at it until he was out of food and exhausted. No levels this time either, but he felt like he was getting better at it, and that his healing was a bit faster, and a little cheaper. Perhaps the first level in this skill was not too far away now, and it looked like it would be an upgrade to the speed and efficiency of the healing itself.

  Then he decided to train his mana. He knew from his mana sight that he could exert some form of control over the mana in the atmosphere which meant that, in the rich dungeon air, he could make his regeneration go a bit faster.

  Concentrating, he tried to feel the mana in the air, forcing it into his body. Whenever he was too full, he simply fired some random skills to empty his pool by roughly half, and began anew. The cycle repeated for a long time, but if there was something that Michael had learned about himself, was that he could be very stubborn. So stubborn, in fact, that after a few hours the universe was forced to yield.

  With this new skill, the rate at which he could absorb mana skyrocketed. He didn’t have hard numbers to keep track of his mana pool, but he was quite sure he could increase his regeneration to up to five times the base rate if he concentrated, although he couldn’t keep it up for long.

  Disappointingly, the mana inside his body was still locked away from him, both from his perception and from his manipulation. His aura wasn’t though. Now that he was used to mana sense, he could see it around him like a thin halo of radiance, and by applying the manipulation skill he could stretch and compress it at will. Not much, and a thin film of aura surrounded his skin at all times no matter how hard he tried to pull it away, but he could change its shape a little bit.

  The limit seemed to be five meters, like the skill said. At that distance, the aura was already frayed and damaged, and trying to push it further away made it unravel, causing backlash of pain so strong it made Michael black out for a moment. He woke up seconds later, blood dripping from his nose, and was forced to heal.

  It was time to leave. Michael left the dungeon, once again ignoring the call of the door leading to the second floor, satisfied with his gains.

  Now that his phone could connect to the cell network again, a message from Old Dave came through, telling him to stop by at the pawn shop after his hike. He replied that it might be a bit after dinner, to which the old man replied with a laughing emoji, telling Michael not to worry and to just ring the bell.

  An old man using emojis, Michael thought as he shook his head. Forget magic, this was proof that the world was truly ending.

  A hearty meal at the diner—with his hard earned money—and he was at Old Dave’s.

  “You did a good job handling Carmela. She can be… quite something.” Old Dave said.

  Michael nodded. “She was nice.”

  “Diplomatic answer,” Old Dave said with a laugh, “but it’s the right answer. She was very satisfied with you, so I packed you a little extra as a bonus,” he said, giving the usual envelope to Michael.