The core took a step, kicking my severed arm a few feet away. “Ugh! What is wrong with you? I told you to beg, not dismember yourself.” The monster tapped its lips in contemplative thought. “Of course, now that I think about it, this could be a lot more fun if—”

  The earth shot from beneath her feet, cracking against her jaw like a bullet, knocking Screech into a dune of ash, unconscious.

  The Core staggered.

  “What. Was. That.”

  The monster gestured toward me. “Enough of this.” Mental energy coursed through the sand, commanded to impale me through the chest.

  Nothing happened.

  Naturally. Sand doesn’t move on its own. Why would it?

  I took a deep breath, regenerating my missing limb.

  The Core put more effort into her concentration. “Where is this power coming from?!”

  “Didn’t you read my mind?” I muttered, grabbing the other bracelet. My will and Xoiae’s clashed violently, sparkling white hot, dribbling molten metal on the sand. Eventually, the enchantment blew apart with a clap like thunder.

  Fifty percent and two to go.

  Maybe the Core was bluffing? I guess it took a while to process months of experience, so she might’ve skimmed over some of the recent stuff.

  I reached toward my ankles.

  “NO!” The Core shouted, lunging toward my throat.

  The monster was much, much faster than me, yet I could see its every movement, as if the Core had been frozen in slow motion. Who knows how fast I was thinking now. To an outside observer, our entire exchange might appear in a blur.

  The ground bunched like springs, throwing me to safety.

  The Core stared. “Fine. We’re at a stalemate. You aren’t strong enough to hurt me, but I’m not fast enough to hurt you.”

  I let the ankle brace drop from my fingers, smoking on contact with the sand.

  Seventy-five percent.

  The monster shouted in slow motion, rearing up to fight. A spike attempted to stab the Core, breaking to dust on impact.

  I could reinforce the ground with mental energy, and obviously by quite a lot, but I couldn’t reinforce it nearly enough to damage something with five million durability.

  I didn’t have enough raw mental power to win an entire fight.

  The Core lunged toward me, so slow that I could count the fake hairs in the monster’s head. I had the ground push me out of the way.

  Why was moving with mental energy so easy but attacking was so hard? Not just in the difficulty of making something happen, but the force it happened with.

  I could only assume an exponential equation was used to process the loss of energy over a distance, meaning I just had to move my attacks closer to myself for substantially better results.

  The Core chased after me, flailing wildly to land a single hit as the ground whipped me around, effortlessly dodging.

  {NOTICE}

  [Failure to kill Devourer in [30:00] will enable Devourer to select a new host.]

  The core licked its lips.

  “You know what? I changed my mind. You’re next, human.”

  I formed spikes inches from my feet, only to watch them blow apart as the monster walked right through.

  And there was that one other thing, too.

  I didn’t feel that strong.

  Yes, I managed to effortlessly remove Xoiae’s bracelets, and my ability to see and react was far faster, but my total raw power was underwhelmingly similar to the power I’d had before. Only now, instead of fighting enemies with stats in the hundreds, they had stats in the millions.

  Boring.

  The Core twisted its heel, kicking up a mile-high cloud of dust, splitting a massive plane of earth. I dodged anyway, using hunks of broken rubble.

  My hands were tight.

  I wish I were stronger.

  Mental energy can move things, but it couldn’t directly affect other people, and it can’t make stats. In other words, it’s only good for mobility—

  What is mobility?

  I ducked under the punch.

  Not with sand.

  Not by manipulating the ground.

  I just ducked.

  Scalding wind burned against my neck, throwing me off balance. But even as the Core moved behind me, I twisted on the end of my feet, landing ontop of her arm.

  Mental energy is used to move things that aren’t other people, because then their wills would stop you. But what if you try and move something no other wills can oppose, which is also so close your mental energy is perfectly efficient?

  What if you moved your own body?

  I stepped to the side of a spinning kick, nailing the Core in the face with a tremendous amount of force, cracking previously unblemished concrete.

  Even as the monster skidded across the sand, I prepared my next punch. Focusing.

  My arm is a train.

  My knuckles connected with the monster’s face.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Of course, mental energy isn’t allowed to deal damage in-game, but then again Cores don’t really have health. They have shells, which you can break with physical force just like a rock or a tree. All I had to do was grab the monster’s crystal, and you didn’t need impressive stats for that.

  The Core’s head was flung backwards, cracking against the packed earth.

  I took a step forward.

  The Core panicked, pivoting, reaching a claw toward Screech in the distance.

  “No you don’t,” I grunted, grabbing the monster by the shoulder, splintering concrete.

  What was the limit? How far could I go? How fast?

  We stood ontop a mountain.

  Mental energy flickered like searchlights, fuzzing around my skin.

  The Core fell to the ground, weak in disbelief.

  “Where are we?” The monster asked.

  “One of the unnamed mountains,” I stated. “I saw it as we were fighting.”

  “You teleported.”

  “Like Master Frank, yes.” I smiled to myself. “I always wondered how he did that without any mana. You know, looking back I’d have expected the technique to be obvious. I was already using mental energy to heal my own body, so moving it isn’t much different.”

  “You fool!” The Core shouted. “Manipulating your body without intense training wrecks your internal organs! You’ll be dead in mere moments!”

  I blinked, pulling up the screens.

  “Seriously?”

  [You have suffered [Internal Bleeding X]]

  [You have suffered [fatal] [organ rupture] of [heart] [intestines] [kidneys] [liver] and 13 more items]

  Given the extent of my injuries and my lack of extensive medical knowledge, I probably couldn’t just mental-energy them away without some serious repercussions.

  Oh wait.

  I poked the screens, freezing them and feeling immediately better, cutting off some of the lingering bite of pain in the back of my mind.

  “There we go.”

  “This can’t be happening,” the Core hissed. “You can’t become this strong in such a short period of time! It’s impossible!"

  I grabbed the mountain and split it in two, opening a seam that boiled with exposed magma.

  I clenched the sides of the split mountain, pressing them back together.

  In total, that had used maybe five percent of my mental ability.

  The monster laughed. “Fool! Can you fathom the sheer quantity of energy you just wasted?”

  “Yeah but that was cool, right?” I chuckled back in good nature. “I couldn’t resist.”

  The Core vanished, less than a speck in the far distance.

  I jumped over. “Seriously? You’re giving up?”

  There was a plume of mana and the monster dove to the ground, landing beside the rolling stormclouds that circled the second area.

  “You know, you and I are pretty similar,” I stated, landing beside the Core. “Not that similar, but similar in our combat style. You see, I’m okay at fighting, but my specialty is not dying. You’re the same. No matter how hard I hit you, you just get right back up. Like a cockroach.”

  The Core jumped into the distance again with myself less than a second behind.

  “Right now, you’re looking for a new host, right? You’ll grab anyone you can and we’ll have to do another fight, and then we’ll run around for a while until you grab another host, and so on and so on.”

  The Core flipped backward, cracking its heel against my head.

  The monster’s leg shattered.

  That took roughly ten percent of my total mental power, though I’d been pretty inefficient about the conversion, so I could probably drop the cost to eight percent with a little effort.

  “Let's play a game,” I said. “If you keep running, I’ll keep hunting you down. I could keep this up for a couple weeks, but you might last…what…three days? You’re in bad shape.”

  The Core bristled. “Or?”

  “Well I’m awfully busy, so why don’t you try and take control of me instead,” I stated. “Nice and simple. If you win, you just killed a time traveler. If you can't, you’d have to hand over your core, swearing to obey every command I give.”

  There was a moment of hesitation.

  The Core smiled. “Oh. You don’t really want to kill me, do you? It’s bait, trying to make me some harmless pet of yours?”

  I frowned. “I’d rather you just stop killing people, that’s all.”

  The Core’s face twisted into Sern’s, stained with fake discolored tears. “And then you get to be the good guy, right? Everybody lives happily ever after?”

  “That would be nice.”

  “No.”

  The Core laughed.

  “Never in a million years.”

  I blew out a sigh of relief, snapping the last ankle brace and tossing it onto the sand. “Well, I had to try.”

  The monster’s face contorted into a grin, preparing for another jump. “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to control each and every person you hold dear so you can watch them die before your eyes, over and over again. Once that image is seared into your brain, I’ll move to the next, and the next, until you’re such a raving mess you’ll gladly kill yourself for me.” She was speaking faster, laughing uncontrollably. “I’LL—”

  A cloud of concrete dust blew across the air.

  “Huh,” I grunted. “Hang on a second.”

  I scrolled through my screens, smacking myself on the forehead. “Oh!”

  {Xoiae’s Cursed bracelet}

  [This item has been tampered with. Other bracelets have increased output.]

  [Full Resistance : 25%]

  “No wonder I felt so weak,” I chuckled. “That last brace was stronger than those other ones. Man, that’s a relief. I know the mental power I had was alright, but it didn’t…it…it wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, you know?”

  I kicked the pile of dissolving crystal shards.

  “Ah, you know what I mean.”

  I held a hand over my brow, scanning the cavern I’d gouged from the earth, blowing down several mountains, turning sand into glass, pooling with lava, yadda yadda yadda. As long as I hadn’t nicked a city, the size of the aftereffect didn’t really matter.

  And after all that, I felt fine.

  My jeans unwrinkled themselves, losing their stains to match my brand-new shirt. While I was at it, I also stitched up some smaller cuts, healed a few bits of bruising, and summoned some food.

  Oh, and I healed all my internal organs, but kept the screen frozen until someone smarter than me gave those a look.

  And that was it.

  I won.

  Things would no doubt feel different when I returned to the capital.

  Out of thousands and thousands of players in the city, only a few hundred had survived.

  It was a massacre.

  But it was over.

  It was okay to be happy about that.

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and walked toward the city, whistling to myself.

  {RANK UP!}

  [Silver]

  [Progression to Gold : 0.01%]

  ~

  {STATS UP!}

  [(+2m) 3.33m Hp (+3) 3.1m Str +(1m) 1.9m Mana]

  // {Notice} //

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