Things, by and large, did not go sideways. This was only if you didn’t consider traveling West to be sideways movement, which Zoe wasn’t sure about. Regardless, nothing bad happened, other than her legs getting as tired as her arms had. They walked until nightfall.


    It had been late afternoon, bordering on evening when they encountered a fork in the main road. The wider, straight option continued South right along the coast, while a slightly smaller but still paved road veered off to head inland West. They did the smart thing at that point, which was to take a little rest and decide on which way to go.


    It was fortunate that there was both a wooden signpost and that Zoe had terrorized that librarian into teaching her to read. It was unfortunate that she only got to practice once, because she wasn’t at all good at it.


    “I think it’s probably Hockenfiel,” Sasha said after a painful thirty seconds of Zoe mashing her tongue against foreign pronunciation. “I think that’s a larger city? I’m not sure, I’m not familiar with this place but I’ve heard people mention it a lot so it probably is.”


    Zoe nodded. That was a reasonable conclusion. She refrained from asking more about the Lycan’s personal situation. The curiosity was not worth the emotional weight she expected from it, not right now. “Then that’s where we’d end up if we keep going South. That makes sense for it to be a big city, if it’s on the coast.”


    They decided to take the inland route.


    The trees were—not all that thick, really. They had a lot more variety and underbrush than the crappy dead forests further North in the Frozen Wastes did, though, and there were birds. Zoe was almost tempted to practice various skills on them as they flitted back and forth over the road, but she refrained. Just enjoy things without murdering everything.


    She got her chance to practice magic when they stopped at nightfall proper.


    _____


    “So you’re sure you don’t have anything that could help us start a fire in that storage ring of yours?”


    Zoe felt guilty for shaking her head again and acting like she didn’t have something called a ‘flame charge’ in her personal inventory. But just a little bit. She only had one, and there was no way she was wasting it to start a single campfire they didn’t even need. “Nope, unless you think you can start a fire by stabbing the sticks hard enough.” She did have the good sense to have removed the actual storage ring she got from Basil and to put it on. She was still committed to the idea of pretending like she didn’t have her special core inventory. It was definitely going to be useful for a dramatic heist one day. But only if it remained secret.


    “What are you doing now?”


    Zoe cracked open an eye to glare at her talkative travel buddy. “Learning fire magic.” She tried to close her eyes and get back into preparing herself for another go at using mana channeling.


    “By sitting on the ground with your eyes closed?”


    Another squinted glare. “Yes. Now shut up or make your own fire.” Then she willed her perception to tune out whatever nonsense Sasha would say next.


    “Damn, so prickly…”


    Zoe steadied herself with a deep breath. There were four main components to this when it came to skills and traits. For skills, she’d actively be using mana channeling and manasight, for rather obvious reasons. Likewise, from her traits, she’d be pulling on arcane antennae and magic resistance.


    The latter half of this process was more active than it might first seem. Zoe had realized at this point that her core traits, while they were passive, in some cases very visual features of her own body, did respond to active intent and focus. Calling on her traits was a bit more than just deciding to make use of them in the way one would a limb. It was far less dramatic than a skill activation, but calling on a specific trait with the same force of will and the system did something.


    Manasight!


    Mana Channeling!


    The darkness lit up with the faint, muted colors of a blobby haze. There wasn’t much to see, not at all, though she wasn’t sure if that had more to do with the skill’s level or what was around her. The trees and dirt weren’t exactly overflowing with magic. But Zoe herself wasn’t quite so dull.


    It’s like one of those anatomical diagrams of the circulatory system, she thought. Similar, but not the same. Her body was a dense network of tangled strings of faint light. Some strings arced in great loops, while others drew taut. Some were thicker or thinner, and all converged in clusters of convoluted knots—the largest and most complex of which converged in her core.


    When she moved her arm, the threads in her arm moved with it. That was to be expected, so Zoe moved on to more interesting experiments. First, she amped up the amount of power she was pushing through the mana channeling skill.


    The total brightness of it all surged. As expected. But was it just brighter? Peering closer, Zoe observed how the increase wasn’t uniform. The increase in intensity was strongest in the areas and threads that were already the largest, longest, brightest, or overall most significant. That’s interesting.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.


    The system must have agreed, because it chose that moment to reward her.


    Manasight has reached level 2!


    Mana Channeling has reached level 3!


    Zoe smiled. But she wasn’t done. She cut off her use of mana channeling—but she left manasight active. This time, everything dimmed. And like the inverse of what happened before, the brightest sections dimmed the most. They were still the brightest by far, of course, but they had the most to lose. This would make sense if basic mana channeling had already been giving them extra emphasis.


    In the end, the mana in Zoe’s body dimmed by quite a bit. It went from a brilliant tapestry of glittering magic to a muted cobweb with portions so faint she could hardly make them out. They were still there, just—strangely empty.


    Manasight has reached level 3!


    Zoe ignored the skill level. These threads were part of her soul, right? They branched out from her core, extending through her body to carry mana and magic. Lilith said her core was what truly contained her self now, and she could believe that after experiencing a full decapitation at the hands of Basil.


    Lilith? Am I right? Are these mana thread channel thingies like little soul tentacles? But the tag-a-long Demon proved her uselessness by remaining silent. Zoe knew she was listening. She could feel the creature’s presence. You just want me to figure it out myself, don’t you? Nothing, followed by a fleeting feeling of affirmation. Figures.


    Zoe sighed and opened her eyes. Sasha was busy rubbing some sticks in a vain attempt to get a spark the old fashioned way. A grin crawled across the Demon’s lips. She would make a little game out of seeing who could get their respective method to work—not that she’d admit she was putting them in a competition, of course.


    _____


    The first light of dawn stabbed over the horizon, illuminating their fire-less campsite. Sasha had given up hours ago. Zoe had not. And while she’d made excellent progress on both her arcane skills and her understanding of magic and the system in general, she had yet to produce a spark.


    Damn, it turns out teaching yourself raw magic is actually kind of hard.


    “Wait, how long have you been awake?” Sasha blinked and stretched, raking her eyes over Zoe’s extremely not-sleepy body. “You look like you’ve been up for a while.”


    Shrugging, Zoe stretched as well. “Since I finished growing my head back yesterday, I guess. You rustle about a lot in your sleep, you know.”


    Silence. “You watched me sleep?”


    And now this was getting annoying. It’s hardly my fault you continue wasting a third of your life away like the pathetic mortal you are. She didn’t say that though. She was mature and could be more diplomatic about it. “I was not leaning over you the whole time taking notes, if that’s what you mean. You’re just noisy, especially on sticks and leaves.”


    As if in adherence to some universal harmony of comedy, it was at that instant a stick fell out of the wolf woman’s wild mane. “Come on.” Zoe stood up and kicked more leaves on her as she passed. “Get up, I’m bored.”


    “Gee, talk about domineering,” someone might have muttered from behind her, but Zoe didn’t put much weight in the opinions of boring people. “Wait! Hey look at that squirrel!”


    And now Zoe was truly exasperated. Rounding on the fluffy woman—who still had yet to rise up on her own two legs—she let loose. Stale mana had been building up in Zoe’s channels for a while now, though she hadn’t thought it was much of a problem. But now it was boiling over, burning at her flesh like bubbling, sticking, hot syrup that she needed to get out. It was ridiculously uncomfortable, though she hadn’t paid much attention earlier due to her deep focus. She was cranky and impatient and bored, and Sasha was holding her up over a damn squirrel. “Are you seven?”


    “Uh, seven what?”


    Zoe’s eye twitched. That’s it. The hot, cloying syrup roiled and grew turbulent. A searing heat so potent it felt icy shot down her forearms, stinging at her fingertips until Zoe swore she felt droplets of sweat pour down them. She could hear a roaring inferno building up in her ears.


    Her companion suddenly looked terrified, going so far as to raise her hands defensively. “I just… something about that squirrel looks odd, and”


    And with that, Zoe’s steam all dissipated. Or it should have, but whatever rage she was feeling had become something far more than emotional. This was because she finally saw the squirrel, and it was actually kind of weird. Part of it was the weird lock of… hair? On its head, but also the way it gulped and took a step back upon feeling the heat of Zoe’s ire. Squirrels don’t act like that.


    And maybe she should have been curious. But Zoe’s unnaturally hot rage needed a target, and now she was just massively pissed that some stupid weird monster had the audacity to think it could play her for a fool. The anger and the painful, stale mana that accompanied it weren’t just rekindled—they detonated.


    Burn.


    Zoe’s mind didn’t register what happened until after her white-hot mana baked straight through three different trees and left the surrounding forest floor a sweltering, charred pit. ‘Pit’ might be a stretch. Regardless, she’d burned up all the leaves, and that left two other women dealing with some serious new burns in one case and trying to stop it from spreading in the other.


    Mana Channeling has reached level 4!


    …


    You have gained the Rank B skill: Mana Manipulation!


    …


    You have gained the Rank E skill: Hellfire Blast!


    You have gained the Rank D skill: Hellfire Eruption!


    Zoe did not know how to feel. Overjoyed at her accomplishment? She’d gotten both mana manipulation itself and the fire magic she’d initially aimed for.


    Concerned over the bizarre anger she’d experienced in the process, and how it had all vanished? It left her feeling emotionally tired, though not physically, and that might be a problem to look into.


    Maybe she should also be concerned about preventing the whole forest from burning down, or maybe the fact that she’d just given that archer and enchanter girl, Millie, some real nasty burns just now by accident.


    But thinking through all of that, Zoe decided she wanted to be annoyed again. Kneeling in front of the injured girl, she prepared to use her healing. But first, she could draw things out just a little bit, right? So she made sure to look real stern as she spoke. “Why the hell were you spying on us by pretending to be a squirrel?”