Vic gazed down on the sleeping girl who’d been brought to the room. She looked Vic’s age. Perhaps a bit younger. The girl was laid down on the cot. Something beneath that girl’s skin was pulsing across her hand, ever so slightly, in tiny pearl-like patterns across her veins. One of her marred eyelids was so swollen the eye couldn’t open.

  “That one’s going to die,” a priestess said. Vic glanced at her. She didn’t acknowledge anything.

  The flat of her broken sword had been laid on Vic’s lap.

  The real question was how she was going to fit a two metres long magic sword in this room and manage to direct it properly at wherever she was supposed to aim.

  She grabbed it by the handle and slowly swiped her finger across the broken edge, where it’d been smoothly melted away. Ava would be disappointed. She was supposed to give it back in one piece. Well, that was just one more failure in her long string of blunders so far. Honestly, she didn’t know how she’d have given it back to her mentor in the first place. Vic had been… a bit… rude, right before leaving. Ah. Anyway. The past was in the past. Nothing to cry about. Nothing she could change.

  She stared down at the dying girl.

  She went to the other end of the room and opened the door to be able to activate her magic sword spell. Maybe that’d be enough. She always had to work around her rigid spells. She didn’t know the inner details of how they worked and couldn’t modify them properly. And the few times she’d tried, it’d had explosive, distasteful, or non-existent results. In that way, she wasn’t a real mage. The best she could do was negate her own spellwork in spectacular fashion.

  She saw the priestess quizzically stare at her from where she stood.

  “I need some room for the spell. It’s a long one. Spatially speaking. It doesn’t take very long to incant it,” Vic said. And to be honest, doing it away from the infected was common sense. Probably.

  “How… large exactly is your spell going to be, my lady?” the priestess asked. Vic cringed. Holy shit. Being called my lady was getting old real fast. “If reducing its size truly is impossible, we could find a larger room…”

  “Call me Vic,” she said, and the priestess blinked back without any emotion. Vic sighed. “It’s… Nevermind, maybe I should get out of this room to activate it. Doing it from the door sounds stupid now. I’m pretty sure it could be detected from this close by the infection. Man.”

  Vic scratched the back of her head. She was so unprepared for this. She didn’t… want to fail this. But she was sort of just finding reasons not to do it now. Getting an answer to the question of “would her spell heal those infected people?” felt awful, because she had a gut feeling the answer would be at best “no,” and a resounding, echoing “no” at worst. The anticipation was twisting her guts. Would the magic sword even do anything good? What was the point to this? Just to fail, in some new way she hadn’t done before?

  She headed out of the room, away from the priestess, breathing a little. She regretted it immediately. It stank. It stank of the sick. As expected. Vic grimaced.

  This was fucking dreadful.

  She returned her broken sword to its sheath. She put on a layer of shadow armour. She should have done that in the first place to keep the bad smells away, filtering them. She climbed up the wall and could once more stare at the layout beneath her. She saw some healers glimpse at her, then return to whatever it was that they had been doing.

  Vic sighed as she reached a beam of timber and sat on it. It was a bit above where she’d been when overlooking the warehouse. She could see the crane that she’d used to go down from where she previously was. Her legs hung in the empty air. This was probably far enough. Probably.

  She took out her broken sword again. She brandished it.

  Discreetly, she licked distastefully her teeth.

  She initiated the rhythm game. Music filled the stuffy place. Some turned heads happened again. One of the patients rolled on their cot and groaned. It most likely was unrelated to her.

  She played the game. Tapping. Tapping.

  Her magic sword had been five metres long when her blade had been unbroken… Then after the blade’s length had been halved, the magic sword had been two something metres long.

  She missed a beat of the rhythm game. Then another.

  The game fizzled out as she sheathed her sword again.

  She reread the description of the spell.

  [Big Magic Sword]

  The [player]’s weapon is wrapped in a mana aura that amplifies the blade’s power in length, sharpness and magic, also strengthening their [Special Attributes].

  Aspect unlocked: [Mana Disrupter]: Your [Big Magic Sword] disrupts the flow of any magic spells it comes into contact. {Condition: Use on an [aspected] weapon}

  Locked aspect: [???] {2 [conditions] required to unlock}

  Locked aspect: [???] {3 [conditions] required to unlock}

  This spell had always been an outlier. It was the only one to have aspects. Her other spells [evolved] when she had a breakthrough. This one… just taunted her with its locked aspects.

  Vic stared down at it. She put her hands over her mouth as she reread the first line of the description of the spell.

  No…

  Wait a minute…

  A weapon… Any sort of weapon… Any… size of weapon?

  Vic glanced everywhere around her. A needle? Would they have needles here?

  Her shadow-armoured hands squeezed tightly the beam of timber she was sitting on. The wood lightly creaked. Oh. Of course.

  She deactivated her shadow armour and traced the old strips of the wood. Her finger caught on a splinter.

  She pulled it out of her finger. Yes. Yes, this could do.

  Vic restarted the rhythm game, feeling weirdly excited about it. She stared as the loading circle took longer than usual to disappear, but the interface showed up.

  Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  She started up the game, holding harshly between two fingers the splinter.

  The rhythm game felt different than usual. The notes lasted less long. The music was more rabid than before. The beat was faster, but her fingers, first moving frantically then with more certainty than confidence, found all the notes. She didn’t fail, not once.

  Her heart was beating so hard she could hear it in her ears. She didn’t fail once. Something curdled in her guts. Anticipation came undone.

  And gloriously, an eight millimetre tall mana aura rose from the splinter, brighter than her mana sword had ever been.

  Notifications echoed around her as she stared closely at the tiniest purple lightsaber to ever exist. Its sides wavered intensely, vibrantly, ecstatically. It downright hurt to look at it for too long.

  This thing felt deadly.

  This was the deadliest eight millimetre long pinprick. Holding it felt dangerous. She didn’t know where the saber part of the splinter truly started, it simply expanded away as soon as her shadow armour let it breathe. Thank goodness for the shadow armour, ey? That spell was a real bro. She’d give it a headpat once all was said and done.

  With a light smile, Vic then eyed the notifications. Her smile widened, turning downright wicked.

  [[Big Magic Sword] has levelled up!]x10

  [One condition unlocked for the second [Locked Aspect] of [Big Magic Sword]!] x2

  Vic’s eyebrows rose like they had a will of their own. Two unlocked conditions?? Two at the same time??

  Aspect unlocked: [Mana Concentration]

  [Mana Concentration]: Your [Big Magic Sword] absorbs mana it comes into contact. Stay in contact to exponentially absorb mana. Select [inward] or [outward] mode to redirect absorbed mana towards [Big Magic Sword] or [Player]. Your [Big Magic Sword] requires a 50 MP/minute upkeep under this Aspect. A lack of mana will automatically shift your [Big Magic Sword] into an inferior [Aspect] to the current one.

  {Condition 1: Reach level 75 of [Big Magic Sword] or reach a concentration of the [weapon]’s aura above 100 MP per mm2 }

  {Condition 2: Use [Big Magic Sword] on [weapon] composed of a part of [Player]}

  Vic blinked. Wait wait wait. Her weapon was… composed of a part of her? That had just been a shard of wood and… oh. Oh. She’d pricked herself with it. It’d been… bloodied. Oh. She hadn’t noticed. Her index finger had tiny traces over it that looked like drying smudges of blood. Oh.

  Oh.

  She briefly glimpsed at the vibrant mini laser pinprick.

  Holy shit, what a stroke of luck.

  A dumb stroke of luck.

  A toothy smirk tore its way through her face. This had to work out. She couldn’t see her spell failing anymore.

  She dropped to the ground, remembering to reinforce the shadow armour back around her feet and legs at the last moment. She flexibly landed, unbending back up.

  The priestess stared at her without voicing anything that she thought. Okay. Maybe next time she wouldn’t just drop down like some sort of predatory criptid.

  Next time she’d drop down like some sort of vegetarian criptid. Vic whimsically walked back inside the room. She strode along while lightly holding it between her thumb and index finger.

  “My… my lady, was… was that the spell?” she asked.

  Vic stared back. Oh. Had the funny face the priestess made been about that instead of Vic’s graceful landing? That did make more sense.

  “Yep,” Vic said happily. “Had a breakthrough, actually. You were right about reducing the size of the spell. I’d been a bit stagnating on that one for a while, so thank you for your help!”

  The priestess ever so slightly seemed to smile back in a strange astonished, weirded out way, but the worry over her face quickly came over that too.

  “I’ve never… seen the sick so calm when using magic next to them,” she said, sounding a bit nervous. “…and such a… tremendous amount of it too… It was… I should have trusted your judgement, of course… But a… a warning, my lady, a fair warning, it… would be appreciated, next time, if… if… no,” she said, pausing. “I… do not know. The fault lies on me. Forgive me for my lapse in judgement. I have to say that it is true that I’ve never seen an incurable so calm when magic was used close to them.”

  Vic tilted her head, holding the laser pinprick in her right hand.

  “Must be because you guys always somewhat infuse divinity in your spells and that they react to that,” she said. HA! Further proof that she wasn’t a god, contrary to what Alberon had claimed about her supposed divinity. It’d be healthy to remind him that he’d been wrong about that with an even healthier amount of “facts” to back it up.

  “It… must be,” the priestess agreed. “Such precision… I couldn’t fathom separating the two when you… oh. My lady, I should have expected nothing else but your mastery over your magic.”

  Whatever. Vic looked at what she was holding up in her hand.

  Victorya then waved it around with a smile, as if to say “look at my shiny new toy!”

  At least the blind admiration over that priestess’s face faltered a little. Yesss, a bit of judgement, that’s what she’d been after. Vic smiled.

  No matter what happened, at least she’d gotten this sweet upgrade out of it. Her smile rescinded just a tiny bit when her eyes stumbled over the lying patient. It had a bit slipped out of her mind.

  “Alright. Time to get to the thick of it,” Vic said, walking and sitting next to that girl. She had sticky sweaty dark hair hiding a part of her face. The priestess’s gloved hands had peeled off all the layers covering the girl’s arm, which was riddled with those weird bumps. Vic awkwardly approached her tiny shiny purple lightsaber to it. Should she just… push it in the weird tiny bulges across her arm? Was that the infection? Vic grimaced. Holy shit, she was not prepared for this. She glanced back at the priestess who just nodded. The look in her eyes…

  Blind faith was fucking terrifying. Vic didn’t like it one bit. In her own opinion, she honestly had no fucking clue what she was doing. She shouldn’t be in the receiving end of that sort of look. No one should. No one.

  With her shadow armoured hand, she firmly but gently took a hold of the arm to better immobilize it. She approached the pinprick but faltered again. Notifications abruptly flashed.

  >>Warning: Extremely high level divinity detected. Avoid physical contact with extensions of [high level divinity].<<

  >>Warning: Do not notify [high level divinity] of your presence<<

  Vic stared. What.

  The priestess seemed to take her hesitation differently.

  “No matter what happens, it is part of a process we’ll be perfecting, my lady,” she gently said. “This elf will be dying in two days even if nothing is done, as the illness has reached the stage where its host cannot drink water without making the clusters swell in turn. Even if they die, even if many more die from your attempts at perfecting your… healing spell, it will be worth it if just one life is saved from your many trials and errors.”

  “It’s… it’s not just that,” Vic hesitantly said.

  Why… Why do this? Why hadn’t the game system properly warned her about the puppet god’s preacher like this when she’d been barely levelled up? Why did she have to figure out how incredibly dangerous and brutal gods were on her own the first time and go through so much pain because of it?

  The game system never looked out for her consistently. If it’d done so, it would have given her the prerequisites for the conditions of her sword spell instead of hiding them. She could have had this upgrade so much sooner if she’d been able to read what they were about. A grimace tore itself through her face. This game system had been made by a useless fuck. Her survival didn’t matter a lot to the game system, now did it?

  “What is it, then, my lady?” the priestess worriedly asked.

  A new notification popped.

  >>Warning: your level is currently too low to fight against [high level divinity].<<

  If she stopped now without trying, they would think that she was being a bratty asshole, which didn’t matter one bit. Vic tsked with a grimace.

  “It looks like it’s a powerful divinity that’s at the source of this,” Vic said.

  “Of course,” the priestess said with surprise. “Hadn’t you already been briefed on the matter, my lady?”

  Oh. She was surprised by the redundancy of the statement. That wasn’t awkward. Moving on.

  Vic looked back to the girl. Whatever.

  “Don’t call me my lady. Call me Vic. What’s your name?”

  “I am but a humble servant,” the priestess said.

  “Who has a name.” Vic immediately shot back.

  The priestess faltered.

  “Myrilla, my lady,” she said. Wow. Sucky name. Anyway.

  “Well Myrilla, my name is Vic,” Vic said. “Not Myladi. Better fucking remember it.”

  >>Warning: Avoid physical contact with extensions of [high level divinity]<<

  The game system was now becoming repetitive. Spamming was just in bad taste. She flicked it away. Vic put the pinprick right above one of the bumps. That one wasn’t pulsing. The same notification as before popped up again before her. She stared at it.

  This wasn’t about anyone thinking that she was a prick if she didn’t do this.

  This whole thing was about the game system. Nothing more.

  “And I’ll have you know that no matter what, no one can tell me what to do,” Vic said, as she pushed the pinprick against the random, nameless girl’s skin and her bubonic, mana aah tumors.

  “Of… of course, my lady, Vic,” the priestess quietly said, watching as the pinprick forced skin apart and came into contact with what was below.