[Party Message Received — Michael Storm]
She stopped talking.
Marina, sitting cross-legged nearby with Lumi in her lap and a half-finished vial in one hand, saw her expression freeze.
“What?” she asked.
Vex looked up from where he was carving a new set of stakes. “Please don’t say ‘Kade’s here.’”
Arin flicked the message open.
Still alive. Horde event cleared.
Coming back. Bad shape.
No mana, no skills for 12 hours.
If I’m not there in… two hours… come looking. Or don’t. You’ll smell the crater.
There was a beat of silence.
Vex blinked. “Horde event?”
Marina’s grip tightened on Lumi. “No mana for twelve hours?”
Lumi’s ears went flat, a small electric snap dancing over her fur as if she’d understood every word.
Arin’s eyes narrowed at the header.
Party Message Received.
They’d tried to use party chat before. At the very beginning, when they’d first ended up together, Mike had sent something out into the void more out of curiosity than expectation.
Nothing had come back.
Now it had.
“Range,” she murmured.
“What?” Marina asked.
“Party chat isn’t global,” Arin said. “If we got this, he’s close. Somewhere in the radius.”
“How close?” Vex asked.
Arin opened the tiny “Details” tab she’d previously ignored.
[Party Communication Range: ~1 km — Signal Strength: Strong]
“Close,” she said. “Less than a kilometer.”
Vex let out a low whistle. “So our storm idiot is stumbling around out there, no skills, no mana, probably half-dead, and close enough we can almost hear him swear.”
Marina’s jaw clenched. “We should go get him.”
Arin’s first instinct was yes.
Her second was the memory of six dead raiders bleeding in their ravine, and the way the leader had nearly put a knife in Marina’s ribs.
“If we leave the camp empty,” Arin said slowly, “we’re handing it to anyone with half a brain. Or any monster that wanders by. We’re low on potions. We just fought. You—” she nodded at Vex “—still move like your side’s on fire.”
“It feels like it too,” he said cheerfully. “Still vote we go.”
Marina shook her head. “We don’t know exactly where he is. If we split up, we’re weaker. If we take everyone, we’re a moving target. And he said…”
She looked at the message again.
Or don’t. You’ll smell the crater.
It was a joke.
Mostly.
“He’s walking,” Marina said. “If he had time and brain cells to type sarcasm, he wasn’t actively being chewed on.”
“Yet,” Vex muttered.
Arin rubbed a hand over her face once.
“We’re not a rescue squad,” she said. “We’re four people in a bad hole. If we go blundering through the forest with injuries and no idea where he is, we’re asking to get picked off. He knows that.”
“So we… wait?” Marina asked reluctantly.
Arin looked toward the tree line.
“No,” she said. “We prepare.”
She snapped into motion.
“Vex, shift three of the nastiest traps from the inner line to the outer approach, but keep the noise triggers. I want anything following him to regret it. Marina, pack your kit, brew whatever you can in half an hour that helps with blood loss or shock. We set up a triage right inside the ravine mouth. Lumi—”
The fox was already off Marina’s lap, claws clicking softly on stone.
“She goes as far as she can safely,” Arin said. “Thunderstep in short bursts, nose to the ground. If she finds him, she barks once and runs back. We follow the straightest line we can from there.”
Marina stared at her. “You just said no rescue.”
“No search,” Arin corrected. “We’re not combing the forest. We’re extending our perimeter out a bit for one person and one fox. If he’s close, we’ll catch him. If he’s farther… we hold.”
It was a compromise.
Mike would probably hate it.
He’d live.
If he got here.
“Go,” Arin said.
Vex pushed himself up with a wince, grumbling under his breath but already mentally rearranging his invisible map of traps. Marina snatched up her mortar and vials, sweeping herbs into a pouch with quick hands.
Arin knelt and scratched Lumi lightly behind the ear.
“Find him,” she said quietly. “And don’t be a hero.”
Lumi head-butted her hand once, then zipped toward the ravine entrance, fur already sparking. She vanished in a flicker of Thunderstep at the threshold, leaving only the faint smell of ozone.
Arin rose, grabbed her shield and sword, and moved to stand just inside the ravine mouth.
Waiting.
Mike’s world had shrunk to three things: pain, trees, and not falling over long enough to reach the next one.
He didn’t know how long he’d been walking since the grove. Long enough for his thigh to go from “sharp agony” to “constant, grinding throb.” Long enough that the Overloaded Channels timer had ticked from 12:00:00 to… something less.
He didn’t look at it.
He didn’t want to know.
Every time he tried to nudge mana, he felt nothing. No spark. No hum. Just absence. It was like someone had poured concrete down wires that had always been invisible but real.
His body, at least, still worked.
In a loose sense of the word.
He used trees as waypoints. Pick one. Reach it. Lean on it. Breathe. Repeat.
At some point, his brain had switched to background tasks.
You did this to yourself.
You chose the horde.
You chose the overcharge.
You chose to be here.
The alternative had been dying tired. He still believed that.
Didn’t make walking any easier.
He tried party chat out of sheer stubbornness more than hope. When the “Message Sent” confirmation blinked, he hadn’t expected much.
He didn’t know that a similar notification had just turned three people in a ravine into a coiled spring.
He limped on.
The forest around him had changed slowly as he moved, from the distorted mana of the grove to more normal woods. Here, he heard birds again. Smaller creatures scurried in the underbrush. Once, he glimpsed a pair of level 3 deer-like monsters with antlers too sharp to be reasonable. They looked at him, decided whatever he was was outside their prey profile, and bounded away.
Even monsters had risk assessment.
He lost track of how many times he nearly tripped. His body was too slow, reflexes dulled without mana. Twice, he did fall, catching himself on his hands and knees, then gritting his teeth and shoving back up.
“Keep… moving,” he muttered. “Ravine. Fire. Annoying rogue. Judgy ex-lawyer. Tiny lightning gremlin.”
The thought of Lumi made him smile in a way that probably looked a little unhinged.
He’d almost died in a dungeon. Almost died to his own Identity. Almost died to a mini-boss. Almost died to a horde.
He was getting really tired of the word “almost.”
He pushed through a particularly thick stand of brush, using his arms more than his legs for a few steps, and nearly went face-first into empty air.
He stopped just short of the drop.
Below him, twenty meters down, was the shallow ravine.
Home, such as it was.
He stared.
He’d come in from a different angle than usual. No wonder the landmarks had been fuzzy. From this side, he could see part of the half-wall they’d built, the faint glimmer of their covered fire, the movement of two small figures.
Three.
Lumi was with them.
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Relief hit so hard his knees almost folded.
“Arin!” he tried to call.
It came out a hoarse croak.
Down below, Arin stiffened. Her head snapped up, eyes scanning.
“Vex,” she said sharply. “Left ridge.”
Vex squinted, hand shading his eyes. “I don’t see—oh.”
Marina looked too.
Mike lifted a hand weakly.
“Hey,” he said. “I brought… nothing useful.”
Vex let out a single bark of disbelieving laughter.
“Idiot,” he said affectionately.
Arin’s shoulders dropped a fraction, tension bleeding out. Then she set her jaw.
“Stay there,” she called. “We’re coming around. Slowly.”
“Don’t… fall,” Mike suggested.
“Don’t give me ideas,” she shot back.
They disappeared from his limited downward view, heading for the gentler path up the slope they’d scouted earlier. The one they’d designated “emergency exit” for when the ravine turned into a death trap.
He slumped against a tree and slid down to sit, unable to stay upright any longer. His whole body buzzed with a leftover echo of the Pulse, like his nerves hadn’t quite accepted that the lightning was gone.
He didn’t have to wait long.
Lumi got to him first.
She shot up over the lip of the slope, Thunderstepping in small, rapid bursts, and launched herself straight at his chest. He barely had time to open his arms.
She smacked into him, claws digging into his jacket, burying her face against his neck with a small, distressed chirp.
“Hey,” he murmured, one hand coming up to stroke her fur. It still carried a faint charge. “You stayed with the sensible people, huh?”
She nipped his ear lightly in what he decided to interpret as idiot.
By the time Arin and Vex reached him, he’d stopped seeing double.
Mostly.
Arin knelt immediately, eyes sweeping over him in quick, clinical passes. Cut on the leg. Burns. Bruising. Blood. The flat, worrying emptiness where she’d gotten used to feeling a low crackle around him.
Vex whistled low. “You look like shit.”
“Feel worse,” Mike said.
Marina arrived a minute later, panting a little from the uphill climb, pack clinking softly with the vials she’d thrown together.
She took one look at him and went very still.
“What,” she said, “did you do?”
He tried to shrug and immediately regretted it.
“Mini-boss,” he said. “Then horde. Big pulse. Bigger than… planned.”
Arin’s eyebrow climbed. “You planned that.”
“Mostly,” he said.
“You’re an idiot,” Marina said. It had more relief than anger in it. “You know that, right?”
“Getting that a lot today,” he muttered.
She knelt and put her palm gently on his shoulder.
Warmth flooded the worst of the claw marks. Clean, greenish mana—not his, not anything like his—flowed into torn flesh, knitting skin and muscle with a faint itch.
[You are affected by: Verdant Conduit (Minor)]
HP Regeneration: +X per second (limited)
The System allowed it. His channels were locked to his own mana, not to external healing.
“Don’t touch whatever’s left of your mana,” she warned. “Your channels feel… fried. Like someone took a hot wire brush to them.”
“Accurate,” he said.
“You’re not out of danger,” Arin added. “That ‘+100% damage taken’ status you mentioned? Still active?”
He checked.
[Status: Overloaded Channels — 11:13:42 remaining]
“Yeah,” he said. “Big bullseye, no armor.”
“Then we move,” Arin said. “Carefully. You walk; we spot.”
“I can walk,” he said.
He proved it, eventually.
They didn’t support him physically, beyond an occasional steadying hand when he misjudged a step. Pride would have made him refuse even that. Survival made him accept the difference between being carried and being prevented from falling on his face.
By the time they made it down the gentler slope and into the ravine, his legs were shaking and Marina’s Verdant Conduit had burned through the worst of his open wounds.
His HP stabilized around a more respectable number.
[HP: 41%]
He still felt like he’d gone three rounds with a freight train.
They settled him on his usual flat rock near the fire.
Marina shoved a tin cup into his hands. “Drink.”
He sniffed it.
It smelled vaguely of mint and earth.
“Not the tree-sweat one?” he croaked.
“Better,” she said. “Barely.”
He drank.
It worked.
Warmth spread through his chest. His heartbeat steadied a little. The throbbing in his skull receded from “sledgehammer” to “annoying roommate.”
“Stamina tonic,” Marina said. “Temporary. Don’t push it.”
“Wasn’t planning to sprint,” he said. “Or move. Or blink.”
Vex dropped onto a nearby stone, wincing as his healing ribs protested. “So. Horde event. That something you went looking for, or did the System send you a personal love letter?”
“Combination,” Mike said. “Killed a mini-boss. I… might have killed it with something the System flagged as ‘destabilizing.’ Mana in the area went sideways. Everything with teeth decided to come say hi.”
Arin folded her arms. “And instead of retreating toward us, you stayed and fought an entire forest.”
He held up a hand weakly. “In my defense, bringing twenty angry tuskers and a hundred wolves to our front door felt rude.”
Vex raised a finger. “Counterpoint: you could have died out there.”
Mike considered that.
“Yeah,” he said. “I could have.”
Silence stretched for a beat.
Arin exhaled slowly. “Next time,” she said, “you pull that kind of attention, you at least circle toward us while you show off. I’d rather fight with you than bury you.”
“Noted,” he said.
Lumi made a small sound and head-butted his chest again, as if to underline the point.
He rested his hand on her back, feeling her tiny heartbeat thudding fast.
“On the upside,” he said, forcing his brain to focus on something less emotionally loaded, “the System decided my self-destructive tendencies were ‘growth.’”
He flicked open his sheet.
The others couldn’t see the interface itself, but they’d gotten used to reading his expressions when numbers changed.
MICHAEL STORM — CHARACTER SHEET (Level 13, Canon)
Race: Human
Class: Chaotic Stormbringer (Unique, Mythic-grade)
Level: 13
Status: Overloaded Channels
- Mana Regeneration: 0%
- Skill Usage: Disabled
- Damage Taken: +100%
- Duration Remaining: ~11h
Physical
- Strength: 36
- Agility: 36
- Endurance: 30
- Vitality: 29
- Perception: 24
Magical
- Arcane Power: 36
- Arcane Control: 26
- Mana Capacity: 27
Derived
- Health Points (HP): 290
- Stamina: 300
- Mana: 270 (currently inaccessible due to Overloaded Channels)
Unassigned Stat Points: 0
- Lightning — Rank B? (Major Affinity)
- Chaos Fragment — Unstable (~7% influence, System-obscured)
Active
- Stormstrike — Rank F, Rare (Active)
Lightning-empowered melee blow.
- Scales with Strength + Arcane Power
- Greatly reduces self-damage from high-impact strikes
- Stormstep — Rank F, Common (Active)
Short-range burst movement.
- Scales with Agility
- Used for gapclosing, dodging, and repositioning
- Chaotic Storm Pulse — Rank E, Rare (Active)
Evolved version of Storm Pulse.
- Omnidirectional lightning + chaotic mana explosion centered on Mike
- High damage at close range, moderate at mid-range
- Inflicts disorientation on lesser creatures
- Severe Backlash: triggers Overloaded Channels (no mana, no skills, +100% damage taken for 12h)
- Chaotic Doppelganger — Rank ?, Unique (Active)
- Manifests a temporary clone formed from lightning and Chaos
- Shares a portion of Mike’s stats and skills
- Acts semi-independently under his intent
- Violently destabilizes on expiration
Passive / Traits
- Controlled Surge — Tier F (Passive)
- Slightly improves safety/efficiency when channeling lightning
- Reduces self-damage from normal Stormstrike / minor pulses
- Storm-Hardened Frame — Rank F, Uncommon (Passive)
- Body adapted to repeated self-inflicted lightning
- Minor physical resilience boost vs his own elemental abuse
- Transcendent Soul (Variant) — Unique Trait
- Effects largely System-hidden
- Known: increased growth potential, mild resistance to external soul/control effects, can interfere with System prompts (e.g. profession choice)
- [Transcendent Soul] — Rank S, Unique
Your soul does not fully conform to System parameters.
- Passive: increased growth potential; resistance to soul-targeting/control effects.
- [Impossible Kill] — Rank A, Rare
You defeated a foe far beyond normal parameters for your level under extreme conditions.
- Passive: moderate damage bonus and small XP bonus vs higher-level enemies.
- [Trial’s First Storm] — Rank B, Rare
First to clear a core Tutorial Trial.
- Passive: small efficiency boost to all lightning skills within this Tutorial instance.
(All stored in Subspace Inventory)
- Basic Tutorial Clothes (damaged)
- Beast Hides (several)
- Small, Smooth Chaos-Touched Core (???)
- Groveplate Core
- Groveplate Bark-Plates & Horn Fragments
- Misc: low-grade potions, coins/credits, assorted monster parts, some gear looted from Kade’s raiders
Active
- [Main] Survive the Tutorial
— Time Remaining: ~09:28:xx- [Unique] Chaos Fragment Stabilization — Ongoing
— Your soul and class are being altered by Chaos. Stabilization and control strongly recommended.
Completed (recent, relevant)
- [Event] The Twisted Warden — Completed
— Reward: Map Fragment — Verdant Maw Depths (Dungeon Location)- [Event] Howl of the Broken Grove — Completed
He skimmed past a few less important lines and focused on the blinking “Rewards Pending” tab.
“Dungeon?” Vex asked, watching his face.
“Probably,” Mike said. “Mini-boss didn’t feel like it was just about the loot.”
He opened the event reward.
[Tutorial Event “The Twisted Warden” — Rewards]
Base Reward: Experience (received)
Material Reward: Groveplate Core, Bark-Plates, Horn Fragment (stored)
Hidden Reward Unlocked:
[Map Fragment: Verdant Maw Depths]
A dungeon has formed in the wake of the Groveplate Guardian’s death.
Location: [Marked on Local Map]
Recommended Minimum Level: 12
Recommended Group Size: 4–6
Additional Note:
? Environmental Hazard: High ambient mana and residual chaotic instability.
The map overlay blinked into his vision, a pulsing marker appearing not too far from where the grove had been. Deeper into the forest. Of course.
He exhaled.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got a dungeon.”
Arin’s eyes sharpened. “Type?”
“Verdant,” he said. “Deep version of the Maw, apparently. Four to six people, level twelve recommended.”
All four of them looked around the ravine.
Four people.
One fox.
One glass-fragile storm mage currently locked out of his own power for eleven more hours.
Marina’s lips thinned. “We’re not going anywhere near that until you can use mana again.”
“I wasn’t suggesting we sprint there now,” Mike said. “I don’t think I could sprint to the other side of the ravine.”
Vex leaned back, staring at the faint mark only Mike could see.
“Still,” he said. “We wanted a way to get ahead. That’s it.”
“And a way to die,” Arin said. “But… yes. It’s the kind of thing Kade will want too. If he hasn’t already found one of the others the System dumped in here.”
The idea of Kade walking into a dungeon, forcing people to run in front of him as meat shields, made something unpleasant twist in Mike’s gut.
The image of Kade walking out stronger from that was worse.
He closed the UI.
“Not today,” he said. “Not tomorrow, maybe. But soon.”
“Soon after you’re not taking double damage from a confused squirrel,” Marina said sharply.
He couldn’t even argue.
He let his head rest back against the rock, the familiar ceiling of stone and tree canopy above him instead of the warped glow of the grove.
The faint sounds of the camp wrapped around him: Vex’s quiet cursing as he mentally revised trap layouts with Dungeon markers in mind; Marina’s soft clinking as she started rearranging her alchemy kit for “stupid boyfriend of lightning” contingencies; Arin’s steady movements as she patrolled their perimeter, a Warden now in more ways than one.
Lumi curled into his lap, for once not immediately demanding he get up and go electrocute something for her amusement. She just pressed her warm body against his ribs and closed her eyes, ears twitching.
His eyelids grew heavy.
“Don’t sleep too deep,” Arin said from somewhere near the ravine mouth, not turning.
“Didn’t plan to,” he mumbled.
He drifted anyway, hovering in the grey space between waking and real rest, Overloaded Channels ticking down slowly in the corner of his vision like a vindictive clock.
Elsewhere, in a place that intersected the Tutorial but wasn’t bound by it, a god who wasn’t supposed to be here watched a ghostly projection of the Broken Grove.
Loki—though no one here knew that name—tapped one finger thoughtfully against his chin as he replayed the moment the Pulse detonated.
The crackle of lightning.
The twist in the mana.
The way Chaos had flared along the arcs, not cleanly, but with the uneven violence of something new trying to decide what it wanted to be.
“That,” he murmured, “was not careful.”
He rewound further.
To the Guardian.
To the clone.
To the grin he recognized too well on a face that wasn’t his.
He hadn’t meant for this.
When he’d first leaned forward in that blinding white room, drawn by the impossible reading on a soul the System itself hesitated to categorize, he’d only wanted a better look. A god’s curiosity, nothing more.
He’d brushed against that soul.
Something had slipped.
He watched the echo of that slip now in every jagged pulse, every distorted arc.
“I didn’t put that there,” he told the empty air. “But I might have… opened the door.”
The System, vast and indifferent, didn’t answer.
It didn’t have to.
Loki’s smile was small and sharp.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s see what you do, little storm, when the door opens wider.”
He flicked the projection away and settled back into his seat as the Tutorial ticked on, a lone god in a role meant for lesser beings, watching an accident become a choice.
END OF CHAPTER 45
Next up, when you’re ready:
- We let time pass for a chunk of the debuff (maybe a time skip of a few hours).
- The group consolidates the camp, claims loot from the raiders, and quietly spreads the word that Kade’s people died here.
- They start planning when and how to tackle the Verdant Maw Depths, knowing Kade is out there running his own butcher’s camp.
- Mike, still recovering, has a calmer scene to experiment with the edges of his mana control once the debuff ends—without overloading again.
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