"Oh, come on," Levin said.

  He cast again. Arcane Bolt — larger this time, the size of a grapefruit, burning with an intensity that cast hard shadows across the road and the trees and the river beyond.

  He aimed for the troll's right knee, because the Principia Arcana had mentioned — in a footnote, buried beneath a diagram of troll skeletal structure that the artist had clearly drawn while weeping — that troll regeneration was slower in joints, where the interaction between bone, cartilage, and tendon created a more complex repair task.

  The bolt struck the knee.

  The knee buckled.

  The troll went down hard, face-first, its massive body hitting the road with an impact that sent a shockwave through the packed earth and produced a crater approximately six inches deep and four feet wide.

  Dust billowed.

  Stones scattered.

  The road, which had been adequate before the troll's arrival, was now significantly less so.

  Levin pressed. Two more bolts — one to each shoulder, pinning the troll's arms to the ground through sheer force, the blue-white energy crackling across its back in a web of arcs that lit the roadside like a lightning storm viewed from underneath.

  The troll roared.

  It was a sound that existed at the boundary between noise and physical force. It came from somewhere deep in the troll's chest, from a resonating chamber the size of a barrel, and it emerged through the tooth-filled mouth with a volume and a bass frequency that Levin felt in his ribs, in his spine, in the fillings of his teeth if he'd had fillings, which he didn't, but the principle applied.

  Birds fled. Critters escaped. Leaves shook. The surface of the river rippled.

  Behind the oak tree, Ria pressed her hands over her ears.

  The golden shield around her flared. An involuntary response as the spell reacting to its caster's distress, brightening and expanding like a startled cat puffing up its fur.

  The troll pushed itself up.

  Through the bolts, the lightning web and through the sustained, concentrated application of magical force that would have reduced a goblin to motes, that would have vaporised a wolf pack, that would have turned the entire rat colony in the guild basement into a fine grey-green powder.

  The troll pushed itself up because the troll's regeneration was not a passive process.

  It was not a slow, background repair function that operated on a schedule. It was active, aggressive, and relentless — a biological imperative that treated damage the way water treats a hole: by filling it, immediately and with no regard for the preferences of the thing that made the hole.

  The shoulders healed around the bolt impacts.

  The knee rebuilt itself.

  The burned skin regenerated.

  The troll rose to its full thirteen feet, and the lightning web that had been pinning it to the ground snapped and dispersed like threads cut by scissors.

  Levin's hands were still raised.

  The blue-white glow along his forearms was brighter than it had ever been — visible even in full daylight, a lattice of luminous lines that traced his veins and tendons and the bones beneath his skin, pulsing in time with the reservoir behind his sternum.

  The reservoir was pulling.

  He could feel it. The sensation of something vast and deep being tapped at a rate that exceeded its comfortable output. His mana pool was large. A lake where there had once been a thimble — but the troll was consuming that lake in gulps.

  The lake was not bottomless

  Nothing was bottomless.

  The troll charged.

  Levin cast a barrier — smaller this time, angled, a ramp rather than a wall. The troll hit it and was deflected upward and to the left, its momentum carrying it off the road and into the treeline, where it struck two birch trees simultaneously and reduced them to kindling.

  The troll emerged from the wreckage of the birch trees with splinters in its hair and fury in its small, dark eyes.

  It came again.

  Levin moved again. Bolt. Barrier. Chain Lightning. Each spell bought seconds. Each second cost mana. The troll healed everything — every burn, every fracture, every disrupted joint and scorched nerve — with the mechanical persistence of a system that had no off switch and no concept of diminishing returns.

  The fight had lasted approximately ninety seconds.

  It felt like an hour.

  Levin's breathing was fast. His hands were steady — the mana field kept them steady, the energy flowing through his arms acting as a stabiliser — but his lungs were working harder than they had since his first week in this world, when his mana pool had been a thimble and every spell had cost him something.

  The troll was bleeding from six wounds. All six were closing.

  Levin was bleeding from one — a scrape along his left forearm where a piece of flying birch bark had caught him during the troll's passage through the treeline.

  The scrape was minor. It stung.

  It was, in the grand hierarchy of injuries sustained during combat with a thirteen-foot regenerating bridge troll, approximately as significant as a paper cut sustained during a hurricane.

  He needed more.

  More force. More mana. More of whatever it took to overwhelm a regeneration factor that treated his best spells the way a sponge treats water.

  He reached deeper.

  The reservoir responded.

  The sensation was — he had no frame of reference for it.

  It was like opening a door that he hadn't known was there, into a room that was larger than the building that contained it.

  The mana surged upward through his chest, arms, hands, and the blue-white glow that had been bright became blinding — a radiance that cast shadows sharp enough to cut, that turned the dappled forest light into a monochrome of white and black, that made the troll, for the first time, react strangley.

  The troll flinched.

  It flinched the way a mountain flinches — a micro-adjustment of posture that communicated, in body language, the first flicker of something that the troll's limited emotional vocabulary did not have a word for but that Levin's did.

  Uncertainty.

  Levin brought both hands together.

  The spell that formed between his palms was not an Arcane Bolt.

  It was not Chain Lightning either.

  It was not a barrier or a gust or any of the catalogued, categorised, neatly labelled spells that the Principia Arcana had described in its chapters and footnotes and diagrams.

  It was raw force.

  It was mana, compressed beyond the point where it had a shape or a name, compressed until it was a point of light so bright and so dense that the air around it warped, bending the light from the trees and the river and the sky into a halo of distortion that made the world look, briefly, like it was being viewed through the bottom of a glass.

  The troll, to its credit, did not run.

  Running would have required a cognitive process — threat assessment, route planning, the decision to prioritise survival over hunger — that the troll's brain was not equipped to perform at speed. It stood its ground, because standing its ground was the only thing it knew how to do, and it raised its fists.

  It opened its mouth and roared again, because roaring was the troll's version of a strongly worded letter and it had never failed before.

  Levin released the spell.

  The point from his palm blasted wish such power that it forced him back three steps.

  It crossed the fifteen feet between him and the troll in a time interval that was, for all practical purposes, zero. Struck the troll in the centre of its chest.

  The same spot where the first Arcane Bolt had landed.

  The spot that had healed in five seconds.

  The spot that the troll's regeneration had repaired as though nothing had happened.

  It blasted and penetrated the troll's chest and kept going — through the skin, through the muscle, through the ribcage (which cracked, audibly, like a ship's hull breaching), whatever organs occupied the interior of a troll's torso, and out the other side, where it emerged as a beam of blue-white light that punched through the troll's back and continued for approximately thirty feet before striking the stone surface of Cairn Bridge and leaving a hole in the granite the size of a fist.

  The blast continued for much further into the forest until it ran out of steam and slowly dissipated into motes of light and fog.

  All within under half a second.

  The troll looked down at its chest.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  There was a hole there. A clean, circular hole, approximately eight inches in diameter, that went all the way through. Through the hole, Levin could see the trees on the far side of the road, framed in a circle of cauterised flesh.

  The flesh was not regenerating.

  The edges of the hole were black — burned beyond the capacity of the troll's healing factor to repair, the tissue destroyed at a level that was deeper than cellular and structural.

  Destroyed at whatever fundamental level the regeneration operated on and could not reach.

  The troll looked at the hole, then back at Levin. Its mouth opened. A sound came out — quieter than the roar, softer, a low and diminishing rumble that was less a vocalisation and more the sound of a very large system shutting down.

  It fell forward, like a tree.

  The massive body tilted, paused at the tipping point for a fraction of a second, and then committed to gravity with the finality of something that had been vertical for a very long time and was now, permanently and irrevocably, horizontal.

  The impact shook the road.

  Dust rose.

  Leaves fell from the surviving trees.

  The river, thirty feet away, produced a small wave that lapped against the near bank and retreated.

  Ria shouted as she was picked off the ground a few inches.

  Levin stumbled and fell to his bottom.

  The troll was covered in dust. Levin waved his hand and a wind pushed it all away from them. Exposing the massive form laying still.

  Grey-green motes began to rise from its body — slowly at first, then faster, and faster still, the massive form dissolving from the edges inward, coming apart like a sandcastle in a rising tide. The motes drifted upward, caught the dappled light, and dispersed into the morning air.

  The process took approximately fifteen seconds.

  When it was done, the road was empty. A crater marked where the troll had fallen. Splinters from the destroyed trees littered the verge. The hole in Cairn Bridge's granite surface smoked gently.

  Levin stood in the road.

  His hands were at his sides. The blue-white glow along his forearms was fading — dimming from blinding to bright to visible to faint to gone, the mana field retracting, the reservoir settling back into its usual hum.

  The hum was different now though.

  It was louder.

  The warmth behind his sternum pulsed — a single, strong pulse, like a heartbeat amplified, like a drum struck once in a large room. The pulse carried with it a sensation that Levin recognised: the golden flicker of a kill registering, the invisible percentage point being added to the reservoir.

  One kill. One point. Five hundred and fifty-two percent.

  This percent was much larger

  And then the notification appeared.

  It materialised in his vision — upper right quadrant, teal, rounded corners, luminous border. The same format as the Sleeve Management notification and the Peeling notification and the Boiling notification and every other unsolicited piece of cosmic feedback he had received since crossing the five-hundred-and-fifty threshold.

  The same format.

  Different content.

  [COMBAT SKILL UNLOCKED: Empower]

  [Empower: Passive — Gain +1% max mana from targets mana stores permanently into your max mana capacity. Per kill.]

  Levin stared at the notification…

  He had been getting the percentages wrong the entire time.

  The notification hung in his vision.

  Gain +1% max mana from targets mana stores permanently into your max mana capacity. Per kill.

  The warmth behind his sternum had a name. And it had a more defined identity he had been getting wrong.

  It had always had a name.

  A combat skill that had been operating since…

  Levin blinked.

  Since when?

  He had it after he killed the first wolf in the forest outside Thornwall.

  He thought harder.

  Since the first goblin?

  Since the confused bear in the root cellar?

  Since the very first creature had fallen before him and the very first golden flicker had registered in the warm place behind his sternum?

  Seven weeks of it actively improving him and his mana pool…

  And the universe had waited until now — until this moment, standing on a cratered road beside a smoking hole in a granite bridge, covered in dust and birch splinters, a giant troll stinking up the entire area, his mana pool drawn down further than it had ever been drawn, his arms aching, his lungs burning — to tell him.

  The notification faded to the background. Another took its place.

  [COMBAT SKILL UNLOCKED: Mana Bolt]

  [Mana Bolt: Active — Concentrated arcane projectile. Damage scales with current mana pool. Cost: Variable.]

  And another.

  [COMBAT SKILL UNLOCKED: Barrier Ward]

  [Barrier Ward: Active — Deployable force barrier. Strength and duration scale with mana investment. Cost: 5-15% max mana.]

  And another.

  [COMBAT SKILL UNLOCKED: Arc Chain]

  [Arc Chain: Active — Electrical discharge that jumps between targets. Maximum links scale with mana pool. Cost: 8% max mana per cast.]

  And one more.

  [COMBAT SKILL UNLOCKED: Beam of Annihilation]

  [Beam of Annihilation: Active — Channel raw mana into a focused beam. Penetrates physical and magical defences. Cost: 20% max mana. Cooldown: Significant for most.]

  Five notifications. Five teal rectangles, queued in his peripheral vision, each one describing a spell he had already been casting — spells he had been using for weeks, spells he had learned through instinct and repetition and the blind, fumbling process of pointing his hand at things and seeing what happened.

  The system had been watching.

  It had been watching him cast Arcane Bolts and Chain Lightning and barriers and the raw, unnamed force that had punched through the troll's chest, and it had been cataloguing them, categorising them, assigning them names and costs and scaling parameters, and it had waited.

  With the bureaucratic composure of a filing system that operates on its own schedule and does not accept rush requests.

  Until the threshold was crossed and the paperwork was complete.

  The spells had names now.

  The thing he had been very good at not thinking about had been formalised, documented, and filed.

  [Note: Combat Skill XP does not contribute to Class Level progression.]

  Of course it didn't.

  Levin closed his eyes, sighed, held it for a second, and then opened them.

  The notifications were still there, fading slowly to the background, joining the accumulated queue of teal rectangles that tracked his Sweeping efficiency and his Peeling proficiency and his six-out-of-ten Plating score.

  He looked at his hands.

  They were steady. The tremor from the spider cave, the one that had lasted five seconds and then stopped, was absent. His hands were calm as he stood in the aftermath reading his mail.

  "Levin!" Ria's shouted.

  He picked up his head and saw her running toward him from the oak tree, her shield spell dismissed and satchel bouncing against her hip.

  Her face was pale, eyes were wide. Her hands, when she reached him, gripped his arms and turned him toward her with a strength that surprised them both.

  "Are you hurt? Are you — your arm, there's blood on your arm—"

  "Bark from the tree. It's a scrape."

  "A scrape? You just — that thing was — it was thirteen feet tall and you — the light, at the end, the beam, it went through it—"

  "Yes."

  "Through it! Through the whole thing! I saw it come out the other side! There's a hole in the bridge!"

  "There is a hole in the bridge."

  "Are you all right?"

  Levin considered the question.

  He was standing and breathing. His mana pool was depleted — drawn down to perhaps thirty percent of its current maximum, which was still, in absolute terms, more mana than most mages possessed at full capacity.

  Which felt, subjectively, like a bathtub that had been mostly drained and was now making the gurgling sounds when they're running low.

  His arms ached. His chest ached. His legs ached. His neck and head ached too.

  The reservoir behind his sternum was humming at a lower frequency than usual. The hum of a system that had been pushed hard and was now recovering.

  And in his peripheral vision, five teal notifications sat in their queue, each one containing information that changed everything and nothing simultaneously.

  "I'm fine," he said.

  Ria looked at him. Her hands were still on his arms. Her grip had loosened from "checking for injuries" to "confirming physical presence," which was a different kind of grip entirely and which communicated something that neither of them was going to discuss on a cratered road next to a smoking bridge.

  "You don't look fine," she said. "You look like someone who just fought a troll."

  "That's because I just fought a troll."

  "You look like it mattered. The goblins didn't matter. The rats didn't matter. This one mattered."

  Levin said nothing for a moment. He looked at the crater in the road. He looked at the hole in the bridge. He looked at the stumps of the birch trees and the fallen elm and the tooth embedded in the trunk twenty feet away.

  "It mattered," he said.

  Ria released his arms. She stepped back and looked at him — really looked, the way she had looked at him on the south road after the bandit and at things she was trying to understand.

  "Something happened," she said. "At the end. When you killed it. Your face did something."

  "My face does things occasionally. It's a face."

  "Your face did a specific thing. Your eyes went — I don't know. Distant? Like you were reading something that wasn't there."

  Levin's left eye did not twitch.

  He controlled it.

  The control cost him something. A small, conscious effort. He decided not to share it.

  "Adrenaline," he said. "The fight was longer than usual and more intense. I used more mana than I've ever used. The body does strange things when it's pushed."

  "Did you feel anything? After the kill? Anything... different?"

  The question landed with the way all pointed questions she asked landed.

  Ria was observant — he had known this since the spider cave, the evening theory sessions, and moment she had looked at his face across a bar and identified the exact expression that accompanied a notification he hadn't mentioned.

  She was watching him now with the same precision.

  "Adrenaline," he said again. "That's all."

  Ria held his gaze for a long moment. Then she shrugged. She reached into her satchel and produced the waterskin. "Drink. You look dehydrated."

  He drank.

  The water was warm and tasted of leather and was, at that moment, the finest thing he had ever consumed, including the tea.

  He handed the waterskin back.

  He looked at the bridge. The hole in the granite smoked gently. The cairns stood at either end, undamaged, their stacked stones maintaining the serene indifference of objects that had survived worse than a troll fight and a mana beam and were not about to start having opinions now.

  The wolf den was on the other side…

  The wolves could wait.

  "Let's go home," Levin said.

  Ria nodded.

  They walked north. The road was cratered and littered with debris for the first hundred feet, and then it smoothed out, returning to its usual state of packed-earth adequacy.

  The the forest closed around them, the river sounds faded, the morning resumed its business of being a morning, and natural life continued like he hadn't just fought a thirteen foot troll, killed it, gained notifications that bothered him, and felt his mana pool grow more significantly than any time before this.

  He looked up past the canopy at the sun. It had been doing sunly things competently for billions of years and which a brief interruption involving a troll, a mage, and a beam of concentrated mana was not going to derail.

  Ria walked beside him.

  Her stride was steady and breathing had normalised.

  The medallion on her satchel strap caught the light.

  She did not ask about the notifications or about the distant look in his eyes.

  She did not ask about the warmth behind his sternum, which was humming and which would add one to his mana pool in a way he had been counting wrong the entire time. All without ever changing a single number that defined him.

  Level 1. Mage.

  The staff tapped the road. The micro-fractures glowed in his enhanced perception. The morning light filtered through the canopy and fell on the path in patterns that looked, if you squinted, like nothing in particular, because patterns in light were just patterns in light, and the universe did not arrange its photons for the benefit of people who were looking for meaning.

  He looked for meaning anyway.

  He found none.

  He found, instead, a quiet gratitude — aimed at a thirteen-foot bridge troll that had sat on a stone bridge and blocked a road. Then charged at him with fists the size of serving platters and had, in the process of being killed, given him the one thing that seven weeks of goblins, rats, wasps, and wolves had failed to provide.

  An answer.

  A small answer and incomplete in its totality. It also raised more questions than it resolved and that sat in his mind like a key that fit a lock he hadn't found yet.

  But it was an answer he hadn't had before this moment.

  Thank you, he thought, directing the thought at the memory of the troll, which was already fading, dissolving into the general background noise of a life that contained too many things to remember and not enough reasons to remember them.

  Thank you for the reward.

  The troll, being dead scattered across a river valley as grey-green motes that were, by now, indistinguishable from dust, did not respond.

  Trolls were, even at the best of times, terrible conversationalists.

  They reached Thornwall as the noon bell rang. The bell-ringer, who had been having an adequate day by his standards, struck the bell.

  Marda was in the kitchen standing over a kettle. "Wolves?"

  "Troll," Levin said.

  Marda looked at him then at the scrape on his arm. She looked at the dust on his clothes, the splinters in his hair, the particular quality of exhaustion that sat on his face like a mask that had been worn too long.

  She poured him tea without being asked.

  He thanked her and took a sip.

  He sat at the bar and closed his eyes. The notifications sat in their queue — Empower, Mana Bolt, Barrier Ward, Arc Chain, Mana Surge — five teal rectangles containing information that would, eventually, need to be examined, understood, and integrated into whatever passed for his understanding of himself and this world and his place in it.

  Eventually.

  For now, he drank his tea, and the warmth behind his sternum hummed its quiet hum, and the number in the blue box sat serene and immovable, and the broom leaned against the bar, pulling left.

  The afternoon stretched ahead of him with the patient emptiness of a day that had already produced its quota of excitement and was now content to coast.

  He finished his tea.

  He picked up the broom.

  It tried to pull left, but this time he didn't allow it.

  [Sweeping: Level 7!]