Near death experience(s)

While Kai was ecstatic that all of that wasn't for nothing and he did end up leveling up after all that work, he held his breath as he remained completetly still.

While he may have accidentally killed that abomination with his claw, there was still a perfectly suitable bomb that could go off and kill Sofia attached to its disgusting carcass.

Wide-eyed, Sofia jumped backwards incase the bomb went off. Wa'rak swiftly followed, but was a bit less nervous in comparison.

"Out of the way."

Everyone moved for the source of that voice, of course they would. Failure made his way through the crowd of beasts and humans towards Kai.

Once he arrived at the crater Kai was lying in, he tutted and said:

"Now, my dear Kai, that was pretty stupid. And look at the situation you're in now. Don't you agree with me?"

Kai groaned in response.

Sighing, Failure tenderly reached out and slid the abomination off of Kai's claw. His arm was starting to tremble even though he tried to keep it still.

"I'm going to go study this, I'll leave you to have your internal regrets. I have too much of those so I would rather not hear yours."

As soon as Failure took the abomination away, Kai's arm fell down beside him limply as he caught his breath.

His whole body hurt, his eyes and face were burned, and worst of all, he was thirsty. His throat was on fire from accidently opening his mouth while falling, the flames were insanely hot after all.

Failure was right, he did regret what he had done.

Not really, he would only regret what he had done if the skills in the skill selection sucked. If they sucked... Kai didn't know what he would do.

Still, he didn't move. He was too sore. Honestly, going to sleep right now seemed like a pretty good-

"Here."

A bottle of water appeared in the centre of his vision, held in a tanned hand. Painfully turning his head slightly, Kai looked up at Noelle with a confused expression.

While he may have been slightly confused, Noelle's expression was blank. She kept her hand outstretched, handing him the bottle.

"Drink, your throat is probably hot."

How does she..?

Actually, he didn't care about the why, he just wanted the water. But he was still to sore to move his body. Painfully, he opened his mouth, the insides burned slightly, and hoped that Noelle would drop some in.

Sighing, Noelle rolled her eyes and said:

"Don't push it."

While she was going to make a more active attempt to be kinder to those who are kind to her, she wasn't going to do that.

It was worth a shot, if there's no harm there's no foul. If someone's good to her, she may as well try to be good in return.

But that was pushing it.

Noelle dropped the bottle of water onto Kai's chest, the fur on the edge of his tunic singed black. Kai let out a small groan at the impact, but didn't say anything.

Since he didn't really want to try and open a bottle while having claws, Kai undid the fusion.

He returned to normal height, and sadly size, no more visible muscles. His hair returned to the normal red colour as well.

Sadly, due to the loss of stats, even more pain washed over him. While in the mystery wolf state, Kai had over five hundred HP. The explosions had taken over three quarters of that, meaning, when Kai undid the transformation, he was left with only sixteen of his seventy base health.

Noticing the boy writhing in pain, Sofia sighed and made her way back towards him. Grabbing the bottle, she undid the lid and stuck it in his mouth like a baby's pacifier.

Kai let out a hiss as the water hit the burned insides of his mouth. He promptly lifted his hand so he could hold the bottle, he felt like he was drowning a second ago.

Tenderly, Kai sat up as he held the bottle. His eyes were still stinging, as was every other part of his body. Drinking from the bottle, Kai felt even more stinging as it hit the burned skin, but he endured in favour of quenching his thirst.

Once he had drank enough to satisfy his needs, Kai opened his eyes and saw...

That everyone was looking at him.

Kai felt his face heat up at all the eyes currently on him. He had never been the centre of attention before, so he had no idea what to do.

Sofia had killed her fair share of abominations, so why were they all looking at him.

Actually, Sofia was standing right beside him. Maybe that's why all eyes were in his direction.

"Was it worth it?"

Aldred asked as he walked over to Kai. He had killed even more abominations than Kai, and even ate them all, yet he looked as if none of that had happened.

If this was the Demon's attempt to wear out Aldred before their duel, it was a massive failure. It took nothing out of the wolf to exterminate those abominations.

But why did the first one have to land on Kai? He almost had a heart attack when he saw it about to land on his face. Honestly, it was a miracle he even remembered he had an innate ability at that moment, otherwise he most certainly would have gone boom.

"Yeah." Kai croaked. His voice was hoarse and his throat was sore, but he still answered Aldred.

The gray wolf grunted in response to Kai's answer, or maybe it was in response to how bad his voice sounded.

The air around Aldred shimmered as a glass bottle filled with a red liquid appeared out of thin air, followed by two glass bottles filled with a blue liquid.

"Drink."

A little bit shocked that Aldred had some sort of spacial storage this whole time and Kai had no idea, he did as he was told and drunk all three bottles one after the other. The health one completetly regenerated all of his health pool and healed Kai's throat, eyes and every other part of him that was injured.

The pain didn't go away though, it still lingered after his body was returned to normal. It seemed that even though he looked completetly fine, and he was completetly fine, there was a sort of phantom pain that came after drinking a health potion.

Which was a shame, they always seemed so OP in the games.

But his Mana wasn't all back after drinking those potions. That was the downside of dumping a hundred unnasigned stat points into Mana. Before, a single Mana potion could completetly refill him, but that was because it gave one hundred Mana when drunk.

Now, with a thousand Mana in his Mana pool, Kai would need to drink ten bottles to fully regenerate it. But you could only drink five Mana potions a day, meaning no matter what, he wouldn't be able to regain all of his Mana at once at any given time.

Luckily, he was only in his transformed state for just over a minute, meaning he used a bit over two-hundred Mana. Still, after drinking the two bottles he wasn't back at full.

"Aldred" Kai began. "Is there any Mana potions that give more than one hundred?"

There is" Aldred grunted. "But they only work when you reach a higher level. There is different materials used in the higher rank potions, but they assume that only higher level beings would drink those. If you were to drink any other type of potion that gives more than one hundred of its respective stat, your body would probably shut down."

Kai froze.

"Seriously?"

Aldred grunted once more.

"Yes."

After giving Kai the bottles, Aldred made his way back over to Failure to presumably study the bomb as well. This would be their only chance to try and plan a countermeasure before the beginning of the actually war.

After saying thanks to Sofia, Kai made his way over to Noelle. The olive-skinned woman had her scimitar back in her scabbard and had a relaxed look in her face.

"You good?" Kai asked as he approached her. She promptly turned, reading an eyebrow as she does so.

"Yeah, I should be the one asking you that though."

Kai smiled slightly.

"Oh please, I've gone through much worse at this point."

Which wasn't technically a lie. A lot of the excruciating pain Kai had felt happened when he was alone. He had told Noelle about the moon incident, but there had been a lot that happened since then.

He had nearly drowned three times so far, obtained a new organ which he still doesn't understand in the form of a soul, nearly got killed by the moon, gazed upon something in a soul that he should have never have seen, nearly got killed by Sleepy back in the forest.

Kai blinked.

That seemed like way too much to go through in such a short amount of time, yet he couldn't tell if it was lucky or not. As long as it all works out in the end he guesses its fine.

"Anyway, thanks for the water. How did you know I would be thirsty though?"

Noelle shrugged.

"It's something the people back in my uncle's group used to do. Light a match and hold it in someone's mouth, it burned them and also made them desparately thirsty."

Kai blinked, then sighed.

It seemed that piecing Noelle's fractured self was going to be a long and tedious job, but it's not that big of a deal. It couldn't possibly be worse than going to war with a Demon created by a God and originated from the dark side of a moon that kills you.

Probably.

But there's was still one thing Kai had to look forward to before the war, even if it technically started with that ambush.

That being the skill selection, of course.