Axl expected the remaining pack members to have noticed their leader was gone, but no, they were still sniffing around the lake's shore, even more spread out. His injured arm was not close to fully healed, but he didn't want this threat looming over him as he made his way further down the tunnels, past the relative safety of being close to Nox's nest.

  He baited a few more wolves to a side-cavern, not bothering with his previous setup, and the fight played out as he expected. His every Attribute was clearly far higher than any of theirs; he moved faster, hit harder, and [Mana Shroud] only made the disparity greater. He didn't even bother trying out [Attuned Drill Strike], since it really didn't feel worth it, and he tore through the wolves using one of Olkan’s spears without any issues.

  After dealing with a handful of wolves like this, he simply stepped out into the open to draw the rest in. A few minutes later, he stood over two dozen corpses, uninjured and not even a bit tired. All the werewolves were dead, and the handful of remaining wolves simply whimpered and started backing up.

  "Leave now and I won't hunt you back" he said, then lifted his blood-soaked spear over his head. The wolves turned in unison and charged back to the cavern entrance, dead quiet and ears down in shame.

  "Why not just kill them all?" Moxlin asked, appearing on his shoulder. "It seems like a waste of Karmic Energy."

  "I don't know what that would do with the hunting quest their leader inflicted on me. I don't want to accidentally turn it into something that makes me have to go after them. I have enough to do as it is."

  "Oh, that's probably for the best, then."

  He didn't mention that the amount of Karmic Energy was piddling, feeling like it barely nudged his progress to level 17. This was expected, given how much better it was to kill a higher-leveled creature, but he was still surprised by how bad the yield was. Most of those wolves were also at the middle of the G-grade, and at least a handful had a higher level than him, but it clearly wasn't that simple.

  At that point, Axl started towards his destination, wanting to put some distance between himself and where he had fought the wolf pack, just as a precaution. Even if he was energized from gaining so many levels, his exhaustion was mounting, not having taken more than a few moments of rest between when he woke up at Nox's bamboo forest and now.

  So he again washed out the blood and grime, changed clothes, and set off. He ran for another hour, weaving into some half-hidden paths and even discreetly crossing a pond inhabited by giant F-grade frogs by climbing into a hole in the ceiling. If the wolves wanted to chase after him, they’d have a hard time not just tracking him, but following a rather dangerous and quadruped-unfriendly route. Not to mention that he was insanely faster than before, covering over twice the distance he'd expected from his previous rate.

  He stopped at a shelf of rock overlooking a large area with plenty of rock cover to escape or fight in, and lay down with his back to the stone. Moxlin offered to use some of her talismans to further obscure the hiding place, and took out long pieces of paper larger than her entire body, then slapped them on the rock, illusory stone showing up to surround them. She even set up a second layer, which produced a slightly shimmering sphere around them that would apparently take some damage before dissolving.

  "Thanks for the assist," Axl said, taking out a pile of clean clothing to use as a makeshift pillow. "Don't try to kill me in my sleep."

  Moxlin rolled her eyes. "You're such a paranoid weirdo! Anyway, the teaching quest I have would severely punish me if I did something like that. And it's not like I could even do any damage before you woke up, I gave up trying to guess what monstrous class you have to get so strong so quickly."

  Axl nodded, figuring all this out himself but glad to confirm it, and he slowly faded into a light sleep. He awoke barely four hours later, feeling more revitalized than if he'd taken a full day off.

  "Looks like we'll be at the valley much earlier than I expected, at this pace," he said, sitting up. "Seems we can take it a bit easy with the running and spend more time on those glyphs."

  "What? Just how did you recover—you know what, never mind. It's glyphing time!" Her initial shocked expression became a flurry of excitedly waved legs, and she took out eight talismans, each with a single glyph on it. Some were quite simple, just two lines put together, while others had several complex shapes overlaid onto each other.

  "These are eight of the core two hundred and fifty-six," she started. “Each is a very clear example of the thirty-two that belong in their group. You need to memorize them, so well you can tell them apart and pick out mistakes if I show you one that is inscribed wrong."

  "Alright, let me get to it." Axl stared at the scribbles, finding his nearly one hundred Attribute value of Intelligence and Wisdom seemed to massively jack up his memory. After barely any time at all, he felt he could close his eyes and effortlessly hold them in his mind. But that was a very inelegant solution, and figured this would slow him down when the material got more complicated, so he started to break them down into how many strokes they had, the length of each stroke, and how many simpler shapes were put together into a more complex one. It was still easier to just bring up the memory of them, but now he had more than one strategy to think of each glyph.

  "OK," he said. "What next?"

  "No! What next, my foot!" Moxlin pointed an angry little leg at him. "Take this seriously! Failing a quest is not good. It will make it far harder to get others, and this could mean the end of my cultivation path."

  Axl grunted. "Just test me so we can move on."

  Moxlin shook in barely contained rage as she removed all the reference talismans and produced three more, each with a glyph on them. The first was one of the glyphs she produced, the type example of group three, the second the type example of group six, but with three mistakes in how it was drawn, and the last a variant of group four he wasn't shown before. Axl pointed these out to her.

  She paused for a moment, then told him to draw out all the glyphs on some dust and he did so. She stared at his scribbles, then looked back up to Axl, a deep confusion stretching into the awkward silence.

  "I have a class related to Oocile," he explained. "Meaning I have the same value in all Attributes, and so I should be able to fight just as well as do stuff like this."

  "You WHAT?" Moxlin shouted and started rolling on the ground. "This is so crazy! How is this allowed? You cheater! You're cheating!"

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  Axl chuckled. "To our mutual benefit, hopefully."

  She turned over, a leg to her chin, ponderously. "Hmmm, you're kinda right. Maybe this doomed quest is not quite so impossible after all."

  Moxlin then showed him all two hundred and fifty-six glyphs, in eight neat rows. It took him longer to commit all these to memory, and already his previous investment was paying off, since he could see how they could be grouped together, a loose pattern arising where nearby glyphs were more similar to each other than ones further away. Group three, for instance, started with a simple glyph with two strokes, then each other one started adding strokes, while group seven started with a complex pattern, the next few shuffled them around.

  But the pattern broke down in the later glyphs of the series, and Axl started to notice other ways that they could be grouped together, each one with its own benefits and weaknesses. He mulled it over for a while, even made some doodles on the dust to try out some ideas.

  "Why eight by thirty-two?" he finally asked. "It seems like sixteen groups of sixteen works better."

  Moxlin looked down at the talismans. "The only taxonomy I've been taught or read about uses the eight foundational pillars. If your book says to use a different one, then you should follow it, but it's not so important for now, if you can just memorize the glyphs."

  Axl didn't correct her about having read it in the book firmly shut in his mind, wanting his easily distractible teacher to stay on topic. So he simply nodded and waited for her to continue.

  "Normally at this point we'd do a few weeks of safely etching out glyphs and discussing ways to shield yourself from mental backlash, but we don't have time for this. Watch what I do carefully, pay attention to the order that I draw the strokes in, and how each stroke is drawn. That's also important."

  Moxlin put some loose flakes of wood shavings on the ground and drew out four glyphs around it in the air, one in each cardinal direction. As she started, Axl activated [Mana Shroud] and saw the Mana leave her leg and form the glyphs, which lingered in the air, fluctuating slightly. When the last one was complete, the Mana making up the glyphs surged, then disappeared, the wood suddenly crackled and started to burn in a tiny fire.

  "This is the firepit spell, a simple four-glyph use of [Glyphic Spellcasting]. I hesitate to start with a fire-based spell, but those are the ones with fewest glyphs, so the easiest to learn. Try not to burn yourself to death."

  Axl asked her to draw out the glyphs again so he could see the stroke order one more time, just to check he'd remembered them correctly, and had to correct a pair of small mistakes he'd have made. He then put out his finger and drew out the glyphs, using his internal Mana to make the neat shapes around another pile of shavings Moxlin produced.

  Immediately, he was surprised by how difficult it was, requiring a good deal of concentration to keep an even Mana flow, more than once a glyph destabilizing and simply dissolving into the air before he could finish. After four tries, he finally finished the spell, and a satisfying bloom of fire burst from the wooden shavings.

  Still, he couldn't help but be disappointed, since the casting took over a minute and a half, and the entire process, together with his failures, took out over 1% of his internal Mana. It felt like an absurd expenditure for such an underwhelming result. Still infinitely simpler and easier than the Mana inscriptions he’d have to do back in Sol, but lackluster compared to using [Mana Shroud] to empower his weapon.

  "Did I mess up somehow?" he asked. "It feels so slow and takes up so much Mana."

  Moxlin shook her head. "What Skill do you even have that is both powerful and cheap? Yes, spells are expensive uses of Mana, but you can learn a whole bunch of them, and with practice, you can optimize them for casting time or efficiency. Better to have many legs to dance around with than hobbling around with just one."

  Axl didn’t mention he had three Skills, but was glad to hear she talked as if most people only had one. This also made sense from how Olkan and Puppy fought, each only using a single Skill, as far as he could tell. And Puppy had a Rare class too, so it wasn't like getting one of those gave you more Skills, probably just more Attribute points per level.

  "Alright, what's next?"

  "I'll teach you three more, all offensive spells meant to be used in combat. Learn them and practice against the wall until you can cast all three, and that should unlock [Glyphic Spellcasting]. From then, we'll see what aspect of Glyphistry we should try to push your proficiency up to, spellcasting being the hardest but quickest path to gain these Skills, and it seems like the right way to go given your frankly insulting progress."

  Axl nodded, and Moxlin started with the first spell in the projectile series, intended to produce an offensive burst of fire out at a target at a moderate distance. It was six glyphs in a T pattern, this time drawn out into the air. It produced a fist-sized ball of fire that sped outwards from Moxlin and onto the wall at a reasonable speed.

  She then proceeded to show him the other two spells, one to produce a barb of ice, the other a concentrated jet of water. Both seemed far less powerful than the little ball of fire, and had more glyphs associated with them, the water jet twelve and the ice barb a full twenty.

  "Why is the fire so much better?" he asked. "It uses fewer glyphs, and for the same amount of Mana it seems to have a much better effect."

  Moxlin grumbled. "Of course, that would be what you took from this lesson. Fire is basically a form of controlled destruction, so it's obviously simpler than imposing order. The problem is that Fire is fundamentally incompatible with sentient life, and the more you rely on it, the more it might consume you as it aligns with your Path. Why do you think there are all kinds of elves, from wood to water to fungus to all manner of nooks and crannies of Mana that you people seem to take up, but no fire elves?"

  Axl looked aside, scanning Roken's memories, a small spike of recognition at the term fire elf indeed came up. Each time, it referred to them as almost mythological creatures, stories of elves to be feared and pitied before they suffer an early and explosive death.

  "So I'm guessing it's not usual to start learning all these fire spells, right?"

  "No, but we're on the clock, so I figured this would speed things up. If you mess up the firepit spell, it just dissolves, but mistakes with the offensive spells will not just cause a mental backlash, but will trigger an uncontrolled casting. Normally, you'd get months of training on how to deal with each type of runaway reaction for each spell you're trying to learn, and how to predict them based on the kind of error that was made."

  "Yeah, we should skip all that for now," Axl said with a shrug.

  Moxlin sighed. "Mommy, watch over us."

  Axl focused on learning to cast the spells Moxlin taught him, but he wasn't entirely reckless, so he started with the water spell, figuring it would be a bit safer than the others. The twelve glyphs were hard to finish in one continuous set of finger motions. If he was too fast, he made a mistake, too slow, and the glyphs would dissolve before the spell activated.

  The glyphs dissolving only lost him an extra chunk of internal Mana and assaulted the protection of his [Mind-Soul Bulwark], probably the mental backlash Moxlin referred to. Luckily, the Skill's defenses easily soaked up all the damage. But when he made a mistake, haphazard explosions of water joined the backlash. The first simply crashed into his face with the force of a punch, the second formed a tight sheet in a jagged line, like a hose of hyper-pressurized water was let loose across his arm. Without his high Endurance, he'd be quite hurt by those mishaps.

  After the second time this happened, Moxlin crawled into a large crack in the ceiling, at the edge of the illusory boundary of their hiding place.

  "Good luck!" she waved, then disappeared into the crack, another protective barrier appearing behind her.

  Axl chuckled to himself, but was glad for the time alone, feeling he could focus better without the fidgety spider staring at his every move like he was a pit creeper.

  After a few more tries, he managed to form the neat jet of water and successfully hit the wall as intended, then repeated it two more times. The entire process took up nearly twenty percent of his internal Mana, but he simply moved on to the ice spell.

  That one was much more of a bear to do properly, the complexity of twenty glyphs much worse than just twelve. He still got it on only his third try, getting the hang of using these glyphs. His mind was sharper than ever, after all, and he was well fed and rested, so what could hold him back? As much as this new system was very different than inscription-based Mana engineering, it was ultimately not nearly as complex, so he was glad his years of previous practice, straining his mind on hard problems paying off here as well.

  Then he started the fire spell, curious to see directly how it compared to the other two, and immediately triggered a runaway explosion that almost blew his hand off.