"What are your energy reserves at, Hector?"

"I'm fully topped up."

"Good," Conrad said. Zelda was at twenty percent and Rodrick just eighteen.

Rodrick apparently didn't like the implied criticism. "What about you?"

"Forty-eight percent this morning."

"You're kidding, right?" Rodrick looked like he was about to have an aneurysm.

"Not at all. I'm very efficient when spending legal energy."

Zelda leaned forward. "Even so, you must be restoring quickly."

"Of course. Only those with superior skill at absorption are admitted into elite training programs. I'm in the top one percent among Jinn."

"Then why aren't you a war barge? Or at least a gunboat?"

Conrad laughed at Rod's question. "I don't have the intellectual or educational background to form a conceptual domain based around gravitonic interactions. Or any other type of conceptual domain. That's just not where my skills lie."

"So you just naturally restore fast?" Zelda's fascination had not waned.

"Naturally? I don't know I'd say that. Legal energy is the power of order. A regimented mind is superior at letting it in. The really smart, creative types might use legal energy better, but they don't always pull it in as fast. I'm not suggesting I'm simple of mind. I just default to straightforward thought and don't hold many contradictory beliefs. The heavy modifications made to my body helps by decreasing my personal entropy. Jinn don't get much of an influx from our auras or domains. So mostly it's down to the shape of our thoughts. And I think like a soldier – a smart one."

As Zelda sat back into her train seat, Hector harrumphed loudly. "Does everyone passively get their energy restored except Xian?"

"Your kind restores passively, too," Conrad said.

"That is only technically correct," he objected. Relying on cosmic energy from the environment only worked on Tian and only up to level four – and it happened so glacially slow that it was impractical in the extreme.

The circumnavigating train dropped them off at the place Conrad chose for their run. "Remember, the cracked clay section has high visibility. We see the monsters and they see us. If something big charges, I lay down a grenade and we retreat to draw the monster on the right path."

"To its death," Rodrick clarified.

"Yes…."

Soon enough, they were charging into the eternal night of the dungeon, their bubble of light illuminating clay that had cracked as it dried to a tile-like hardness. There were only a dozen other humans entering with their group of four. The others fled along the wall while Conrad led their group further into the flat region.

The clopping of hooves announced their first challenger. Hector watched as a moose blazed into their lights, eyes wild with hate. He threw a cable forward, wrapping it among the antlers and pulling to the side in one motion of his domain. Conrad pulled his pistol and put several incendiary rounds through the neck and head.

Before anyone could relax, a mob of emu appeared. Conrad holstered his pistol and flicked his rifle up to begin firing. Zelda lifted into the air on her wings. Rodrick summoned his sword. Hector flicked his cable out to trip the oncoming birds.

Every single one of the monsters jumped over his cable. Hector scowled. At least none of his teammates could see cosmic energy to know he'd missed.

"Slow them down, Hector," Conrad commanded.

He whipped two cables forward this time, one from either side, and placed one higher than the other. The mob was scattered like bowling pins. As they struggled back to their feet, plasma blasts hit home. Zelda moved to one flank and cast balls of fire down. Rodrick decapitated one of the birds, then a second.

Realizing they were too resistant to his attacks, Hector instead began entangling individual birds and causing them to freeze in place or stumble when most convenient for his allies. The mob was whittled down to nothing in three minutes.

They waited a few minutes, catching their breath and getting drinks of water. Then a crab the size of a school bus skittered forward. Its carapace easily resisted plasma and fire and swords. As the minutes passed, their attention had to be split as a walrus slid forward, barking madly.

"Hector, keep the crab busy!" Conrad back away and fired on the walrus.

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He began swiping at the legs of the giant crab to trip it. The beast had too many limbs and barely wobbled with Hector's tricks. So he seized the eye stalks and yanked. They didn't break, but the monster lifted its claws and attempted to snip the force cables.

Tried… and succeeded. Hector had not expected that.

Rodrick disappeared from his field of view at some point. Now, he rushed back in from behind the crab and drove his giant anime sword deep into a joint. The blade shattered and vanished at the same time that the crab's leg went dead.

Hector threw his friend back with a swish of a cable just before another leg could connect in a kick. Zelda flew up at the crab's face and seized an eye stalk with both hands, which briefly glowed bright white like a welding torch. When she kicked off the face and flapped to safety, the eye stalk ended abruptly before where the eye should be.

The crab shuffled forward, claws raised to attack the flying woman. From behind, Rodrick took out another leg. Once again, his sword had to be sacrificed in the process. Hopefully summoning it wasn't too expensive in terms of illusory energy. The beast was now down two legs on the same side, so Hector was able to sweep another one and send it crashing to the ground.

Its insectoid mouth undulated as it pulled itself forward on its belly. The grenade bounced off a corner of the food hole and bounced deeper inside. An explosion sounded and the critter died with a dramatic sigh. Conrad skidded to a stop beside Hector.

"Is everyone uninjured? Good on energy levels?"

They gave positive reports to Conrad. Fifteen minutes later they were ready to head for an exit. In that time, they'd dealt with a pair of weasels, a heron, and an army of centipedes. The centipedes were soft compared to the average monster, so Hector was able to head shot them one after the other while the rest of his team handled other threats.

Then energy levels were too low for their Arahants to safely continue and they hiked towards a dungeon exit. The only monster they encountered on the way out was an immense moth. Its gossamer wings burnt apart when Zelda rose up to meet it. Then Rodrick stabbed his sword into its brain.

They celebrated with high fives and hugs as they rode the moving sidewalk out.

"I wish I could use Jinn technology," Rodrick exclaimed.

"You can," Conrad shot back, "it just won't stand up to interference from monsters."

Rodrick shook his fist in the air. "Those pesky monsters."

They joked the entire way back to the capsule hotel, where they grabbed dinner together in the first floor restaurant. Everyone retired then. Hector watched them hop in an elevator going up and begged off, claiming he wanted to visit the spa.

After the door closed his friends away, Hector called up his statistics.

Survey Results

Type: Xian

Level: 5

Body: 4

Mind: 3.6

Aura: 2.9

Domain: 2.6

Energy Reserves: 84%

He'd used only sixteen percent on that dungeon trip. It had been quite easy for the team. And that was an actual delve, not a quick run. Hector looked at his credit balance then. Just over seventy thousand. He was barely keeping his cash reserves steady. Training a prostitute as a student was an expensive hobby.

Fortunately, he knew an easy way to make more money.

Hector retraced his steps and returned to the dungeon. He cultivated chaos on the way to top his reserves up a bit. Then he went to the location he'd started his second dungeon run from – the start of the ravine run where a trio of Arahant swordsmen had betrayed them.

He queued up at the entrance, then rode the moving sidewalk down into the dungeon proper. Hector took off at a sprint none of the other humans could match, long legs a superhuman blur. He cut left where the sand changed to stone. Then he dropped into the ravine.

His pace did not slow whatsoever. Hector sprinted through the ravine, killing a sloth that hung from one of the walls on the way without needing to stop. He ran up the far end and sprinted towards where he knew the entrance in the wall would be.

Hector rode the moving sidewalk out, saw his credit balance increase by twenty thousand, and rode the circumnavigating train back to the entrance for another repeat. It took most of the train ride for his legs and lungs to recuperate from the exertion of his sprint.

He went a little slower the second time. He also encountered three monsters. Two of them he killed quickly. The third he threw off balance and ran from. He emerged from the dungeon with a credit balance just over a hundred and ten thousand. All he'd needed to pay for it was a slight outlay of cosmic energy. He was down to seventy-eight percent energy reserves.

He couldn't feel proud that he'd so successfully scammed the System. At the same time, he didn't feel bad. The System let people starve to death in homeless camps and sign contracts turning themselves into virtual slaves. If it wouldn't use its funds properly, then Hector would need to redirect some of the money.

It seemed unwise to run the dungeon a fourth time in a single day. He certainly was feeling physically tired from the trick he'd pulled. Hector decided to carry through with his claim to visit the spa. He booked a massage, specifying he wanted an Arahant masseuse this time. Then he ordered a Jinn pill for mitochondrial function. Since he was flush with cash, he also ordered a vial of blood boiling elixir to go for Riley.

The massage given by an Arahant involved a lot less weirdness than one from an Alfar. It was more Swedish style, with a little bit of deep tissue work on occasion. The masseuse used the entire force of her body behind her elbow and it felt perfectly comfortable to him – actually, it felt like she was going too light. When he completed his next level of body enhancement, he might become completely immune to the benefits of massage.

He then moved upstairs for the night, noting as he went that the wonderful afterglow that accompanied his previous spa trip had not repeated. It must have been the Arahant rejuvenation potion that made him feel so good. He'd backed the wrong horse when he bet on Jinn science being superior to Arahant magic.

The next day he began his effort to restore his energy reserves to a hundred percent.

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