Javier stood in the crater where the boulder had once been, the smell of ozone and ionized air stinging his nostrils. He stared at his palm, then at the scorched path of destruction he had carved through the ancient forest.
In AeonQuest, a Mana Bolt was a tactical tool—a way to poke an opponent or interrupt a channeled spell. Here, it was a kinetic railgun.
"The output is tied to the reserve," Javier whispered, his voice trembling with a mix of awe and terror.
In the game's mechanics, spell damage was usually calculated by a fixed base number plus a small percentage of your total mana. But with an infinite mana pool, the math had broken. Even a one-percent scaling of "infinity" resulted in a force that defied the laws of physics.
He took a deep breath, trying to steady his racing heart. He needed to think. Was he actually inside the game? He looked at his hands again. They felt real. He could feel the coarse texture of the linen robes against his skin and the humid warmth of the air. If this was a VR simulation, it was millions of years ahead of anything the tech giants had released.
Moreover, he didn't recognize the terrain. He had been a top-tier player, a man who had memorized the tactical maps of every major expansion from the Frozen Tundra of Malakor to the Sands of Shifting Time. The creators of AeonQuest were notorious for their relentless expansion, adding thousands of square miles of content every month to satisfy the player base.
It was entirely possible he was in a corner of the world no player had ever reached—or, more chillingly, he wasn't in AeonQuest at all. He was in a world that simply borrowed its rules.
"First rule of gaming," he told himself, trying to regain his composure. "Acquire map data."
He began to walk. The forest was dense, the canopy so thick that only narrow shafts of light reached the mossy floor. He walked for what felt like hours, pushing through thorny thickets and crossing crystal-clear streams.
The silence was eerie. There were no monsters. No wandering NPCs. No quest markers. It was a wasteland of beauty, a sprawling wilderness that seemed to go on forever without a single sign of civilization. The further he walked, the more the isolation began to gnaw at him. He was used to the chaotic global chat of the game, the constant trade pings, and the noise of the city. Here, there was only the sound of his own boots on the dirt.
"I need a better vantage point," Javier grumbled.
He opened his mental spellbook. He needed a scouting spell. Normally, a high-level mage would use Eagle Eye or Arcane Eye to project their vision into the sky. Javier didn't have those. He looked at his list of "garbage" spells.
[LEVITATE (LV 1)]
Description: Reduces the user's weight, allowing them to hover three inches above the ground for 60 seconds.
"Three inches is better than nothing," he muttered. "Maybe I can use it to slide over the brush."
He focused on the spell and channeled a tiny—truly tiny—spark of mana.
Cast: Levitate.
In an instant, the "three-inch" limit was discarded by the universe. Javier didn't just hover; he was launched upward as if he had been fired from a catapult.
"Whoa! Too much! Too much!"
He didn't stop at three inches. He shot past the low-hanging branches, burst through the thick canopy of the giant trees, and kept going. The wind roared in his ears, whipping his linen robes around his legs. The forest floor rapidly shrank beneath him, turning into a carpet of mossy green.
Javier flailed his arms, trying to find balance in the air. He was rising at a terrifying speed. Five hundred feet. A thousand feet. Two thousand.
"Cancel! End spell! Stop!"
He tried to cut the flow of mana, but the spell was already "overcharged" by his passive presence. He was a balloon filled with the pressure of an ocean. As he ascended into the thinner air, the sheer scale of the world finally revealed itself.
To the North, there were jagged, purple mountains that pierced the clouds. To the West, a glittering silver sea. And there, far to the East, nestled in a valley between two rolling hills, he saw it: a plume of smoke and the faint, geometric outlines of stone walls and thatched roofs.
A town.
"There!" he shouted, pointing a finger toward the settlement. "Civilization! I just need to get—"
He stopped. The town was becoming smaller.
He wasn't just floating anymore; he was drifting into the stratosphere. The air was getting colder, and the sky above him was deepening into a dark, bruised violet. The "Basic" version of Levitate had no horizontal steering; it was a simple vertical lift. In his current state, he was essentially a runaway rocket with no guidance system.
Panic, cold and sharp, flooded his chest. If he kept going, he'd freeze or suffocate before he ever reached the stars.
"Okay, okay, think," he gasped, his breath misting in the freezing air. "In the game I played, if you want to stop a channeled spell, you just... kill the connection."
He slammed his mental "off" switch, forcefully severing the link between his infinite reservoir and the active spell.
The silence that followed was absolute. For a heartbeat, Javier hung motionless against the backdrop of the world, a tiny speck of white linen against the vast blue.
Then, gravity remembered him. "OH, NO—"
The scream was ripped from his throat as he plummeted. Without the lift of the spell, he was nothing more than a stone dropped from the heavens. The wind didn't roar this time; it shrieked. The friction of his fall began to heat the air around him.
He was falling toward the very forest he had just left, but at this velocity, the trees wouldn't break his fall—they would be his executioners.
'Think!' his gamer brain screamed. 'Utility combos! Use the basics!'
He tried to cast Gust downward to slow his descent, but the sheer speed of his fall made it impossible to aim the pressure. He tried Drip to create a cloud of steam, but the water evaporated instantly in the friction.
The ground was rushing up to meet him—a blur of green and brown that grew larger with every passing millisecond. He was a meteor of flesh and blood.
"I'm going to die," he realized, the thought strangely calm amidst the chaos. "I survived a God-tier assassin just to die to a Level 1 utility spell."
He tucked his limbs in, a last-ditch effort to minimize his profile. He was less than a hundred feet from the canopy. He closed his eyes, braced for the impact, and felt a surge of mana flare up instinctively—a passive Mana Shield that he hadn't even consciously triggered, fueled by the sheer desperation of his survival instinct.
CRACK.
Javier didn't feel the trees. He felt a series of jarring, bone-rattling thuds as he smashed through branches like a cannonball through toothpicks.
Then came the final impact.
The earth didn't just hit him; it swallowed him. The sound was like a thunderclap. A crater ten feet deep erupted in the center of a small clearing, dirt and roots sprayed into the air like a fountain of debris.
Javier lay at the bottom of the pit, his vision swimming in a sea of red and black. His robes were scorched, his skin was covered in a layer of fine grey ash, and his lungs felt like they had been flattened by a steamroller.
He tried to draw a breath, but his body refused to cooperate. The "Infinite Mana" had protected his vital organs, but the sheer kinetic shock was more than his human mind could process.
"Town..." he wheezed, a single red drop of blood hitting the dirt beneath his nose. "...east…
His eyes rolled back into his head, and the world finally went dark.