Medy yanked Wade hard, "Wade! We've got to go, come on run!"

  "Wait! What about Bael?!" He called back, then turned to look over what the pair behind him were up to.

  "Flee now, hell damn you mortal!" The demon on the other end roared back in both fear and annoyance.

  Eri clicked his jaw, diving onto the dirt pile they'd come with, his skeletal digits digging into the wet ground looking for any blackrotten bug in there.

  Meanwhile, the Satyr was holding the line against the monster ahead. His hands were held up, solidifying the shield as the giant centipede like thing scraped its claws across it in a flurry of anger. He hadn't even looked back at Medy or Wade, too focused on the task. "It'll get impatient and try another route soon enough. I'll come after you then," He shot a quick look at the lake for possible danger or a third party, then back to the barrier, reinforcing the weakened sections. "Medy! Take him and find cover!"

  "I'm working on it!"

  And Wade once more felt her try and tug his arm with way more insistence.

  He stumbled for a half second, nodded, and sprinted after her, relying on the water mastery boon to propel him onward.

  And found that it was barely keeping pace with the insane speed Medy was running forward at.

  She slowed her pace down, turning to him, eyes wide. "Go faster!"

  "This is fast for me!" Wade panted, the boots feeling extra uncomfortable all of a sudden.

  Waterlogged rubber rain boots with sponges as the sole didn't make great running boots, unfortunately. "I don't know how the hell you're running that fast but I'm maxed out here!"

  They reached the first fork of bone, or rather a few openings near the ceiling that looked too small to squeeze through.

  Medy paused to slap something onto the wall at one turn. "Leaving marks for Bael to catch back up after," The marks began to glow blue. "This way! Should lead to a smaller cave soon! Focus on your body training techniques, forget the arms, just do your legs!"

  "Focus what on my legs? What kind of body training do you expect me to do while we're running?!"

  Medy's eyes widened. "Oh. Oh. Right. Uh, your uh, nevermind, no time for theory," The demoness grabbed his arm, pulling him along down the path. "We'll go straight to the crash course. You feel the mana in your body right?"

  "Yeah, a little hard to miss right now!"

  The ground was rushing under him at his speed, his legs trying to keep up with Medy dragging him forward. They ran over dry bone, avoiding the lumps of flesh that followed the trickles of water down here, so at least his footing was stable.

  That limp was flaring back up real fast. He had no idea where they were going, but Medy sure looked like she knew.

  She turned them down another fork, this time it looked more like a window of bone, or a closing tunnel. "There! Get inside!"

  The 'inside' she'd been pointing at was filled with bioluminescent plants all growing over what looked to be that growing flesh. And it was everywhere, including the ground, sidewalls and ceiling.

  Wade stared at the tunnel of absolute nope.

  "Go-go!" Medy said, trying to drag him through this bullshit horror movie set. "It's fine! Plants here aren't the danger, the predators are!"

  She dove inside, her hoof squashing through the flesh and plant alike, bending down so that her horns didn't stab into the ceiling mass and get stuck.

  Wade was a lot taller than she was, which meant he had to crawl after instead. On his hands and feet.

  It smelled exactly as bad as it looked. Rotten meat, and parts getting squashed in between his fingers as he struggled to follow behind Medy.

  At least wherever this was it was already too small for that mana burrower thing to follow after.

  Medy stopped two minutes into the crawl, holding a hand out, then pointed to a lower river of water passing by, pooling up slightly before flowing through some kind of open drain where the bone had turned porus. "Don't step on the water there, it's all liquid mana. There's no actual water in this realm, it's all liquid mana, so don't think about taking a drink at anytime, understand?"

  Wade nodded, not that she was looking back to watch, but followed behind her steps, taking care not to step inside the pool of mana bubbling away.

  "If you think the air pressure is bad, liquid mana is on another level. Extremely bad stuff. Worse than solid mana, which you'd think would be backwards because solid is way more dense than liq- sorry, I'm rambling, I know! I know, just nervous."

  "Yeah I got that, it's fine!" Wade shouted back, following over the steps Medy walked past. "Are we sure Bael can follow us here? He's taller than I am and has horns. How's he going to fit in this place?"

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Also he had more muscles. A lot more.

  "I told you, the plants here are fine, he'll crawl through here without too much trouble!"

  Wade continued after the demoness the whole time, avoiding the glowing blue trickles of water, or liquid mana apparently, and trusting Medy knew what she was talking about.

  Given she worked here pretty often, Wade felt he could trust her.

  But she did say she kept dying here again and again.

  That might be a problem.

  The tunnel ended, and Wade crawled out into another madhouse of bone arches. It felt like he was walking through a dry sponge, except water was trickling down walls everywhere in some way or another, joining at the bottom into streams.

  Medy turned to him. "Okay so, past a branch tunnel like that means the mana burrower is going to take a few detours to catch up. We're still in the larger lake regions right now, we want to race to the edges, the bone gets smaller there. I'll try to be quick, we really need to pick up the pace here."

  "I'm trying," Wade pointed down at his boots, and then his limp. "I don't exactly have perfect running gear on me at the moment Medy."

  The water mastery boon was helping him already run way faster, but that was still not enough.

  "I know, I know, I'll try to explain as fast as I can. Body strengthening techniques, uh, focus on the mana you control and send it down to your legs. That's the whole thing, it's just using mana to power your legs to run faster."

  Wade tried. There was mana everywhere in his body, so he just grabbed some from his chest and stomach and cycled it down into his legs. His points in intellect made grabbing large chunks of it easy enough, and almost intuitive to hold together. The moment he did, more mana from the surrounding air quickly replaced the parts he'd moved out. Although his body seemed to hold onto the mana he was concentrating into his legs.

  Or maybe it had nothing to do with his body. The mana was attuned to him. Only way it was leaving his body is if he willed it specifically to leave.

  He tried to stand a bit taller with the mana condensing inside his legs.

  It… did absolutely nothing.

  But he did notice his mana bar was going up further, from utterly ridiculous slightly more utterly ridiculous. He tried to tap a foot down, see if there was any change.

  "Or wait," Medy held a hand out, "before you do that, the strengthening techniques are just basic free magic spells that people get really good at casting. Do you know how to cast spells?"

  Wade looked up. "That would have been better to know before I flooded my legs with more mana."

  "Oh. That's my bad, sorry." She looked over him, "You still feeling okay, right?"

  Wade nodded. "The game system thing tells me I've got… 5 hours or so to live."

  It had gone down by about twenty minutes, so condensing mana did have a pretty quick effect on him. "What's the sympto- actually, not important. I'll find out real soon anyhow. Medy, what's the spell I have to cast to do that body strengthening technique? Guide me through it like I'm in magic kindergarten."

  She nodded, thinking. "So you know how you can cast a spell outside in your hand right? You do that inside your body instead. And the spell you're trying to imagine is just making your muscles stronger. There's some limits to how much your muscles can actually do, push too much mana and they might snap, which you could heal, so it's not too bad if you go overboard right now. Mortals can use holy magic with jus- oh, you don't have a sigil. Uh, nevermind."

  "I don't know how to use healing magic too." Wade said. "Only chance I got was with a ring that did it for me."

  "Okay, yeah, don't overload your muscles or snap them please." She paced back and forth thinking. "How about this, convert half the mana in your legs to power the spell, that should be enough to keep up. If you still can't, continue doing smaller casts until you keep up with me. I think that might be good enough for now. If you were sprinting this whole time without any technique, you're already really fast for a mortal. We just don't want to snap any muscles because then you can't run at all anymore."

  "Medy. What exactly am I casting? How do I do this strength thing?"

  Medy wiped her forehead, and tried to shove her hair away and over her ears or horns. It looked like a nervous tick to Wade, likely she was brainstorming hard how to explain. "Uh, you know how you can cast things by funneling mana outside your body and using your imagination to shape it right? You're doing the same thing, but inside your legs instead. Just focus on the idea of changing mana into power and energy or something like that, and have it flow into your muscles. Oh and this is the really important part, think time. Like five minutes. So mana slowly empowering your legs over five minutes, yeah that should do it. There's way better ways to do this and generally you'll want on demand power so you can stop as soon as you don't need it, but we're not exactly focused on efficient or even safe use of mana right now."

  Wade focused, grabbing his attuned mana inside his legs that he'd shoved down together. It had remained where he'd left it, though bits of mist were being leeched from his skin out into the air where the pressure was less dense.

  He concentrated on what she'd explained.

  Power. Energy. Like magic circling around each muscle strand and empowering the entire thing. It looked more like a little movie in his mind, pulled straight from video games or other things.

  He could almost hear Zin's voice in his head, telling him how completely wasteful of mana he was being by not perfectly visualizing the actual muscles and instead just thinking some general concept of the leg and calf muscles and just hoping his random bullshit thoughts would work.

  Mana continued to burn away and he stopped when he felt the outside pressure start to push mana back into his leg instead.

  "Okay, I th-"

  A new buff was applied: Weak Body Strengthening I - Five minutes remaining.

  He lurched forward, nearly faceplanting.

  "There!" Medy's smile was manic, she even jumped a few times in place. "Now just remember to do the same thing after the spell fades, and make sure you use the same amount of mana. It looks like the amount you used didn't snap any muscles, so we're lucky!"

  "I'm going to die." Wade said, getting back up.

  "You're already dying! Now you're just dying faster! Get it?" She grabbed his hand, practically dragging him the rest of the way up on his newly-reinforced legs. "Okay, we're going to start running now, and if you see anything come after us, don't try to fight it, just keep running. I'll throw some barriers, we'll get the time."

  "Okay, I don-" A wave of pure nausea hit him and he tried to hold it down by sheer instinct - then decided to just follow what his body demanded and threw up.

  Not like this place was anywhere he cared to keep clean anyhow.

  There was blood in the bile. Or something more black in there, hard to tell in the blue glow everywhere.

  But on the other hand, he did feel a bit better after throwing up.

  Medy yanked him back on his feet, "No time to waste, hurl while you're running next time!"

  She turned and sprinted.

  Wade took a breath, and then pushed forward, following the same expectations he had when he'd been blackrotten empowered with super speed.

  He had a new body strengthening buff. And he had his water masterboon still active.

  What he didn't realize was that both buffs were basically percent multiplication.

  And they were multiplicative.