"So what the hell is this?" Freya asked, looking around at the forest they found themselves in. She had that specific expression where confusion fights a losing battle against sheer disbelief. She was looking at the forest and trying to reconcile it with the fact that five seconds ago they were in his room.

  Surely, she hadn't made jokes about him inviting a lady to his room.

  "Welcome to what I call the Hunting Grounds." It felt necessary to give it a grandiose title. "I asked Seraphina to help make a link to this place so that I could come and go whenever I wanted."

  She gave a stare so dry it could have desiccated a cactus. "Let me get this straight. You asked Seraphina—one of the most terrifyingly powerful mages I know—to perform high-level spatial tearing just so you could have a back door to a playground in your bedroom?"

  "Yes."

  "You're a genius." She beamed. "We are going to have so much fun here."

  Of course she would say that. It should have been the expected outcome. Most people would worry about having a spatial tear in their room, but Freya just sees the utility.

  "Yeah, well, I thought it'd be a good idea. The third event will be duels between individuals. It's gonna take a while… I figured we needed a place to chill, test some theories, and hunt some beasts without an audience."

  "Say no more," Freya disappeared from her spot, leaves rustling as she moved about in search of strong beasts to hunt.

  "Well, that happened." Theodore shook his head.

  ***

  Walking through the woods, the first target presented itself. Though it wasn't quite alone, it had a few friends with it. It was some sort of quadrupedal armored beast. Biology wasn't his strong suit, but he could pretty much see how durable this thing was. It looked heavy as well. A beam of thermal energy shot forward. Despite being the size of a finger, the result was… overwhelming. It hit the target, scorched through and exploded from the back.

  A moment later, the beast disintegrated into ash.

  Another beast charged.

  It was slow. Or maybe his perception of time was rather fucky after [Parallel Processing] evolved into [Mind Division]. He had to admit, getting used to… multiple "brains" running at the same time was quite hard.

  He often found himself distracted, and his thoughts wandering in directions.

  And that's why he had this skill off for most of the time since he'd gotten it. He hadn't gotten used to it yet.

  Sidestepping the beast's pitiful attack was rather trivial. The second shot was queued up. This time, more mana. Higher density. The lance formed, vibrating with that instability that suggested it wanted to explode before it left the hand.

  Fire.

  The white streak connected. It punched through the shoulder this time, cauterizing the wound instantly. It was just a hole without any blood. The beast stumbled but kept coming, even as the thermal lance blasted through the beast behind it that wasn't quite as lucky. Getting hit square in the chest would do that, obviously, even if the other one had gotten lucky he'd only hit its shoulder.

  It was time to stop playing with single shots.

  More signatures appeared on the periphery. The noise had drawn them in. One became three. Three became seven. They were pack hunters. The thermal lances needed a rapid-fire mode, and given the new skill he was testing, that wouldn't be quite as hard as it had been before.

  The beasts encircled. They were coordinating, cutting off escape routes. It was a cute tactic, assuming the prey intended to run.

  A human mind, generally, focuses on one active task. You look at target A, you shoot target A. You look at target B, you shoot target B.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  An apt way to look at it would be writing. Writing with one hand was rather easy, but writing different things with two hands simultaneously?

  Before, his brain would've splintered into multiple threads, most of them rather… dull compared to his fully functioning brain. After all, they didn't quite need the finesse of a full brain most of the time. For instance, focusing on multiple targets.

  There would then be a single bigger governing thread over everything, which held most of "him".

  Now, however, he wanted to test out [Mind Division].

  It was a strange feeling, the activation. It was not a sensation of having his brain splintered into multiple threads, but of separation and subsequent evolution from a single thread to a fully functioning pseudo-organ that, for the lack of a better word, layered itself on top of his brain. Then more followed.

  Ever since he got this skill, he'd been keeping it under control. Having multiple brains was weird.

  The singular consciousness fractured. Multiple of "him" layered upon a single body. For the lack of a better way to put it, he was no longer "him", but rather a higher being in a sense. That thought did make him laugh, but it was the most apt way to describe it.

  Where before he had to focus dividing his attention so much, now he simply existed as an entity not bound to a single… consciousness.

  The result of having a few of said consciousnesses in a single place was rather telling. For one, time slowed down to a crawl. The sudden clarity was absolute. The noise of the situation vanished, replaced by a grid of vectors and variables. The beast on the far right was leaping. Its trajectory was calculated. The beast on the left was flanking. Its speed was noted.

  It wasn't a conscious decision to duck on his part, as not just a single "him" was in the position to choose, and they weren't all quite in sync given his inexperience with the skill. The body just moved, guided by one of his minds. The claws swiped through empty air where the head had been milliseconds prior.

  This was where a slight error occurred. He blamed inexperience with the skill. He needed to eliminate the pack. There were about twelve of them.

  Mind 1 decided to engage. Mind 2 decided to engage. Mind 3 decided to engage.

  And here was the problem: Muscle memory is a hell of a drug.

  When he usually engaged a group of enemies using [Parallel Processing], he would splinter his focus into dozens of threads to manage the mana constructs. He didn't think about it; he just did it.

  So, Mind 1 splintered into hundreds of threads. Mind 2 splintered into hundreds of threads. And Mind 3… splintered into hundreds of threads.

  He realized the mistake exactly one microsecond before the mana left him. He hadn't just queued up twelve lances.

  He created a wall.

  A solid, blinding sheet of thermal energy composed of densely packed lances manifested in an instant. The mana drain hit him like a physical punch to the gut, his nose rupturing immediately from the cranial pressure and blood flowing down.

  "Wait—"

  The recoil dug his heels into the dirt, dragging him back a foot.

  The world went white.

  When the spots cleared from his vision and he wiped the blood from his upper lip, he looked forward.

  The beasts were gone. The trees behind the beasts were gone. The hill behind the trees was gone. In fact, a conical section of the forest extending for about three hundred meters had simply ceased to exist, replaced by a smoldering trench of vitrified earth and ash.

  He stood there, blinking, his three minds slowly reintegrating into one very confused, very throbbing consciousness.

  "…Whoops."

  The silence lasted for a few seconds.

  From the deep woods beyond the newly created devastation, a roar shook the remaining leaves off the trees. A massive shadow rose from the canopy. A Wyvern. And it was looking directly at the source of the anomaly that had likely just woken it up from a nap.

  Its eyes locked onto him and it shrieked.

  ***

  "It tastes like chicken," Freya mumbled, her mouth half-full.

  She tore another chunk of meat off the bone, grease dripping down her chin. They were sitting by a campfire—made entirely of the Wyvern's own broken ribs—roasting the massive thigh of the beast Theodore had accidentally angered.

  "A little gamy," Theodore noted, staring at the massive carcass behind them. It had taken a bit more effort to bring down than the wolves, mostly because he'd been nursing a migraine, but in the end, a lizard was just a lizard.

  Freya swallowed and beamed at him, waving the bone like a scepter. "You blew up half a mile of forest and summoned a Wyvern within ten minutes of arriving."

  "I was testing a theory."

  "Was the theory 'how fast can I start a wildfire'?"

  "The wildfire was a variable I hadn't accounted for."

  "Uh-huh," she took another bite. "Well, keep testing. This is delicious."

  Theodore looked at the meat, then back at the charred trench in the distance. "Yeah. Let's just… maybe not tell Seraphina about the landscaping."

  "Bold of you to assume she doesn't know already."

  "Oh."

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