Although they had defeated the unfairly strong minigun, Kairos and the others weren’t out of trouble yet. Everyone quickly gathered around Sydney, inspecting her condition.
Kairos quickly got her legs and arms, putting them in the proper places so that they could reattach once more. And thankfully, they did do so. However, the pace was much slower compared to before.
Sydney’s eyelids began to fall, like she was unbearably sleepy. However, Kairos felt it would be bad if she lost consciousness, so he called out.
“Don’t fall asleep!”
Sydney blinked a few times, but her eyes still didn’t open up very wide. She seemed to be on the verge of falling asleep.
Kairos furrowed his brows intensely as he thought of possible solutions to her condition. Then, an idea he had come up with long ago resurfaced within his mind.
“Open your status panel! I will help you add points into endurance.”
From what he remembered from testing it a while ago, while adding points in endurance wouldn’t heal the injury, it would still increase their overall constitution without increasing the injury.
In video game terms, it could be seen as someone taking ten damage out of a one hundred shoppingmodehp health bar. Adding one hundred points to the total health wouldn’t change that the ten damage existed. However, it would change the fact that what was initially ten percent health missing, became five percent.
Kairos raised his finger, ready to press a button.
It took Sydney a second, but she did end up opening her status.
[Status]
[ID: 423632551433]
[Rank: E-]
[Objective: Survive]
[Proof Of Perfection Points: 0.3]
[Strength – 4.8
Agility – 4.4
Endurance – 5.0
Willpower – 4.6
Mana Capacity – 0.4
Magic Affinity – 0.3]
[Special Abilities: Gnawing Hunger (F), Temperance (F), Earth Spell (F)]
[Hide]
Kairos’ eyes widened considerably when he noticed that she only had three tenths of a point available. He assumed that she must’ve added these points into her stats beforehand, though it confused him why she decided to spread her points across all the traits rather evenly.
Kairos’ finger decisively shot towards the plus sign next to the endurance stat.
But then it froze.
[Points – 0.3 – 0.2]
He saw the available evolution points go down, but he was sure that he didn’t do anything.
And just a moment later, Sydney’s stats changed, despite nobody touching it.
[Mana affinity – 0.3 – 0.4]
Kairos narrowed his eyes and muttered.
“What?”
Though the points seemed to be automatically assigned to whatever position they wanted to be in, Kairos did not act immediately. Thoughts flashed through his mind one after another.
He remembered that Sydney’s stats were suspiciously low before after she had slaughtered an extremely large amount of bunnies when they had been assaulted by a horde of them.
In fact, just by looking at all the carcasses that littered the ground at the time, Kairos was fairly certain that Sydney had killed the most bunnies. Most of the carcasses laid out across the floor hardly had anything left of them, not even the bones.
The bloody mess underneath Sydney only told a small picture, as most of the carnage had been swallowed up by her.
This made Kairos think of the gnawing hunger skill. This seemed to be the source of Sydney’s strange regeneration ability.
It was quite clear that if an ability just gave one the ability to regenerate fully even from a near death state, that it would be a little unfairly powerful. Kairos would expect that sort of ability to be inborn, or an ability acquired under special circumstances.
Yet, from what he could tell, this seemed to be some conicendental mutation that Sydney got from the original transformation she had gotten from being exposed to a sliver of the red sun.
Kairos believed that it had some sort of relation to the grief she had from the death of Harold and possibly some other special features of her constitution. All in all, there were a myriad of factors that made it too hard to determine which exactly let her gain this ability.
However, all of that wasn’t important.
Rather, the fact that she seemed to need these points seemed more crucial. Kairos pressed his lips together as he saw the points she had available go from 0.2 to 0.1.
He could still increase her endurance, but that may actually have a bad effect in Sydney’s case.
Seeing as she was still regenerating, Kairos took a deep breath and shook his head.
“Nevermind, it seems that the points are being used for your healing.”
He narrowed his eyes as he saw Sydney’s agility stat go from 4.4 to 4.5.
“And they aren’t even wasted, as they are being put into your own stats.”
Although Sydney still looked really tired, her body looked relatively intact. The thick layer of dark red blood that coated her clothes was rather concerning, but there were no visible wounds.
Her last point disappeared, before going into her willpower stat.
Sydney parted her lips slightly.
“Hun… Hungry.”
Nicole immediately stood up and saluted.
“I’ll go get something!”
As she ran off, Kairos called out after her.
“Get something that doesn’t need much chewing!”
Nicole gave a thumbs up without looking behind her to acknowledge she understood. Just a couple seconds later, she returned with some canned peaches and opened them up next to her.
After opening it up, she was about to pick up one of the peach slices with her hand, but quickly stopped herself once she noticed how dirty and bloody it was.
Instead, she took out one of the utensils she had, picked one up and then put it into Sydney’s mouth.
Sydney almost immediately swallowed it, not even bothering to chew.
Seeing how quickly she ate it, Nicole seemed a little concerned about choking, but decided to give her another one anyway.
Once more, she swallowed it whole.
Kairos furrowed his brows.
“I think it’s better if you just dump the entire thing in.”
Nicole let out a soft gasp.
“Ah! O-Ok.”
She then put the can next to her mouth and tilted it, letting all of the peaches fall in. Sydney made a gagging sound, making everyone a little concerned, but all of the peaches traveled down nicely.
Kairos looked at her intently.
“Do you need more?”
Sydney took a few deep breaths and shook her head.
“I-”
Though she was still speaking, Kairos’ eyes suddenly snapped to the side.
It was because Sydney’s points had changed.
[Points – 0.0 – 0.1]
Then, a moment later, it went back to zero. Sydney’s skin originally had a few leftover cuts, but they quickly disappeared.
Then, her strength stat increased.
Sydney furrowed her brows, even blushing slightly because of embarrassment.
“Ah, I feel… hungry again.”
Kairos muttered.
“You are able to gain points through eating.”
Sydney’s eyes widened considerably.
“E-Eh?”
Chase raised an eyebrow.
“That does seem to be the most likely case.”
Tori gasped.
“Wait, how is that fair?”
Sam simply chuckled.
“This is quite ironic, considering you were never a glutton before, Sydney.”
Sydney laughed weakly.
“It isn’t healthy to eat more than what you need, after all.”
Kairos turned to Nicole.
“Could you get some more food?”
Nicole broke out of her stupor, jumping slightly.
“Ah, yes!”
Kairos nodded and paused for a moment.
“…Thanks.”
Nicole smiled a little and ran off to get more. She soon returned with a couple cans of peaches and opened them up before giving them to Sydney.
She ate them as greedily as before.
This time, it didn’t increase after one can, but after another, it went up by a tenth of a point.
Soon after, that one disappeared as well as another stat was increased.
Kairos sucked in a cold breath.
“…Sydney, do you feel like you can cast either the gnawing hunger ability or the temperance ability?”
Sydney blinked a few times before shaking her head.
“No, but I do feel like I can cast the earth spell.”
Kairos nodded with his chin in hand.
“It seems like those two abilities are passive, activating on their own. My guess is that your gnawing hunger ability lets you convert food you eat into evolution points and also use those points to heal yourself. Though even when healed, you still gain stats.”
He furrowed his brows, thinking of all the numbers. Though he could only work with rough estimates, he could already come very close to answers with just a rough estimate in math class.
It was just something that came naturally to him, letting numbers flow through his mind peacefully.
Kairos took a deep breath.
“As for the temperance ability, it should have something to do with abating your hunger. I think it might make you need to consume less food… as well as fewer points when using your gnawing hunger ability. Or it might be giving you more points, but regardless it is increasing the conversion ratio.”
He blinked a few times.
“In other words, this ability perfectly compliments your other one, enhancing both of them at the same time.”
Sydney’s eyes widened significantly.
“W-Wow…”
Kairos hummed.
“Well, while we are still here, I guess you should eat as much as you can. Just leave a bit for us to carry along later.”
Sydney shakily got up to her feet and nodded.
“If my abilities really work like that, then I should take advantage of that.”
Kairos nodded.
“First eat the stuff that will either spoil soon or is not calorie dense.”
Sydney let out a small sigh.
“Alright.”
With that, she headed off to begin eating. Chase couldn’t help but smile bitterly.
“…Something like that really makes me jealous.”
Kairos rolled his eyes.
“You were able to cheat out mana early and even got a special bow. Don’t you think you don’t have the right to be jealous?”
Chase chuckled.
“Yes, yes. But if we ever do find a large food source, then she will become quite frightening, no? It wouldn’t be a stretch to say she may soon surpass all of us.”
Kairos shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, at least she will be on our side.
Chase smirked.
“Yes, thankfully I am not on the opposite side of her…”
Tori pressed her lips together.
“…I wish I had some sort of special ability like that.”
Kairos waved his hand dismissively.
“Once you evolve, you will be able to use up your points to get your own ability too.”
Tori smiled brightly.
“Heh, yeah.”
But then, she pouted.
“…Why can’t I evolve, still?”
Kairos rolled his eyes.
“Just have a little bit of patience.”
Tori sighed.
“I guess there’s nothing else I can do.”
Sam was looking at Sydney intently, before shifting his gaze towards the corpse of the minigun. Kairos noticed this and seemed to guess his thoughts.
“If Sydney eats too many monsters, I am fairly confident that she will turn into a monster. It’s not like she couldn’t, but doing so would be too risky. We should avoid it if possible.”
He sighed.
“Plus, it is rather… bad for the mind to eat the corpses.”
Kairos said this because he remembered one of his past experiments. Just sticking his hand into the corpse of a monster increased his evolution energy. So naturally, eating should increase it by quite a bit more.
Sam chuckled and scratched the back of his head.
“Alright, alright! But I didn’t even say anything.”
Chase smirked.
“I admit I was thinking of that too.”
Kairos waved his hand.
“Anyways, we should get back to eating our own fill. Ah, and let’s also start a fire, the thing we were trying to do before.”
Sam laughed.
“That was quite crazy, wasn’t it?”
Nobody was against that, so they went to work. Kairos collected some of the clothes he could find scattered by and made a small pile with them. Then, they all had a nice warm meal, making them refreshed.