Chapter 2
My Gift, the Magic Repository, can store surplus mana.
Mana naturally regenerates at a fixed rate, whether I'm awake or asleep.
When I'm asleep or on days off.
Once my mana is full, it won't regenerate any further.
I can store in the Magic Repository the mana that would normally go to waste.
Its capacity is equal to my maximum mana.
In other words, I can hold up to twice my normal maximum mana.
And the only Skill I can use is—【Mana Transfer】.
A Skill that lets me give my mana to other people.
Since it was called “lending,” I thought the mana I lent would be returned, but that wasn't the case.
It was a Skill that only let me give mana away, with no benefit to me whatsoever.
I wanted a Gift that would let me mow down monsters, too.
But you can't choose your Gift.
I had no choice but to accept it as the fate God had ordained for me.
The four of us, joined by El, who was our age and a Healer, began adventuring under the name 'Sky-Cleaving Sword'—and continued our meteoric rise.
We started out as promising rookies, quickly overtook veteran adventurers, and now were known as “the B-rank party closest to reaching A-rank.”
A-rank was, in practice, the highest level an adventurer could reach.
In just five years, we'd climbed that far.
—And the reason was my Gift, the Magic Repository.
Every Gift comes with Skills to match.
For example, Guy's Swordsman Gift came with 【Swordsmanship】, Misa's Mage Gift with 【Fire Magic】 and 【Wind Magic】, and El's Healer Gift with 【Healing Magic】 and 【Enhancement Magic】.
With Skills, you can spend mana to perform sword techniques or cast magic.
They're powerful, but consume a lot of mana.
Even with a full mana pool, you can only use them a few times, so you save them for crucial moments.
But my 【Mana Transfer】 turned that conventional wisdom on its head.
My mana pool was extraordinary from the start, and I could store surplus mana in my Magic Repository.
By lending them huge amounts of mana, I let Guy and the others use their Skills without holding back, allowing them to easily defeat even stronger monsters.
'Sky-Cleaving Sword' grew at an unbelievable pace.
Especially the other three.
The experience you gain from defeating monsters is proportional to your contribution in battle.
The more damage you deal to a monster, the greater your contribution.
That means Healers and support roles tend to contribute less, but Gifts in those roles let their users progress with less experience, so it's not much of an issue.
The real problem was me—the only one with a Unique Gift.
In battle, all I did was supply my companions with mana, so my contribution was low. I grew slowly, too, and my mana pool barely increased.
In stark contrast to the other three, who were rapidly rising through the ranks of top adventurers, my growth was slow.
As slow as a tortoise.
The gap between me and the other three kept widening, until now they were calling me “no longer needed”...
The others passed me by, and I gradually fell behind.
Even the one thing I had going for me—my mana pool—was now only enough to fuel a few uses of their Skills.
My mana ran dry in no time, leaving me a useless deadweight who could barely fight.
“Now that I've got this, you're completely worthless! You piece of trash!”
Guy ostentatiously flaunted a silver bracelet.
And it wasn't just Guy.
“You're useless~”
“Ahaha! How pathetic.”
The two people on either side of him were laughing at me, and they wore matching bracelets, too.
They were 'Mana Recovery Bracelets.'
A rare item we'd obtained during our recent dungeon exploration.
As the name suggests, the bracelets restore the wearer's mana.
They probably figured that, despite the limits on recovery and uses, the bracelets were enough to replace me.
Just as Guy said, I was “no longer needed.”
Still, I knew I had value beyond that.
Since I couldn't help in battle, I did everything I could in other ways.
Gathering information on the monsters that appeared and their weaknesses.
Selling loot and procuring consumables.
Carrying the party's luggage while we traveled.
During battles, I'd risked my life to distract enemies.
And yet.
And yet...