"Sure, that sounds reasonable enough."

"And then we have the word 'spells' for the kinds of Skills that mages and priests use, right? But not for, for instance, your Double Attack."

"With you so far."

"And 'Increase Agility' is a spell, right?"

"...yes..."

"But 'Improve Dodge' isn't."

"It's... a passive Skill..."

"'Improve Concentration'?"

"I guess I would accept calling that one a spell."

Vallynn shrugs, but the other two aren't looking at him (though a couple of others have started half paying attention, too).

"Anyway, my point is, while there's a kind of fuzzy boundary between Skills that are and aren't spells and they bleed into each other, there is a very sharp difference between stabbing something twice and Double Attacking it. Like, in both cases, you're deciding to stab, right? It's still you, a creature with a will, using your will to change the world. But when you use Double Attack you are changing the way your body works to make it do a thing that you don't, yourself, know how to do, and that you couldn't just do on your own—at least not yet. When you learn a Skill you're very directly using your mind to cause an effect in the world without going through intermediate steps."

"Right... because I need to actually work out and exercise physically to be good at stabbing things but with Double Attack it kind of just happens?"

"Yep."

"And Stats?"

"Same deal. You're absorbing the strength off monsters but that's not the same as going and, as you say, working out yourself. If nothing else, there's no amount of working out that'd let our friend Annika here punch through steel the way she'll be able to in the future. That has to be through Stats."

"Mm."

"...that feels... wrong."

"Oh?"

"I don't have a good way to... I mean, why is exercising different from killing monsters?"

"...when you exercise, there is a specific thing that is happening to your muscles, they are getting stronger and more resilient. When you increase your Stats, you can do the punching-through-steel thing even without a single noticeable change to your actual body. You've seen monks? They're ripped but not, like, built like oxen, working out enough to get like that should not be enough to do what they can do."

One-two-THREE one-two-THREE one-two-THREE...

"It shouldn't?"

"Their bones aren't any harder to break once they're dead."

"Big difference there, that 'once they're dead'."

"Well, yeah, but that's sort of it, right? The kind of muscle that lets you stab very well is still there when you die; the kind of Stat that lets you stab something twelve times a second isn't."

"And you're saying that's magic."