Dav finished gathering his Wisps five days before Sophia did, because she’d decided to double up on a couple more Abilities than he did. They both had lots of room from the Wanderer’s additions to their Sphere, so there was no reason to be stingy. He simply didn’t need as many duplicates as she did.
Sophia had finally picked a direction, and it revolved around Bond of Plus and Magic Attuned Aura, along with her current Sphere. She might even be able to get away with only Bond of Plus and her current Sphere; she wasn’t sure. Either way, she wanted extra copies of her key Abilities, just in case. She was pretty sure she’d end up using all of them.
With the last few Wisps gathered, they picked up Marcie, Xin’ri, and Ci’an from the Library of Monsters and headed back to Mazehold. They were all ready; it was ti.
Jax found it fairly easy to withdraw them entirely from Arena appearances. It was, apparently, not that unusual for a team to be close enough together that they all tried to upgrade at the sa ti. The fight scheduler told Jax that if only a couple of them made it to the third upgrade before they needed the aurichalc from the Arena fights, he could schedule a smaller fight. He’d also be willing to schedule a mixed fight if that worked out better.
Jax sounded amused when he told the rest of the team about the scheduler’s words and added that he was pretty sure the scheduler was willing to bend over backwards for them. “Jero sounded almost desperate to make sure I knew that he’d schedule a fight for as many or as few of us as we thought could fight. We must be bringing in more aurichalc than I thought we were.”
“Or the Blade’s given instructions to accommodate us,” Dav added cynically. “That could go either way, after all; if we’re stuck and desperate, we’re more likely to take her offer, but the sa is true if we’re stuck and grateful. If we can fight in the Arena, we can fight in the Maze and earn aurichalc that way. Plus, we’re more likely to live in the Arena than the Maze if we fuck up, and she wants us alive. Well, she wants Sophia alive.”
No one seed to have a good coback to that. Sophia hated it that Dav was all too likely right about the Blade having put her hand on the scales. It didn’t feel fair; they hadn’t earned it. Whatever consideration they got for the Arena ought to be from their performance in the Arena, not from what the Blade wanted from them afterwards.
Well, she couldn’t say it wasn’t. They had done well in the Arena, better than many third upgrade teams. It was also entirely possible the the scheduler was normally flexible with teams hitting the third upgrade; after all, it wasn’t like people would schedule fights when they couldn’t really fight. It felt like grasping at straws.
“That’s the last thing we needed to do before you two start,” Jax stated firmly. “Do you have any more questions I can answer? And Taika - you’re sure you don’t need to do anything?”
“Can’t,” Taika piped up. “Sophia has to reach the third upgrade before I can. Everything’s locked in place right now, rging doesn’t do anything.”
“That’s how it works for summons and bonded animals,” Jax admitted, repeating sothing he’d said every ti Taika’s status ca up. “I hoped you’d be different; sotis those upgrades don’t go well. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re so fast or if it’s because the Called moved their upgrade in a direction that didn’t support the bond.”
“The second, surely,” Xin’ri pitched in. “We already know it’s possible to completely botch a third upgrade, and that’s what that sounds like. The Guide has to be treating the bonded creature as an Ability that wasn’t upgraded properly.”
That sounded both horrifying and like sothing the Guide would absolutely do. Sophia still couldn’t forget the mont when it shoved Cliff into her mana system to see what it would do. It worked out, true, but Sophia still wasn’t happy about how it happened. All it would have had to do was ask!
It took a while for Sophia to settle down enough to try to rge the base Abilities she wanted for her Grand Talent. When she finally did, her Sphere felt positively hollow, like an empty shell that should have held life. It looked as fragile as a shimring soap bubble floating in the air, but Sophia knew it wasn’t; it also held the strength of magic itself, and magical barriers were the best barriers.
Sophia watched it for a while, then reached for Bond of Plus. It was a spray of feathers illuminated with iridescent light that shifted and shimred in her Domain. The feathers were tied together by bonds of iridescent mana that lopped between them, shifting as they moved. Sophia tugged the plu over to the bubble. She didn’t want to drop the feathers into the bubble or paste them to its outside; she needed them to rge.
The first few tries were obviously wrong, when the feathers phased past the bubble or made it bow inwards. She stopped and stared at them for a long mont. She was looking at this wrong, wasn’t she?
Her new Sphere, her Grand Talent, needed to be the binding between the plus. It was the iridescent magic she’d ignored, not the blazingly obvious feathers. In fact, that magic was itself the plu of the spell; the feathers were nothing more than an outward symbol.
She lost herself in the process, shaping her aura to reach her goal, moving the magic that was her birthright into the shape she desired. Eventually, it clicked into place: a sphere made of feathers bound together by magic itself. It was whole and unbroken, yet still a plu: a plu of magic.
Exactly what she wanted as a basis.
With that piece completed, Sophia let herself fall out of her trance.
She was hungry, thirsty, and had a blinding headache. The light around her was blindingly bright, so she squeezed her eyes shut almost imdiately. “Why do I hurt so much?”
A soft chuckle that was still much, much too loud echoed in Sophia’s head, followed by the feeling of a hand on her back as a glass of water t her lips. “Have so water, then we’ll talk.”
Sophia drank. When she finished the water, she leaned back and found a cushion supporting her back. She cracked her eyes open and found herself in the party room, but the party room with no lights on; the only light in the room ca from the crack around the door and from Bai’s eyes. It should have been dark, but even those two tiny sources of light tried to stab the back of her eyeballs. “Bai? Why are you here?”
“Because I can be.” Bai sounded amused. “This isn’t the first ti I’ve helped soone who was performing the upgrade, though it is the first ti I’ve seen what looks like a successful upgrade trance on the first attempt. Your friends will be happy; they’ve been hovering ever since they noticed you weren’t coming out of the trance. They were more worried about sothing being wrong than rejoicing at your success.”
“This is normal?” Sophia couldn’t quite think straight. “Why didn’t Jax ntion it?”
“It’s unusual but not unheard of,” Bai corrected. “The final rge of two Abilities is almost always a trance, enforced by the Guide to make sure the Abilities slot together correctly. The only cases I’ve heard of that were were failed rges, where the person performing the Talent creation couldn’t push the Abilities into compatibility with their Grand Talent and lost them during the third upgrade. I’ve heard of so who complete their rges without a trance and cannot then progress to the third upgrade at all, but I believe that simply ans they didn’t actually complete it. You should have seen a representation of your Abilities and how they changed.”
Sophia nodded. “I rged the mana bubble of my Sphere with Bond of Plus, making the Sphere the link that holds the Bond together. It’s a feathered orb now, contained and corralled by the magic of my aura. My Domain.”
“That explains how long you took,” Bai said with a nod, then added, “Which was a day and a half and the reason you feel terrible. Most rge trances are about an hour long, but you skipped straight through weeks of them to perform the rge in a single session. It’s impressive, certainly, but I don’t recomnd repeating it. Go in, look at your options, then co back out. Take care of yourself. This isn’t a sprint; if it’s a race at all, it’s a marathon. Pace yourself.”
Sophia nodded at the scolding, then froze as her headache exploded. “I, uh, you’re right. But do we have a painkiller available?”
Fortunately, they did, in the form of an alchemical tonic provided by Ci’an.
Sophia’s trance might have pushed her ahead of her teammates other than Jax and Ci’an, even after the two days she spent recovering without re-entering the odd trance design space, but they were also coming along well. They maintained a more “normal” pace of a couple of weeks per Ability rge, spending an hour or two a day in trance.
It was a constant struggle for Sophia to rember to erge after only a few trials, sothing the others didn’t seem to struggle with. She often spent several hours each morning in the trance before she ca out with new ideas buzzing in her head. A couple of tis, she dove back in after a short break and a al, but she quickly discovered that that was a bad idea; it might not leave her hurting the sa way a day and a half did, but two or three days of two sessions was almost as bad. One session a day of two to four hours gave her enough ti to recover in between.
She completed a new Ability rge every three to four days, which was apparently a blisteringly fast pace. Sophia didn’t understand why it was so hard for others; it was really pretty straightforward for her. She knew what she wanted to do, so it was just a matter of figuring out how the pieces fit together. They all did fit; if she wanted to rge them, they had to have sothing in common already. There were a few tis where she had to use a third Ability as “glue” to make it work, but most of her Abilities were already closely aligned enough that they fit together easily.
The first thing she tried to rge after her Sphere and Bond of Plus was her Magic-Attuned Aura and Plud Aura Armor. It wasn’t the most obvious combination, but it worked easily, making her entire aura work to protect her. It would work better on magic than on physical attacks, but realistically even those would be affected. She was probably giving up a little bit of her protection against nonmagical attacks, but there were very few attacks of any power that didn’t have magic used in so form.
That was true here, at least. She could point to quite a few back ho, and Dav’s ho almost certainly had many as well. They even had the area-wide effects that would make her Plu Shift ineffective as protection, sothing that was even more unlikely here than normal attacks that were harmful.
She considered adding either Plu Shift of Spread Plus to the list, but she didn’t want to limit her armor to requiring her to have her Plus out. Sure, she could empower it then, and it was still at least sowhat of an active Ability, but Spread Plus was more than that. She wanted to see if she could rge it into her new Grand Talent instead.
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