Broken Lands

Chapter 359 – Splitting the Party

The last two levels’ worth of Wisps took Sophia more than a year to gather. 

Some of that time was spent reconnecting Tiwaz’s lost connections, but oddly enough, that turned out to be a source of Wisps as well. The only fight they had in the interspace conduits was on the way to find a facility-mind named Algiz; that particular conduit was overrun with gigantic goo-filled ticks the size of a small dog. They didn’t have any containers to collect more spatial resin with them, but at least the ticks were easy enough to kill. The conduit shrank as they moved forward until the tunnel was too small for anyone but Taika; at that point, they had to give up. It was pretty clear that opening up that conduit would take more than just spatial resin, if it was even possible at all.

Ci’an finished the second upgrade first, of course; she had the simplest Sphere, at least by the number of Abilities she had to improve. While she had the Wisps ready only eight months after the Blade’s invitation, she found that she had no idea how to actually reach the third upgrade. 

Unlike the first two, simply pushing Wisps into her level wasn’t enough; that triggered a warning from the Guide that she did not have a Grand Talent available to select. It gave her the options to forfeit the Wisps, break her Sphere so that she could follow a new one, or split it. Ci’an chose to forfeit the Wisps; the other options were for someone who didn’t like where they’d ended up. Ci’an loved where her Sphere was headed.

That was how Sophia found out that the information they’d been given about reaching the third upgrade was incomplete. It wasn’t wrong, but it favored the what over the how. Fortunately, as someone who’d already reached the third upgrade, Jax was able to walk Ci’an through it. 

You had to choose a core Ability and bring everything else into line with it, pulling the Abilities together until they met. You could create the core Ability from one Ability or from several, but it had to come first. You also had to separately partially merge other Abilities so that they’d work together seamlessly after the final Grand Talent creation. 

This was where Grand Spells and Grand Ability came in; they were essentially Abilities that had already been partially merged together in a way that the Guide would accept. They could easily serve as the central aspect of a new Grand Talent if you pushed the rest of your Abilities into supporting positions. They could also be relegated to lesser positions supporting something else relatively easily, though in that case you had to make your own central Ability - that was at least as powerful as the Grand Spell or Grand Ability it attached to itself. 

It was also the reason that having multiple copies of Abilities you wanted to keep different aspects of was important. It meant you could merge them in more than one Ability merge or merge different parts of them into a single Ability merge more easily with a lower chance to distort them.

Your current Sphere was also a major factor to consider. Technically, it wasn’t a player for most people, because it was very difficult to work with and affecting it wasn’t actually required. Using it also didn’t necessarily make the new Grand Talent any more powerful; instead, it made it more integrated, which wasn’t always what people wanted. It was something Jax could describe in great detail, however, because he’d taken a very difficult route: the core Ability of Grand Talent was something he created from his second upgrade Sphere and his Signature. Without that Grand Talent, he wouldn’t be able to Mask his entire Ability set as well as his appearance. 

Jax described his Grand Talent as a great tapestry woven of many different colors, but it sounded more like a solar system to Sophia. Ci’an thought that a winter forest made more sense than either, and while that made very little sense to Sophia, it would probably also work. Apparently, the imagery didn’t matter as long as it made sense to the individual. 

It was not a fast process. Worse, any Abilities that were being merged might not work exactly as expected, no matter where they were in the merge process. That meant that fighting could be iffy while you were reaching for the third upgrade. 

It certainly made the Blade’s confidence that they’d be back to take a shortcut make more sense. It wasn’t something Sophia would have considered even if she trusted the Broken Lord, but she could see how people who did would accept the trade. She’d accept it if it came from the Voice, her home’s equivalent of the Guide,  after all; that was sort of what a Path was. It wasn’t the same, since Paths weren’t exclusive. It also helped that the Voice offered options similar to the way the Wanderer did. From what Sophia had heard, the Broken Lord didn’t. You got the Hallow he gave you.

Grand Abilities were rare but known, so it was possible the Blade had accounted for that chance. They had come from Izel, after all, and that was one of the places with a large number of Challenges. They were also a skilled team, which was “known” to help people gain Grand Abilities, probably because the techniques that earned Abilities in Challenges and could also earn Grand Abilities 

They had one large advantage the Blade couldn’t possibly expect: Sophia’s aura training turned out to be exactly what was needed to perform the Ability merges required to make a Grand Talent. Ci’an was able to merge the Ability she wanted to use as her Grand Talent from her Sphere and a couple of the Grand Ability Fragments she’d earned back in the Skylands in the month and a half it took for Xin’ri to finish gaining the Wisps she needed to start the same process. According to Jax, that was incredibly fast.

While Ci’an was doing the merge, however, she couldn’t really fight because it probably wasn’t safe for her to use any

of her Nightowl Abilities while she altered the Sphere. It was easy enough to excuse her from the Arena team, but it was even better to take longer breaks and head into the Maze - specifically, to head to the Library of Monsters with Marcie. They’d make their way to the first token-enabled link-gate they could find, then Marcie and Ci’an would head inside and spend a tenday or so improving the Library while the rest of the team explored the Maze, gathering everything from Wisps and aurichalc to monster pieces and whatever Marcie needed for the Library.They’d managed to improve both of the already open areas of the Library and open two new ones. The main Library hub now had a functional card catalog with useful indexing; you could look up monsters by their name, type, or biome. It wasn’t complete yet, but Marcie had indexed well over a thousand books, including ones that did not have a good description of what they contained and had to be read for details. 

She’d also expanded the space to at least five times its original floor area. All of the shelves were now on the first floor; more importantly, there were three small reading nooks that included comfortable chairs and good lighting. She said there were about two hundred more books than there had been when they started, but she didn’t know where they were coming from. 

The quiz area was also both larger and more comfortable than it had been. It now had several different styles of quiz, as well. Sophia’s favorite was the quick quiz that tested you on knowing or guessing the monster’s most important features fairly quickly, while Xin’ri preferred the longer original quiz that required more knowledge but gave you all the time you needed to do research. It was good that they liked different things, because the rewards were different as well; each quiz type fed the other rooms they’d opened, but in different ways.

The quick quiz mostly fed information to the Monster Combat Forms annex. It was the first additional annex they managed to open and it was very similar to the “very limited combat area” Tiwaz mentioned.

Completing a quiz correctly was the way new monsters were added and older monsters were improved. It was such a poor combat area that Sophia could see why it was called a “combat forms” annex; it was more useful because you could watch the monster fight than because you could fight it yourself. 

The last annex they’d opened so far was the Environmental Annex, which deepened with more correctly answered quizzes in the long format. It was almost the opposite of the Combat Forms annex, because rather than limited areas with few things present so that you could see a monster fight, it was all about where the monsters lived in the Maze. You could watch them move and hide without disturbing them or examine the tracks they left. You could even observe how they interacted with each other when they shared the same area. While Sophia had seen a lot of monsters that were clearly placed encounters, all of the ones that were shown in the Environmental Annex acted like they were real creatures in a real world.

Sophia’s guess was that they were … somewhere. That was often how dungeons worked, back home, and there was no reason to believe that it was different here. Copying something that existed was generally easier than inventing it out of whole cloth, especially if you didn’t have to be completely accurate.

Whether that was the case here or not, the Environmental Annex had a lot of flexibility that could be unlocked. Much of that came from using the books to answer the long-form quizzes, but some of it came from actually bringing pieces of both monsters and their environments to the Library to donate. In a way, it reminded Sophia of the polite habit of offering something to a dungeon you were about to delve, except in this case the offering came from elsewhere in the Maze. 

Sophia definitely noticed the lack of Ci’an in the Maze while she was at the Library with Marcie. Most of the time, it seemed like Ci’an didn’t do much … but every fight without her was a struggle at first. There was always a monster that slipped through the cracks and came at Xin’ri from the rear or a group that refused to hold still for Sophia’s spells or slipped around Dav like he wasn’t even there. It was quickly obvious that while Ci’an wasn’t the strongest member of the team, she was the one that covered all the places the stronger people weren’t, slowing and stunning monsters for others to handle. They could do it without her, but it felt like they had to completely relearn how to manage the fights.

Once Ci’an’s Sphere was altered, she was able to test it and found that everything worked properly. That was her goal for that merge, so she returned to their Arena fights and went back to helping in the Maze. They left Xin’ri with Marcie instead, but somehow the tenday-long expeditions shortened to only two or three days before they returned to the Library. Ci’an always had a reason and most of them were valid, but the trend was obvious: she didn’t want to be that far from Marcie if she didn’t have to. 

They started leaving both Xin’ri and Ci’an with Marcie in the Library after that. Losing either of them from the Maze expeditions was noteworthy, but it was good practice; they were still strong enough to manage it and this meant they had to. They definitely couldn’t leave more than two people in the Library and still accomplish much, however, and Sophia wasn’t willing to move forward without Dav. When they were down two people, his healing was actually used after almost half of their zones. They simply weren’t good enough to escape unharmed while fighting monsters intended for a team with two more people.

Supposedly, they were doing well to be able to fight while down two at all, but Sophia didn’t really see it that way. The Maze really wasn’t that hard, especially not if you prepared; it was probably intended to have some variability. All they had to do was stay in the outskirts and it was fine.