Broken Lands

Chapter 360 – Third Upgrade

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 Plumes and Magic Attuned Aura, along with her current Sphere. She might even be able to get away with only Bond of Plumes 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 time.

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 same time. 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. “Jerome 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 same 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 seemed to have a good comeback 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, merging doesn’t do anything.”

“That’s how it works for summons and bonded animals,” Jax admitted, repeating something he’d said every time Taika’s status came up. “I hoped you’d be different; sometimes 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 something the Guide would absolutely do. Sophia still couldn’t forget the moment 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 merge 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 shimmering 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 Plumes. It was a spray of feathers illuminated with iridescent light that shifted and shimmered in her Domain. The feathers were tied together by bonds of iridescent mana that lopped between them, shifting as they moved. Sophia tugged the plume 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 merge.

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 moment. She was looking at this wrong, wasn’t she?

Her new Sphere, her Grand Talent, needed to be the binding between the plumes. It was the iridescent magic she’d ignored, not the blazingly obvious feathers. In fact, that magic was itself the plume 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 plume: a plume 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 immediately. “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 met her lips. “Have some 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 came 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 time I’ve helped someone who was performing the upgrade, though it is the first time 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 something being wrong than rejoicing at your success.”

“This is normal?” Sophia couldn’t quite think straight. “Why didn’t Jax mention it?”

“It’s unusual but not unheard of,” Bai corrected. “The final merge 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 merges, 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 some who complete their merges without a trance and cannot then progress to the third upgrade at all, but I believe that simply means they didn’t actually complete it. You should have seen a representation of your Abilities and how they changed.”

Sophia nodded. “I merged the mana bubble of my Sphere with Bond of Plumes, 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 merge trances are about an hour long, but you skipped straight through weeks of them to perform the merge in a single session. It’s impressive, certainly, but I don’t recommend repeating it. Go in, look at your options, then come 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 merge, spending an hour or two a day in trance.

It was a constant struggle for Sophia to remember to emerge after only a few trials, something the others didn’t seem to struggle with. She often spent several hours each morning in the trance before she came out with new ideas buzzing in her head. A couple of times, she dove back in after a short break and a meal, but she quickly discovered that that was a bad idea; it might not leave her hurting the same 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 time to recover in between.

She completed a new Ability merge 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 merge them, they had to have something in common already. There were a few times 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 merge after her Sphere and Bond of Plumes was her Magic-Attuned Aura and Plumed 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 some form. 

That was true here, at least. She could point to quite a few back home, and Dav’s home almost certainly had many as well. They even had the area-wide effects that would make her Plume Shift ineffective as protection, something that was even more unlikely here than normal attacks that were harmful. 

She considered adding either Plume Shift of Spread Plumes to the list, but she didn’t want to limit her armor to requiring her to have her Plumes out. Sure, she could empower it then, and it was still at least somewhat of an active Ability, but Spread Plumes was more than that. She wanted to see if she could merge it into her new Grand Talent instead.