Broken Lands

Chapter 367 – Third Upgrade Team

Dav was the next to finish his upgrade. Unlike both Sophia and Ci’an, there was no question when he reached the third upgrade. Darkness bloomed from the spot where he sat. Sparks and ribbons of mana spread through it, just behind the darkness. Sophia could feel it as it passed through her aura; there was no active effect, at least not one that was controlled. Instead, it was alive, much like the beings that lived in the Origin.

A moment later, it disappeared, pulled back to Dav’s location. 

Sophia recognized that flash. It felt like a piece of the Origin brought to the outside world. All of her worries about Dav rushed to the surface. “Dav? Are you okay? What did you do?”

“I’m fine,” Dav answered easily. His voice was clear and calm, without any of the secondary overtones or odd pitches that Sophia worried about. “I’m not sure why it got away from me, but that was one of my new Abilities, Eldritch Revelation. It’s flexible, sort of like my old Eldritch Call, but it’s not my Anchor Ability. I didn’t want an Eldritch Ability as my Anchor. My Anchor is called Immanent Embodiment; it’s the Ability that lets me become something else, sort of like what Los’en could do. I can’t turn a spark into a body of flame, but I should be able to take over a spell without nearly as much trouble. I managed to package all of my Calls into Eldritch Revelation, Force of Nature, or Divergent Unity. It was strange what fit where.”

Sophia took the time Dav talked to examine him with her new senses. It had been months since she advanced to the third upgrade, so she’d had plenty of time to get used to them. As far as she could tell, Dav looked very similar to how he’d looked before the upgrade. If anything, he looked more human, with less of the Origin’s influence. That was probably a good thing, though it was clear the influence wasn’t gone; it was simply hidden better.

“Overall, I don’t think I lost anything significant; I think I might be able to pull off some tricks I couldn’t before with gravity, but that’s about it other than being able to take on aspects from things we encounter.” Dav bit his lip with a frown. “I think I can expand what I can do, too, as long as it fits one of the three pillars I built after I take it on. That’s what I was trying for, and I think it worked.”

That was something neither Sophia nor Ci’an had bothered to push into their Grand Talents. Some people were able to expand their Grand Talents fairly easily, while others couldn’t or could only do so in places. Arryn gave them a few tips on it when he visited, but even he didn’t seem to think it was particularly important as long as you were flexible enough to do what you needed to do and happy with your Grand Talent. Sophia was happy with hers; it seemed like Dav wasn’t entirely happy with his.

“What about your Body and Core?” Ci’an interrupted. She clearly wanted to know if Dav was like Sophia, with descriptors for both, or like Ci’an herself with only the single descriptor Veiled for her Body.

“Refulgent and Serendipitous,” Dav answered with a nod. “I think it has to be because Sophia and I have higher Body and Core; you should get a second one if you push your Core higher.”

“That’s not always possible,” Sweetfire volunteered. “Surely you noticed that if you went really heavily into one of the two it got significantly more expensive? That’s one of the known issues with pushing them too high too quickly and why most people only put a point or two in each level. It comes down with time, especially if you also level, but most people find that it’s not worth the price to do much more than that.”

“No?” Dav sounded just as confused as Sophia felt. “It was always very cheap, especially later on when everything else was incredibly expensive. Why would it be different for us?”

Sophia shook her head. She might be able to understand why it would be cheaper for a dragon, but Dav didn’t have her advantages. The only real differences between him and the people around them were his origin and the time he’d spent in the Origin. She protected him as much as she could, but it still deeply affected him.

Wait, maybe that was exactly it. “The Origin. Chaos or Potential. As a dragon, I’m a child of the Origin and you spent long enough there to change you, even if not as badly as it affected Taika. Maybe that’s it?”

Sophia was glad Dav wasn’t as affected as Taika, much less the eagle or the other bandits. 

“Maybe,” Dav agreed. “Ci’an, I think you should try to push your Core higher anyway. I bet you really want to get that descriptor before it’s time to try for the fourth upgrade. I refuse to believe it’s impossible if people did it back in the Empire.”

Sophia nodded. “Even if it’s not until after we’re through the Maze, whatever that means, we can’t stop here.”

Xin’ri was last, more than a month later than Dav even though she had enough Wisps well before he did. Her delay was for a simple, if painful, reason: she wanted to change the focus of her Grand Talent. Its old focus was on creating things, with a significant benefit if she was also the one to use them. She wanted to change it to something closer to a “standard” Item Anchor, something like the one Jax’s Jaycen Deepmist Mask imitated.

Specifically, she wanted to incorporate her friend Mo’ra, the one who was trapped in a broken sword she made, into her fighting style. What she really wanted was to heal Mo’ra, and that was the first option she thought of.

It didn’t work. Her Sphere absolutely refused to allow her bond to Mo’ra to take the place of her Anchor Ability, even though Mo’ra was definitely an item. When she tried to force it, she broke things and had to offer Wisps to the Guide to repair them.

It took her a number of failures before she accepted that she was going about it the wrong way. 

Her next attempt was to try to gain an Ability that would let her “repair” Mo’ra directly. It was less costly, because she stopped before anything broke, but it also didn’t achieve anything.

It took her a while to figure out the problem, but when she did, it was all too obvious. She was being an idiot; she didn’t want a repaired sword. She wanted Mo’ra back.

Which meant she had to truly repair her, not depend on an Ability that would patch her back together. It wouldn’t be easy, not at all, but she threw herself into the effort anyway. Mo’ra’s broken sword would form the core of a golem in the shape of a young woman, animated by Mo’ra herself. 

It took months and more than a little help from both Tiwaz and Alley Sweetfire, but eventually she succeeded. The new Mo’ra wasn’t perfect, but she was about as human in appearance as Scout, without the android’s built-in senescence. Mo’ra was more like herself than she’d ever been, which meant that she was both wonderful and exceedingly frustrating at the same time. 

As she built Mo’ra’s new body, Xin’ri merged her Abilities to support what she needed to do. Long before she finished her upgrade, she discovered that she could make equipment for Mo’ra that worked just as well for her as it did for Xin’ri. That was wonderful … except that Mo’ra hadn’t changed that much. She still didn’t want to be Called; she was happier as a purely Professional blacksmith. 

That was when they found out that Mo’ra didn’t have her old Abilities. She’d inherited Xin’ri’s, instead. It shouldn’t have been a surprise; the Guide was clearly treating them as one person. It was odd, though; Xin’ri expected it to be more like Sophia and Cliff or Taika. They were supposed to be bound together, but they each had different Abilities.

In the end, they worked out a solution. A large part of Xin’ri’s problem had always been how long it took to make things; she spent so much time in the workshop that she couldn’t spend much time out gathering Wisps. That seemed to have mostly vanished in their time in Mazehold, since they all spent a lot of time practicing and in the Arena rather than out in the Maze, but Xin’ri was certain the problem would return. Mo’ra could fix that; she could do what she loved and do the actual forging, while Xin’ri did her piece and enchanted the components or the nearly complete product, depending on what was needed for each item. 

There was only one real surprise that came out of Xin’ri’s upgrade after that. The Abilities she merged to help her create Mo’ra’s body transformed her Grand Talent into Bridge of Enchantment and gave her the Ability to either temporarily animate enchanted objects or even permanently animate them if she could place a willing spirit inside. 

That must be what she did to Mo’ra. Xin’ri doubted she’d ever use the permanent Ability again, but the temporary one was a very interesting addition to her arsenal, especially when she had Mo’ra’s help to make the enchanted items she wanted to animate.

There were limits on how much she could control on her own, but the ability to use four different enchanted staves at the same time was amazing, as was having a somewhat separate item that could handle her flight or even assist one of her allies. Four was her limit, and it drained her of mana quickly while being less precise, but she could easily see the usefulness. Out of all of the team, she was often one of the primary attackers, and being able to hit the enemy hard and fast right at the beginning could make up for a lot.

Her only descriptor was Ardent, for her Core. Xin’ri wasn’t certain she’d ever be able to get her Body up high enough to get a descriptor of its own. She wasn’t entirely certain she cared. Simply reaching the third upgrade was amazing, and doing it before she reached thirty was incredible.

Naturally, there was one other thing she had to do once she reached the third upgrade: figure out how to help Jax’s persona Jaycen Deepmist change as if he’d also reached the third upgrade. They’d talked through a ton of different options, but none of them had the kick they wanted until Mo’ra weighed in.

The answer was obvious once she proposed it: summonable gear made of light. At the second upgrade, Jax used light-based gear and could summon protective barriers made of light. At the third upgrade, changing that to summoning his actual gear fit his existing theme with the same sort of twist that a Grand Talent would give. He would be literally Armored in Light, which was the name Mo’ra proposed for his supposed Grand Talent.

It wouldn’t do anything about the fact that Jax couldn’t create a Mask that was as powerful as he truly was, but he could get close enough with the boost from Xin’ri’s gear that no one would be able to tell. If she planned ahead, she could animate one of his items to make it appear more powerful during an Arena match. That ought to be enough, especially since it was well known that they always chose to limit themselves to make the matches interesting.

It was good to be done. Xin’ri wondered just how long it would be before they ended up back in the Maze, determined to find its center and the Gates that Sophia and Dav wanted to find. Before they did that, though, they needed to decide if they were going to accompany either Arak Shade or Broken Blade Amaryssa Seuvarin into the Maze. Xin’ri wouldn’t mind a trip with Arak Shade, but the Broken Blade set her teeth on edge.

Even before that, though, Tiwaz had a request for them. He wanted them to visit one of the other facility-minds, one Dav and Sophia had reconnected nearly a year earlier. He wouldn’t say why, only that it was important.