Gordon looked out over the remains of what had been an avianoid settlement in the far east of Aughal, feeling destruction carried on the breeze. Farthest Run, of which there were six now after taking in as many as their movement enhancing powers could affect at once, had been tasked with scouting the evacuated settlements. By the Tyrant themself no less. He had thoughts on that matter, but nothing actionable.

  With every former village they found ravaged by monsters, his chafing under Aughal’s new management grew less pronounced. It wasn’t that he was changing his mind, or having it changed for him. Gordon was confident the Tyrant couldn’t throw anything on him he wouldn’t notice. No, it was the sense that the world was caving in that was weighing on him. There were worse things than Tyrants.

  The main issue was that abandoning a village didn’t mean it was no longer there. Gordon had no special insight into the workings of the Octyrrum, only the knowledge that the effect of a Spoke weakened the fewer settlements there were. Each one that was fully removed from the map sapped Aughal. They weren’t here to stop this from happening, merely report on how many were left.

  After this one, our circuit’ll only take half a week. Tal’ll be happy. He was about to call an end to the morbid break when the transcription stone landed in his hand. ‘East, coming in fast. Can’t get a read on it.’ Gordon drew his swords and grunted to the other two who stood. Marky was the only one of the old guard with him and the Druid looked about as well as could be expected. Which was to say, not. Recent events had hardly changed public opinion on his class for the better, and Gordon’d sent one of the earlier additions to his team back to the ‘Bastion Saint’ bloody after learning what they’d been doing behind his back to the man.

  “Trouble coming,” was all he said to Marky at the questioning gaze. “Don’t take any chances.”

  “Fine.” Hesitantly, the Druid took the form of one of the new shank stomper variants he’d acquired from recent hunting. The third person in the group, a level 2 Arcanist Gordon didn’t think too highly of, looked uneasy but didn’t go further than that. The leader of Farthest Run had made sure news of what had happened to his predecessor had spread far.

  Closing his hand, Gordon sent Qess a message to link up and prepare for a retreat. They’d be doubling their movement powers and expending a good deal of mana, but there was no point fighting this far out. The Tyrant’s kill zones were holding thus far against anything lower than a level 6, the dragon that had been revealed to be under their command reigning supreme. The thought of a high level monster with a full suite of mortal powers scared him more than anything else. Thankfully the rumor was it was a one of a kind abberat-

  “Siren Lance.” Gordon had halfway turned to avianoid beside him, wondering why they were firing off a power this early, but then he fully registered what his senses were telling him. The voice that had called out that incantation was distant, but more so, wrong. He saw the sand ripple in the distance as a sonic projectile disturbed the surroundings and knew it was heading to Qess’ group.

  “Speak of the beast.”

  “What was that?” the Arcanist asked, fear creeping into his voice.

  Gordon felt no rising fear, just the same resigned tiredness anyone got when their job became ten times harder. “Overtime.”

  …

  Wingcraft, plus a few additional members depending on what you considered Sigron, Spinner, and Shuni’s status to be, departed their compound. Janice was left to deal with the fallout of both Spinner’s awakening and Daniel’s defiance. She would probably be fine. Soraso might have slipped some kind of mind control power through with the one that enforced the secret of the ruins, but he’d shown no signs of straight up killing people that defied him. With a Spoke in his hands, he could have easily taken out Lagori level disparity or not. As far as Khare, though Daniel regretted leaving without them, there wasn’t any time left to wait.

  “Hunter’s still following us,” Willow reported as the team entered a sharp dive. It would be faster to go down first and loop up near where the ruins connected. He had the exact spot they’d entered with Soraso in mind, the Map screen open on the phone embedded in the shield. The translucency of the material had an unexpected benefit, semi-projecting what was displayed onto the front after he’d flipped it around. It would take some finagling to change the screen and he’d still have to set it to the Encyclopedia’s scan function before combat, but this setup would now allow him to scan creatures while fighting.

  Wind now whipping by too fast for anyone without Keen Senses to hear Daniel just nodded at the Spirit Master and tallied his equipment. Claws, bullets, everything’s restocked. Blast bow set to shotgun mode. Magazines labeled and loaded. Experimental smoke bombs for the avianoid. Walls remade after the sparrow burned them up. Half a dozen glorified compasses I’m glad I made after meeting Padri. No time to redo armor after getting Echo Durability. Not really the materials for it either. Oh well. I’ll do Hunter’s first, I’m sure he’ll like fur armor better anyway.

  What his mental list did not account for was Hunter’s body. Still missing, and he’d burned another possible lead into his sealed memories. Half of him hoped it wouldn’t be needed, and the other pushed him to forget about it until they had Hunter in front of a rift. Which one was the bond and which was him he wasn’t sure.

  Arriving at the entry point went mercifully swiftly, despite Spinner being as gracious in the air as a box truck with half its wheels missing. She’d been able to lift off with her spider legs wearing his backup sets of boots, but she could forget fighting like that. Without awakening any other powers, she wasn’t capable of much off land anyway. The true value of the drider would be within the ruins, where her webs combined with his walls would lead to them at least have some warning before a strong point was attacked. Considering they were planning on leaving Willow behind at the first friendly rift they came across, it was worth the cost of raising the average level of people they were bringing in.

  Not like I can trust that dynamic anymore, Daniel thought. Soraso could have made the whole thing up to justify sending us in the first place. Did he know about the Spoke before I told him? Why would he try to set up Murdon to go in first? Unless he expected Lograve to bring me along. He was finding more and more suspicious things as his unshackled mind kept working. At least Zolyra wasn’t fooled. If Lagori wasn’t affected either, then it’s limited to at least his level. It might only be people who have consented to one of his powers, like Thomas suggested.

  All of this was something to be dealt with after he got Hunter back. Whether Soraso was a villain in disguise or just taking things too far to cling to power amidst a crisis was still to be determined. Once he’s back, I won’t have the oath anymore. I’ll be able to think more clearly. God, that’ll be a relief. Dipping below the ground limit, Daniel was relieved to find neither monsters nor Soraso in the area. Maybe he meant what he said about not being able to leave. Good.

  “So, uh, what do we do now?” Tlara asked as they all hovered in place for a moment. The Beastmaster had clearly expected Soraso to be there.

  “The Regent isn’t coming. No time, but I have something that could work. You weren’t there for this because you were, uh, dead,” Daniel said a little awkwardly, the earlier conviction he’d been granted no longer in play. “Back in Aughal, I was able to get through that shield by myself, but whenever I tried to take anyone else through with me the Spoke fought back. I got around it by combining mana my Spoke gave me with an ability Hunter channeled at the same time.” Daniel brought his hands right up to where the sky limit was, imagining he was at the top of a very large room. “Same principle here. Soraso can cut through the sky limit to get through to the ruins, I just have to tear my way through.”

  “How are you going to do that without Hunter?” Tlara stared at Daniel, who didn’t have an immediate answer. “Oh for fucks sake!”

  “I’ll figure something out!” Daniel shouted back. “Maybe I can Flash Craft something with the mana and use that… but no, I’m locked out of other powers while it’s channeling.” He said nothing about the bond helping him dual-channel through force of will since no one besides Cloak and Quala knew about that effect on him. “I’m getting us into the ruins no matter what.”

  “If it helps, teleporting doesn’t work.” Shuni, currently having Grown Wings, shrugged her shoulders mid-flap in response to the questioning gazes of some. “Tell me you wouldn’t try it if you had that kind of power. You just end up above the ground limit.”

  “Worth a shot though,” Daniel replied, Shuni nodding at his agreement. In the next moment he activated Flash Jaunt, aiming the power up and through the sky limit. There was a brief moment of transition comparable to hitting the loop point in real space, and when he reappeared he was indeed kilometers below the rest of the team instead of in the ruins. “Well, thanks for the heads up,” he said after drifting back down.

  “No problem, I’m here to help,” Shuni readily assured.

  Khiat, having pulled out her bow in the few seconds he’d been gone, was looking thoughtfully at it. “It’s normally opened with that sword. Could you try to push mana into something and cut it with that if it worked last time?”

  “I can’t just move mana into something.” Daniel raised his arm, indicating the new shield. “I mean, I can, but enchanting is its own thing that counts as an ability. Generating Spoke mana would break that.” Despite having an innate feeling that what Khiat was suggesting wouldn’t work, her words struck a strange chord in him. It was like he was moving closer to another revelation that would unlock memories, but it wasn’t all there. “What gave you the idea?”

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “I can kind of do that. It’s new,” Khiat answered somewhat uncertainly. She looked sideways at Shuni and Sigron, still not in the know about her classless nature, and continued in roundabout terms. “I’ve started to awaken something that lets me control arrows after I release them. It’s tricky, but I’m getting better. There’s a couple of other things too, like this.” She closed her eyes and concentrated for a moment, then gripped the bow at one end and held it out.

  Daniel placed a hand on the other end and raised his eyebrows in surprise. This was an enchanted weapon, of course. Khiat had the original bow from her village still but normally used the one he’d made because of how much better it was, especially considering it was a higher level than she should rightly be able to use. While all enchanted items had a sense of magic to them that was easy to get used to after a few moments, like how the buckler on his arm was ignorable until he thought of it, Khiat’s bow had a stronger buzz to it that almost, but not quite suggested it was at a higher level than he’d made it.

  “You’re putting pure mana into this?” Shuni asked during her turn to hold it. “Weird power. You hear about people like Star Clerics getting stuff that can temporarily enhance weapons but this feels like a channeled ability. The fact that I can tell that is strange, my seventh sense isn’t that strong.”

  “I’m still figuring it out,” Khiat said noncommittally. “It does make my attacks stronger, like when I designate arrows.”

  “Well, thanks for the suggestion Khiat. It’s too bad I can’t do that.” Daniel put his hand up to the sky limit again, thought about breaking it instead of going through like normal, and felt the contest of Spokes begin. His normal mana flow was subverted by an effusion coming from his heart, blocking anything else from happening. He let go quickly, not because he was wasting mana, this was sourced from his Spoke and might as well be infinite, but because he was afraid this was telling Soraso exactly where they were. “Willow, any ideas?”

  The Spirit Master raised a misty hand to the upper barrier and then shook her head. “Wisp’s mana isn’t doing anything. I’d try the sparrow but we still don’t fully trust each other.”

  Who else? Sigron has some kind of bond, but no. Tlara or Spinner? No. If Willow or Khiat had the Spoke they could probably do it but there’s no way I can switch it to them. I was lucky enough that the bond let me use it while in Hunter. He floated back up and readied a hand. “Everyone, step back. I’m going to try the dumb way.”

  “Just putting it out there, what exactly happens if you do break the sky?” Shuni asked nervously. “We heard how big the ruins are. If they fall through-“

  “There’s no way I can break the entire sky limit,” Daniel assured. “Back in Aughal I was only able to do what I did because I affected a limited part of the Shroud. Trying to do something like make a Spire collapse would have overwhelmed me. I only need to make a path for us, that’s it.” He said that as much to the limit itself as the team. This has to work. I’m not going to lose Hunter because a fucking glorified door is in my way.

  He announced his intention to the region once more, letting the Spoke mana flood into him over the course of a minute. When it reached its zenith, decaying at the same rate it was generated, he made a fist and punched upwards. There was an impact, but it left Daniel grunting in pain as his knuckles became bloodied. Like punching a mountain and expecting it to move. He did it again, harder, feeling something crack but disregarding the pain.

  The rest of the team watched as Daniel continued to pummel what otherwise looked like open sky. The blood that flew from his hands didn’t stain the illusion as it passed right through, only to fall once more. When it was clear that wasn’t working, Daniel switched to bone claws, going so far as to pause his Spoke mana, activate Elemental Onslaught, and then start again. The trance did nothing and expired quickly as he wasn’t dealing damage to anything that could be considered a target.

  Screaming in anger when that failed, Daniel was about to punch the wall again when a heavy grip seized him. “Please, stop hurting yourself,” Khiat said, her frame allowing her the strength to overcome Daniel’s. With it still being 21, she might have been nearing him in attribute value as well. “This isn’t working.”

  “It has to!” Daniel resisted for a moment before allowing Khiat to drag him away from the sky limit. “I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Is there anything you have that haven’t tried?” Willow asked helpfully, and a little at a reserve after witnessing the carnage herself.

  Weird crystal, Daniel thought instantly, pulling out the item he still had no explanation for acquiring. It had grown a deeper purple since the last time he’d seen it, but not by much. Channeling his Spoke for a fourth time, Daniel pressed it up against the barrier with a thin amount of hope before pulling back, not wanting to crush whatever it was in case it was tied to Hunter.

  He made to slip it back into the bag of holding made from skink leather and his eyes caught the two weapons he’d taken from the avianoid. The red bag was his default for anything truly important or unique since it was impossible to confuse amongst the ubiquitous gray of those made from wolf fur. The dagger and short sword, ostensibly level 4, were the strongest weapons in his arsenal.

  Gadriel was able to hold level 6 gear for a few moments. Hell, he managed to break the Shroud around Casia with them. Could this be enough? “If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do,” Daniel admitted. There was no point hiding it. It felt like he was trying to cheat his way through an invisible wall in a game and was down to his last glitch. Nothing he could make could contest the raw power in the avianoid’s weapons regardless of what he’d been able to accomplish with the blast bow. It was this or nothing.

  Daniel picked up the sword from the bag of holding, prepared for it to fight his grip, when something strange happened. He didn’t get the normal feedback from holding an item above his level. Wait, what? Experimentally he released his Spoke and felt the sword begin to bite in his hand.

  “Damn, guess that’s it,” Tlara said not too unkindly as she watched him drop the blade back in his bag of holding. “Sucks, but are we just going to stand here all night?”

  “No, it’s working, I just wasn’t expecting…” Daniel picked the sword up in his hand again with the Spoke’s mana running and found something else that was strange. “I can hold this while my Spoke is active. It might be letting me bypass the level requirement, only, it feels like the weapon’s part of my mana flow.” He closed his eyes, concentrating on his seventh sense.

  The sword in his hand was different from any other enchanted item he’d held. They all had a magical sense to them, but there was still an element of physicality that made it clear they were an item as well. As it stood now, Daniel could have mistaken the sword for something entirely magical, like it had been conjured and would evaporate when its spell ran out.

  It wasn’t exactly tied to his mana flow, however. That was just his first mistaken impression. There was an interaction between the mana in his hand and the weapon, but also a distinction. Either way, Daniel could make an easy conclusion. This sword is made entirely from mana. I thought that avianoid had made it from aetherwood. It feels and looks real to my other senses, but with my Spoke active it’s just mana.

  It didn’t make any sense. With Flash Craft, you could spontaneously generate real items, but when Daniel took out the sending stone to Janice he’d used that power to create it didn’t give him the same feeling. He’d never encountered anything like this before.

  Or, had he? Feeling that line of thought was putting him on the verge of an epiphany, he followed it. How had an avianoid trapped in the ruins been capable of making something like this? All they’d had was time and mana considering he could rule out the presence of powers and magical material now.

  Murdon had said that time could have given her the ability to fully grow into the attributes she’d been able to raise before being corrupted. What if it also let her figure out something else? What if she is an Artificer and can do something no other class can? True Enchanting.

  He’d already figured out that question posed by Star, he just hadn’t realized it yet. Every Artificer who enchanted enough would touch on the subject, there was no way to improve their craft without doing so. The patterns, the ones he’d figured out to make his blast bow, related to certain parts of an object’s identity.

  Taking it to the next step and copying the power of the gods? You would need to perfectly understand every variation of mana that led to the creation of something to instantly make it, something Daniel wasn’t close to despite every bag of holding he’d made so far. That would be something requiring direct tutelage or an unimaginably long amount of time.

  It was all mana manipulation, unguided by any power. Like Khiat had prompted him to think about, though what she and Willow did wasn’t the same. No, it was best thought of as every god having one way they could influence mana. It was why they were limited to domains in the first place. He wasn’t sure how it worked for the others, but he’d been shown how Star’s domain worked. The memory was there, begging to be used to reveal the past, but he had to get into the ruins before following that thread.

  Daniel gripped the sword in both hands, feeding the oath bond his willpower as he pleaded his case with the Octyrrum itself. As it stood, he was not capable of True Enchanting. It would require him to know exactly the mana patterns of everything he would otherwise use to make an item. He would have to know the combination better than he knew himself, to the point where he could shove the entirety of the mana required to make an item into reality over a few seconds. When the simplest of items, his ammo, took him a quarter of an hour at best, it was currently impossible.

  Yet, True Enchanting was a domain of the Octyrrum. Daniel the Artificer could not do it, but he possessed a Spoke that could do it for him. He wasn’t asking it to make a level 9 version of his blast bow or even succeed at a successful enchant. No, all he wanted it to do was let him start the process and use the mana it was giving him.

  He’d told the team that enchanting while using his Spoke would be impossible, and that was true. Activating it during the normal process would kill whatever he was working on. This was different. This drew deeper than his class, cutting at the heart of the system itself. What’s more, it was possible.

  Daniel felt the Spoke’s mana begin to invade the sword and instantly knew that this would have failed if he’d tried it on anything else. Not even his Foci had survived being infused with the torrent of Spoke mana that had been unleashed on Hunter’s death as they and the items he enchanted weren’t pure mana. The materials used in them were inflexible, unable to accommodate the desires of the invading mana to change into what was needed, at least not with his level of non-mastery.

  Mana coerced into the shape of a sword? Possible. Still beyond him, but it was the attempt that mattered. In the briefest of moments, Daniel was able to sustain the craft, he possessed a powerful weapon infused with the mana of his Spoke. With a desperate cry, he swung it upwards and felt it catch, then tear through. A horizontal cut in the sky formed behind the blade which began to rapidly disintegrate as he ‘failed’ whatever it was he’d been trying to enchant, but that didn’t matter. He’d broken the sky limit. “Go!” Daniel shouted, himself the first to fly through.

  The rest followed, Spinner barely able to squeeze through before the hole in reality fixed itself. They were back in the transport tunnel, exactly where Daniel had wanted to go as the stairwell rift was nearby. The shield on his arm lit up with what looked to be notifications from the Arcadian, but he only glanced at them to confirm there weren’t any from the Octyrrum that would disappear forever before putting them out of his mind.

  “I need someone to carry me,” he said quickly. “I just unlocked more memories and I have to focus on that. Get me to the last rift we were at and secure the area. Khare’s paint will show you the way.”

  “Wait, you’re just going to-“

  “No time,” Daniel said over Tlara’s objections, and before anyone else could say anything, he dove into the past.