The two liches returned with new bodies eight hours later, only to find the cathedral empty. There were no signs that the intruder had breached the inner sanctum, but he was so powerful that neither of them were willing to take anything for granted. Accordingly, they both set their minions to searching for the breather, but after a day and a half without discovering them, they were forced to give up.

“Nothing’s been taken,” one lich said to the other.

“The vault seals are all intact,” the other agreed.

“Was he just here for levels?”

“It’s not like he needs more! He beat us…” The lich paused and shuddered as it remembered how thoroughly it had been overwhelmed. “It was easy for him, like we were an annoyance.”

“We must make preparations for his return. It’s obvious that we weren’t ready for someone that powerful,” the first lich replied.

“Agreed,” the second lich said. “Perhaps something that targets the soul? Mental attacks did only slightly better than physical ones against that human.”

“More of a monster than we are,” the lich muttered.

They’d been guarding the core of the necropolis for a long, long time, willingly turned to undeath to ensure that the entombed dead of the Covenant War were forever contained. They went decades between visits from outsiders, and, gods willing, they’d never again see another human like the one they’d tried and failed to drive off.

“Soul traps run counter to our purpose here,” one of the liches said after a few minutes of silence.

“Better to destroy one soul than to unleash a plague upon the Garden. This is the only land left for humans. If it’s overrun by undead…”

“Hmmm. You have a point. Very well, but only on the deepest levels to be used against existential threats. What we’ve been doing already has worked very well for every other breather.”

“Yes. We’ll place them here. Anything that reaches this far down…”

The consequences were left unsaid, but both of them thought to the guardian below their feet. It would be catastrophic if that was ever unleashed. They’d been trying for centuries to find ways to limit its power and freedom, to no small success. An interloper upsetting that delicate balance was unthinkable.

“Soul traps,” both liches agreed.

* * *

Velik emerged into sunlight and set about climbing to the top of the ravine. The world looked completely different now that he was seeing it through a new skill. He hadn’t gotten the generic [Mana Sense] that he was going for, but in retrospect, that didn’t surprise him.

[Mana Sense] was a mage’s skill, and he was no mage. Instead, he’d gotten something a lot more esoteric called [The Wanderer’s Path], which claimed to let him pierce the Veil of Lesser Reality, not that it bothered to explain what that meant. Velik assumed it was the mana under the mana he’d found down in the cathedral.

Either way, he was experiencing the mana saturation of the world in a whole new way that was honestly quite disorienting. It would be nice if these passive sensory skills came with the ability to turn them off, but, as always, he wasn’t that lucky. Truthfully, [The Wanderer’s Path] actually wasn’t as bad as [Mana Sight] had been.

Of course, that was my own fault for taking the skill in the middle of a spatial warping dungeon.

What was weird about his new skill was that it was like looking at the world through a threadbare sheet. It was all still there, vibrant as ever, but there was something else overlaying it. And whatever it was, it wasn’t mana as Velik had come to experience it. It was influenced by mana though, so maybe Torwin’s advice had been the winner after all.

He couldn’t see mana directly anymore, but he could see this other layer and how it was affected by magic. It was technically different, but for all practical purposes, it was the same thing. In some ways, it was even better, since delicate, hidden magic like that trap spell he’d studied weren’t actually hidden from the [The Wanderer’s Path].

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There was also the added benefit that he’d freed up a skill slot, leaving him with two open ones now. In theory, those were reserved for [Mana Control], or rather the component skills. In actuality, he’d probably end up with something weird again.

Why can’t anything ever be simple? I can already hear Aria complaining about this.

Now that he was relatively safe outside the necropolis, Velik went through his system menu and added [Magical Finesse] and [Mana Weaving]

to his skill list.

* * *

“How many days has it been since he disappeared?” Aria asked.

“How the hell should I know? Three? Four?” Jensen said.

“For a man supposedly on a mission from a god, he sure doesn’t take this exercise seriously,” she grumbled.

Jensen couldn’t really disagree with her, but after hearing Velik’s thoughts on the ‘training’ he was receiving, he didn’t think any amount of time spent with Aria or Sildra was going to get results. He knew Velik well enough to know that the guy wasn’t just going to up and abandon his quest, which meant he was out there, somewhere, trying something different.

Probably still alive. I mean, what could even kill him at this point? A divine beast, I guess, Jensen answered his own question.

“Is everything ready for the next phase?” he asked, trying to change the subject. As he understood it, Morgus had mandated that Velik pick up two skills in preparation for this expedition into the sand sea, where he would presumably manage to not get himself killed.

“Not really,” Aria said. “No point in setting it up until we get this part down. And I’ve got better things to do than to just sit around waiting for him to feel like showing back up whenever it’s convenient.”

“Nobody would blame you if you left,” Jensen said.

“I know. I’m not staying for him.”

“For Torwin.”

“Yes,” she said softly. “Frustrating as that boy is, he’s still our best chance at getting revenge.”

That surprised Jensen. He didn’t think there was even the slightest possibility that Velik would succeed, but he did believe the claim that divine beasts would come back for Velik if he didn’t go to them first. For the safety of everyone else in the country, Velik had to fight.

All we can do is our best to get him ready.

He’d been quietly picking up as many stat boosters as possible, using a variety of intermediaries so that it wouldn’t be traced back to him. He’d used all of Velik’s cut of the profits from the last expedition, and when that had run out, he’d dipped into his own funds. It was an absurd amount of money, easily into the millions of decarmas, and it threatened to bankrupt Jensen’s burgeoning business.

But it was all he could do. Enchanted weapons and armor were useless where Velik was going. Raw stats would have to suffice, and if that wasn’t enough, then he’d have to rely on his skills. A pragmatic part of Jensen’s mind couldn’t help but calculate all the good he could have done with the decarmas, that he was throwing them away trying to help a man who was destined to die.

He ignored that.

“It’s probably best to assume he’s going to come back with some new skill he pulled out of his ass,” Jensen said. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Those were all class skills, though,” Aria argued. “This time he’s working with general skills. Hundreds of thousands of mages have used those exact same skills over the last few centuries. We know what to expect. Whatever asinine scheme he came up with isn’t going to produce something new. All the possible permutations have been documented since before any of us were alive.”

Footsteps coming down the hallway caught Jensen’s attention. “Sildra’s up.”

“Good. Maybe she’ll have some idea of when this foolishness is going to end.”

The druid kept odd hours now, though Jensen supposed it made sense. She did draw the majority of her powers from the moon, after all. She’d privately confessed that the moon’s cycle did impact how strong she was, but fortunately, a new moon didn’t render her helpless. Either way, she often went to sleep with the dawn and didn’t wake up until late afternoon.

The door opened without preamble and Sildra stepped through. She froze, nonplussed, to see both Jensen and Aria staring at her. “Um…” she started.

“We were hoping Morgus has given you some clue as to when we should expect to see the return of our wayward student,” Aria said.

“Morgus has opted to remain silent on the matter,” Sildra told her. “You do know that I don’t speak with him every night, right?”

“I had thought the unique nature of the circumstances might warrant an update.”

“About that. Morgus hasn’t told me anything, but Velik himself did stop by to let me know he’s back.”

“He did what?!” Aria demanded, springing to her feet. “When? How long has he been back.”

“About twenty minutes now,” Velik said from behind her, startling the mage so badly that she jumped halfway across the room.

“Velik,” Jensen said, adopting a calm façade and trying to ignore the sudden spike in his heartbeat. “How was your vacation?”

“Illuminating,” Velik said. “I went back to that necropolis we cleared out and hit the deeper levels.”

“Those were deemed too dangerous to explore,” Jensen said. It was too bad, too, because [Treasure Hunter] was insistent that there was some extremely valuable loot down there.

“It wasn’t bad. The worst of it was a pair of liches that kept coming back to attack me after I killed them.”

“He says that so casually,” Aria muttered. “Did you at least accomplish anything to justify the time wasted?”

“Well, I did manage to merge [Mana Sight] and [Mana Scent],” Velik said. “But I didn’t get [Mana Sense.] Have you ever heard of [The Wanderer’s Path]?”