I had to hand it to the Rakshasa lord. He hadn’t come here without a plan. Worse yet, I was falling straight into the trap he had led me to.

Just like I had with Glonek. That realization pissed me off more than what was actually going on here.

I hadn’t yet actualized it in my head, but one of the worst ways that incident with Glonek had affected me was just how much I had been forced to dance to someone else’s tune. The Elder’s death had been a big shock at the time, but now that the grief’s intensity had abated, a different kind of disappointment and anger raged within me. A different goal had risen to being.

Never again was I going to be caught so flat-footed. I was not going to be goaded to act as someone else decided, I would not be scrambling without a plan to right some other the wrongs of others.

What I needed were plans of my own, safeguards I could put faith in.

Reacting appropriately was an excellent skill to have. But so was planning and preparing so that I was reacting less and acting according to my goals more.

Prevention was better than cure, as they said.

This moment with Brasvay was the tipping point. So what if he had come here with a plan. I was going to stop him. I was going to turn things around and make him regret trying to play this stupid game. His goal was nefarious. If I had to bullshit my way to getting what I wanted, then so be it.

It helped that, despite Brasvay’s words, most people here were still on my side. Sure, I was getting a few looks from some Ring Four residents, but the majority was glaring at the Rakshasa lord, angry that he had dared to accuse me.

Time to turn the tables.

“Care to tell us what you know about the Blight Swarm?” I said. “Since you seem to know so much about them?”

The Rakshasa lord scoffed. “You think I will simply tell you what you want to know for free? All you really need—”

“If you know about the Blight Swarm, then you should know who mentioned it, shouldn’t you?”

He frowned. I wasn’t sure if it was at the interruption or because he couldn’t understand what I was getting at. “And what of it? The Anymphea are tangential to the matter.”

“If you know where the information originated, then you would know that I was there, that I attended the meeting between the Councillors and the Anymphea. You would know that the Councillors asked for discretion as they figure out the true extent of the Blight Swarm’s threat to Zairgon and that they have promised to take care of all of it.”

Brasvay scowled, making his face go pinched. Now he was getting a taste of his own medicine, of being caught in a conversational trap.

He couldn’t admit he had broken the Councillors’ trust, nor could he counter the information I presented because he hadn’t been at the meeting in the first place. His source was third-hand at best.

“You are too weak.” Ah, there it was. His glower was mighty. “You can’t stop the Blight Swarm. You can do nothing against it. I will leave you for now, but remember that spurning this opportunity will lead to your demise. Put aside your worthless egos and think for a moment if it’s really worth it to stand by your meagre pride if all it does is ensure your destruction.”

“Oh, we’ll think about it. We’re just not for sale.”

“Be warned.” He pulled his bag of money back into his carriage with his glowing green threads, then himself retreated back inside. “The Blight Swarm will ravage you and leave nothing behind. A stain on Zairgon. That’s all you will ever amount to at this rate.”

Before I could fire off another reply, he was back inside his carriage with the door slamming shut. And then it was trundling off, the engine glowing with runes and more mana threads. What a cowardly asshole.

Just because he had left didn’t mean we had won

, though. The whole meeting had done nothing but leave an ashen taste in my mouth.

I turned to everyone else. Well, everyone who wasn’t a cultist.

“Don’t let his words get to you,” I said. “The Blight Swarm will be a threat in the future, but the only reason he mentioned it now was to rattle you. We have time and we will prepare.”

“But…” someone said. “It’s a Blight Swarm. We used to hear tales about it. There’s no way we can—”

“We can. We survived the Scarthralls. Everyday, we keep on surviving through the harshness of Ring Four. Don’t underestimate yourselves. Don’t underestimate our resilience.”

I kept it short because the more important thing was the appearance. The Rakshasa lord’s words had scared them, and just a simple statement wasn’t going to make that fear disappear. Instead, they needed to see that I believed in us. And through that belief, they could regain confidence.

“Remember, he doesn’t care for you or me,” Hamsik said. “Everything he said was a calculated ploy to sow division, even if he used shades of the truth to do so.”

Bit by bit, the others left with resolute looks instead of with fear. Some even came up to me, Hamsik, and Sreketh and offered us words of encouragement and belief before going. By the time everyone was gone, my heart had lightened a great deal.

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“When the time comes for the Blight Swarm,” Hamsik said before leaving. “I will be here.”

“I know,” I said.

Afterwards, I headed back into the temple to get some rest and do some thinking. Sreketh skipped along beside me.

“You don’t seem afraid of the Blight Swarm,” I commented.

“Afraid?” she said. “I’ve heard stories about them. They’re like these giant bugs or something.” She flashed me a toothy grin. “Yummy!”

I stared, then laughed.

The next day, I focused on training some more. I had received a letter from Kostis that he was going to be there at the Mage Guild, so I decided to try to practice a couple of things I wanted to try before I headed out.

Mostly, I wanted to test Gravity. I had been using it on and off for a while now, and I still hadn’t gotten a rank, so I wanted to push it a bit.

To that end, I tried flying.

Siphon reduced my weight as threads of purple energy flowed within me, and soon enough, I was floating. Of course, I was practising outside the temple. No point in trying to fly only to hit my head against the ceiling. But the real point of the practice was channelling Flare’s Concentration simultaneously with Gravity.

The general idea worked. After a little bit of tinkering, I managed to condense enough heat to a point behind me that it actually started to strain my will to keep it in check.

When I let go, it flashed out in a small shockwave. The burst of flaring energy across my back wasn’t too uncomfortably warm, and I wasn’t really paying attention to it in the first place. It was the ejection of force driving me forward while I was in mid-air that made me gasp a little, my eyes widening.

I was, technically speaking, flying. For real.

Well, maybe for like a few feet or so before natural air resistance slowed me down. I let myself drop and decided to think about it all for a bit.

So the theory behind it was sound. With the combination of Aspects and Affixes I possessed, I could achieve liftoff and create enough thrust to drive me forward. The problem was that it wasn’t practically applicable just yet. Even if I shot myself through the air, controlling my motion without further thrust vectors was difficult.

Concentration still needed a little bit of time to work and I hadn’t practiced moving the point of concentrated energy along with me. I needed to remain stationary to make use of it. For flight, that was a complete non-starter.

Great. Now I was wondering if I could make use of another Affix to fix that downside. An Affix for Flare, to be precise, which made me curse. I was here to work on Gravity, not my newer Aspects.

So, I continued practising, throwing myself up into the air with Siphon while using Concentration as best as I could to move around. But even as I did so, I was starting to wonder about my next Flare Affix. Something to make Concentration work faster…

The problem with Concentration was that it was dependent on the temperature of my surroundings. If there just wasn’t as much heat energy in the environment near me, then of course it was going to be slow. That was terrible for flight. So that dependence on external temperatures was what I would need to address.

The obvious answer to that was acquiring Manifestation as an Affix instead of waiting for it to be an Augmentation.

Not what I was going for though. I still wasn’t sure what happened to an Affix after I transferred it to an Augmentation, and without that bit of surety, I was reluctant to proceed. Doubling up on having the same Augmentation and Affix was going to feel terrible.

But I was already figuring out a bypass. I would just need to test it. Later.

There was also a certain secondary application I hadn’t yet paid attention to. Drawing heat away from my surroundings left the everything nearby much colder. That made me wonder if I could sap away heat from, say, a fireball before it hit me, thus immunizing myself to heat-based threats.

[ Rank Up!

Your Vitality Attribute has risen by one Rank.

Your Gravity and Flare Aspects have risen by one Rank.

Your Path of Burning Starlight has risen by one Rank.

Vitality: Silver V

Flare: Iron VII

Gravity: Silver V

Path of Burning Starlight: Silver IV ]

Perfect. It had taken a few hours of practicing to get to that point. I was even caught by several people making their way through Ring Four, who had stared up at the floating cultist trying to poorly imitate kangaroos with jetpacks. They had just received some grins and waves from me.

With all that done for the day though, I headed out to meet Master Kostis.

Before I left, I took a few moments to talk with the other cultists, especially with Santoire, Guille, and Sreketh. I told them that, after the visit from Lord Brasvay, things might be a little tense. If they could allay other people’s fears, make sure no one did anything stupid, and remained in good spirits, then that would be great.

I didn’t have to worry about the trio. They all practically saluted like soldiers, fist to chest followed by a small bow, their faith unshakeable as a mountain.

With their promise that they’d make sure everything was alright, I left for the Mage Guild with a light chest.

This time, I made sure to pre-emptively climb up a few storeys of height to set my path. I wasn’t getting lost again. Although, I didn’t need to bother. Closer to the gate to Ring Three, people were gathering in a crowd. Someone nearby said there was a special arrival on the way, and at first, I wasn’t sure what they meant, though I saw the guards keeping the road clear.

Then I spotted a distant wagon coming up the mountainside. I frowned, unsure what I was witnessing.

As the strange wagon got closer, I started understanding what was going on.

The wagon itself seemed like a heavy thing with a bed and wheels made of stone, though carved to resemble traditional wooden wheels. It was the rest of the wagon that was really eye-catching. The top was constructed from glass, with thin ribs forming the frame that held the brittle structure in place.

As the first wagon rumbled past, I was sure I spotted actual living plants inside. Green and lush and maybe slightly wet, though that might have been a trick of the light through the mostly transparent panes.

Oh, and there were Anymphea riding at the front of the contraptions of course, but I had expected that. We were getting the first convoy of the Bloomwagons, besides the ones that might have come in with the Anymphea who had attended the meeting.

I watched them pass one by one. There weren’t enough for there to be all the Anymphea, because I remembered one numeric detail that the entire Anymphea tribe were almost three thousand members strong. The wagons had carried maybe one one-hundredth of that number, going by the Anymphea hanging out in the drivers’ seat of the Bloomwagons.

Which meant there were a lot more out there. I looked down the road, and down the mountainside. Somewhere far off, the Blight Swarm was gathering.

I needed to be ready.