Alex breathed heavily, huffing through the exertion of the climb.

“You know,” Mark said from somewhere below him, “I finally get stats and have superhuman strength and the stamina of a triathlete, and we’re still finding absurd stuff to climb.”

“Just think of it like a game,” Sam said. “Your stats are better than mine, and you have two earth skills now. Shouldn’t this be your perfect environment?”

Mark grumbled a few times, and Sarah laughed as she paused on the ledge next to him.

Alex looked over his shoulder from where he currently hung, suspended on the wall. He felt like he should be wearing webbed red tights from the way he was anchored to the cliff face. His left hand was pressed flat against the cold stone, with his corresponding foot barely perched in a crack.

Mark looked up, eyes drawn by the movement. The others followed suit, and Sam waved at him with a smile, somehow enjoying the outing.

“Then there’s you,” Mark said with a slight whine. “What are you even doing? You could just use your movement skill and be at the top as fast as Olivia was.”

“Eh, I wanted to make it a challenge. And I need to practice more with my anchor spell, it’s a bit different from what I thought it would be.” As he said it, the spell binding his hand wore off, and he started to fall backward. He swiped his hand once at the wall ineffectually and almost lost his cool.

Activating his [Spell Storage], the anchor spell formed under his right foot in the blink of an eye. The spell activated, and his foot found purchase on the smooth surface a few feet above where his left foot still hooked into the crack.

His arms flailed in a circle before he caught his balance, engaging his core muscles and looking back down at his friends. The Magician’s Cap on his head almost fell, but he caught it and couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation.

“Okay, this is cool,” he said to himself.

“Whoa!” The chorus of voices could be heard below him.

“Dude,” Mark said in amazement, “can… can you walk on walls now?”

Alex laughed louder in response, feeling the blood rushed to his head. While he wasn’t upside down, he wasn’t completely horizontal either. He cast the anchor spell on his foot again, worried that it would run out once more. “I guess this is a good way to practice, isn’t it?”

He focused on moving the rest of the way up the cliff face one step at a time, alternating feet and reapplying the spell circle as necessary. When he was near the top, he saw Olivia waiting for him. She sat at the edge, with both legs hanging off the side, smiling down at him.

Covering the last bit of distance was tricky, but he managed not to make a fool of himself as he crouched to reconnect his hands to the edge of the lip and lift himself up onto the small plateau on the side of the rocky mountain they were on.

As he crested the side, he rolled forward on his shoulder and onto his back. He stared up at the grey sky and drew in lungfuls of breath while recovering. Olivia and Valtherion’s faces appeared in his vision, and his smile renewed and was filled with genuine mirth.

“That was pretty damn cool, not going to lie.” She brushed a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “When are you going to teach me how to do some of that fancy magic?”

He moved into a better position to look at her, one leg hanging off the cliffside, with his other leg bent to the side. Valtherion was wrapped around her shoulders once, but he was so long that his tail came down from her shoulder and back to rest on the ground. His front-facing wing almost covered her like a blanket. “You want to learn? I just gave a bunch of notes to the Hunters, so the teaching portion of things is fresh in my mind. What’s your Willpower?”

She paused to check her status, answering, “Seventy-one after the fruits and body tempering.”

“Hmm, I think it’s too low for you to start learning. I recommended the Hunters get to around 150-250 before starting. That’s around what I had when getting mana threads.”

She whistled. “That seems really high.”

Bored with the conversation, Val slowly slid from her shoulders. He flapped his wings, the wind buffeting both of them and causing Alex to grab onto his hat. The growing amphiptere did a lap overhead before folding his wings close and diving over the side of the cliff.

I really need to teach him to move away from people first.

He brushed the dust from his lap before answering. “It is, but it doesn’t matter how much someone learns; if they can’t use the threads, they can’t cast the spell. You might be able to learn it earlier, but I’m pretty sure I could only do it because my magical control was so high. You might be able to use the System to guide your skill evolution toward something similar.” He teetered his hand back and forth. “But that might take more than one evolution… then it would probably just waste your time and focus. Probably better to wait to get the stat higher. Then, learn the basics of each kind of magic during that downtime. At least, that’s what I recommended to the Hunters in case they had anyone interested in learning.”

“What about unstructured magic? You can use them with your illusions now, so that must be possible.”

“Yeah, it’s possible,” he said, activating the skill combination for emphasis. His duplicate smiled, waved, and lazily stepped from the side of the cliff. Instead of falling, it quickly wove a spell circle and cast it at its feet, sticking to the wall like Alex had.

Olivia looked back and forth between the two. “It’s still so strange to see that. Why does it seem so much more confident than you?”

“What do you mean? Because I know that it’s a clone. If it falls, it just bursts into motes of mana; if I fall, I break bones.” They both laughed.

“Why don’t you use it more? I’ve only seen you use it in some of our fights, and didn’t see you use it all the last few days while we were in the camp… other than that one time.”

“Trust me, I want to use it a lot more. This entire environment is really just not great for it. I can use it to go out and scout or look around, but the Night just gets so drawn to the mana. So it feels like right now it’s more of a decoy than anything. And I only wasn’t using it in the camp, because I want to keep it as something of a secret.”

“Why?”

“It might not be worth it in the long run, but if barely anyone knows that I can use this kind of skill, then whenever they see me, they’ll think it’s the real me. They’re so fragile right now that it’s a risk even to have them in a crowded area. If someone bumps into it, it’ll shatter. Same thing if someone looks at it with mana sight, they’ll notice something is wrong.” The point caused him to remember when he’d first returned from the Celestial Rift before Christmas. “Remember your reaction when you saw I had a mask on? What if you saw someone’s entire body covered in mana the same way?”

She snorted. “Yeah, I thought you were a shapeshifter.”

Mark’s hands slapped on the lip of the cliff. With an effort, he hauled himself up, rolled, and came to rest in the same way Alex had. It was strange to see him without his armor on, and despite how large he was, something about the lack of armor made him seem smaller. “Holy crap,” he said.

“I get what you mean, bout keeping it a secret,” Olivia said, drawing his attention back. “Keeping it close so others don’t know you have access to it makes sense. But I don’t get why you’re not using it here more. Just don’t keep it near us, and you could use it to train, right?”

“I suppose,” he answered.

“Really, though. I mean, if I had the ability to split what I was doing and practice all the time, I would. What do you lose by sending it out to practice? Mana?” She shrugged. “So what, it regenerates. And who says you have just to get poofed each time you send it out? Why not use that as training, too? Practice running and evading the monsters without your skills. See how long you can go without getting hit. Hell, see how many of them you can kill with just the use of your spell circles. You have a few of them to use now, use them as live training.”

Alex was nodding along, the gears of his head turning in time with the conversation. “Yeah… I do like that idea. I mean, I would really only get the information back; it’s not like I’m really training my muscle memory or anything, but it would be really useful to get those instances of training in my mind. What combinations work, how to move, when to cast, all of that stuff.” He paused and shook his head. “Yeah, I should have thought of this. Muscle memory won’t carry over, but my mental or magical training should. I used the mirage to train my magical control and refine the use of mana threads without a skill. I could keep practicing building the circles in a live fight with this method. Damn… even doing it in reverse. I could just park the mirage in the colony and keep it going all the time unless I need the extra processing speed.”

He gently pushed the thought toward his mirage, knowing that it would feel like a mental prodding to check the shared memories on the other end. Understanding dawned on it, as it had with him, and it pushed off from the wall and formed a breeze spell circle in the air.

Alex’s eyes widened as he watched. Just before it landed, the spell circle activated, and from their high vantage, a huge plume of dust from the mountain’s base bloomed into a cloud. It hid the landing from their eyes, but as he felt his consciousness snap back to his body, he groaned.

Olivia continued to watch the cloud, waiting for it to disperse for several more seconds. As it settled, there wasn’t a sign of the mirage.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

He was already shaking his head while creating another mirage next to him. When it appeared, it moved off again, making its way down the side of the cliff in a more controlled manner.

Olivia laughed. “What the hell was that?”

“I guess I decided if the goal was limit testing, there wasn’t a reason to wait until we found monsters.”

Still laughing, she watched as Mark joined them, wiping his forehead with the collar of his shirt. They made idle conversation and enjoyed the view over the landscape while Sam and Sarah finished the last part of the climb.

When everyone was together, they moved away from the ledge and toward the small mountain spring a short distance away.

“Wow, this is amazing,” Sam said. He moved to the edge of the water and tested its temperature. “It feels great.”

“We’re not here to take a bath,” Alex said in exasperation. “You guys are getting obsessed, I swear.”

“This place is so dirty. Even the creatures are messy to fight. I’m sure that there is a bit of a compulsive habit being formed in the group,” Sarah said.

“Why are we here?” Mark asked.

Alex gestured to Olivia, and she waved the group to join her on the far side of the plateau. The outcropping of rocks that they stood on was a round platform extruding from the mountain before it continued to climb. “I found this place a while back, and it was the first place I came to check when we got back yesterday. It has a view that extends further into the Night territory than we’ve ever been. Look,” she said, pointing toward the far horizon.

The group joined her at the edge and peered toward the east. The terrain was a swath of grey and black that grew progressively darker as it traveled toward the edge of their vision.

“Holy…”

“What is that?”

They all stared at the twisted terrain. The distance was hard to judge from their current angle, but what had to be a dozen or more miles to the east, the terrain seemed to warp. There was no other term for it in Alex’s mind.

“There’s a ton of mana there,” he said. To his left eye, the wide area of land seemed to be coated in a purple and black mana that hung in the air like a cloud. “That mana storm is definitely part of whatever’s happening to the land.”

“Nox says that it’s part of what’s called a convergence, and it’ll be our best chance to attack Unity.”

“It’s happening now?”

“No, this is what happens before it starts. He says… it will get worse.”

“What makes this convergence a good time to attack?” Sarah asked.

There was a pause as Olivia and Nox communicated through their bond. Her face paled before she responded. “A convergence only happens for one reason, and it’s when one aspect absorbs another. From what he knows from the aspect of hunger, the natural goal of all aspects will be to attempt to reform. The convergence is a means to that end. During this period, when they try to access that power, they become vulnerable while attempting to rejoin. Hunger experienced something similar when he tried to absorb Eura's body and remnant power."

“Okay, do we have a timeline?” Alex asked.

In response, Nox emerged from Olivia's shadow. While he wasn't in as poor shape as when they'd caught up to Olivia three months ago, his condition was deteriorating. Glowing white and yellow light covered one side of the shadow cat's body, slowly spreading across the rest of him.

“He has a few weeks at most. The sooner we can go after the aspect, the better.”

“Well, you said that the convergence hasn’t started yet. That’s good. We need to spend a bit of time scouting and planning. If there’s that much mana there, we need to know what we’re walking into. Will the place be swarming with creatures of the Night?”

Nox growled. It sounded like a lazy kind of hostility that Alex didn't take seriously, but he recognized as displeasure.

“We need to make plans,” Alex told the bond without backing down. “I will try not to be overcautious. I know that you’re on a timeline here. But we really need to know what’s waiting for us. There are some questions that have to be answered before we move. We can’t run in there swinging.”

He didn’t say it because he didn’t need to. Olivia looked chastised, recognizing what he meant, and agreed with him. "Yes, we'll need time to scout. You and I can handle that over the next couple of days while we're out here."

“You want me to go?” he asked.

“I think it’s better that we go as a pair. I could do it alone, but I think you’re ability to pull in your mana will be enough to hide from most creatures out there. We can move slow and focus on avoiding fights as we get deeper. Information gathering will be the goal.

“Makes sense. I like it,” he said.

“Well, that settles it. Let’s head back,” Olivia said.

Mark and Sam both looked at her in disbelief. “Wait, really? Dude! Why did we come all the way here if you just needed to talk with him?”

Olivia laughed. “Nah, just kidding. Get comfy, I want to make a map of the surrounding area while we have this view. I wanted you guys to come to get some training in and see what we might be going into here soon. Also, Sam, you should look in the center of the pond. Nox has been eyeing some sort of plant over there the last two times we’ve been up here.”

“He hasn’t gotten it yet?”

“He doesn’t like water,” she responded.

The group stared at her for a moment, before laughing at the irony that even though Nox was a large, dangerous creature of the Night, he stayed true to his cat-like nature and disliked water. They spent the next several hours on the plateau, chatting, sparring, and planning scenarios. Sam removed his shoes and rolled up his pant legs before wading into the water. There was a single plant growing at the bottom of the small pool. It was a clear white and blue that reminded Alex of Valtherion’s fins. It naturally blended into the water, and it was one of the first untainted plants that any of them had seen in the territory of the Night.

After Olivia finished her map drawing, the group made their way back to the spinner colony. Alex felt relieved knowing they had a tentative plan and time to develop it further, rather than charging in blind.

Since leaving the Hunter's camp, he had recharged Maelis's amulet and carefully listened to the old spirit's detailed explanation of the Planetary Titles and their capabilities.

So you’re telling me that I can just swear in anyone? And as many people as I want?

“Yes, that’s quite literally what I just said.”

Okay, I’m just finding it hard to believe. That seems ridiculous. What is stopping me from just trying to swear the entire country to myself?

“Only your power and ability to do so.”

That seems insane. You said the oaths are binding and enforced by the System, right? What if I just made everyone swear an oath to do exactly what I say?

“Then they would need to do so. But you’re forgetting, the oath must be mutually agreed upon. You can not force someone to swear an oath.”

“Still…” he mumbled to himself.

“How is the grumpy spirit?” Mark asked as he sat down next to Alex. Now that they were back in the large cavern within the colony, they quickly made themselves comfortable. Naturally, Alex had gone directly to his thinking spot and continued his conversation with Maelis.

“He’s good; we’re just—” he hesitated. Maelis had encouraged him not to swear his friends to him yet, and he was heeding the warning. But something about this situation and the lack of communication felt like Deja Vu to Alex, and he refused to make the same mistake again. “We’re talking about the Planetary Title. Do you want to know about it?”

Mark looked at him closely. “Not if you think I don’t need to know,” he answered casually.

“I do want you to know, but I know you’ll think it’s cool, and I should just preface that Maelis has warned me more than once that we should wait and not do it now.”

Mark raised an eyebrow at him and tossed a pebble a short distance away, picking another one off the floor between his legs.

“The card has the ability to take oaths from people and swear them into ‘my house.’ It sounds like knighting someone in medieval times or something. We create an oath together, you would swear it, and be bound to me in some way, depending on the oath you take. It provides benefits for both of us, though Maelis is being somewhat secretive about them right now. Apparently, these benefits grow and evolve as we do."

Mark was quiet for a long moment. “Okay, yeah, that sounds freakin’ cool. I wanna do it now.”

They looked at each other and laughed.

“Not to make it worse, but I think I already know what position I want to give you,” he said with a rueful smile. “If you’ll take it.”

His friend groaned and rolled his head in a circle. “Come on, then. Spill!”

“The King of Swords,” he said dramatically.

“Oh. That’s… that’s pretty cool, I guess.”

“Really, that’s it? I was expecting a little more from—”

“NO! Okay, that’s cool as heck. I want it now. I swear, I’m going to just start screaming from the rooftops that I’m The Magician’s King of Swords. Protector and confidant to the Integration Champion, Alex the Magnificent.”

“You’re making me regret my decision already,” Alex said while covering his face.

“He’s actually not far off with that statement, kid. The four suits serve as different pillars to the cardholder. The Swords are usually martial or strategy-based holders. Typically, people who can help with protection and conflict resolution. Someone creating and running a kingdom might use them as the leaders of their military or guards. A group of people starting a private group might have them as the melee fighters and core group of combatants.”

Alex passed the information to Mark before asking Maelis about the other three suits.

“Each focuses on a different function. It’s not required, but you’ll find that the titles you can give to the court members will be better if they fit the synergy well. The Cups suit often aligns with emotions or social influence. Crafters and traders also fall into this category because ‘filling one’s cup can be a physical or spiritual experience.’” Maelis said, clearly quoting something with his last line. “Pentacles have two halves to the suit. One side is the physical or material aspects of magic, like enchanting and warding. The other half is healing magic, directly affecting the most sacred part of the physical world— life. Finally, there are the Wands. This suit is connected to the direct and naturally occurring forms of magic. Often, the creative side of genius falls into this category as well.”

“I feel like there’s some overlap here, though. What if there’s a particularly creative or innovative crafter? Or what if there’s a powerful mage who also learns how to enchant? Which suits would these people go to?”

“That’s up to the cardholder to decide. There isn’t a wrong answer, but a balanced House is almost always best.”

Something occurred to him then, and he sat up in his makeshift chair. “Wait a second. You said that I can lose the title if someone passes me in achievements related to the card, right? What happens if I’ve sworn hundreds of people to me?”

“Oaths are mutual, so it would not just be passed to the future title holder. But they are given the option to petition the new cardholder for a place in their court under similar terms. Sometimes people accept it, sometimes they don’t. The System nullifies any oaths that you had while you held the card. Those people might still believe in you and choose to follow you, but they are no longer system-bound to follow you or their oaths. Remember what I said. This system is designed to allow leaders of the world to build powerful factions and foundations for their new world. It’s meant to be used as a way to keep your title. If you’re building something and continuing to push yourself, it’s not likely that someone who is an individual will be able to take it from you after that. That being said, the time when titles are most frequently changed is in the first few years of obtaining them.”

“Great,” Alex said sarcastically.

Mark spoke up. “As cool as all of that is, what’s the next step for Nox?”

“Olivia and I will start scouting the area to the east tomorrow and hopefully get closer to the convergence site. When we figure out what we’re up against, we’ll come back here and start making a plan.”

His friend nodded seriously. “Crazy to think that we were sitting at a table and drinking beers just a few days ago.”

“Now we’re out here alone and preparing to go fight a huge monster that’s attempting to rebuild itself into something so powerful that it could kill Eura.”

“Seems easy enough, I guess.”

“I guess,” Alex agreed. At that moment, his head popped up, and his mind felt a flash of panic as the second half of his consciousness snapped back to his mind.

He quickly sifted through his thoughts and found that a pack of Nighthounds had destroyed his mirage. One had been killed, but another flanked him. While the paw swipe wouldn’t have been enough to kill the real him, it was plenty to shatter the illusion.

He looked up but saw nothing other than the dark ceiling. Activating both of his skills, another Alex appeared next to them both and gave a sarcastic salute before taking off. The other version of him left through a side tunnel that he knew would be a relatively straight shot to the surface.

Just then, a small stream of blue motes appeared at the top of his vision, flowing through the cavern’s ceiling and down to his chest.

“God… that’s so overpowered.”