“If by striking a bargain, you mean being a paying customer, then… yes?” I said, raising an eyebrow at the dramatics.

  She pouted at that, but nodded.

  “Fine, fine,” she said. “If you want to take all the fun out of it. What did you need?”

  I extended my hand and summoned my suit, putting it down on the table, alongside the aura pin.

  “This is my current set of defensive clothing enchantments,” I told her. “While I’m going to be picking up some armor spells soon, and don’t need them to act as my sole sources of defense, getting them improved seems like a wise idea.”

  “I see,” she said, nodding. She traced a finger along it, then raised an eyebrow. The giant spider looming behind her shifted and let out a hissing sound, seemingly quite frustrated.

  “What a waste,” she said. “This is tenebrous lacewing silk. It’s absurdly expensive and takes to enchantments very well. It can even handle arcanist level enchantments, if you’re careful. Whoever sold you on the idea of putting second gate defensive spells on it cheated you.”

  I considered that, then sighed. Of course Orykson wouldn’t see it as wasteful. He probably intended for me to replace them frequently and have the enchantments reworked into stronger forms. Giving me something that was useful, but not at its full potential, was very much up his alley.

  “Is it possible to remove the enchantments and put new ones on?” I asked.

  “Mmm. Kind of. But I’ve got a better idea.”

  She swept her gaze critically up and down me.

  “You’re not a full suit guy for defenses. Trust me, I know, and you’re not. You’re going to want a duffel coat, one that can be worn pretty much daily, with a variety of other outfits. You can style it up with a white dress shirt and dress pants, or dress it down with a pair of black jeans and a t-shirt.”

  “Black jea–”

  She gave me a look and rolled her eyes.

  “Please. You’re telling me you don’t have at least four pairs of black skinny jeans? Probably with stylistic rips around the knees?”

  I closed my mouth, and she laughed, then continued.

  “That’s about what I thought,” she said, running a finger over the materials, then flicking her fingers. Shadows surged up and engulfed me for a moment, before fading away. The spider hissed again, with an odd staccato sound that almost reminded me of laughter.

  “An interesting fact about my bond here is that she can spin any variety of fabrics,” the woman said, gently patting the spider’s massive legs. “She’ll make the wool for the coat, and I can strip the enchantments on the lacewing silk and use it to create the interior lining. With the excess I should be able to burn it to create a clothing-tether effect, so that the coat’s enchantments extend out to the rest of the clothes you’re wearing.”

  She glanced up.

  “Now what kind of enchantments did you actually want? You’ve got an overclocked second gate pin that’s producing a defensive shroud around you, but is that what you actually want?”

  “It’s been useful,” I said. “I’m going to be picking up spatial armor and a more standard armor spell soon, so something that compounds with those would go well. I also use a strange variant of slow that slows everything in a field around me.”

  Saying that much about my strategy and future to a stranger felt unusual, but I figured if anyone should know, it would be the person who built my defenses.

  “I see,” the enchantress said. “How about this, then. I’ll give it some basic defenses, but nothing incredible. It’ll shed blows from a normal knife wielded by a normal person, but not much else. Instead, it’ll weave itself in with any defensive spells cast on you, or that you cast. More of an enhancer to what you’ve got than an additional power to try and manage.”

  “That sounds pretty good,” I admitted. “But if you’re using the pin and suit for the material, that should bring the cost down a good bit.”

  She rolled her eyes again.

  “Yeah, duh. Here’s what I’m thinking…”

  We spent a while bartering back and forth over the price, before we finally settled, and I paid her half of the agreed upon price. She told me that she’d have the coat done in four days, when I’d pay her the other half.

  With time running short on the clock of heading to Port Ruby and Crysite, I debated flying out and back with Kene again, in order to track down the fungal spells, but since I was already back in the capital, I decided to focus on the tasks that I had here, before I headed out.

  Instead, I turned my attention over the next few days fully to other tasks.

  First was completing the homework Orykson had assigned me. I didn’t spend the money to get another bit of structure-ore, since that felt like a lot of work for just a test.

  No, I took the practical approach.

  I used a permanent marker and a cardboard box. Running power through such cheap, non-magical materials meant that the inefficiencies were awful, and the spell core collapsed the first time I tried to form it, but by easing up on the strain I was putting on the box, I managed it.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I was left with an enchanted box. Technically. Very, very technically. It was about a quarter of an inch deeper on the inside than on the outside.

  Still, instead of needing a telluric enchanter to reshape the ore into a ring and spending days with a jeweler’s lens to trace the spell arrays into it, and connect it all perfectly, or all the time for exacting woodcarving and chalking, it took me about thirty minutes, and I’d completed his challenge.

  After that, I spent a few days training and working on the teleportation platform. With the straining of all of my abilities in the assassin’s fight, I was able to bring Mass Enhance Plant Life to ingrained, further improving my plant spells, and the movement potion from the reward took Seven League Step up to mastered. The nightly use of both Improved Sleep and Quality Lifespan also saw to their mastery, though that was much less exciting.

  Most exciting, at least in my personal opinion, was that I was finally onto the very last tile in my Beastgate. I’d be able to implement the Kirin’s spell – very soon.

  Steady improvement. Before long, I’d need to start digging out my life gate, though that was a bridge I’d cross when I came to it. For now, I had more work I needed to do.

  The day I finished the platform, I gathered my family up for the test.

  Again, I felt the massive strain and surge as Dusk and I reached to combine my anchor with the one within her, to shrink her astral plane and claim the anchor itself for her power. I was crushed down under the pressure of moving something at fifth gate mana density.

  But things were different this time. After being exposed to the strain – even if I’d needed a spark of Dawn’s power to help complete the process – it was easier to bear. I was nowhere near being able to channel the power regularly, but this time, as I pushed against the weave of space, and Dusk pushed back, our hands met, yet they were still disjointed. There was something… missing. A fundamental aspect.

  Then there was the blazing of starlight and steel, and Kerbos’ power cut the veil of space like a knife. Power soaked into him, as he became guardian of the way located here.

  The power faded, and I let out a breath.

  “Is it done?” my dad asked, looking slightly confused. “I can sense a lot of spatial mana, but it doesn’t seem all that different.”

  That hit me like a blow. I wasn’t sure why, but it did.

  To me, the difference was obvious. Even putting aside my bond to Dusk, and thus my relative connection to this space, my mana senses alone could easily tell that this platform was fundamentally different from the rest of the world around it. The fact that my dad’s senses couldn’t pick up on that…

  I gave a sad smile, then steadied myself.

  “Yes. It’s connected now. Now I just need to open a way between.”

  I reached out through my connection to Dusk, as if I was opening a portal. Opening one to the teleportation platform that we’d set up behind the cottage was easy enough, but the difficult part was the next step – opening the portal to the platform on the log outside of Delitone.

  Technically speaking, all of them were a part of Dusk, integrated with a part of her. It shouldn’t be any harder than stepping in and out of her realm…

  Technically.

  But I was trying to use this fact to forcibly manipulate power well beyond what I could normally manage, which meant I was leaning heavily on the ‘technically’, which made it less certain, and more like ‘possible at all’.

  I felt my spatial mana rush out of my third gate, as well as from my Hudau mana. It guttered dry, and I converted up both my first and second gate mana into them, then drew power from my transivy and pointer-moss, even though the moss didn’t do much for me now. I really needed a stronger mana source for spatial magic…

  Focus.

  I sharpened my will, pushing and pouring my restored mana into it, until a shimmering portal rippled into existence, and for testing purposes, I started a stopwatch with Internal Pocketwatch.

  The portal was completely opaque, much like the ones into and out of Idyll’s realm, but instead of being made of a swirling rainbow, it was a solid gold. Too rich to be called a yellow, it had an almost noble bearing, if such a thing was possible for a portal.

  “Does that really head to Delitone?” Ed asked.

  “Only one way to find out,” I said, then stepped through.

  I appeared on the log in Delitone, facing the dragon sanctuary. The portal wavered behind me for a moment before solidifying. I quickly stepped back through, then grinned.

  “Yep! It works. I got to Delitone, and then back.”

  “Now to see if it works for someone not bound to Dusk,” Liz said. “That’ll be the real test.”

  She strolled up to the portal and stepped through with no hesitation. I had to admit, I was impressed by the guts that took. The portal wavered again, more substantially, but stabilized with a couple of seconds. Liz stepped out a moment later and shook her head.

  “Primes. Well, that’s… Certainly something. I had an idea you might wind up being able to do crazy stuff, but so soon?” Liz said, shaking her head. “Not fair, not fair in the slightest.”

  I started to say that I was pretty sure Liz could still beat me in a fight, but stopped myself. I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She was much less powerful than the assassin when it came to raw mana amount and density.

  I was sure Liz was better at using her power, Liz’s legacy effectively doubled her spell output, plus her full-gate desolation spell gave her spells an edge and danger that even the assassin hadn’t been able to replicate. But was that enough to beat me? I wasn’t entirely sure.

  “We all have our skills,” I said instead.

  “Good job,” my dad said, patting me on the shoulder before heading back in to get back to work. Liz, Ed, and I chatted about some of the ideas her guild had for hiring me as a transportation expert – apparently there was a contribution point system being set up by Elio that we’d need to look at – until the portal collapsed.

  “Four minutes and fifty-seven seconds,” I said. “It took all my mana to open it, and seemed to destabilize when people went through. If we space it out every five seconds, that’s… fifty-some people I can shuffle back and forth. Assuming it can continually restabilize without increasing delays, which I doubt. To play it on the safe side, let’s say twenty?”

  “Not bad at all,” Liz said. “A standard portal Arcanist can open a way between two points for ten minutes with as many people crossing back and forth as needed, so you’re definitely more limited, but I admit that we were prepared for you only being able to take two or three people per trip.”

  “I can open more portals if I’ve got the mana provided,” I said, and Liz snorted.

  “Yeah, that’s true for anyone who can make portals, though.”

  “They need fifth gate mana restoration,” I pointed out. “Third works for me. And plants work for me.”

  “Fair enough,” Liz agreed. “I’ll pass it on to grandfather, and he’ll get a contract drafted up.”

  We made a bit more small talk before they had to leave, and I considered what to do with the few days left. I could fly back down to Kene’s, play with the blink foxes, and check in on the fungal folk village. They could likely point me to an abyssal shambler, and might have some magical fungi that I could use.

  On the other hand, I could grab the spells from the foxes while I was on my way to catch the boat in Teffordshire, right before I left. I’d be stopping by Kene’s village anyhow. I might not have the time to go wandering off with the fungal folk, but I’d at least get the blink fox spells. And that would give me time to work on my spells here, refine them a bit more. I’d made a lot of good gains, and I might be able to keep that ball rolling.

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