Emily draws the Spitter from its holster at her hip as they move from one space to the next, but instead of meeting waiting enemies, they find themselves in an empty, spacious room. The floor and walls are bare stone, and the ceiling is occupied by a single pane of glass giving a clear view of the same three suns hanging in the sky.

  The glowing doorway shuts behind them once they’re all clear, and a quick glance around the room reveals no exits or furniture, with only a few faintly luminescent words carved onto the wall behind them to break up the monotony:

  Rest and consolidate your gains, for the next step on the path will open in half a suns’ cycle.

  The room is filled with a light mist of mana, and Emily can feel the revitalising air gently circulating despite the room appearing to be completely sealed.

  “Do dungeons normally have rest stops built in?” Pod questions as he follows Emily’s gaze to the short message.

  “The last one I entered didn’t,” she responds, tasting the dense mana filling the room, less powerful than her gathering arrays, but still far higher than Ulea’s ambient levels. Her circles start to refil. “But I don’t believe this is a normal dungeon. The mechanical presence in that city felt intentionally targeted at us, and the essence reward is the exact thing I need to progress my specific cultivation. I’m not sure how it’s choosing who to target from our group, since we entered as one, but based on that message and the dungeon’s name, which some of us instinctively knew, I don’t think it would be outlandish to assume it’s trying to push us towards our next ascensions.”

  “So, we can relax here?” Ivor signs with a sceptical brow raised.

  “Looks like it.”

  Emily holsters her gun and gestures for Mensacus to lift her to the ceiling a few metres above, saving her recharging mana. Once she’s close enough, she deploys a blade from her left palm and attempts to shatter the glass. Her attack bounces off without leaving a mark, and she retracts her blade as her son lowers her again.

  “Unless an enemy forms in here, or the walls open up, we should be safe.”

  Emily leads by example and drops down into a meditative stance, crossing her legs and interlocking her fingers before resting them in her lap as she shuts her eyes. The others take up positions around the edge of the room, with Mensacus corralling his monsters into a corner and producing three plump ectolytes for them to feast upon from a spatial bag fixed to his waist. Silica settles with her head in Pod’s lap, following an unspoken command to give her mother space.

  The room falls silent as they recuperate and, after a couple of hours, her reserves now replenished, Emily opens her eyes. She reaches into her Dimensional Factory and draws out the two essences waiting there, placing them both above her lap, directly in front of her face.

  She fixes one eye on each essence, draining the mana filling her head and charging it with pure machina instead. Her kids and apprentices watch with rapt attention as streaks of plasma and spears of metal leap from the floating elemental sources, driving themselves through her eyes and spreading faint cracks across her skin from the open sockets. Her right eye draws in lightning, and the jagged lines creeping up to her brow take on the familiar fractal form of the element, while her left draws in metal, and the neat lines that grow from it resemble traces on a circuit board.

  More and more of the essences flow into her mind, and Emily feels cold pain slicing through her cortex as it's imbued with their nature. When the essences have shrunk to half their original sizes, the feeling spreads, seeping into her bones and setting her nerves alight with activity. Her bones harden and condense, slowly turning metallic, and her nerves burn away before reforming, further reinforcing themselves against the destructive torrent of charge flooding them.

  Emily takes advantage of the energy coursing through her and, once the essences shrink to a quarter of their original size, she takes control of freely flowing mana, forcing it into the carefully designed form of Faraday Cage. Runes and magical traces sear themselves into her flesh, blood, and subdermal armour, reshaping the latter into a dense mesh. She unleashes her restrained magical circles, letting her mana twine with the foreign energy and flow through the new pathways added to her magical network to sustain the defensive spell.

  The essences fade completely, and Emily’s eyes snap shut, holding in the last dregs of their power. A few seconds pass in silence as Pod and Ivor glance at each other, both wondering if she’s been successful, then a faint, electrical buzz emanates from her body, so quiet it would be unnoticeable anywhere but the isolated chamber they’re within.

  Emily opens her eyes, and Pod’s widen as he notices a vague film of distortion hugging her skin, barely visible if not for his intimate familiarity with electromagnetic fields.

  “Did you…” he starts, trailing off as she lifts a hand to inspect the change.

  “Yes,” Emily responds without looking away from her new energy field. “I successfully integrated Faraday Cage. Now, as long as I have mana or machina flowing through my body, I’ll always have an active defensive spell.”

  “Congratulations,” Mensacus says, gazing at his mother with awe and pride.

  Pod and Ivor echo his sentiment while Silica scurries over to press her face into Emily’s chest without meeting any resistance, rubbing her nose excitedly against the odd, warm tingling that radiates from her mother’s skin and purring in content.

  ˉˉˉˉˉ

  [Progression]

  [Circle/Stage:] Fourth

  Requirements:

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  -Intelligence 418/450 (Not Complete)

  -Create and integrate an innate defensive technique (Complete)

  -Clear a fifth circle dungeon (Not Complete)

  -Receive a natural blessing (Complete)

  -Decide upon and realise your development pathway (Complete)

  >Replace twenty per cent of your mass with metal (Complete) {Optional}

  >Restore your body to exclusively flesh (Not Complete) {Optional}

  >Consume the essence of your chosen element(s) (Complete) {Optional}

  >Attribute your mana circles (Not Complete) {Optional}

  _____

  A quick glance at the progression tab in her system confirms her success.

  So, two out of four optional tasks were enough to realise my development pathway? All that’s left is increasing my intelligence and clearing this dungeon. Hopefully, the next will reward us with something I can create an elixir from. Now that I’ve attributed my cortex, I should be able to neutralise an essence to consume it for mana alone if I receive another.

  Time ticks by, and the three suns high above complete their long arc through the sky. As the balls of fire slip out of sight, dimming the small resting chamber, a ripple of space parts the wall where the message was carved. Seeing the doorway to the next trial opening, Emily wakes Silica and calls for Mensacus to bind them all together once again.

  Stepping through the doorway and feeling the disorienting sensation of spatial travel, they find themselves in a rocky terrain. Glancing around, Emily sees the familiar steep slopes of a mountain range, but instead of snow-capped tips, like in Morzea, the towering mounds of rock are covered in scorch marks as thunder roars and lightning strikes near-constantly from the dark clouds gathered above. There's not a trace of a sun in the covered sky, with the only light coming from the bright tongues of plasma dominating the space.

  “I think I preferred the city,” Pod signs, not even attempting to speak over the cacophony, before reaching up to adjust his hearing protection.

  Ivor nods in agreement, but Emily takes a deep breath and relaxes as Harriet dances along the surface of her skin, leaping from the subdermal armour buried beneath and lapping up the electrically-charged mana suffusing the air.

  “I don’t,” she signs back after a few moments. “It’s a little louder, but it feels more alive.”

  Mensacus hums his approval and turns his head to the closest mountain peak. His wendigos follow his gaze with palpable excitement.

  “Here is better. There’s food.”

  Glowing forms begin streaking down the mountainside, quickly approaching their group at the base. They’re glowing the same off-white as the bolts of lightning sparking from the clouds above, but their faint footfall confirms they’re solid. They appear similar to wolves in shape and size, with light grey fur buzzing with charge and three sets of eyes sitting above their gaping jaws that hang too wide, exposing their toothless gullets lined with rings of plasma.

  “Go wild,” Emily commands, her voice loaded with mana and cutting through the noise clearly.

  The three wendigos leap into motion, shooting forward as fast as their approaching prey, moving faster than Emily could in an unenhanced state. One of them slips into the ground as it goes, mimicking the first wengido Mensacus ever created and swimming freely through the stone to burst up from beneath one of the beasts, skewering its head in a single motion before tearing into its throat with its teeth.

  The other two meet the beasts head-on, with one mindlessly summoning a gust of wind to push them forwards as the other’s eyes flash with disorienting light that halts the beasts’ charge. Neither of the wendigos flinches at the weak waves of lightning that tear from their targets’ mouths, nor the swiping jagged claws that glance off their reinforced skin. They rip through the beasts with terrifying efficiency, accurately targeting their vitals as they brutalise them without a second thought, bathing in their blue blood.

  Ivor shivers at the sight, images of the Salvia expedition flashing through his mind at the grim reminder, but the others don’t bat an eye, watching the massacre calmly.

  Emily casts her gaze up towards the clouds, noting how the snakes of lightning gathering within them are focused above the mountains’ peaks. She glances over and meets Pod’s eyes, nodding once without need for orders before kicking off the ground and shooting up into the sky, riding a wave of golden sparks boosted by Harriet’s excitement.

  They crest the mountain within seconds, gaining a clear view of the sprawling range. Emily counts tens of mountains, but only eight match the height of the one where she started. Climbing the side of one of them, she spots another person, fending off waves of lightning beasts alone, using a long spear of condensed plasma that sends out rippling shocks with each swing.

  Before she can attempt an approach, she feels a dense magical signature nearby and looks up to see a silver bird the size of a small airship cutting through the clouds, wreathed in a raging net of charge, drawing energy from the surrounding storm. The bird fixes her with a hostile glare, opening its beak and drawing in the lightning covering it, swallowing it down and causing its chest to bulge, intense light glowing beneath its skin and scattering between its feathers.

  Emily scoffs, pulling the Whisper from her belt and shouldering it while flooding the weapon with machina to Overdrive it. She squeezes the trigger, letting the gun’s rails fill with electricity before a bullet tears from the magazine, silently shattering the sound barrier before it's even left the end of the barrel, pushing the noise-dampening enchantments to their limits. Her shot punches clean through the bird’s chest, dispersing its gathered attack through fist-sized holes before it can be unleashed on her.

  The bird doesn’t drop from the sky, its fourth circle vitality preventing the wound being fatal, but reigning in the wild charge distracts it, letting the second and third shots that follow cripple its wings before the fourth turns its brain to mush. It plummets towards the ground. Emily casts a basic wind-based flight spell to halt its fall as it breaks into dust, appearing beside the corpse in a flash to take hold of the mana-dense heart that remains.

  “It left a magical resource behind,” she mutters to herself in thought. “Why didn’t the spiders? Is it because I’d already scanned them for blueprints? That is an equivalent reward for a mechanic…”

  Tucking the heart away in her belt for later, Emily confirms the closest mountain peak, along with the smaller surrounding peaks, is now devoid of lightning.

  One target down, eight to go. It’s a similar pattern to the first trial, but with an extra initial target. I suppose I have our guest to thank for that.

  She turns her gaze back towards the unknown mage scaling a distant mountain, slipping into the cover of the clouds to approach them. As she gets closer, she recognises their blue and green Morzean robes, coated in a thin protective film of lightning, but not their face. They touch the edge of her magical senses without her entering theirs, and she confirms they’re fourth circle before raising her rifle once again.

  She fires a flurry of shots without a word, watching the first few deflect off their defensive spell before the fifth shatters it as she casts several spells, conjuring jagged blades of metal coated in glistening charge. Caught off guard, the enemy mage barely has time to swing his lightning spear into the path of the sixth shot before it can penetrate his forehead.

  “What is the meaning of-” he begins to cry before cutting off as six metal blades appear before him in a blink.

  He manages to block three of them, but the others slice through his shoulders and one of his thighs, splattering his blood on the ground and giving the swarming beasts around him the opportunity to strike. His arms slow their movements as he bats away the annoyances, and though he releases a flood of mana to form into a spell, he never gets to cast it as Emily lands with a thud behind him, driving a blade through the back of his throat.

  The man’s body slumps to the ground, losing all strength, and Emily ignores his death throes as she conjures a wave of fire to force the lightning beasts back, giving her a chance to check him for spoils.

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