The Path of Ascension

Chapter 326

The moment they arrived back into the rift, someone - presumably Baxter - whisked Allie away like a thief in the night. It was a good thing too, as to Matt’s spiritual perception she felt like a wisp of a lingering thought more than a human.

That could not be good.

Still, it shouldn’t be fatal.

Though, while Allie was certainly in the worst shape out of all of them, they all needed medical attention. Even Matt, now that he was coming off the high of combat, felt spirit-deep exhaustion grip him. His willpower felt like a wrung-out dishtowel, his armor needed some serious fixes, and he had a whole host of runic tattoos and long-term potion treatments that needed to be renewed.

Around the ship, people staggered to their feet and out into the rift proper, being bustled onto medical transports and whisked away rapidly in turn. Matt was one of the last ones out, following Susanne while he directed his armor to disengage from around him and reassemble around a nearby mannequin. It only mostly worked and he was forced to tear inactive pieces off himself.

“Oh,” Joy winced as she hopped down from the access hatch. “I didn’t know that could hurt.”

“Nice flying, though,” Susanne commented, as she waved away a healer trying to get her on a gurney in favor of personally setting her equipment on its designated racks. Matt was surprised she had enough energy to do that, let alone talk. He certainly didn’t. “I’m still impressed you dodged that [Corroding Missile]. I thought we were done for.”

“Ohhhhh yeah, rust spells are a pain and a half. The shields usually deflect them, but at that level of combat it’s best not to bet on them. I would have needed a ton of mana to fix that one up if it’d hit, and I don’t know if we would have made it to that last ship in time.”

Behind them, Liz dropped out of the ship, swooping over to perch on Matt’s arm. He gently stroked his wife’s feathers as she veritably melted into his touch, then nodded for the healer waiting on his signal to pull him away.

“What about domain-fighting it? Whenever I ran into rust, I could…” Susanne’s voice trailed away as Matt was swept into the air on a far too-comfortable transport. Below him, the landscape of Camp Lightfoot rushed by, until he was dropped into an open-air courtyard and whisked into assessment, reluctantly letting Liz go to be scanned separately.

A wave of exhaustion came down on him, nearly putting him to sleep, but he nudged aside the feeling. He wasn’t ready to rest yet. He wasn’t ready to call it quits yet, no matter what his spirit said.

Coming down from his combat high was certainly part of it, but it wasn’t the only factor. The room itself had a formation that worked to relax his spirit and the healers had activated it. Matt wanted to be annoyed that they thought he needed to be soothed, but he was tired.

Tired of the war.

Tired of the fighting.

Tired of the death.

Tired of being angry.

Tired of being powerless.

Tired of… everything.

That wasn’t a good sign, and he knew it.

His Willpower hadn’t been entirely exhausted since he was on the Path, but this was as close as he’d gotten since he’d formed his Intent. That deep, deep well of missing motivation wasn’t helping with his melancholy any, and only served to exacerbate the issues he was already experiencing.

Fort Lightfoot had its share of mind healers and therapists, of course, including one with a high enough security clearing that Matt could speak truly freely with her, but he’d had enough experience over the centuries to know exactly what was wrong and what he needed.

Matt needed to win this damn war.

It was a lofty goal, but Matt felt like that was the only path forward.

The Harmony Accords and their thorough planning to counter their abilities was like a wall in front of them, but it was only a wall. They could climb the wall given enough time and blood spilled; of that, Matt was sure. More than that, he felt like it was his duty to win the war.

Matt snorted as the thought made him grin.

Not win the war, but help win the war.

Nobody, not even Aiden himself, could win a war single-handedly.

The war might have been officially started by Allie and Zack’s Ascensions, but their own coming in so close behind had no doubt played a part in the other Great Powers' decisions. If Matt had just not pushed as hard, maybe the other Great Powers might have seen the back to back Ascensions as a fluke, and not the start of a trend. If he could have only been content with living a life of luxury selling his mana, he might have avoided all of this.

Matt let the thought sit. Marinate. Stew.

He pictured himself as a decadent young noble. Even being paid just a single percent of his mana’s value, he would be able to live a life of luxury. He could be content. Know no stress or pain. Have every whim catered too.

He looked down to his hands, struck through with glowing blue veins and fractures as mana ran rampant through his flesh. His right hand was even discolored in a few places, where raw mana had burned him, transmuted his flesh to steel, turned his fingernail into mana crystal, and broken several invisible runes. His left hand was in better shape, of course, but even it shook with exhaustion and sparked with raw mana that danced between his fingers. Both of his hands were rough, hard, callused and slightly dirty. There were even a few scars he’d never purged. Looking closer, he saw more. The skin on his left ring finger was slightly different then the rest, the result of a bad healing centuries ago… Matt couldn't even remember when, but it caused the ridges of that finger to be slightly off, and the small hairs on that finger lay in the opposite direction from its neighbors. Letting his eyes lose focus, Matt could see a thousand and one other wounds and injuries he had taken in his three hundred or so years of life overlap themselves on his hands.

Then, he let his imaginary life’s hands overlap them, soft and unburned. The nails were perfectly groomed instead of being cut right back to the nail bed. The skin was smooth instead of being rough and calloused. They were the hands of someone who had forgotten what the cost was to hold a blade in one's hand day in and day out.

They weren't his hands.

And more importantly, Matt didn’t want them to be his hands.

He never wanted those to be his hands. Those were the hands of someone who didn’t understand what it truly meant to be alive, to be a cultivator. The life of someone who just let life… float by, content with what he had and without the desire to grasp for more, to challenge the Realm and win.

It was far from perfect, but if it wasn’t Matt sitting here, he was sure it would be some other poor schmuck.

And ultimately, that was what it came down to.

Matt wouldn't, couldn't, put his fate in the hands of anyone else. If he failed, then it was his fault. But if someone else failed, he would always question the result. It was more than a little egotistical, but so be it. He felt like he’d earned the right to have a bit of an ego at this point. The Emperor himself hadn’t been able to complete the Path of Ascension while Matt had.

Having let himself wallow in the dark parts of his mind, Matt shoved those thoughts down. He acknowledged them, thought through them, and rejected them.

He was where he was, and despite everything, he thought this was the right place for him. Maybe not the best place, but it was the place he was needed.

Fortunately, the healers’ report came through shortly thereafter. He wasn’t completely fine, but most of his issues were easy enough to treat. A few potions, some time at the tattooist, and a guaranteed one subjective month of rest should be enough to get him back to fighting shape. One month subjective… wasn’t a lot of time, honestly. It would be enough to get his willpower above the absolute bottom of the barrel, but he’d still need to be very judicious with his Intent usage. It would have been better if they’d been able to have a month or two objective to recover, as a year would get him into a substantially more comfortable level of exhaustion.

They needed the break, and could use ten times that amount of time to really recover, but they all knew the war wasn’t going to wait for them to be in perfect condition before things kicked back into high gear.

That was why they needed to recover as quickly as possible.

After a couple of hours getting his runes put back in place, Matt flew off into the grasslands that surrounded the base of Camp Lightfoot. Then checking how much room he had, he flew a few times farther away, all the way to a valley that they used for training on occasion. No one would miss the place if he accidentally filled it in.

It came down to Domains.

Domains were special. They were one's connection to the realm itself.

A Concept was who you were, an Intent, who you wanted to be.

Matt was endless and dauntless.

The world around him fell away. He didn’t need to close his eyes, but he chose to instead interpret his senses the way his Domain saw things.

Mana flowed around him, wispy and rare inside a rift closed for this long. Light beamed down on him, shadow where it didn’t fall, and illusion on the hazy edge of illuminated and shaded. Air swirled around him, vague impressions of water on its breeze, and where it impacted the earth around him. How much, or what kind of mana was there didn’t matter. He had more. He alone was a brilliant whitish-blue, his cores radiating their power throughout his entire body and beyond. He was the source of creation, the source of magic.

And he let it flow.

His mana spilled out, illuminating his surroundings for brief moments before it raced away, radiated into the distance to enrich everything there was. Along the ground, he created a thin barrier of mana crystal, just a foot or two thick, encasing everything around him in a barrier of mana crystal.

From there, he changed his approach. Instead of simply covering things in mana, he created something more useful. Finger-sized mana stones, each containing little more than a million mana, were created at his fingertips as well as along every surface already covered in crystal .

And so, the pile of mana crystal grew. Just shy of forty-two per second, two and a half thousand per minute, over a hundred and fifty thousand an hour… Matt swiftly found himself buried within a pile of mana stone. Each one was a million mana, each one would be valuable to the war effort, and Matt just kept making them.

Endlessly.

He never stopped fighting, and he refused to let something so mundane as his spiritual limits slow him. It was invigorating, and he kept at it for nearly a week, his willpower regenerating quickly, as the realm acknowledged his place within it and rewarded him with the strength needed to enact his will upon it in the future.

He wasn’t exactly ready for a fight, but he wasn’t running on fumes any more either, and that made everything feel better. The world itself seemed brighter, as though everything had been washed out but was now filled with life and vibrancy.

It felt good. Really good.

Of course, he was also buried underneath a train car’s worth of mana stones, but that just made it feel better.

With a thought, he broke the coating of mana stone around his surroundings into the same size as the rest of his creations, and pulled the 25,365,000 mana stones around him into a dedicated spatial ring. It wasn’t his normal ring but one that got shuffled in and out of the rift via the non teleporting rift breakers. He couldn't take the ring out of the rift via the ‘Allie Express’ thanks to how large it was, but it was perfect for collecting his junk. It wouldn’t do to litter.

After dropping off his mana stones with the bursar, who would send them to wherever Matt’s mana needed to go, Matt checked in on his friends.

He found Liz working in her lab but didn’t bother her, seeing she was in a similar fugue state, but harmonizing with her Intent rather than her Concept. Matt would prefer to do something similar, as acting in concordance with his Intent would go faster than acting with his Concept, but it was a lot harder to be dauntless while not fighting, or without breaking things.

Aster, on the other hand, was working at her forge. It looked like she was making a chair or railing out of twisted bits of metal woven together and cold-forged.

Entering the frigid smithy, Matt grabbed the wagging tail of his bond.

And promptly earned a hammer to the face.

Not that it actually hit. All of his cultivation was in his physical core, and Aster was a mage after all. Dodging the attack didn’t even register as a conscious choice.

Still, from their bond he felt her surprise was genuine.

“You scared me! I thought you were Allie, and I warned her the next time she scared me she was getting a hammer to the face. Fuck! Warn a girl please.” Looking him up and down, Aster added, “You are looking better. How was your retreat?”

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Matt hopped up on a nearby table even as he activated [Cracked Phantom Armor]. It was too damn cold and he didn’t want to be chilled for the next few hours just because he was having a conversation with his bond. “It was fine.” Seeing the narrowing of Aster's eyes, he elaborated. “Good, even. It did what it needed to do. I’ll probably go work on my Intent for a bit but I wanted to check in with everyone and the war situation.”

Aster nodded at that and turned back to her forge. She plunged the rod of metal she was working on into what looked like a normal furnace, but seemed to contain a winter storm instead of a fire.

“Things are decent. Allie is currently sneaking into places she shouldn’t be, but only after getting me to bring her snacks for an entire day.”

Matt snorted at the imagery and felt Aster's amusement through their bond. “Yeah, I knew it was bullshit when she said the best way to resonate with her Domain was through being brought snacks, but I did it anyway. Shoved said snacks into her non existent face when she came clean. We were really only buying time for the workers to build a simulation city for her to sneak around in.”

Aster snorted again, and Matt felt her roll her eyes. “Allie used it a whopping two times before she vanished and started breaking into actual meetings and other locked rooms. Last I heard, she figured out some way to partially phase through physical objects thanks to her fading.”

Matt frowned at the information. He wasn’t familiar with fading, but so far as he understood, the person still existed, just a little less firmly. They didn’t fall through floors or anything, and they could still wear clothes, after all.

Maybe he was wrong though. “Is that how it works?”

“No. It’s not.”

Matt chuckled. That sounded about right for what he knew of Allie and her Domain, and he couldn’t help but find the image of a mostly-transparent Allie sticking her head through the wall of meeting rooms and vaults, probably scaring half the camp over the past week with her shenanigans. Still, he figured that at least she was recovering at a decent enough pace. They had some pretty impressive spiritual healers present in the rift, though compared to what Melinda could facilitate it wasn’t all that impressive. The fact the damage had been self-inflicted also complicated things, but there were enough relevant skills floating around that Allie would be making steady progress for recovery.

Changing the topic, he asked, “What about you? How are you feeling? I haven’t checked in for too long after Eric's death.”

Aster flipped her ears in something Matt interpreted as a shrug. “Decent. I stressed my spirit and got low on willpower, but I didn’t push either to the limit. On the matter of the war, our actions kicked over a hornet’s nest, that's for sure. It's only been a day real time, but the Harmony Accords’ ship vanished after our sighting of them, and rumor has it, Manny got hate calls for what we did to the elites. They weren’t happy with the losses at all, least of all with Allie.”

Matt snorted at the idea of trying to make his enemies happy. No, he was more than content to piss them off as much as possible.

“I heard Virgil, the Federation Tier 50 tried to get Allie reclassified as a support personnel, and somehow that translates to the fact she should be kicked out of the war thanks to her Talent? I don’t quite follow the logic, but I only heard it thirdhand, so maybe the original idea made more sense.” Matt chuckled at the thought of a irate Tier 50 calling Manny and screaming into her AI. Aster chortled as well, feeling the thought. “Yeah it obviously didn’t work because duh. But it's funny. Apparently Janet is making some noise about ‘appropriate retribution’, but Winter Hornet— ugh. Winter Hornet, despite being equally upset, is sending a gift to Allie for such a, and I quote, ‘masterful use of one's gifts’. Fucking Sects and their worshiping strength. Don’t mention the gift to Allie. Please. She has been insufferable since she intercepted those messages and takes any opportunity to rub in it. So don’t give her another opening.”

Matt nodded even as it became clear where Aster was hearing these rumors. Allie wasn’t just messing around while she broke into places, but that was probably a requirement of her Domain. Being stealth and infiltration focused, the training city that had been created for her had probably been minimally helpful with harmonizing with her Domain. She almost certainly needed to be doing it ‘for real’ to get any appreciable willpower out of it.

“Well, at least she’s feeling better. How long do they think she will be down?”

Aster winced, and her tail and ears drooped. “Despite everything, she’s honestly in pretty bad shape. The healers all estimate she won’t be fully recovered for at least three or more likely four decades but…”

Matt finished the sentence for her. “We can't afford to allow her to be out of the war for the next five or six years.”

“Allie has repeatedly said she will be ready in under a decade. From everything I’ve seen, I’m… skeptical. Fifteen years seems like the minimum, so two years real time. Not great, but we can deal, I'm sure.”

Matt was sure they could. Because they had to. Ascenders before them hadn’t had the luxury to return to a rift between fights, and they could and would deal with the same thing if they had to.

“Speaking of deployments. High Command said they are going to buy us at least a month off real time by pulling up reserves and pulling back some Admiral for transport to the frontlines, so two hundred and forty days of time off at least. Any time after that, we might be pulled back to the front. All the analysts seem sure the Harmony Accords are going to start striking out and with the elites they picked up try to roll over us, given the opportunity.”

Matt mulled that over. “All of them?” At Aster's agreement, he spoke his thoughts out loud. “Seems odd none of them think the elites will spread back out. Sure, it opens them up to being ambushed, but the enemies must know Allie won’t be in great condition. Even another year or two would help them right?”

“No clue, but it's also only been a single day outside. For all we know, they will all change their minds next week.”

Seeing Aster finish the piece she was working on, Matt gave her tail a small tug. “Take a break and I’ll make us something so we can have lunch.”

Lured by the temptation of food, Aster followed him out and by mutual unspoken agreement they turned the conversation to lighter topics.

Matt was halfway through Aster's panini when he felt the ghost of a breeze trail across his neck. “Allie, if you want lunch, take a seat. No need for dramatics.”

“You're no fun. Guess what?”

“I already know about your reward.”

“Aster what the fuck? I wanted to tell everyone!”

“You have told everyone. That’s—”

“No, I didn't get to tell Matt! You ruined my moment to showboat. How could you?”

Hearing Aster take an extra deep breath, which could only mean she was about to go on her own tirade, Matt interjected. “What do you want on your sandwich, Allie?”

Except, he was a moment too slow, and Aster went on a roll. Knowing what Allie normally liked, and not feeling like making anything too fancy, he weaved chicken and spicy cheese through the dough and tossed it in the oven, filling the air bubbles that formed as the bread rose with an aerated gravy, and mixed up a bit of fresh cheese while the sandwich cooked, inserting the cool dairy into an air pocket just below the peak of the crust right before he pulled the loaf from the oven.

Fine work if he said so himself.

The idiots were still bickering back and forth five minutes later when he sat down at the counter with them, but he took the opportunity to inspect Allie.

She… didn’t look good.

Not at all.

In fact, she looked awful.

She was still mostly transparent, with only the tips of her fingers being much more solid. Her cloak fluttered through her torso in a few places, which was still so transparent as to be nearly invisible. Where her sandwich went, rapidly vanishing into a barely-present mouth, he couldn’t tell.

She was even eating slowly, bite by bite, instead of scarfing her food down like she normally did.

But he knew commenting on it would only upset her. Allie never liked to be weak so he made a joke he knew she would hate. “Allie you are a shadow of your former self.”

“Har har. Very funny. I’ll have you know you are the fourth person to make that joke and the second to use that same phrasing.”

Not wanting to argue with her Matt didn't snark back. Instead the kitchen was filled with the quiet sounds of chewing until Allie said. “This is good, Matt.”

At least her situation forced her to appreciate his food. Except he thought too soon, as she added, “It would be even better if you made snacks! Scones? Scones with blackberries? Maybe even some brownies. I found some ice cream I bet would pair well with both. Or maybe cookies? Oh scones sound good. What about scones? Scones with a fruit maybe?”

When Matt just gave her a flat look, she grabbed Aster and moved her head in front of the disembodied mouth loudly whispering, “Look cute and pathetic.”

Aster started to pout until Allie said pathetic, and she jerked herself free. “Pathetic? Excuse me? When have I ever looked pathetic?”

Matt couldn't help but smile, even as he went and started getting the ingredients out.

If anyone deserved a snack, it was Allie.

She really had pushed herself to the limit, and that deserved a treat.

Scones delivered to the duo who had moved into the living room, Matt went out and tried to consider how to be dauntless.

While a Domain could be anything, it had to resonate with his Intent. And for Matt, being Dauntless was more about fighting, and he wasn’t able to fight to a level that would push himself without expending willpower.

But he did know someone who might be able to help.

He found Aiden just a few miles away at a small inland sea, fishing with a tiny rod only a foot and a half long. “I need you to drown me.”

Aiden blinked at him like he was stupid before shrugging, and before Matt knew it, a pseudopod reached out from the water and dragged him underwater.

Matt felt a feather light application of Aiden’s Domain push down on him, trying to convince him he needed air, but Matt didn’t resist it. First of all, it was a very light working, but even more than that, Matt didn’t want to resist it. He wanted to push through it.

He was dauntless.

Being mortal and drowning was perfectly fine, so long as he pushed through it. Drowning could not stop him. He was always moving forward. He was unstoppable.

It wasn’t perfect, but there was a significant harmonization with his Intent, which further accelerated his willpower recovery.

Matt wished he could make mana stones at the same time, but that was currently impossible.

He could make mana stones, that was his Talent doing the hard work, but despite his efforts in the past seventy years, he hadn’t been able to figure out how to use his Concept and Intent at the same time and therefore wouldn’t get any extra harmonization out of it.

That was the risk of opposite Domain paths like that. They were polar opposite, and therefore couldn’t exist at the same time. There were a number of ways to solve that issue, and the most common approach was one Matt didn’t want to fall back on, to make his Aspect the mix of his Concept and Intent. He couldn’t see it as anything but a waste, to utilize the highest form of Domain in this realm to look backwards instead of striving further ahead.

There weren’t exactly guides on how to do it, but there were people in the Empire that Matt could probably have gotten as teachers to help him along. But what he was more interested in the information One Step Behind had given him about forming a Power, the perfect blend of one’s Talent, Domain, and if they had it, a bloodline. Some natural treasures could also be involved… but Matt didn’t care about going that far right now.

Mirror Concept and Intents were far, far more common in Guild space thanks to their outlook on Domains, and a good number of those who tread down that path figured out a way to settle the inherent contradictions of using two polar opposite powers. For the successful, the rewards were… bountiful.

Most who succeeded ended up creating what was almost an extra Domain power, a half-step between their Concept and Intent. It wasn’t a unique stage of a Domain, but something between.

The example he’d been told about had been the possibly apocryphal Wendy Firestorm, a fire elementalist who’d developed an ice-based Intent. The creation and destruction of temperature, and allegedly the creator of the thermal aspect, she had eventually combined her fire Concept- which just increased the temperature and resilience of her flames - and ice Intent - which gave her near complete immunity to ice attacks - into an ability which let her simply break things directly, shattering them like glass. Stone, metal, even magic just broke with a flex of her Domain.

With her Aspect, she’d taken that power and expanded it, gaining a myriad of explosions and becoming one of the Guild’s foremost fighters for ages until she eventually ascended, supposedly in an explosion of fire and ice.

That was Matt’s goal.

He wasn’t sure what a mix of his Concept and Intent would create; a white hole and a black hole would either cancel each other out or create something like an ouroboros. Both had plenty of possibilities.

What made things worse was that Matt had felt like he was just a step away from succeeding for the last forty years or so. It was like he had all the pieces of the puzzle laid out, and simply needed to slot the last one for everything to click into place.

Beyond that, if he could figure out some way to get Intent-level recharging from being endless, he could easily double how quickly he was recovering. Possibly more than that if he got some recovery from harmonizing with his merged Domains as well. That was pure speculation, as the information hadn’t covered anything about that, but it made sense to Matt. If the mixed portions of the Domain worked like he thought they did, he should be able to harmonize with all three and boost his willpower recovery like that.

Matt had known this became more common as one progressed through the stages of a Domain, yet he couldn’t help but remember the first time he had used his Concept at Travis and Keith’s house, and had gotten light headed and had a nosebleed from the incident. Back then, just sitting down and meditating for ten or so minutes had seen him back in ok shape.

He wished it were that easy now.

After spending a few days getting drowned, Matt tapped out to Aiden’s annoyance. Apparently, drowning people was a good way for Aiden to recover his willpower, and they weren’t letting him out of the rift to go and actually drown people and/or monsters.

For all that he liked the man, Matt wasn’t going to volunteer for drowning duty for more than he had to, which seemed to baffle Aiden.

Thankfully, Liz was finished with her own work by the time Matt got back to the house.

The moment he got back, he was promptly kidnapped, and the two of them absconded deep onto the rift to spend some alone time together.

One of the family members who lived in the rift had long since found a nice string of tropical islands in one of the planet sized oceans that the Tier 35 rift contained, and the area had been turned into something of a resort for those who wished to get away.

Landing at one of the uninhabited islands, Matt used a gust of [Air Manipulation] to clean the dust and sand out of the house while Liz pulled a fluffy cloud out of her spatial ring to replace the bed.

Once they were done, they made their way over to the shore and just laid there together.

What started as Matt trying to bury his toes into the sand ended up turning into a footsie fight that further devolved into the two of them entangled in each other's limbs. Matt lost, but only after Liz created three more bodies to pile onto him with. He didn’t mind.

It was exactly what they needed. They might have been fighting next to each other for months on end, but they had both been incredibly busy with their own projects, and the physical closeness helped affirm their commitment to each other.

That, and it was just fun.

Taking a note out of Aiden’s book, Matt had even brought some fishing rods, and the two of them competed on who could catch the largest fish.

Matt refused to believe that Liz had caught the twenty five foot Tier 3 tuna-like fish without cheating, and the smirk Liz couldn't hide only proved his point, but he was unable to figure out how she cheated and so was unable to prove it.

With the loser's cooking duties foisted upon him, Matt butchered the fish, spending the time feeding Liz the best bits of sashimi as he went.

Eventually, their discussion turned to work as it always did, but that was fine too. While talking about nothing was fun and a good way to settle themselves, they were both driven individuals.

“Any new news on the mana types?”

Liz nodded as she chewed. “Nothing groundbreaking, but Mondino Luzz derived another theoretical lightning-based variant that uses crystal to stabilize it. It lost a bit of quintessential focus, but also added some more lateral robustness. Not sure I love it but it's an interesting idea.”

Looking over the mana structure Liz sent over, Matt nodded. He was no expert, but his time with Light working on travel mana had helped give him a decent understanding of how mana worked… in one model, anyway. He preferred to think of mana in discrete units, which had its advantages and disadvantages, but he could see how the lightning interwove between the blood and fire, and how a few motes of crystal mana helped keep the lightning stable, without chaotically lashing about and releasing its grip over its partners.

He could also see the problem. The mana structure was incredibly complex, as all such things were, and it was very clearly metaphorically tilted in the direction of being an attack, sudden jolts and explosions, energetic and dangerous. Fire and lightning were both strongly oriented with that purpose, but blood wasn’t, and kept wanting to pull it towards being more stable and subtle. Crystal, with its reflective properties, was acting as a mediator, but there was only so much you could do without reconciling the two contradictory purposes for the mana. There was some life mana sprinkled around for that very reason, as both blood and fire wanted to spread, just like life did, but it was far from sufficient.

But seeing the problem wasn’t the same as seeing the solution.

Still, it was good progress, and Matt knew how proud Liz was that the team she had bought had done so much in the short few decades she had led them. Part of it was their wealth and ability to just throw mana at a problem, but a much larger part was Liz being able to test the suggestions and give direct feedback to Mondino’s team.

If she had been there and able to work alongside them, Matt was pretty sure they would have already figured out a stable configuration for fire blood mana.

Matt set his [AI] to look for better distributions of the motes of crystal, trying to stabilize the existing construct as much as possible, because he didn’t have any better ways to help. The accuracy of such simulations quickly became suspect, but it was computationally expensive to run such tests and anything he came up with might help the researchers' own efforts.

Ultimately, it was just nice to help his wife, and that was what mattered.

They didn’t have too long to relax. But the week they did have, while not enough, was good. It reminded Matt what he was fighting for. Who he was fighting for.

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