Unbound

A small, hiltless blade appeared in Felix’s hand. It was crooked, pitted, and dull along the long edge, but he marveled at the ability regardless. Shaping things out of raw Mana was still a trip. With a flick of his wrist, he threw it down into a post of wood he’d shaped up from the deck. The blade went right through the post and out into the dark.

Hm. No problem doing damage even with a shitty knife. Felix imagined the same would happen were he to throw a butter knife at someone. A keen edge didn’t really matter when you had over three thousand points of Strength. He conjured another crappy blade and aimed it at a second target, another shaped post. This one, however, was wrapped with a Leviathan bone breastplate he’d borrowed.

He threw it a bit softer and the crude iron shard blasted itself apart.

Okay. So material definitely matters. So far Felix had only been able to conjure iron objects, and his efforts with multiple tiny daggers had advanced the Skill to level 8 in a short span of time. What about quantity?

He focused, marshaling a large portion of his Mana before feeding it through the buzzing pattern of Ferric Shaping. The Skill sang, louder and more chaotic than before, as five crooked blades appeared in Felix’s hand.

Ferric Shaping is level 9!

Oh, nice. In quick succession, he threw all five iron shards into the Leviathan bone breastplate. Putting all his Strength behind them, he was able to blast a hole the size of a grapefruit in the center of the armor.

Ferric Shaping is level 10!

Okay. Materials matter less when faced by overwhelming force. Got it. That particular fact was one Felix was aware of generally, but he hadn’t ever seen it put to the test. At a certain point, Temper and stats overwhelmed most other things…unless they found a material that could hold up. Leviathan bone was the strongest material they had found, outside the metal the Archon had produced. My bet is that Merodach had a sort of metal shaping Skill too. Just a lot more advanced.

Felix’s hope was that, with enough practice, he could push Ferric Shaping to the same heights. Better weapons and armor, formed from his huge store of Mana instead of being mined or stolen from Domains? It would be an awesome benefit to his people.

He summoned another blade, this time copying a sword he knew very well. A bent and twisted copy of his Inheritor’s Will congealed in Felix’s grasp, blunt and even vaguely rusted somehow. At his hip, a twinned, buzzing chorus sounded—it came distinctly from his two Crescian Bronze weapons. The real Inheritor’s Will was the loudest, and Felix’s Affinity translated the buzzing into an expression of clear disdain. He blinked, looking between his crude facsimile and the real deal. “Are you mad?”

Buzz.

Felix swallowed. “Whoa. Mad because I made this like you?”

Another cacophony of buzzing answered him and Felix scratched his head. He knew Crescian Bronze had a Will—it was what made forging it so crazy hard—but his two blades had never reacted to other weapons before. Felix banished the crude blade and the buzzing faded…and when he summoned another, this one looking like a simple knife, the buzzing was not nearly as loud. Nevertheless, each use of Ferric Shaping after that was accompanied by a certain melody of derision.

Ferric Shaping is level 11!

“Look, I know they aren’t good, but I’m trying.” Felix patted the hooked blade and the smaller Riposte beside it. Strangely, both weapons seemed…was content the right word?

Before their ship hit the end of their journey through the Dark Passage, he tried a few more experiments. His swords displayed zero reaction when Felix shaped shields or basic pieces of armor from the Skill, which was kinda funny. Apparently, they only disliked competition, and the armor, no matter the crude craftsmanship, was beneath their notice.

And the armor was crude. Blocky and too heavy, looking more like beat up slabs of metal than anything intended for battle. They had little appeal and their weight made them impossible for others to use. The first proper breastplate he managed to shape weighed somewhere around a thousand pounds. Few could carry it, let alone fight in it. Felix was going to have to push himself to a far higher Tier to get anything good out of the new Shaping Skill.

Ferric Shaping is level 15!

When the Sailwhale reached the exit of the Dark Passage, Felix was still mulling over his plans. Pushing Ferric Shaping to a higher level was necessary so that he could include it in his Shaping Array, not to mention the other benefits…but he was just killing time. His tenth Pillar remained un-woven, his Skill unchosen.

All choices have consequences, he reminded himself. But I gotta make a choice eventually.

He just had to ensure it was the right one.

Felix was the first to emerge from the Dark Passage, splitting the starry rift to reveal a clear and crisp field of snow. Large hills rolled across the terrain, but the storm that had plagued the area previously was gone, leaving only bright mid-morning sunshine to sparkle across the ice. The trip hadn’t taken very long for those outside of the Passage, though it had felt like hours to the rest of them. As the rest of his company poured out of the rift, Felix checked quickly with Karys, who confirmed the Passage had performed just as it had the day before.

“It appears to be incredibly stable, my Lord.”

“Thanks, Karys. We’ll talk soon.”

“Of course. I hope to see your list of Territories soon expand.”

Felix spotted six blue-skinned giants hustling over a nearby hill. “Me too.” Their connection cut off, and Felix raised a hand toward the approaching Risi Warriors. The lot of them bore spears and axes made of blue ice, but none were particularly aggressive. And they looked really young. Like really young, few of them taller than ten feet tall. “Hello there. I assume you’re the welcome wagon?”

The giant in the lead pulled up a dozen yards away from Felix before ducking his head. “Lord Autarch?”

“That’s me.”

Relief sang through his Spirit. “I am Warrior Orvar. We were told to wait here for you and escort you to Cold Rock when you’d returned. This is everyone?”

“It is.”

“I see.” The young warrior’s face was guarded, but his Spirit was like a window into his thoughts. Disbelief mingled with disappointment rippled through him and the other warriors, followed swiftly by a faint ember of something darker. “Follow me, please.”

The Risi Warriors turned and trotted back up the nearest hill, and Felix followed. “C’mon folks.”

“We’re not going to walk to this Cold Rock, are we?” Laur asked. For all that he moved through the snow easily, he was clearly unused to physical exertion. “It is leagues away, no?’

“Hm. I like it. A little exercise would do this crew good,” Harn said.

They crested the hill with little trouble and Felix spotted a small, ice-shaped hut formed against the craggy sides of the pass. Fetched up against it though, were a fleet of sleek sleds that had been made by a much more talented hand. Traces of gossamer frost were fitted around enormous, white-furred Hoarhounds that pawed at the ground as if eager to be off.

“Ooo, Hoarhounds,” Pit cooed. “They’re bigger than me. Lots bigger than the few we have in Elderthrone. Why is that?”

“No clue,” Felix admitted. “Maybe you can ask them when we get to Cold Rock.”

Pit nodded. “I will.”

Orvar and his men were busy getting the sleds ready, but gestured broadly to the crafts. “Lord Autarch. Please take a seat and we will take you into Cold Rock.”

“This is more like it,” Laur said, hustling forward to climb aboard the lead sled.

Felix gestured for everyone else to follow. The vehicles had been made to accommodate giants, so his company was able to fit into all six sleds without difficulty. Even Hallow’s Multipede was able to curl up in the bottom of the rearmost one. Before long everyone was settled in and the giants climbed into the driver seats. They clicked their tongues before flicking the reins lightly.

The Hoarhounds shot off, hauling the sleds behind them as fast as any car. A few surprised shouts came from his Claw as the frigid winds blasted into them all, but none of them fell out. The ride was smooth.

Felix, seated in the first sled with the Chanters and his close friends, raised his voice over the rush. “Orvar, where is my representative Kimaris?”

“She has been welcomed into Cold Rock already. The Coven is meeting with her and feteing her warriors.” His Spirit tilted closer to that dark ember Felix had noticed before, tinged this time by a health dollop of jealousy. “She is safe behind our walls.”

“And would she not be safe outside of them?” Vess asked.

Orvar spared her a glance. “More than monsters hunt the Hoarfrost, my Lady.”

The trip across the Boreal Pass was swift, but it afforded Felix plenty of time to read. The book from Pit was interesting but not particularly long; the information within, however, was dense. Around two hours lapsed during their snowy sojourn, and Felix read over the tome twice in that time. Understanding it, however, he felt would take far longer.

The book, titled Quintessential Skills, was written by Pagewright Tern. The same person that had put together Felix’s other favorite book, a treatise on ethics and use of power…a treatise that was, apparently, banned by most nations. Quintessential Skills detailed the basic function of Skills as interpreted by Tern’s studies. He viewed Skills as the System quantifying a reciprocal relationship between cause and effect. For instance, a person who devoted a significant amount of time to learning swordplay would earn Long Sword Mastery. The cause was practice use of the sword, and the effect was earning the Skill. In turn, the Skill would confer basic information to the user as they leveled it, which was termed as a “System knowledge packet.” Felix agreed with that; he recalled learning new Skills through trial and error and improving a lot at the early levels. Tern went on to detail how those knowledge packets had a decreasing rate of return as the Skill grew in level, and it was then up to the user to learn more actively to push the Skill to higher Tiers. Repetition, stress, and intentional study all contributed to leveling at that point.

All of that jived with what Felix knew of Skills. Tern himself admitted that this was the most commonly held belief in all the Continent. It was the following section that was the most interesting.

“Above all else, each Skill contains within it a seed of influence. Whether one calls it scope or reach or purview matters little, so I shall call it scope. The scope of a Skill acts much as a Domain does around a monster core: it creates a tiny realm that defines what the Skill can accomplish and how. This is distinct from the pattern of the Skill, though we know each Skill has a unique resonance to them. The pattern is the vehicle by which the Skill enacts its scope. Scope is a reflection of something deeper than the sum of its parts—it represents the potential of truth, translated by the potent System into a discrete unit. A Skill.”

If Felix was understanding it correctly, that meant that Skills had more to them than he’d first assumed. So if a Skill has the right scope, it will broach all three Aspects and achieve something greater. With the right power and scope combined, you get higher rarity Skills and evolved abilities. Huh. Okay. So how do I go about ensuring I can put together a proper Skill?

The book didn’t cover that, sadly. Felix had plenty of experience with combining, evolving, and even stealing Skills, but it was always a crapshoot. He couldn’t rely on luck to get him through the coming challenges—even after they’d saved this Unbound they had to get the Mote of Frenzy from the Dwarves somehow, and then there were the other Unbound to find and whisk away. Other challenges, on and on, until the day the Ruin arrived.

How many more days before that happens? No one had known for certain. Mauvim believed it would be soon, and the Hierophant clearly agreed, considering she summoned the Unbound in the first place.

Don’t worry about it, he told himself. You just have to get strong enough to stop a world-ender. Easy peasy.

“We have arrived, Lord Autarch!” Orvar shouted.

Through the icy spray, Felix beheld an ice fortress shining in the midday sun as if it were made of diamonds. It clung to the top of an upthrust rocky butte, the ice spread into crevices and cracks until the stone was all but coated in transparent blue frost.

“Gorgeous,” Evie said. She rubbed at a spot just below her chest, where her core was located. “All made of ice, huh.”

Ahead of them was a wide open field, flat in all directions around the fortress. The sleds zipped forward, Hoarhounds guiding them carefully across the terrain as trench after trench were revealed to them. They were nearly invisible in the glare of the sun, which would have given them a bad day had they blundered into one; each huge trench was filled with razor sharp ice spikes, and more than a few were soaked in dark blood.

We move forward. One step at a time.

The sleds navigated an almost invisible path between the chaos, and soon they approached the walls. “Open the gate!” Orvar shouted at the guards, and a deep rumbling sounded from somewhere above. “Open the gate!”

The giants at the gate hustled as much as any huge creature was able to hustle, and the large door lifted up as their sleds approached it without slowing down. Someone gasped as they passed through, their drivers’ heads just barely clearing the gap, but Felix was watching something else. The warriors atop the walls were as young as their escort, younger maybe judging by the plethora of unlined and unbearded faces he saw. Moreover, they looked exhausted and a few sported bandages around red-soaked wounds. They had been fighting recently.

Perhaps that’s why some of the traps had blood on them. Felix turned in his seat, gazing back out over the field. He could spot a couple larger smears on the pristine snow, but most detail was lost in the glare of the sun. Then the gates dropped behind the last of their procession, and his view was cut off entirely.

“Welcome, Lord Autarch, to Cold Rock.” Orvar said.

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