Unbound

Felix cleared a space for himself on the forge floor before he sat, his thoughts a whirl of nervous anticipation. He had yet to use any of the Skill evolutions he had earned from their combined Titles, and he was…unsure of how it would unfold.

"Alright, everybody just stand back," he said. Harn and Evie were quick to oblige. Evie even took a couple of extra steps back.

"No chance I'm tangling with whatever you got going on there," she said.

"Appreciate the confidence," he replied dryly. Evie winked at him.

"All right, kid, do your thing," Harn said. The man’s face was studiously neutral and his voice was easy, but anxiety slipped through his guarded Spirit. Felix nodded and clenched his jaw.

He refused to disappoint.

"Okay, time to do this. System, I wish to evolve my Skill,” he said to the air. He was answered quickly.

Due To Title Bondbreaker And The Audacity Of Mortality You Can Evolve Four Skills!

Which Skill(s) Do You Wish To Evolve?

Spun up all around him were the planets of his Skills, and Felix realized he had sunk into his core space. He hadn’t even felt it. Shaking off that disorientation, Felix grasped the Skill marked as Theurgist of the Rise, which looked like a planet with a single ring around it, like Saturn—if Saturn were solid gold and dripping a waterfall of light from its rotating ring.

Felix? What are you doing?

Relax Pit. I’m going to evolve one of my Skills with our Titles.

You Have Chosen To Evolve Theurgist Of The Rise (Legendary).

Y/N

Yes.

Warning!

Energy Is Required To Evolve A Skill.

Energy Will Be Taken From You Until Either The Skill Is Complete Or You Have Perished.

Do You Wish To Continue?

Y/N

That doesn’t seem fine. Wait for me to come back, I can—

No, keep doing what you’re doing. I’ve been through this before. System, continue.

Evolution Has Begun…

Felix had been through several Skill evolutions in the past, and most of them had hurt. A lot. This one was no different. Pain flowed through him as if he’d touched a live wire, blanketing his entire Perception in a riot of colors, each different hue a new and more hurtful sensation. They gathered upon his golden planet, its rings now bursting in all directions. Essence, what little remained, was sucked clean from his Divine Tree and his Mana and Stamina dropped too fast for his insane regeneration to compensate.

Felix. Beware—

The words from his Hunger vanished as sound was pulled into the Skill. Everything was, until there was only Theurgist of the Rise. Only the pain.

Within that mute agony, Felix saw what he could only describe as an…egg. Without words or messages, Felix knew that it was the Audacity of Mortality Title. The egg cracked within the Void all around him, and beams of incomparable power flowed from it like a torrent. A hurricane ripped outward, spinning around his core space but focused entirely on his Theurgist of the Rise.

Felix screamed, but his voice made no sound. His visualized Body was barely hanging on, as pieces of him were pulled up and into the hurricane. The golden planet was too. Its rings vanished, then its gleaming surface in strips and streams, until only the unadulterated patterns remained.

Then it all reversed.

The power went back, laden this time with those gale-force winds as the visualized facade was reassembled atop the wirework frame of its pattern. The sound returned, and it was a triumphant blare that shocked Felix’s senses until his ears rang. Land and sky and sea flowed onto his Skill, building upon its shape with new, unheard of strangeness. Felix smiled despite the pain. It was glorious. It was—

Wrong.

The Harmony that sounded around him was complete—save for a single piece. A descending note that could have been missed, would have been, had it not been for his Affinity. Felix felt the note, the burr of it in his Mind and Spirit, and knew it for Dissonance. It howled at him, a big red arrow through the blinding hurricane, impossible to ignore.

Just as the same note flagged upon another point in his core space. Another anomaly. A smaller Skill, one barely a moon compared to the planet of Theurgist of the Rise. It orbited nearby, and it pulsed in counter rhythm with the Harmonic hurricane. The same rhythm as contained in that strange, descending note.

Invocation. A Skill utilized to activate sigaldry once inscribed, bringing arrays to life by flooding them with Mana. He knew, without a doubt, that it could join his new pattern. That it needed to join.

Felix seized the Skill. Without questioning, he pressed them close, his Intent and Will pitted against the riot of the System-born evolution. Bits of Invocation tangled with the evolving Theurgist of the Rise, but the moment they paired the storm around them tore them apart. The Grand Harmony sang out in offense, but Felix listened instead to the dark undercurrent that urged him onward. Dissonance railed against the storm, seeking its kin as pattern found pattern. The System sent pain through him, bursting flesh and organs within his Body, but he couldn’t stop. Not anymore.

WARNING!

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Dissonance Detected!

Combination With Evolutionary Process Is Not Recommended!

Death Will—

Quiet! Felix could feel that this was right, that it was necessary. If he were to repay Harn for all that he had done, all that he had sacrificed, then he couldn’t stop now. I haven’t died yet!

Acknowledged, Felix Nevarre.

All Choices Have Consequences.

Pit couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. He could only vent the excruciating agony that his Companion endured.

Hallow covered her ears as Pit screeched out into the forest. Pain rolled from him like a physical force, pummeling the Homunculus down into the dark loam as the underbrush was torn asunder.

Vess lost grip on her partisan and fell to her knees, Yin’s concerned cries falling on ears that could only perceive a vast darkness. Eyes that could only see a storm of gleaming thunderflame clash against the unending might of a golden hurricane. She—

—stumbled across the earth, chitin unfinished. Beef grasped his throat, his chest, searching for a wound that wasn’t there. He panicked, terrified that he was dying, and he—

—grabbed the edge of the worktable, his body only held up by the fact that he was sitting already. Harn’s head rang like a bell.

“Felix,” he croaked. “Kid, you’re—”

“—makin’ me angry!” Evie groaned. She was on the floor, though she couldn’t remember getting there. That idiot sat close by—too close—wreathed in red-gold flame and blue-white lightning like he’d swallowed a storm. “You stupid sonofa—”

“—Felix! It’s definitely GAH—” Atar convulsed atop a building, and the snow around him burst into steam all at once.

“Felix hasn’t returned,” Isla said, staring at the mage in growing fear. “What is this?”

atar, release me! you cannot endure it all! she sees us!

“It’s Felix,” Atar repeated, and he spat blood onto the rooftop. It boiled away. “He’s—”

“—burning up,” Imara said, staring at her hands. Devoid of gauntlets, they were engulfed in red-gold fire as if they were torches. It hurt, but the pain couldn’t touch her. “Do not run. I am fine.”

“Is this a gift of the Pathless?” Bellar asked, frozen halfway to the tent door. He waved down the guards that had lifted their hands, and their Skills faded away.

Imara didn’t answer at first, too Intent was she on the flames. Lightning sparked among them, charring the edges of her fingernails. She could…feel him. The Unbound. He stood like a watchfire among the peaks, a blinding beacon for all to come and witness him.

Nevarre…Who are you?

She looked up. “He is closer than we imagined. The southernmost point of the range. We will find Felix Nevarre there.”

You Have Combined Theurgist Of The Rise (L) and Invocation (R) Into Glyph—

ERROR!

Evolution In Progress!

Combination Rejected!

All at once, awareness flooded through Felix at the same time that the agony abated…right as a fissure spiked through the Harmonic hurricane and ejected Invocation’s whirling pattern.

Felix grasped at it, but it blasted through his Will and Intent like they were tissue paper. It crashed into his dual cores as they spun in counterpoint, ricocheting from the roots of his Divine Tree, before spinning around the outer circumference of his Hunger.

Before Felix could so much as protest, a rumbling roar resonated across his core space.

No, Hunger uttered. It was a deep, basso rejection. Not For Me.

Instead of being pulled inward into the event horizon of Hunger’s maw, the Skill was ejected, sent hurtling back into the storm. Felix quickly joined his Will to Hunger’s own, and together they blasted through the System’s resistance.

You will not deny this! he roared into the Void. It sings!

With a reverberating snap the patterns joined, and the hurricane spun into overdrive. It grew not outwards, but upwards, tightening all the while around the singular Skill it now wove into being. Harmony and Dissonance sang a complicated melody and counter beat that filled every inch of Felix’s awareness.

This is…familiar.

It was a song he had heard in pieces here and there, only now in greater form. It swept him up and refused to let go as the hurricane descended again, and this time its winds condensed upon a single point.

All of it collapsed, and his core space was bathed in an explosion of incomprehensible light.

Felix gasped back to awareness of his body, and he blinked open crusted over eyes to witness a crowd of terrified onlookers. Harn and Evie were among them, and both looked like they’d gone three rounds against the Unending Maw. They were sweating and shaken.

“What’re you doin’, gawkin’ at us for?” Harn demanded of the gathered Dragoons. “Get back to work!”

They traded looks but did as they were told and retreated to the farther end of the forge. Once they’d gone, Evie hissed at him through her teeth.

“What in the blighted Night was that?”

“Did I—Did you feel that?” Felix asked, confused.

“Kid, whatever you did, it poured across your Links to us,” Harn said.

“You spilled all over us like a leaky cup!”

Felix cursed. He hadn’t expected that to happen. Pit? Pit are you okay?

Am I okay? his Companion asked, his anger palpable. You felt like you were going to die!

I wasn’t. I was fine. Just feeling a little…drained, now.

Rest. Eat someone. You need energy.

I know. Felix stretched his shoulders with a groan. I will.

“Did it work at least?” Evie asked, snapping her fingers in front of Felix’s face. “Stop talking to your bird and tell us. You owe us after all that.”

“It—” Felix stopped as he realized he had notifications lingering just outside of his sight. “One second.”

He brought them up.

Congratulations!

Evolution Complete!

Your Combined Skill Has Evolved!

Level Is Retained!

New Skill!

Magus of the Grand Design (Transcendent), Level 98!

You have heard the hidden song and have gleaned a piece of its truth. You have walked to the edge of your ancient path toward mastery, avoiding Ruin with every step. Stand tall, Magus, as the pattern of magic is laid bare before you.

“Yeah. It worked,” he said, before sending a piece of his Mind down into his core space. Where once it was a glittering gold planet with a single wide ring…now it was gold streaked by crimson and blue, three times the size and surrounded by nine thick rings that spanned its circumference from multiple directions. The rings rotated and spun, moving in a strange pattern around the planet as a deep rhythm sounded within its depths.

“It worked really, really well.”

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