The next morning, Robert stopped grooming Poochline to answer the doorbell. He gathered the gold, white, and blue fur and put it in a trash bin. Then, he used his talent and used the visit to develop his imprint. It was close to complete but it would still take a week in real life, two years in the liminal void.

Upon his return, Robert cast mage armor on himself and answered it. A blade flew at his face. Forewarned, he used his main talent.

He went around the blade and checked. It was a woman wearing the Academy student uniform but didn't look like a young adult. An assassin? This soon and inside the campus?

Robert had little time to make sure. He placed his hand on her shoulder and waited. Upon his return, he immediately went back. He had three minutes.

The blade bit at him, breaking through his mage armor. The spell was in the early stages of development and was almost the same as raw essence manipulation.

He let go of the person and watched as Time wisps flew off of her. Robert got good at gauging a person's essence stores and advancement through the amount of Ether the liminal void took out of them. She was a late two-stars.

He touched her again but this time cast a spell. "Mind blackout."

Without a single protest from his inner ethics committee, Robert delved into the woman's memories. She was an assassin, hired by an anonymous source to kill him. She was paid one and a half million dollars.

He ordered her to get inside with him. In the last minute before returning again, he erased her motor skills, making her as proficient at moving her body as a newborn baby. He did keep a copy of the neural imprint as a VHS tape in his library.

She slumped to the ground like a bag of potatoes as he released her from his spell to save essence. The colors returned to the world and Robert closed the door.

"Don't use a whiff of essence if you want to live," he whispered to the paralyzed woman.

Poochline ran towards them, happy to sniff the new guest. His foresight blared a warning. He saw the woman spewing flames out of her mouth, killing the mortal dog instantly and turning his living room into an inferno.

The flames came out but in the liminal void.

Robert let go of her and waited for the void to devour her essence and part of her star. Only then did he touch her again.

"I warned you," he said with a cold, rumbling voice.

Robert didn't think he would get any clues from her. He just snapped her neck and stored the body in his personal spatial storage technique. It was more secure than his rings.

Back for the third time, he hugged a confused Poochline. The golden retriever mixed breed looked around, confused as to where did the lady he smelled had gone.

*

*

He decided to not let one assassin intimidate him and went out for a walk with his creature friends. He let the puffblooms ride the wind, Poochline and Freddy ran freely on the vast fields of grass between the buildings, and the demonic Minotaurs trudging behind him. They weren't wearing armor nor trying to learn their musical instruments.

It was a day so nice he thought it was Sunday.

After the tournament gala, all students had three weeks of summer vacation. A good portion of them remained on campus, studying and trying to better themselves but most went back home, to work for their factions. Robert sided with the latter. Though they weren't going back to Pittersville, he and Amanda were going to work hard for the betterment of Samson's corporation most recent subsidiary, Gurglock Explorations L.L.C. CEO, Amanda Samson. And Caroline was going to do an intensive work to better bond and use her pets with Noah. She was still adapting and Robert doubted she would fully change in this short vacation.

Though the outing was idyllic, he didn't let his guard down. Robert kept prescience on at full power, burning all the essence his satellite core was generating to get the warning of any incoming attack on his group as early as possible. He also monitored the "dross essence poisoning index", as the technical term for this condition was known by, of his body.

Its technical name was "Dross Essence" because this residue couldn't be used for nothing. Well, not for nothing but the Archhuman couldn't recycle this leftover essence. It was garbage and poisoned the body. The human organism sucked at expelling this degraded type of essence. And its effects were exponential. The more you had, the less you needed to reach the next level of intoxication, and eventually, poisoning.

Usually, people didn't need to worry about this thing. Even with a gathering chamber, the rate of charge and discharge of an Arch's essence pool was small enough to let the body purge this dross essence naturally. It was only with artificial sources of extra essence, like the recharging potions Amanda took in the liminal void to evolve her plants back then, or with artificial satellite cores that this became a concern. Robert thought he needed to add his contagion drain essence to the list.

Funny enough, he cycled dozens of times his essence pool's worth without a problem. Professor Andronicus speculated that it was due to either the symbiote suit, his Void affinity, or his void veins tempering. Or, more likely, a combination of the three. The symbiote fed on exactly this dross essence, taking it out of his body. His void veins could be channeling the dross essence out of his body faster than normal. Or even canceling it altogether because of the canceling properties of void flesh.

Whatever the reason, Robert had a bigger tolerance for dross essence but not even he was completely immune. That's why he created the purge essence spell.

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Purge essence took a chunk of Void essence and circulated it around his body. But Void essence, when in contact with matter, canceled each other. Though the spell was designed to avoid causing the Arch to self-delete, it still seemed like a really dumb idea for anyone else to do but Robert's body was almost half a step into the void itself. The combination of his body tempering techniques and the alchemical baths he subjected himself to allow his body to harmonize and avoid the worst effects of Void essence. Ignoring Robert's body left the spell with little to neutralize and disintegrate. The spell's only target left was residual essence in his body. Be it dross essence or foreign essence, like essence forced into his body from an attack.

And speaking of which, Robert sensed, five seconds from now, a beam of light striking him. It came from a tree far in the distance. With a sigh, he ordered his bonded monsters to stay alert, sent a silent message to Freddy to keep Poochline safe, and used his talent.

*

*

The second assassin was also wearing Academy uniforms but this one had many tattoos underneath the uniform that Robert could see through his spatial senses. Robert became furious. How many assassins would he find in a single day? Place your bets now.

Robert returned to reality behind the man, who was mumbling, "where did he go" (famous last words). He used his main talent to drag the assassin into the void and blew the man's head with a one-inch Void Punch, in honor of Bruce Lee. This time, he stripped the body of anything useful or valuable, and left everything else as a monument to stupidity in the liminal void. Including the sphere of discarded scalp, hair, and brain matter scattered by void punch. A still frame at the moment of death, immortalized.

Robert refused to cut his friends' walk short because of something as commonplace as an assassination attempt. He could have searched the man's memories but he was so mad he now scanned the horizon, the trees, bushes, and even the buildings for threats. He felt a budding pressure on his head from pushing prescience and his temporal sense tempering to the limit. Then he stopped, checked his essence poisoning index, found it satisfactory, and added jade mind to the mix.

The Burmese tempering technique felt like a bucket of cold water after a whole morning in a sunny beach. That idea made him wish he could see Amanda in a swimsuit.

After months of valiant resistance, the siege of Fort Blaze was finally over. It didn't end in defeat but the defenders of Fort Blaze had reached an armistice with the enemy. The main reason to avoid Amanda's advances were the age, her family and business, and the odd chance she would turn and change gears once they were in a relationship. Many people did exactly that. The moment the couple got committed, the floodgates opened. They discarded their public personas and revealed their worst selves.

But he saw enough of Amanda in her everyday persona and even in intimate (but not naughty, dammit) moments. He had little evidence to suspect she would change. And even if she did, he hoped he could reason with her.

He felt his future pain as a massive metal sword came out of the ground to impale him. Robert placed a wall of force underneath him and used sense life to search for the third assassin. When the giant sword burst from the ground at two hundred miles per hour, the wall of force only gained Robert half a second before it too broke. It was more than enough for him to use his primary talent.

A quick scan of the surroundings revealed no hidden person in a half-mile radius around him. Whoever conjured that massive metal sword out of the ground must be around. He changed into his fairy form and searched in the air. Nothing. It left only one place for an enemy to hide from his spatial senses and his sense life spell.

Still in fairy form and invisible, Fairy-Robert returned to reality next to Cotton and took the puffbloom with him to the liminal void. The sword was still coming out of the ground. It was coming out so fast he could see it inching upward even from the void. Next, he took coal and strapped a puffbloom to each of his fairy legs. Next time he came out, he grabbed Poochline and sent a warning to Freddy so he could use his talent.

With his squishier friends out of harm's way, Robert went back to his apartment, the arcology apartment, and left the dog and the two floating bath loofahs under Veronica's care. Then he returned to the Academy campus.

He was out for about a minute but he found one of his Minotaurs riding a metal sword twenty feet tall. The Metal affinity monster had dulled the edge and somehow welded the blade to his scales. The other two were bellowing their war cries. Robert slapped a hand to the giant sword that came out of where he was, sent it to the liminal void, then returned and rescued his would-be impaled Minotaur. He dropped him next to the other two and ordered them to climb on the wall of force he placed a foot above the grass and stay there. They could attack any enemy that appeared nearby.

To an external observer, they would see only the creatures appearing and disappearing. Fairy-Robert did all that invisible. He suspected his attacker was buried underground, sensing their position through some sort of tremor sense and launching these metal blades. They seemed to be molded with a spell and not forged. Examining it up close, he didn't see any signs of the usual forging process. The metal crystals were too uniform, signaling they were shaped by essence.

Flustered, he went back and took all three Minotaurs by dropping three strands of silk rope and having them grab one each. He led them away from the battlefield and left them on top of another wall of force. This hidden enemy couldn't sense anything floating above-ground. He reinforced the spell with half a star's worth of essence and left them there after they returned to reality.

Now, he had to go fishing. Robert took a chair from his storage ring and dropped it on the ground. Wham! A sword rose to smash the chair the moment it touched the ground. Touché. He took the sword, dropped it in the liminal void, and then dropped a barbel. Schwing! Another sword, fifteen feet of blade, erupted from the grass.

Yoinks. "Mine now," thought Fairy-Robert. "Silly human."

Wary of getting his mind messed by his form again, he cycled essence through jade mind and kept with the mischief. Just how many swords did this assassin have? The answer was two dozen. Once he collected the twenty-fourth sword, a head popped out of the ground.

"Tag, you're it!" Fairy-Robert giggled as he tapped the head and shifted the person to the liminal void.

The Assassin, an olive-skinned woman, was stuck in the impassible ground. She screamed in pain as the twenty-fifth sword refused to break through the black ground, a mere shadow of reality but indestructible from the liminal void side of things. Blood started to seep from the gap between neck and ground.

"Help me," she croaked.

"Let my essence enter your body," Fairy-Robert said, "And I may heal you."

"O-okay!" She whimpered.

Robert pumped Life essence into the woman. He not only stanched the bleeding caused by the erupting sword almost cutting her in half but he also severed her tendons, leaving her arms and legs as limp as a puppet without strings.

"What did you do to me?" The distressed assassin woman asked, fear making her voice fluctuate.

"Ha! Funny you say that when you tried to kill me and my friends!" Fairy-Robert accused. "Now, you shall tell me all your secrets!"

"Just kill me already!" The woman begged.

"No~pe!" Fairy-Robert lilted. "Mind blackout!"

He delved into the woman's mind, an open book before his powers. She too had no knowledge of who hired her. Just that she should kill Robert. This one charged two million and seven hundred thousand dollars. Got half the pay in advance, spent all in equipment and Ether supplements, then came here to waste her life.

Robert made a copy of her motor skills. Perhaps he could learn a thing or two from these assassins if he collected enough of these. Then he obliterated her head and disintegrated her brain in a single instant, the most merciful death he could grant an enemy.