Robert sat in a meeting room, alone with Noah. A week had passed and Titania still hadn't allowed Amanda to contact him. He barely finished his requests. Pappardelle's guidance was invaluable when crafting those satellite cores but he still had to use his Temporal Restoration every single time.
He felt like a kid again. A nervous kid, unsure if the girl he wanted to invite to the junior prom would even give him the time of the day. Damien might have scarred them for life regardless of failing to remain alive.
"Take some mental health time out," Noah said. "There's no rush. You already have enough credits for the whole semester anyway."
Robert let one dry chuckle escape his lips.
"You should make use of the new affinity you got. It doesn't hurt to get stronger. When the next asshole comes knocking, you make sure to make them work hard for their win. You should pick at least Underworld Fortitude and Unholy Strength."
The former was a body tempering that increased one's damage resistance and toughness. The latter was a toggleable buff that greatly improved muscular mass and explosive power. Both had drawbacks. Underworld Fortitude slowed down regeneration and reduced the amount healed while Unholy Strength damaged the muscles. Neither was a problem for Robert. The benefits were immense, though.
That only scratched what the Unholy affinity brought to the table. It excelled at healing; it was in the same level as the Holy affinity but this healing came at the expense of others. All healing spells of the Unholy affinity had a vampiric element to it. Most of what people considered necromancy also fell into the umbrella of the Unholy affinity.
But Robert felt tainted by this undesirable power. He started to believe it to be a punishment for all the deaths he caused.
For failing Amanda too. He kept replaying the meeting at that house in his mind. She needed support and he gave her suspicion instead.
He had no news from her this whole week. He didn't go to Samson or left any notes either. The doubt about the future of their relationship only pushed him further and further down this path. Would they still be a couple even after a whole month of separation?
To him, they've been apart for two years instead of one week.
*
*
Titania didn't have to wait long before Veronica came to open the main gate. She schooled her expression as she thanked the former bookstore clerk. She could have the gate opened by herself but she appreciated a servant with the right sense of promptness.
She went ahead with Veronica and Gerome trailing behind. Crossed the corridors and found her target's bedroom door. She knocked first.
"Wait outside and don't disturb us unless it's a personal visit from the Empress."
Both nodded. Titania opened the door and entered.
Amanda was sitting on the bed. Dark bags, sallow cheeks, hugging her knees. Titania cast her Psychic Numeromancy to obtain several pieces of information straight from the girl's mind. Average meals per day in the last week, average attempts at masturbating per day, date of her last period, date of her last sexual encounter with a male, total number of minutes spent crying in the last week, total number of times she considered ending herself in the last week, number of psychotic episodes, and total number of minutes spent outside her master bedroom in the last week.
Titania would never admit it but she was a closet pervert.
The numbers came in and were as she expected. Amanda was sulking but it was nothing that required an intervention.
"I would burn half of Italy if it granted me a new affinity, you know?" Titania broke the silence. "And yet, here you are, having the loneliest pity party this arcology has ever seen."
"Please, leave me alone," Amanda begged, her voice breaking and croaking with vocal fry.
"Good!" Titania crooned. "I see you are already tempering with your new affinity, because I've seen zombies with a better voice than you."
Amanda threw a pillow at her Granny. Titania caught it and threw it back. She cast Distraction on the girl to make sure the pillow struck true. Amanda let her body move with the impact and fell to the side.
"Well, I think I'll be on my way then. You obviously don't want neither need my help. Just a warning before I leave. You are going to lose him. While you spent a week here sucking on your thumb, he spent two years without seeing or hearing from you. Men are basic creatures, with… needs and wants we women often fail to consider. I wouldn't test the limitations of his commitment if I were you. But anyway, you are more interested in savoring all these negative emotions, they surely feel good, right?"
Titania turned and walked to the door. "I ordered a new wardrobe for you; they are coming to replace everything. It's all Frilly Gothic Lolita with studs and spikes and fiery red see-through underwear. No arcology shop or boutique is allowed to sell you anything until I give them permission. Enjoy your dark phase! But if you don't want them to toss your whole wardrobe, all you need to do is to go out and stop the delivery. Toodles!"
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
The old crone didn't give the stupefied girl any time to react as she slammed the door after her.
*
*
Robert slashed a puma in two while beams of light seared other pumas and a blob of darkness jumped from monster to monster, smothering lungs and pulling out eyeballs.
Violence spoke to some primal instinct of him. But he wasn't in the mood for slaughter. Instead, he decided to let his Puffblooms do the slaughter for him to grow stronger.
The two had tiny essence pools and grew tired quickly. Puffblooms just weren't built for battle. But these two mutants didn't shy away from it.
With the session over, he took the two back to their home realm, where they let themselves drift lazily in the Etheric winds around the island.
Robert checked his collection of Ether scrolls and found two abilities that interested him.
The one dumbly dubbed Doom Guard was an aura passive that strengthened one's minions when near the master. It wasn't a tempering technique but a toggleable spell with a low essence cost. He changed it to Strengthen Minions. Nothing but human custom enforced these names. They weren't engraved on the runic shells or anywhere but man-made texts.
He opened the scroll and read it while iRobert and Pappardelle discussed the best way to adapt it to Robert's needs. The psychic imprints conjured a model of the shell floating between them and tossing change ideas back and forth. They reduced the strength bonus, moving almost all of it to toughness and agility. The aura range shrunk to reduce the costs. The original spell was to bolster undead hordes from afar. Fifty feet at the middle of stage one was okay. The maximum number of targets was cut by a factor of eighty, to improve the bonuses granted to the few creatures Robert intended to use the spell on.
The second was the Essence Tap spell. It allowed the caster to drain essence from his minions, bolstering his reserves. This one was Evil with a capital E. Sucking essence from someone with Unholy magic was painful and damaging to the body. Yikes. Robert didn't want disposable minions and he could drain essence from his enemies with his Void spell. As it was, that spell was useless for him. So, the two psychic ghosts in the made-up university inside Robert's head set to fix the spell.
Unfortunately, reversing the essence flow of the spell was impossible. It would allow Robert to share his vast reserves of essence with the Puffblooms but that also reversed the spell's element and it required Holy runes to stabilize the spell construct. Self-sacrifice was not a valid move in the Unholy affinity's playbook.
The same was true when they tried to change a vampiric healing spell to affect others and take lifeforce from the caster. It became a Holy spell. This reversal was a phenomenon Pappardelle experienced just a handful of times in his long life.
iRobert then pointed out that an Unholy spell that sent essence to linked minions already existed. It was just that this spell created a strengthening effect at the destination. Why couldn't it deposit the essence into the target's core? What if they could make the spell take effect from the minion, making the minion the caster and targeting the master?
Pappardelle and he started to work hard on the spell's design. Casting spells originating from a familiar or a minion was not groundbreaking but unusual enough to make it hard. After hours of failed designs, what made the spell click in place was to add a small life drain effect to it. The spell originated from the minion, drained essence and a sliver of lifeforce from the master, refilling the minion's essence pool and doing a little of supernatural-quality healing.
Robert also added the Underworld Fortitude tempering to his roster, along with a modified Unholy Strength that also increased agility. He called it Unholy Vigor.
Tempering Underworld Fortitude was tough. It made his skin stiff and dry. The muscles often locked in a simulacrum of rigor mortis. His hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes fell. He could use Life magic to fix all of that, but he could sense that his body was getting infused with undead energies. One of the possible evolutions of this tempering was exactly that. Robert could bridge the gap and make his body undead. It had several benefits and harsh drawbacks, though.
Fortunately, that was not a decision he needed to make right now.
*
*
Amanda stared at the shadows of her gloomy bedroom.
Inside her Ethercosm, things weren't looking so good. A tiny cartoon man, wearing heavy black boots, and black denim pants decorated with tarnished silver skulls, a black biker leather jacket full of 1990's heavy metal band patches, a black hoodie inside the jacket with the hood up, and a fanged vampire skull mask that hid the upper three-quarters of his face floated there.
"Hey!" Damien's projection shouted. "Can you imagine some beer for me? I'm deathly parched down here!"
"Shut the fuck up!" Amanda whined.
"Come down here and fucking make me!" Damien taunted as he showed Amanda his best finger.
When Damien attempted to take over Robert's soul and was partially sucked through the Void Gates of Nirvana, he lost a good chunk of his soul. Advancement, ability shells, and, most importantly, his talent downgraded because of this loss.
Then, when he attempted to take over Amanda's soul with a weakened talent, it gave her time to bullshit her talent's description and pluck the seed out, taking away another chunk of his soul. His talent downgraded again and now it only allowed his projection to survive in an infected soul, instead of taking it over. In the state he found himself at, he couldn't even read Amanda's surface thoughts, much less be in her mind.
Damien became a refugee. No, a trespasser inside Amanda's soul. He didn't even have the power to mess with her soul constructs. All he could do was talk to her and annoy the hell out of the young woman's life. And she couldn't toss him out. His degraded talent allowed him to live there, as just a squatter and not the landlord. Small mercies.
When Damien started to call her from inside her soul, she freaked out and almost let go of the Nature essence keeping the Seed of Unholy Rebirth in stasis. It would be catastrophic if Damien managed to grow stronger by rejoining that fragment of his soul. But she had no idea of what he could do or not, so he forced her to try and get Robert to go away by any means necessary.
Amanda felt so guilty for doing that to him. And now she believed she'd lost him. She was pissed at Damien, angry at herself, and unfairly disappointed that Robert hadn't insisted on reading her mind.
She heard an Ether engine rev in the driveway. Was it the wardrobe delivery? Amanda finally stood up from her bed, her muscles complaining from the inactivity even though she was a two-star Arch. She rushed to the backdoor, still wearing her pajamas.
Titania was insane if she thought Amanda would agree to dress as a "Frilly Gothic Lolita". Unless Robert was onto that. No. Not even then.