Zack looked at the devastation left in the wake of the blast and shuddered. This was most certainly not his intention, but it was the end result. Snow executed the self-destruct power, and the resulting explosion had ripped apart the dungeon. Anything that lived inside the radius of the blast was vaporized, including Alex's body.

Enza's core lay on the ground some dozen feet away from Zack, at the epicentre of the blast crater. She was no longer attached to her cane, and Zack thought he could feel a distinct sense of weakness coming off her. He paid it no mind, instead turning his attention to the aurora of swirling colours above his own core.

Snow's destruction unleashed all the aether pent up inside him, all the magic he was vainly trying to contain as Zack forcibly levelled him up. There was a cloud of swirling light above the crater, already being pulled together by gravity. With a thought, Zack grabbed the loose threads and started to work.

Inch by inch, foot by foot, Zack started to rebuild. He started with the foundation, adding layers of cement and solid earth until the crater was filled in and solid. Then he got to work on the walls, trying to rebuild them from memory. He was surprised to find that every minute detail of his former dungeon was saved in his memory. He need only reach inside and pluck it out, laying the room patterns over one another to create new space.

As he worked, he gathered up the other cores under his protection. Iris was shaking in terror, her library destroyed. Glitch was making horrible noise that repeated over and over again. Enza was silent, as though in shock.

Once he had a basic structure established, Zack set aside rooms for each of the other cores and left them to recover from the ordeal. He then turned his attention towards something far more important: respawning Archie.

It was effortless to slurp up the loose aether and spit out his rabbit friend. Archie staggered for a moment, looking around in surprise before noticing that he was once more alive.

"That was unpleasant," he said, in a half-joking tone.

Zack made a grunting noise and got back to work, absorbing magic and spending it to repopulate the dungeon. He reconstituted the meadow first and started to fill it up with life before pausing. He had a unique opportunity here. He could reconfigure his entire dungeon, change the layout however he wanted, and it wouldn't disrupt anyone.

"But that aether needs to be cycled," he mumbled. There was still so much of it, and it was still trying to coalesce into something dangerous. If Zack didn't absorb it, something else might.

Lamenting his poor fortune, Zack started on the burrow. He could worry about reconfiguring his dungeon later.

"Zack? Are you okay?" Archie asked. "What happened? Where's Alex?"

Zack paused, a badger already half-formed. "Alex? He's…"

The image of Alex's shredded carcass flashed through Zack's mind. He challenged Snow in an effort to protect his friend, stepping up to someone who vastly outscaled him in power.

"Zack?" Archie's face was wide with horror, his eyes bugging and his jaw hanging open. "Zack, is he okay?"

"He's dead," Zack grunted. "He died to protect me, and then…"

Archie stared silently into space, his gaze pointed towards Zack's core room. He didn't need to say it out loud for Zack to know what he was thinking: he was considering rushing to Zack's side to console him. That wasn't what Zack wanted, though. He didn't want condolences or kind words.

He just wanted his friend back.

There was a sharp pain in what Zack could only describe as his chest. It was an odd sensation, because he didn't have a chest, nor did he have anything capable of feeling pain. Yet the pain stabbed at him regardless.

Alex was there with him the day of the Aetheric Boom. He was there when Zack was swallowed in the aetheric fires and turned into a core. He kept Zack close when everyone else gave the cores up for dead—not even Zack's own parents wanted to keep him. If it weren't for Alex, he would have ended up in the hands of an archmage sooner rather than later.

In more ways than one, Alex had saved Zack's life. Now he was dead, and there wasn't even a body to bury. The explosion vaporized everything that was left of him.

Zack wished he had tearducts or some semblance of a human body, because he desperately wanted to have a body. He needed flesh of some kind in order to properly process these emotions. He wasn't a creature of flesh anymore, though. He was a creature of magic and stone. His heart was a crystal, his body a mixture of magic and earth.

But that didn't stop the hurt.

Zack worked silently through the day, tugging hard on the aether to keep it from drifting away. He couldn't afford to let this much raw power loose into the world, not when he could put it to better use. His harvesters helped hold the excess aether in place when it started to slip from his grip. He built a larger one on the roof of his reconstituted dungeon and let it slowly draw magic in for later use.

"Zack?" Archie's voice occasionally tried to break him out of his concentration, but he largely ignored the rabbit. There was just too much work to do, too much to repair. "You can't close yourself like this, it's not healthy."

"I'm fine," Zack grunted, spinning up fresh spiders for the newly rebuilt spider warren. As he worked on them, he decided that it was his least favourite room in the dungeon. The unique opportunity to rebuild offered him the chance to exclude those rooms he didn't like, and he decided this was it.

With an effort of will, Zack smoothed out the walls of the cave and erased the few spiders he already created. When he was finished, the room was a blank box, ready to be inscribed with new creatures and designs. He could come back and change this later, when he was ready. For now, he didn't know what he wanted to add there.

"You're most definitely not fine. You're grieving," Archie pointed. The hare was standing alone in the lobby, so Zack quickly spun up the other lobby mobs to keep him company. Archie leapt aside as Bob and Jean-Claude appeared beside him, only to bump into Ember as she spawned. "Zack, you need to calm down."

"I am calm. Never calmer," Zack lied.

"Zack…"

"WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY!?" The words came out far louder, angrier than he would have liked. "Alex's is gone, and it hurts! There, I said it! My best friend, someone I knew since childhood, died to protect me. The only person who was always on my side, who loved me like a brother, is dead. Are you happy now?"

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"No, Zack, I'm not happy. I'm worried about you. You're mourning a loved one and trying to drown your grief in work. It's okay to let yourself feel this pain," Archie said. The kobolds next to him started shivering, and he gently pat each of them on the head in calm reassurance.

"Yeah, well, I don't have time to let myself feel this pain," Zack grumbled. "In case you missed the giant cloud of unstable magic hovering over us, somebody has to filter that back into mana before it spawns a nasty monster. Unless you're able to do that, it has to be me."

Archie frowned and looked towards the ceiling. Zack quickly absorbed part of the roof to allow full view of the swirling magical nebula. Archie stared at it for a long moment, before his expression shifted from concern, to horror, and finally confusion.

"Zack… There is something in there," he said, pointing.

"What are you talking about?"

"There's something inside the aether. Can't you see it?"

Zack mentally frowned and turned his attention towards the nebula. Most of it was inside his area of influence now, as he was steadily absorbing it to fuel his renewed expansion. He scoured the cloud, looking for any sign of what Archie was talking about, but he could see nothing.

Then, something flashed inside the swirling magic.

It was subtle. If he hadn't specifically been looking for something out of place, he probably would have missed it entirely. It was a tangle of mana fibers, not unlike a wisp. It was orange and red, the fibers dense and tightly woven together. It stuck out from the aether as the stable threads glowed more brightly than the loose aether around it. Bits and pieces of it were starting to fray as it tried to escape the cloud of aether, but it seemed… stuck.

"What is that?" Zack asked.

"Haven't a clue. Can you touch it?" Archie shuffled uncomfortably.

"I… Maybe?" Zack reached out with a mental hand and tried to take the strange cluster of mana. As he brushed against it, he felt a familiar warmth. "What are you…?"

Sensing his grief and curiosity, the Akashic System deigned to answer.

[Soul Node: Alexander Hale]

[The soul node of the human Alexander Hale. Recorded upon this node are his memories and levels. Without a body, this node will attempt to escape to the Outer Wilds.]

[WARNING: Absorbing this soul node will erase the stored memories but bestow upon you the spells it knows.]

[Would you like to absorb this soul node? Yes or no?]

"No! Don't absorb! DO NOT ABSORB!"

"Zack? What is it?" Archie voice was frantic now, as Zack's sudden outburst reached him.

"It's Alex! Give me a moment, I need to guide him down," Zack explained. With as gentle a touch as he could muster, he wrapped a thread of mana around the node like a lasso. As careful as he could, he started pulling the soul node back down into the dungeon. The moment it exited the aether nebula, Zack could feel it starting to fray faster. It tugged against his pull as though trying to escape.

From the system's description, Zack could already tell that if he didn't quickly bind the soul node to a body it would disappear forever. He would not let that happen!

The easiest body he could create was a kobold, so he quickly spun one up. It was grey and lifeless, standing t-posed in the middle of the lobby. Archie quickly got the other mobs to step aside to make room for Zack to work. It took a bit of coaxing for Zack to push the soul node towards the lifeless kobold body, but as soon as he attached his own tether to it, that seemed more than enough to anchor it.

"Come on. Come on, take it," Zack murmured. "Take the body, it's for you!"

He tried to push the node, but it wanted nothing more than to escape. Already its edges were starting to come undone, stray fibers evaporating into thin air. If Zack didn't work fast…

"Alex! You're not allowed to leave, you hear me?" Archie shouted.

That seemed to get the soul node's attention. It stopped struggling against the tether binding it to the kobold body, and slowly sunk towards it. As the orange mana touched the lifeless body, something changed.

The tangle of mana opened up in a starburst of light and colour. In the sudden flare, Zack could swear he saw the shadow of his friend. Then, the mana sunk into the lifeless body, the light fading with it.

For a moment, nothing changed. Then, the kobold let out a gasp as it took a deep breath.

All at once its appearance shifted and changed. Its lifeless grey skin took on a bright red-orange hue. Its eyes opened, a brilliant blue colour as the pupils shrunk to slits. The arms dropped to its sides as it looked around in confusion, then looked up to meet Archie's gaze.

"You're taller than me. How dare you," Alex said. His voice was raspy and of a slightly higher pitch, but it was unmistakably him.

"ALEX!" Zack cheered. He conjured a wisp and rammed it as hard as he could into the orange kobold's chest, knocking him to the floor.

"Ow. Get off. I just came back from the dead, give a guy some space, would you?" Alex groaned, shoving at the wisp.

"Oops, sorry!" Zack chuckled, pulling the wisp away again. "I'm just… Holy crap, I can't believe that worked!"

"It almost didn't," Alex grunted, sitting up and shaking his head. His pointed draconoid ears flopped around with the motion, then perked up as he recognized the sensation. He stared down at his hands and stubby legs, then looked over his shoulder at the tail wagging behind him. "Why am I a kobold?"

"Ah, yeah, sorry. That was the only body I could think to make for you on short notice," Zack chuckled, his wisp turning a shade of pink. "It was that or you become a clone of Archie, and I couldn't help but think that would be awkward so… kobold!"

Archie looked from the kobold on the floor to the wisp above him. Jean-Claude was shuffling forward and gently helped his fellow diminutive lizard person back to their feet, dusting Alex off before running back to Bob's side.

"I'm extremely confused about this. Alex was dead and now he's a kobold?" Archie asked, pointing at the orange kobold and then up at the wisp. "Explain."

"I have a theory, though I'd need to do some tests to further explore it. When a person dies, their body can't serve as a proper anchor for their soul node anymore—that's what that orange wisp I grabbed was," Zack explained. "If I had to guess, I'd say the soul node can only stay attached to their body for, what, seven minutes after death?"

"Something like that," Alex shrugged.

"Right. So in that time, I blew Snow up like a bomb, releasing so much aether into the air that it basically served as a net to catch Alex's soul node. It didn't matter that his body was vaporized, his soul physically couldn't leave this planet," Zack continued. "I don't think I can repeat this feat if I wanted to. We got extremely lucky and the circumstances lined up perfectly."

"But how did you blow Snow up?" Archie asked.

"Oh, I uh… I levelled him up," Zack explained sheepishly. "He touched my core and physically connected to my mana. It was… I basically dumped every single upgrade into him at once."

Alex shuddered and Archie turned pale.

"You mean you did to him what you did to yourself that one time?" Archie whispered. "You showed him billions of upgrades at once."

"Shoved them into him, too. His body could only handle a couple thousand before it started to break down," Zack muttered. "But yeah. I upgraded the spell he used to kill Alex into a self-destruct spell, and he used it to escape me. Took my entire dungeon out in the process."

"Could you repeat that feat?" Alex asked, both out of curiosity and concern.

"I… probably could, yeah. I'm not sure if I could do it without killing someone right now—I still can't look at upgrades without seeing billions of them at once—but I think I could eventually use it to directly level people up…" Zack confessed.

"We should probably keep that to ourselves," Archie said, crossing his arms. "If word of that power were to get out…"

"I was thinking the same thing. More people than just Cornelius Snow will come looking for me if they find out I can force someone to level up," Zack concurred. "For now, let's try not to worry about that too much. Alex, I'm relieved you're okay. Why don't you take some time to acclimate to your new body. I need to finish reconstituting the dungeon."

"Yeah, before you do that, could you reconstitute me some pants?" Alex asked, raising his hand and waving it around. "I think I've made my opinions on Donald Ducking abundantly clear."