Footsteps echoed down the hall. At the end of the brig, of the empty line of cells, a trio of Koedor-Terginian soldiers marched. They were the normal, less-flaunting variant of soldier—without their holographic plumes or etched armour.

They began to march down the hallway, talking amongst themselves. One looked over at Jace’s cell and began to laugh.

“Lessa?” Jace whispered. “Kinfild?”

They both looked over at him. Kinfild said, “There’s nothing we can do until we get out of hyperspace, if anything. I don’t have my staff, and your abilities aren’t any good if you’re trapped in a cage.”

Jace bit his lip. “Can I—”

“You barely plowed through an armoured soldier,” Kinfild snapped. “His armour was only a fraction of an inch thick. You would kill yourself trying to plow through a set of thick iron bars. Your shattered bones, travelling at lightspeed, would rip holes in this starship, and then we would all die.”

Jace grimaced at the gruesome description, then paced in a circle and marched back toward the wall. “There has to be a way to make the hyperspace jump card more powerful.” Immediately, he mustered his stat sheet. Golden dust poured out of the air and swirled up in front of him. It warned him of unassigned attribute shards, and now, his ‘advancement progress’ displayed a clean thirty-five percent. His level rating was eight.

Kinfild must have seen his confused expression; he said, “Cavalrymen will often award you more Aes. The more powerful the Split sees an enemy, the more Aes you get as a reward, even if that enemy was a living sapient.” He raised a finger, then added, “And it only counts if you kill them by hand, sword, or plasma rifle. Not if you happened to… destroy the repeller-bike they were riding.”

He turned his mind to the unassigned attribute shards. “If I assign it all to Vitality, would I be able to survive a collision with the bars?”

“Survive?” The Wielder chuckled. “It doesn’t make much difference how strong your skin is, or how resilient your muscles are when travelling through hyperspace. Negligible, at best. Even an ingot of armoursteel would be damaged by a lightspeed collision. Improving your Vitality for solely that purpose would be foolish.”

“Then why haven’t I been killed before?” Jace asked. “I’ve rammed other objects at lightspeed.”

“Because the technique card protects you. Your Vitality will only make a minimal difference when travelling so fast—and most hyperspace cards scale with Resistance, regardless. But even if you put all your available attribute shards into Resistance, it wouldn’t be enough to plow through such an object, unless you spent centuries only sitting here improving your attributes. We won’t get centuries.”

“So…how, then? How do I improve it?”

“Your technique cards can be enhanced and modified,” Kinfild stated. “And that is the best way to protect yourself. The rate of Resistance scaling coupled with the innate power of the card. You have seen your skill tree—the little tree at the center of your dreamspace plane—yes?”

“I have.”

“The Split will show you potential branches to modify your technique card along. Whichever cards you have socketed, it will display potential modification routes for you—a perk of being a worldjumper.”

Lessa ran up to the side of the cell, then said, “I can see the skill tree if you hold still, Jace.”

He turned towards her, head tilted.

“Hold still, and I’ll read it for you,” she insisted.

He placed his arms down by his side and straightened his legs. Lessa shut her eyes, but he couldn’t see anything happening. Not until her eyelids snapped open. A fine film of golden dust had accumulated on her eyelashes.

She wiped her eyes, then sat back down on the floor. “The Split sees two potential options on how to enhance the card. If you take it down one branch, it’ll get brutish—you’ll be able to smash through thicker and more heavily-armoured targets. Make cool explosions and big dents and all that. If you take it down the other branch, it becomes elegant and slippery, allowing you to phase through small objects. Both branches’ effectiveness scales with your Resistance.”

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“How do we enhance the card?” he asked.

Lessa held up her engraving needle. “With the proper application of arcane calligraphy circles and a few runes, I should be able to carve new Aes channels in it and draw out wires to different places. I’ll need to watch the skill tree—the Split will show the way.” She shut her eyes again, head directed straight towards him.

After a few seconds, she opened her eyes. “Alright, slight problem. Not as easy as I thought. I’ll need you to be doing something, uh…Aes-intensive. That’ll get the branches to light up, and I can better visualize them to modify the technique card.”

“Like cycling Aes?” Kinfild suggested.

“More. Like…using a Vault Core.”

Kinfild snorted, then pushed the Vault Core over between the cell bars. Jace caught it as it skittered along the deck.

“It will probably be a few Vault-runs before I can get the engraving done,” Lessa said.

Jace dipped his head in understanding. It would be simple. Enter vaults, run through them, and he’d show Lessa the way to enhance the card with his cycling Aes.

“Which branch should I aim for?” Lessa asked. “Slippery, or tanky?”

Jace chewed his bottom lip. “Tanky would be best for getting us out of here—just plowing through the bars—but I need to think long-term.” He rubbed his forearms. Plowing through things was effective to a certain degree, but he figured that he’d end up in a simple scaling contest—a contest of attributes—if he chose that route. “Chances are, I’ll be an underdog in most fights, and in that case, I’d rather be slippery.”

“If I can get the card modified just right,” Lessa said, “we can have it so you slip right through the bars. We’ll upgrade the technique enough that objects in the physical world can’t hurt you.”

“Then it’s settled,” Jace said. “I’ll get started.” He ejected the technique card from his core and passed it to Lessa. “If I need it in the Vaults, I need you to put it back in my hand, okay? I’ll let you know when.”

“As long as I have it in a configuration that’s stable to use,” she told him. “Don’t need you ripping yourself apart with a bad technique card.”

“Understood.” Jace laid down at the edge of the cell, right beside the bars and within reach of her. Her arms were much skinnier than his and could slip between the bars easily—if she ever needed to give him back his card.

He began his cycling pattern and pulled himself into a meditative trance. He picked up the vault core and activated it. It prompted him to enter, and he agreed to it.

He shouldn’t have been tired. After all, he had just been unconscious for who-knew-how-long, but his eyes slipped shut almost against his will. He felt a faint heat in his chest as the cycling began, which was a welcome break to the chill of the cell. Then, he faded off into an almost-blissful trance.

After a few seconds of flashing, meaningless visions, he arrived at the dreamspace plane. He ran across the soil and reached the sapling—which had grown a little taller since he last saw it. There was no card socketed in the roots at the bottom, but the buds were still glowing faintly, reeling from the impression of the card.

But first, he needed to distribute the new attribute shards—six in total. He gathered up the glowing crystals in his arms. For a moment, he pondered their placement, then decided that setting three in Vitality and three in Resistance would be a good choice. He’d taken too many hits trying to escape the soldiers, and had been subdued too easily. He hated the idea of that.

As soon as he set them down, the crystals melted into the soil, but the floor didn’t fall away yet. The Vault Core heated up and vibrated, but it wasn’t ready to send an impression of him across the galaxy.

He turned to the sapling. He located the glowing bud, the one he’d touched earlier to see a glimpse of the skill. He traced the branches beyond the single glowing bud, where there were many, many more buds to see.

He tested each one, and a glimpse of the ability flashed through his mind as a vision. One branch showed a route of increased toughness and durability while dashing through hyperspace, and the other branch presented a route of cunning and evasion.

The sledgehammer-approach at first seemed easier, and after only two buds’ worth of changes—be it runes, wires, or calligraphy circles—he should have been able to smash straight through a crowded, thick forest—perfect for breaking out of the cell. But the second path seemed more versatile. The ability to pass through objects unhindered, and a vastly reduced cooldown, soon seemed like the obvious choice. After making three buds’ worth of adjustments, he’d be able to pass unhindered through thin walls.

Kinfild says the Vault Core is about to go off, Jace, came Lessa’s voice from outside. Are you ready? Oh, he also wants to remind you that the attributes only help your body direct how it should enhance itself—you will still need to exercise and meditate between vaults, cultivating your body along with your spirit.

Jace nodded. “I remember, Lessa.”

Great! Then—

Before she could finish, the Vault Core triggered. The floor crumbled, revealing a black void, and Jace fell.