Theora took a glance up at Dema, who sat on a ledge overseeing the cavern, a safe distance away, letting her thin legs dangle down the edge. Dema gave her an encouraging smile, her demonic eyes gleaming in the dark.

Then, Theora took a glance at Bell, also a safe distance away, sitting on a small rock protrusion next to the exit from the chamber. Bell scowled impatiently — little jolts of her floating tentacle hair betrayed her nerves. She glowed blue bioluminescence — her limbs and the jellyfish bob around her head made rocks and edges cast soft shadows away from her.

Then, lastly, Theora glanced at Isobel, who stood right in front of her, completely focused on their object of interest. The rock mandibles in front of her face scratched her chin as she stared in wide-eyed curiosity at the bubble floating between them. It contained a head-sized stone shaped like a shark tooth.

It was the moment of truth. Well, the first moment of truth. It was what they had come all the way out here to test.

Theora was able to redirect [Obliterate]’s ambient damage into herself, keeping the world mostly safe from her most vicious Skill. Did that mean she could also channel the damage into another object?

She’d never tried before. Withholding the backlash of permanent corruption from imprinting itself onto reality was the entire point of redirecting it.

Instead of Theora’s old approach, Isobel was proposing they’d create a pair of SCISSoRs.

For this, they had come to a faraway place deep underground. If Theora messed up even just the tiniest amount, the consequences would be relatively tame. The calculations of risk were made: If Theora could infuse an object, like, say, a pair of SCISSoRs, with reality-defying properties that would fray the fabric of reality in its surroundings, then she could use that pair of SCISSoRs as a tool instead of her Skill.

She would still be able to retrieve the Fragments of Time embedded in the beyonds of other worlds to complete her current side quest.

Theora knew all of that. But between Dema, Bell and Iso, some of the cutest people she knew had gathered in this cave, so she had to make sure not to harm them. And Bell was only a child. She’d once been the second strongest hero of Himaeya, fallen off after a series of unfortunate deaths, the last of which she was currently recuperating from in the form of a teenager with no memories of her past lives. Had just turned sixteen, too.

She’d worked hard to be allowed to accompany them on this journey, which, without her, would admittedly have proved difficult.

“Will you do it anytime soon?” Bell hissed nervously.

Theora took a deep breath. She focused on the rock, on how she wanted to [Obliterate] its inability to wield the permanent damage of the world at its edges, on how large a target that might be, and how much of the spill out she could shove onto its surface.

She nodded at Isobel, who nodded back and cheerfully started a countdown.

“Alright. Three — two — one… Let’s go!”

Theora dipped her fingers into the bubble of water, grazing the rock. “[Obliterate],” she murmured.

The cavern flashed brightly. A drip of corruption rolled off the stone, sizzling into the ground like acid made of glitched-out iridescent angry grains of light. Dema lifted a hand in reflex, and Theora could feel she was about to activate a Skill to try and contain it. Thankfully, Dema cancelled at the very last moment. Nobody except Theora was to interact with permanent damage.

Theora took a moment to observe the irate flaying goop, then knelt down to dig it out from the rock with her bare hands. It boiled against her skin, very upset with being moved.

Isobel was right. This type of corruption was different from that at her training grounds. This damage could be relocated, albeit only with fairly strong resistance. Theora brought it up to her face and drank it.

It dissolved her tongue and throat, but slowly lost its edge as it continued to pour down into the folds of Theora’s vastness, finding company within the endless reefals of emptiness already there.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Meanwhile, the shark-tooth rock had fared… well? Some corruption now coated its edges, but otherwise it remained mostly rock-like; hard and dark, with little crevices in its sides, shaped the way it was before, all sharky.

Isobel nodded, meaning she had all the data she needed.

Thus, Theora plunged her fingers into the bubble once more, slowly extricating the rock. She cut through the air with its edge, making sure to impose the idea of severing into her motion.

As she grazed the nothingness in front of her, a thin slice remained in the tooth’s wake. That looked promising. The cut was superficial and patched itself back up within a few seconds. That was promising too — it appeared like the damage did not transfer from the infused object onto reality; at least not in large amounts.

“Woah,” Dema let out as she watched Theora scribble a little flower into the air. “Cute!”

It faded soon, the way flowers did.

The tension left Theora’s body, and she took a deep breath. “Got all we need? Should I get rid of it?”

Isobel asked Bell and Dema to use Investigation-Skills on the stone, and when they sent the resulting prompts into the shared party chat, Theora took that as her cue. She crumbled the rock apart, making sure to keep all the shards in her hand.

Then, she ate one.

Isobel shot her a look. Watched her chew for a moment. Tilted her head. “You… could look a little less happy about it, you know? I feel kind of bad for making you do this after my big speech back then.”

“I’m not happy,” Theora claimed. And if she was, it surely had nothing to do with eating little chips of everlasting corruption. If anything, it was because she was surrounded by people she cherished, with no more secrets to hide and nothing left unsaid.

“Remember you only get to do that now, because we’re looking for a solution,” Isobel warned. “Other than this, no more consuming permanent damage.”

Theora nodded. “It’s not like it tastes well,” she assured, crunching down on a shard. It wasn’t a lie. They were crispy, but not amazing. Still, she wasn’t going to admit the process of eating it was kind of fun, like eating something incredibly sour, spicy, and bitter at the same time.

People ate lemons for fun too, or chilli peppers, or unsweetened coffee. This was fine.

Of course, consuming permanent damage tired her out either way, so their trip had blocked out lots of time for her to sleep and rearrange her insides to accommodate her new state. The next experiment was scheduled a few weeks out; it almost felt a bit long, but Theora really was not going to argue the point. At least her family still even allowed her to fetch more Fragments of Time in the first place, instead of putting a complete stop to the rescue mission, after they’d found out she’d been stacking and hiding most of [Obliterate]’s ambient damage inside herself for thousands of years.

“We need to restock on air,” Bell said. “If the experiment is complete, let’s go back up.”

Everyone nodded. Theora did still have some reserves in her attire, but those were for emergencies.

Bell created a protective magical bubble around them, then dismissed the static barrier she’d thrown around the cave. This mission had taken over a year of prep-work, and Bell had spent it relearning and mastering all the protective Skills necessary for the endeavour.

Nobody had pushed her to do that. Isobel’s initial plan had been to just wait until Bell was an adult again. Another ten, or twenty years, at least. But Bell hated that idea, and perhaps she just wanted to prove herself too.

They stepped up the stairs. This entire cave system had been hollowed out by Dema’s earth magic. It was deep. Sometimes, Dema would make the stairs move up like an escalator, blowing Bell’s and Iso’s minds with what she’d learned in her time in ‘Reality’, but it was a bit of a waste of Mana, so she didn’t do it on important days.

Eventually they broke through to the surface. The blue gravel cracked under Theora’s feet, the sun cast a heavy shadow over their previous footsteps as it hung in the cloudless starry sky right next to their gigantic home planet, Himaeya.

Whenever she looked down at it from this moon, Theora found her gaze drawn to a little spot in the far north: the Zenith of the End. It was where, almost three hundred seventy-three years ago, she and Dema had first met. Then, inevitably, Theora’s gaze would dart over to her. They’d come so far.

Now they were visiting the second moon together. That would have been completely unthinkable a mere hundred years ago. Mostly because back then, Theora had been stuck alone on the outskirts of the planetary system, thinking she’d never ever make it back home. But Dema had come to fetch her.

“You alright, Bun Bun?” Dema asked with a smile after finding Theora staring.

Bell and Iso had already walked a few steps along the path toward the wide dome at the horizon, formed by one of Bell’s strongest barriers, and were waiting.

“Yeah,” Theora said, breaking into a wide smile. “Sorry, let’s get going, or you and Bell will be in trouble.”

“I’d like to remind you that while you might survive not breathing,” Bell started dryly, “you might not survive None’s ire if you treat yourself unkindly again.”

Theora swallowed another piece of rock, and increased her pace. Better get to the dome soon.