“And then you just do the, er, swoosh thing. You know, you take the sword, and you swoosh it.”

At one of the highest altitudes in all of Alois, under the bright, uninhibited sun, surrounded by cotton candy clouds, Momo couldn’t have asked for a better place for this moment to happen.

To reawaken some of the lost power inside of her.

To get one step closer to conquering the heavens—err—no, not quite—

To saving Valerica and Morgana, yes. And, equally importantly, spritzing Kyros with some water like a cat on the kitchen table so he’d stop stomping all over the precious afterlife. That technique worked on Dusk, so she figured it was worth a try with god-cats, too.

If only she knew what the hell Kezko was on about.

“I just swing the sword?”

His eyes bulged. “Yes, yes! That’s the word. Swing. It really doesn’t have the same emphasis as swoosh, but I suppose it’s more accurate. Swing away, dear.”

Momo reticently spread her legs, steadying herself on the uneven ground. Her fingers grasped around a single one of her rapiers, its blade crackling with black electricity. Kezko stood with great enthusiasm a few feet away from her. A few feet too close.

“I really think you should back up a little,” she pleaded quietly. “If this does work, I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Ha. Your ego really is gigantic. I’m an Expert, dear. I think I can take the hit.”

Momo sighed. She figured it wasn’t worth bothering him with the reality that she was an Excalibur; after all, the likelihood of this working seemed ridiculously slim. Kezko had taken all of five minutes to haphazardly wrap one gem to the hilt of the sword, and another around Momo’s wrist. He had emphasized that the whole ‘tape it together with hair ties' approach wouldn't have as good of a connection than an actual surgical insertion, but Momo wasn’t about to let him rip her open without a test drive.

So, here was the test drive.

She swung the sword.

Immediately she felt a sensation in her wrist. A feeling of immolation, like her very veins were burning. A quick glance revealed them to be just fine—if a little bit prominent, protruding from her skin like small rivers. The gemstone was glowing a bright, shining blue, and the black inside of it was swirling in a circle. It was equal parts painful and mesmerizing.

“Did it work?” Momo asked, looking back up at him. Nothing about the attack had seemed particularly astonishing. She hadn’t ripped a hole in the universe by any means. Black crackled through the air as usual, and wind rushed past, but that was it.

“Wonderfully so,” he replied, clasping his hands over hers. He had the expression of a mad scientist—it reminded her uncomfortably of Sera. “Even without the surgical implantation, you’re resonating beautifully. If the mana pathways in your ears weren’t injured, I’m sure you would have heard the harmonizing.”

“Uh huh,” she said, nodding with her eyebrows furrowed. “It felt like a volcano was erupting onto my wrist, but I didn’t notice anything different in my attack.”

“That’s because there wasn’t. That was just a test of the connection. I was watching to see how quickly you could send commands through the gem to your weapon—the efficiency of your casting potential. My eye here,” he said, tapping at the glass of his eyeball. “Can slow down time to see fractions of seconds, so I could measure just how quickly your gem turned blue.”

Momo furrowed her eyebrows. Right. So it’s basically a wifi test?

“And how fast is my … um … upload speed, exactly?”

“That is an odd way to put it, but,” he hummed. “Quite terrible. It took a full few seconds for the gem on the sword to resonate. In battle, that kind of lag can cost you your life. But we can up that speed considerably just by embedding the gem in your flesh. So no worries there.”

Momo grimaced. He was way too nonchalant about sticking an overclocked Mana computer into her neck.

Kezko began rubbing his hands together eagerly.

“Ok-i-doke,” he said. “Now for the real test. I want you to use one of your spells.”

Momo frowned, appalled. “But I can’t. It’ll break me. That’s like, the entire point.”

He shook his head and wagged his finger teacherly. It was a very condescending motion for someone who was a frankly terrible instructor.

It wasn’t difficult to believe that he saw Valerica as a role model.

“Use the spell through the sword, child. Don’t say it aloud. Allow it to trickle through your veins quietly, drawing all your attention toward the stone.”

Momo took in a breath, and nodded. She didn’t know what any of that was supposed to mean, but she figured it was worth a try.

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She closed her eyes tightly and, for the first time in a long time, rolled through her inner grimoire. She flashed through spell after spell, from Raise Undead to her flashy new Summon Husk. Ultimately, she settled for a personal favorite. A smile crossed her face as she remembered her days on the open ocean, playing pirates with a lemur and an elf.

[Nether Displacement]

She knew it wasn’t a spell that could be cast silently, so she wasn’t worried that it would actually destroy her Mana Pathways by accident. Still, the mere thought of using magic left her terrified.

It’s okay. The worst that can happen is it won’t work.

Mere disappointment. Nothing she wasn’t well-practiced in.

Holding the sound of the spell in her head, she tensed her muscles. She felt that wildfire feeling again. Peeling one eye open, she saw tendrils of black snake down her arms and coalesce around her wrist, tightening like a medical bandage.

“Good, excellent,” Kezko said, his voice a hurried whisper. “Now just hold it.”

Wincing, Momo kept herself steady through the burning pain. The longer she sustained it, the more manageable it became, until it was simply a low hum in the back of her brain.

“Well, well, well. Seems that it worked.”

Momo snapped both eyes open simultaneously. Before her lay a scene that would have rendered her younger self speechless: Kezko stood before her, his grin stretched wide, with her rapier impaling him straight through the middle.

“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” she babbled, not thinking as she hastily withdrew it. The sword slipped out like a spoon through pudding, effortless. No blood nor guts came with it.

Only after she took a few seconds to make sure he was alive did she realize what had just happened.

“Nether Displacement,” she breathed. “It worked?”

“Delightfully well,” he cheered, taking her hand. “Seeing as my torso is still in-tact.”

An overwhelming feeling of joy stirred in her, her cheeks heating.

She had done it.

She had cast a spell.

Well, her sword had. Kind of.

“I am so confused,” she said, waving the sword around. She watched as it dipped into the soil, then came out dirt free. “Does the Nether Displacement apply to me, too?”

She thrust her hand at the ground experimentally, only to be rudely met by the reality of the physical world; unlike her sword, she had not transformed into a transient Nether entity.

“Ouch,” she mumbled, hugging her red palm.

“You really are a student of Valerica. She was very big on Show, Don’t Tell.”

Momo grimaced. “I’m aware.”

They spent the next thirty minutes drilling through the practicalities of self-casting artifacts. In practice, the rules could be summarized like such:

* All status effects would apply to the weapon, not the user.

* Attack spells such as projectiles would be fired from the hilt of the sword.

* Summoning spells would also manifest wherever the sword was located. So if she was to summon a chicken, that chicken would spawn from her sword.

* The amount of spells that could be cast in succession would be restricted by the weapon’s internal mana pool. Not hers.

Momo weighed the sword in her hands, marveling at it.

“So, just how big is the rapiers’ mana pool?” she asked.

He prodded his glass eye with his fingers, adjusting it like an optometrist might adjust the dials of an autorefractor. His pupil zoomed in and out.

“Five hundred points,” he said. “Quite impressive.”

“That’s half of my own,” she said, not disappointed.

“It is an Excalibur-level magical artifact.”

“Wait, and that’s per sword, right? So if I can use both at the same time…”

“You will effectively have use of your entire mana pool again,” he said, together. “But it will take quite a bit of mental training in order to fire off spells so quickly. And you’ll have to become accustomed to the new form several of your spells will take, now that they’re being used via your weaponry. Some will become almost useless, such as the one you used on me just now.”

Momo could barely hear him anymore. Her grin was practically cannibalizing her face, and her thoughts were a rapid succession of finally, finally, finally.

A succession that was only interrupted by an overwhelming feeling of fatigue.

She barely got out a groan before she was falling toward the ground, gray edging around her vision. The exhaustion—the one she hadn’t felt in days—had returned with a wickedness.

“[Dark Healing],” Kezko cast, pressing his hand to her scalp and then yanking her upward by the hair. She bobbed upward like a ragdoll. “Ah, I forgot to mention one tiny detail. While you’re not using your Mana to actually fire the spells, you are still exerting yourself by using Gem Transmission. It tends to be physically exhausting to those of… lesser statures, such as yourself.”

“Lesser statures?”

“Small. Weak. Minute. I was trying to put it politely,” he huffed, then let go of her. “To be blunt, you’ll have to continue with that Strength training routine of yours if you want to actually use more than one spell per hour. So, while it is a loophole in some ways, in others…” He leaned close to her, so their noses were touching. “It is not. One cannot completely escape the limits of his own corporeal form.”

Momo nodded, sluggishly recovering from her fainting spell. She pulled her knees to her chest and sighed into them.

“Unless you’re Azrael,” she added grumpily.

“Ha! And how do you suppose he does it?” he said, smacking Momo on the back, already forgetting her condition. She nearly catapulted off the cliffside. “Azrael was my first professor. The man was utterly untouchable in the field of necrotic artificing. His title—the necroknight—was such an undersell. He could crush mana gems into fragments and disperse them into armies of self-casting ghouls.”

Momo furrowed her brows. “Really? But he does full-body possession, doesn’t he? Like, fully inhabiting the corpses he steals?”

A flurry of dirt blew past her as the Wyrm of Darkness settled into the grass. Kezko began to thread his fingers over the beast’s scales.

“Not at all,” he said, nudging the wyrm’s head away from him. “That would pose too much of a risk for someone as risk-averse as Azrael. The man is a homebody. He never leaves his realm. In fact, his risk-avoidance is exactly what led him to become such a fine artificer. He spent all of his free time perfecting the art of mana gem possession. It allowed him to operate high-level monstrosities without risking an inch of his soul.”

That explains a lot, Momo thought, reflecting on all of her run-ins with the man. He wasn’t afraid in the least to lose one of his physical forms. They were just puppets to him. He didn’t even feel their pain as one might have during a formal possession. It was just like flying a drone, peeking through its eyes on a computer monitor.

“I hope I’ll get to meet him for real one day,” Momo said, rising from the ground and dusting the dirt off of herself. “He’s been a real help to me, even from beyond the veil.”

“If he wants to meet you, it’s only a matter of time.”

Momo laughed. What a strange way to put it.

“Kezko, I have one last question for you, if you don’t mind.”

He turned to her enthusiastically.

“Anything, your highness.”

She smiled at him brightly, and extended a hand to shake.

“Do you want to become my Court Artificer?”