It was the moment when she witnessed Zelsys torn limb from limb. Back then, when she fell into that trance and carved the glyph of Eternal Snow upon the Living Storm.

That was where her Phantom Core waited, in the middle of her memory of Ubul’s Tomb. She found herself standing in that thoughtscape, striding through a frozen snapshot of it at the exact moment when Eternal Snow took effect. The Core wasn’t a physical object, of course, but in her mindscape, it took the form of a wispy, floating orb, trailing a foggy tail, floating in the spot she had believed might be Zel’s final resting place. As she drew nearer to it, reminding herself that the lifeless, disembodied head of Zelsys was just part of the memory, the Core expanded out into a vaguely humanoid shape. It took on more and more of her own features, but quickly diverged well before it could even start to match her in appearance. By the time she reached it, Zefaris stood face to face with a maimed upright corpse in a tattered garment halfway between her current dress and her original, generic Ikesian olive-green uniform. It was bedecked by badges. The Phantom Core lacked a hat, had short hair, and only had one eye - not the Homunculus Eye, but a Brass Eye in the left socket, while the right one was a scarred-over pit with no eyelid, a chunk of glistening shrapnel sticking out of its brow and forehead. It wielded the sparklock which became Tempesta, stock replaced by a darkwood, gold-inlaid one and a long, thin scope sticking off to the side.

The Phantom Core was, in effect, a mishmash of every heavy consideration Zefaris had given to the possibility of her own death. She reached out for it, and the nascent spiritual construct snapped into a stiff salute just before Zefaris plunged her hand into its chest and grasped the spherical form it had originally taken. At that moment, both the humanoid representation and the thoughtscape of Ubul’s Tomb vanished. Zefaris looked into her hand, and saw the wispy, barely-visible swirl of bluish-white grasped between her fingers, glimmering threads tangled around her hand. It wasn’t a physical object, not truly there; she had merely found where it was buried within her astral body and learned how to grasp it, just as one could learn to control an obscure muscle.

Before she moved forward, Zefaris went over the actual Sword Phantom section of the scripture, particularly how one went about forming a Sword Phantom.

It required only a Coherent Remnant as the foundation, and any number of other Remnants, Coherent or Scattered, as material. Zefaris, however, felt that something was missing. The Scripture focused on the idea of the practitioner using their own armament affinity to create Sword Phantoms that would wield ghostly versions of the practitioner’s preferred armament, but it also mentioned that other means of empowering the Phantoms for combat were possible. It also mentioned the spiritual strain inherent in manifesting already-formed Phantoms, though the scripture described it as a natural limit on the number and power of Phantoms any practitioner could maintain, even referring to techniques for temporarily going over that limit while mitigating risk of spiritual strain injury. That all was irrelevant to her for the moment, however.

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Zefaris had a faint gut feeling that blindly following the Scripture would likely lead her to make subpar choices. Most obviously, she felt it would be wasteful at best or counterproductive at worst to impose her own armament affinity on a Phantom if her base materials carried an affinity that contradicted firearms, such as a sword or a weaponized suit or armor. The problem was, she couldn’t reliably discern the affinity of Remnants for whom it wasn’t excessively obvious, like That Inquisitor. It was obvious that he carried an affinity for the sword and for his armour, even if Zefaris couldn’t detect them with her own spiritual senses, but many other Phantoms were not coherent enough to get a read on them visually or didn’t retain ghostly weapons. So, she decided she needed help to sort them all out. The Remnant Revealing Array wouldn’t go anywhere; the strain of its operation was minimal, and the Stillness of this battlefield was more than enough to sustain it for the time being.

Forming a kinetic glyph halfway between herself and the ground, she leapt down and made her way back to their campsite. Having the time, she had a second, small portion of the pork dish Jorfr had cooked, explaining a simplified version of the Scripture, what she had done, what she still had to do here before they could leave, and the roadblock she had run up against with her own lackluster spiritual senses.

“I should have guessed that there was an art centered around drawing power from the ghosts of battle,” Jorfr commented.

Before she could even ask, Victor swallowed a half-chewed chunk of meat and pointed at the nearest Remnant. The man wielded a war-knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, had gaping holes through his head, and a featureless head with only the outlines of eye sockets.

“Gun.”

Another point. Another man. Rifle in hand.

“Gun.”

Another. An Inquisitor with an Aquila Calibur.

“...Gun. Huh.”

A different Inquisitor.

“Sword.”

Next one, a woman.

“Uh… Not sure.”

Jorfr got up, walking over to that particular Remnant. He inspected it from a few steps away, then returned.

“I felt roughly the same degree of blade-like and gun-like aura. You will need to know the affinities of all these strange battle-ghosts then, yes?”

Zefaris nodded.

In moments, Jorfr inhaled what was left on his plate.

“Let us go, then, while this formation of yours yet holds.”

With Victor readily following after the borean and Zefaris joining them moments later, the three of them took account of each and every Remnant with a distinct armament affinity, with Zefaris carving a corresponding symbol into the ground under each Remnant.

“That’s… That’s all of them done, I think.”

With that, they returned to the edge of the formation’s perimeter and Zefaris made her way around the battlefield, picking out Remnants with no discernible armament affinity and incorporating them into her own Phantom Core.