When Seras woke three things came to her mind on rapid succession.

The first was that she wasn’t dead, again. Which wasn’t a bad thing. Not this time.

Seras was now a magical iron ranker, half formed, and shooting for diamond. She didn’t want to die until she reached diamond and beyond.

Two that she felt no pain.

Given that her last memories were of pain this was a welcome surprise.

And third was softness. Her head was laying against something warm and soft, and Seras really didn’t want to move.

But the smell of blood wouldn’t leave her alone.

Slowly Seras opened her eyes and was greeted by a vision of stars.

Thousands upon thousands of twinkling stars filled her vision. All colors, including a few that looked like they were made of many colors.

Seras sat up, and gawked at the sight around her. It reminded her of her last minutes of life on Ruin, or rather above Ruin. An endless field of stars undiminished by light pollution.

It was a pretty sight then, but now it seemed pale and pathetic to the beauty here.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” A voice asked, it sounded slightly strained.

Seras turned and saw Athena sitting right behind her, her face was pale and her breathing was constricted. Seras looked down at Athena’s tanned thighs where a small pool of drool could be seen.

Seras tried to hide her embarrassed flush as she turned away. “How long have I been out?” she asked.

“Half an hour, if that.” She answered.

Seras considered her words. “And we’re still alive right? This isn’t some magic afterlife or something?” she asked.

Athena chuckled, “not dead, yet. I think we fell into an astral space. A very strange one.”

“It looks like we’re in space, but we can breathe, that’s weird.” Seras muttered.

“Astral spaces can be anything. Abandoned cities, realms of fire, or floating rocks in the middle of nowhere with pretty stars.”

“Mhh, probably fake stars, otherwise this space would be enormous.”

“Or really tiny and close up.”

“Or that.” Seras admitted.

Her mind flashed back to those last moments of the chaotic fight with the Star Gliders. Athena had used her ability on Seras to instantly heal her arm and take away the pain, it had given Seras the strength and clarity of mind to do what had to be done. But in the final moments of the male Star glider, it had battered them with its aura out of spite. That final act must have knocked out Athena because all the pain had returned to Seras in one moment, and the nausea…

It must have been the condition from after she hit 10%. Athena held it at bay all on her own, until she couldn’t anymore.

She had fallen, fallen into this strange astral space. Something about that struck as odd.

Seras had fallen down the shaft, but Athena should have been fine, she was safe on her Stibium cluster.

“Did you fall in after me?” Seras asked.

“No,” Athena said curtly, “I jumped in after you. A good thing too, you would have fallen headfirst on this rock.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Okay, good for me, but why did you jump in after me?”

“You really think I would let you just fall into the unknown after we’ve come this far together. I might be a coward, but I’m not that craven.”

Seras glared at her, “it’s just a strange thing to do for a stranger.”

She quirked an eyebrow, “are we strangers?” she asked rhetorically.

Seras sighed, “I guess not.” She looked down at her arm, fully healed, and all it cost Athena was her own arm. “Thanks for the arm, it saved my life.”

“It’s about all I could do to help.” Athena muttered.

“And thanks for the for jumping in after me. But you need to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“My pain, its gone, you’re taking it in right now and are trying to hide it. Stop.” Seras met her eyes and refused to flinch away as all the pain returned in an instant.

She clenched her jaw, but kept the strain out of her voice. “It’s my burden, not yours,” Seras stated.

The color began to return to Athena’s face as she took in several deep breaths. “I don’t know you can stand it. Just trying to handle for thirty minutes has left me drained.”

“It’s just something I have to deal with, all the time.” Seras grunted.

They both sat in silence. When Seras finally trusted herself to stand without falling over she stood and stretched out her legs. Her clothes were torn up and stained with the glittery black blood of the Star Gliders, proving they weren’t monsters at all. Monster blood would have vanished in rainbow smoke when she used her looting power.

She glanced down at Athena and checked her over. Unlike Seras, her clothes hadn’t been torn up by the Star Gliders, just stained through with her own blood from the injuries she had taken from Seras.

Seras summoned a spare pair of clothes and passed them to Athena, “I’m not as big as you, so it might be tight, but it’s better than crusty bloodstained rags.” She said as she handed them over.

Athena accepted them with her remaining hand and then awkwardly tried to undress herself one handed. Seras sighed and stepped in close to help her undress.

“No, let me do this.” Athena protested. “I’m gonna need to get used to this,” She said bitterly.

Seras backed up, “alright, I can respect independence.” She stared at the stump of a limb awkwardly. Seras scratched the back of her head with her repaired arm, “you know, if we were back on Ruin you wouldn’t have to adjust to the injury. We’d just get you a new cybernetic one. I’d even have like eight different suggestions.”

She tried to smile. “Oh yeah, like what?”

“Well, mine are built especially to reduce recoil, while still being better than normal human hands. But I’ve seen some crazy ones. Hands with power tools for cutting or soldering, hands that split into ten extra fingers, and I even saw one that was a gun.”

“Like your pistol?”

“No, bigger, stupid thing was whole-ass cannon. Guy could only fire it once before needing a long reload time, but it blew a hole into anything he shot.”

She laughed as she finally slipped her shirt off, “those all sound awful. What would use the extra fingers for?”

“I don’t know, back home you’d use them to type faster, or maybe surgery. But your powers make that pointless.” Seras turned and saw the blood staining her skin, and had to quickly turn her head away as her stomach turned.

“I don’t suppose you have any crystal wash?” she asked.

Seras summoned a small bottle from pocket space. “It’s a small one, so use it sparingly.” She said as she passed it off.

“Why so little?” she accused.

“Shits expensive alright, I don’t sweat, and dirt washes out just fine. I only got a bottle because I had a little… incident.”

“What kind of incident?”

Seras grimaced, “one of my outworlder abilities lets me absorb essences and awakening stones without a ritual.” She began.

“Right, I saw you do that with the Greed stone. You turned it into a shard thing and stuck it in your neck.”

Seras nodded “right, so, no one told me what happens when you rank up. So when I got my last essence I slotted it in at a table in a busy restaurant.”

Athena cupped her mouth behind her hand to hold back her laughter, “You didn’t!”

“Yup, and since Outworlders remake their bodies out of garbage magic I had a very, very messy rank up.” Seras said.

“Gods, that’s mortifying.”

“Yep, like crapping yourself in public, actually…”

“Stop, stop, I can’t breath.” She wheezed.

Seras smiled, she hadn’t heard Athena laugh much down in the labyrinth. Probably because she snorted like a rutting pig. It was nice to hear.

Her story reminded her of something. She summoned up the final thing she had looted from the Star Glider. An awakening stone.

Awakening stone of the Cosmos, awakens the powers of the vast cosmos. Would you to convert to an appropriate form? Y/N

There weren’t a lot of entries on the stone. Some star-like weapon conjuration, a few summoning powers, familiar bonds, and some spatial or dimensional utility powers.

No combos known between her Tech or metal essences. Some potent spells like ‘solar fury’ or the beautiful ‘nebula shield’. And a few bizarre avatar combos, like the avatar confluence for light, wing, and dimension providing egotistical powers like ‘behold my glory’ a boon that turned the user into a giant version of themselves with a blinding light and wings.

“What kind of stone is that?” Athena asked.

“Cosmos. Got it from the last Star Glider.” Seras was turning it in her hand. From one angle she saw a field of stars, in another she saw a burning pulsar up close, and then another reflected the rings of a gas giant. It was beautiful, almost be shame to use its power instead of letting it remain. Almost.

The stone was in the highest bracket of rarity, though the entry noted that its scarceness was due to a lack of appropriate conditions. Cosmos awakening stones, as well as star, void, and vast were often only found in the remnants of star falls. A magical event caused by a comet drawing close to the planet. Along with a bright spectacle, special awakening stones and essences also fell from the comet’s tail.

Rarity did not always mean an increase in the specificity of powers, some conditions simply didn’t exist on the planet’s surface.

“Are you going to use it?” Athena asked.

“Yeah, I can see some good combos with my potent essence, I need the extra oompf.”

“Oompf?” she said teasingly.

“Ah shut it, you know what I mean.”

Seras selected Y and transformed it into a shard. It shrank into a finger sized shard, one look into its surface revealed a scape as deep and endless as the stars above.

Seras took a deep breath and slowly let it out as she slotted it into her chip port.

She felt the now familiar rush of power as her soul accepted the shard, and for a minute the pain diminished.

Seras had a flash back to her last moments on Ruin, floating freely, slowly dying. Stars twinklingly around her, and a deep black that filled her vision and Volta ripped a hole in the astral.

She even remembered a single moment after. If she could call it that.

Her soul had been bathed in an endless amount of magic in a realm without time nor space. Moments were just a construct of her material mind applying time to astral.

Something had touched as she passed. Something old, and curious.

Then she was back.

“Well? What did you get?” Athena asked.

Seras read the prompt, stopped, read it again, and again. Slowly an uncontainable grin split her face.

“Now that’s a proper magic power.”