Neveah insisted that they enter arm-in-arm, so Roy was dragged haplessly along beside the more powerful individual into the rather loud interior of the ballroom. A chorus of voices bounced off the hard marble surfaces, filling the room with life. The party had been going for almost two hours now and people were deep into raucous discussions.

As the newly arrived duo glanced around, they saw two main groupings of people: one on the central platform in the ballroom and another on the opposite side from what was clearly a buffet. Having accepted his role as arm candy, Roy simply glanced at Neveah and waited for her to decided what to do.

A passive role was not one he liked, but Roy could smell something deeper taking shape around him. It didn’t seem like it would be his Third and Final Labour for his Soulskill, but there was something important here.

The illusory-woman-covering-a-monstrous-bonewyrm sighed dramatically. “That big group in the middle are the people attempting to beat the challenges that Randidly left for the party. Which should be impossible for anyone on Earth, even with several weeks to work at the project. Not worth bothering with; he already told me that my assistance would be cheating. And over there… that’s definitely a stage. Which means my ex will be here soon to perform…”

“Even if you don’t want to be, you sound excited,” Roy said casually. Although he couldn’t physically resist the presence of Neveah’s arm through his own, he did try to rile her up when he could.

Unfortunately, the pointing out of the obvious seemed to have been exactly what she wanted. “Ah… what to do… I’m sorry, it’s becoming very difficult to concentrate on our connection now that I am thinking about her… Just such a complicated situation…”

“There are infinite roads to happiness,” Roy said smoothly, finding the barest hint of a narrative he could use. He flashed a wide smile at Neveah. “The only issue is that if you try to follow another’s, you will inevitably grow lost. This seems like a situation where I am simply-”

With a casual brutality that both filled Roy with bitterness and admiration, Neveah shook him. So much so that he stumbled, although she promptly lifted him and set him back down on his feet. “Now, now, don’t think this means that I don’t value you… Ah! Sydney! How wonderful to see you again.”

While they had been standing by the entrance to the ballroom chatting, the door opened and a very familiar young woman walked through. Unlike most of the other entrants into the room, Sydney kept such tight control over her image that not even a single person seemed to notice that she had arrived. She simply wasn’t there one moment and then she was.

If it wasn’t for the intense gazes of the two familiars perched on her shoulders, Roy would think that Sydney had arrived in a particularly chipper mood. She was, however, certainly dressed to the nines. She wore a shimmering silver gown that trailed behind her across the ground. At her neck was a fist-sized sapphire and she wore her hair up in an elaborate arrangement of pins that spoke to both sophistication and class.

Sydney gave Neveah a cold smile then turned to look at Roy with obvious distaste. He was opening his mouth to greet his former partner in a jovial tone when Neveah once more shook Roy with enough force that the words died on his lips as his teeth clicked painfully shut. He couldn’t resist throwing a scowl Neveah’s way as Sydney chuckled.

“...It is good to see you too, Neveah. I’m surprised at your choice of companionship, however.” Sydney said lightly.

“Not even going to acknowledge that I’m here?” Roy grumbled, but he knew this wasn’t the time to try and escape from the strange situation in which he found himself. There were some real costs to being a vanity person, but there were also a few benefits. Neveah had much more mobility than Roy would have on his own here, after all.

And that scent of a narrative… was it tied to Sydney…? She definitely wouldn’t speak just to me...

As he had expected, both women ignored his words. Sydney tilted her head and peered across the packed ballroom. “Is Randidly not here yet? I hadn’t thought he would be the type to arrive late to his own birthday.”

“He was here earlier, but left after giving the people some image-related tasks,” Neveah replied.

The air around Sydney grew chilly. Her hands tightened into fists. “Trying to show the difference between him and us, huh?”

“Pretty much,” Neveah agreed. Neither commented on the crackling sense of tension that began to radiate outward from Sydney. The cold was bad enough, but the buzzing intensity of the electricity that surrounded Sydney filled Roy’s body with a dull ache. The combination of the two was already starting to leave his muscles spasming and sore.

But then the pressure vanished. Sydney shook her head, almost ruefully as the metaphorical frost across her expression cracked and a spring smile could slip through. “I’m being petty. Can I catch up with him, do you think?”

Neveah chuckled. “In some ways, you are much farther along than him already. His strength doesn’t change that.”

This exchange mystified Roy, but he obviously was going to take note of what was said. And in the wake of those simple sentences, the lines around Sydney’s face softened even further. The permafrost dispersed and green shoots of genuine emotion poked up through her expression. “That’s fine then. And in terms of gifts…?”

“There is a table over by where they are making the stage.” Neveah shook her head. “Although with everything else that’s going on, who knows when that show will happen…”

Sydney shrugged. “I’m not here for the pageantry, although I have to admit the feel of this room is… fascinating. And beautiful, obviously. No, I’m just here to give my oldest friend a gift… and to give him a warning. If you believe that it’s fine to speak in front of this walking pile of human excrement, I’ll inform you now…”

“By all means, speak; my date is a perfect gentleman,” Neveah purred. Roy, playing his role well, grimaced. But of course, his once dead heart began to beat with a little bit of urgency.

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“East End was robbed a week ago. Because of a disappearance at the time, I thought it was an internal issue, but now I’m not so sure...” Sydney began. “I assume you’re aware of the substance we call ‘magical plastic’ out of East End? The material we use for the elemental focai?”

After Neveah nodded, Sydney continued to speak. “Some of my people theorized that it wasn’t just a building material, but that what made it special was the presence of life within it. The conductivity of elemental energy and images was directly proportional to the size of the raw material it was extracted from. So the magical plastic we refined from a ten-meter vein was exponentially more powerful than what we could gather from ten one meter veins. To the point that there is a… qualitative change at certain sizes. And there is a theory that this qualitative change might eventually endow a focai with intelligence. It’s just a matter of finding a large enough vein.

“To be perfectly frank, my scientists were inspired by Randidly’s Living Engravings. If an Engraving could grow, why couldn’t an elemental focai? It was a problem of mass of the magical plastic and the strength of the image of the related elemental that would fill it. They even believed that in significant enough quantities, it would create something like an egg where a truly special existence could be grown.”

“The egg is what is missing, then?” Neveah tilted her head to the side.

Sydney grimaced. “That would be much simpler to track. But no, we’ve not located a vein large enough to function as an egg. We’ve gathered quite a bit of the mineral in question for our experiments in artificially producing such an egg… but progress has been slow.

“No, the reason head researcher on the project disappeared… along with a… interesting monster we recently discovered. It’s called the Impending Rock… it has no real abilities to harm people, aside from its size and weight, but whatever substances are around the Impending Rock will be dissolved and absorbed, becoming a part of it.

“We ultimately discarded the plan because the amount of minerals required in the short term was prohibitive… Based on our observations, if it absorbed enough magical plastic and raw minerals… it could become solve the problem of self-propagation to create the giant egg we wanted.”

“Not to interrupt,” Roy said slowly, “But this thing grows right? How did they steal a rock? How large was it?”

Sydney seemed to notice the gleam of excitement in Roy’s eyes but overlooked it to answer his question. “It was large. Almost as large as a house, at Level 39. But when the Impending Rock is shattered, it doesn’t die. It just reverts to its Level 1 form, which is the size of a fist.”

“So the best research on elemental focai and a bold method to create an extremely large vein disappeared. And you think you know who committed the crime?” Neveah said slowly.

“If he isn’t here already… and there is no way he would willingly miss Randidly’s birthday…” Sydney replied in the same slow tone. “...It’s likely Ace. He always had a dark sense of humor. What he could make with a living focai… a monster like that… would be a gift that made him laugh.”

*****

Ezekiel shivered, standing on the ridge next to two other figures. Below them, the ground dropped away and was swiftly devoured by the hilly forest in the area around Kharon. Unfortunately, the trio dare not approach any closer to the Kharon, because of the absolutely monstrous group of individuals patrolling.

Their images were bright and vicious in the dark night. Rather than humanoids, monsters seemed to be rotating methodically in the shadows of these treelines around Kharon.

But from their vantage, they could also see a wooden raft drunkenly riding a wave of emerald light through the sky. Although its course was rather meandering, it was clear that it was making a beeline for Kharon. What was even more intimidating was that it was obvious that the powerful patrols noticed this vessel, yet did nothing to stop it.

“If we wanted to sneak into the party, we would just need to make use of the moss spirits,” Ezekiel said slowly.

Ace snorted. “I stink of blood and death; would the moss spirits really accept us?”

Ezekiel shrugged uneasily, all too aware of the shadowy figures moving amongst the trees below. There was no way of knowing whether they would be intercepted as a threat to Kharon, but after watching group after group of guests and terrorists walking boldly forward and being accurately diagnosed based on their images, Ace was unwilling to take the chance.

“Maybe this is a good thing,” Ace said softly. “I’m not ready to give Randidly the gift that he needs-”

The rest of his sentence was lost in a series of hacking coughs that shook Ace. Hunching over, Ace struggled to control his body as wet and crimson blood oozed out of his mouth and nose to drip onto the few hardy stalks of grass that covered the surface of the ridge. But as soon as that blood touched the ground, a halo of withering spread outward. The stalks shivered and died in droves.

The woman standing with the two men frowned. “I told you it’s too much to keep that substance within your body. They might call it Lifeblood Essence, but that blood-”

“Enough, enough,” Ace waved his hand airily as he straightened and wiped his mouth. “It’s the only way to keep it potent long enough for the egg to be ready. And then I can give Randidly the gift he truly wants. A homegrown villain to change this world for the better.”

Ezekiel grimaced. “If that was what he really wanted, he wouldn’t have killed Straud so quickly.”

That caused Ace to begin to chuckle. So much so that more blood began to ooze out of the corners of his mouth. And Ezekiel didn’t miss the way that his ears were also starting to drip blood. It was beginning to stain his leather shirt. “That’s an entirely different thing. Straud was ultimately a foreign threat. And most importantly… it was a threat that didn’t understand the grandeur of our current stage. Straud was a small man with small fears-”

“A man that almost killed you both when you saved me,” The woman pointed out.

Ace continued without noticing her interjection. “-a man concerned with returning desperately to the past. A man who could not see outside the venue of our worlds. A man who had no appreciation for the horror of the System around us… no, that was never what Randidly wanted. This whole time… he’s been waiting for me to realize my true potential.”

Ezekiel and the woman had shared a glance. Ace had grown increasingly… manic since his consumption of the Lifeblood Essence stolen from Straud’s ritual. At this point, Ezekiel started to feel rather leery about continuing to associate with the man. But since he had come this far…

Plus, some part of Ezekiel’s Class couldn’t help but wonder what Ace tasted like...

“What about you?” Ace suddenly said, sending a bright smile Ezekiel’s way. “It’s your son’s birthday. I think as long as you keep that in mind, the patrols shouldn’t bother you much. They let the Nemesai through, after all. Didn’t he extend a personal invitation to you?”

Smiling nervously, Ezekiel lifted the unadorned box in his hand. It was only wrapped in brown paper, but as Ace had said, it felt like a talisman against the powerful images Ezekiel felt in the surrounding trees. “...yes. But are you sure you don’t want to make an attempt? You’ve been talking about this party all week.”

“Nah, it hurts to admit, but I’m not ready for this.” Ace’s eyes glittered as he looked toward the luminous form of Kharon in the distance. The strange raft continued to sway and slide its way toward its destination across the night sky. “Randidly Ghosthound… is powerful. So powerful that even now I’m afraid. But I can’t run away from our confrontation, right? He was my best friend. I owe him that much.”