The next three months flew by. Constant combat training, soul training, and a consistent influx of rollover points mixed with some wishes had slowly sharpened and molded me. I'd spent a large amount of time working on my staff art, trying to fuse it to DS Mastery by creating unique staff moves that melded well with my subskills, to middling success, but I'd become much more skilled with my staff as a result.

At the moment, I found myself resting after a rough fight with Abel, panting and exhausted as I glared at my mentor. "Why can't I beat you?" I complained. "I keep getting stronger, but you keep being just that little bit out of reach."

He snickered. "You're not the only one getting stronger, kid. Not only do I have a bunch of stat points rolling in from that last battle same as you, I'm also fighting with you, Blake, Callie, Valk, and about a dozen other people pretty much every day. You're training and working on your soul and Skills. Learning to harness your Path, and any number of other things, all I do is fight until my knuckles crack."

"Freak." I said scathingly, though it probably would have been more biting if I wasn't collapsed in a puddle of my own blood and sweat.

"I'm sorry." Abel said with a laugh, cupping an ear. "Did you say 'weak' because while you are pretty disappointing in combat I wouldn't go quite that far. I'm sure you can catch up eventually." He snickered at my glare. "Jokes aside kid, you're improving more quickly than most. I'm just extremely narrowly focused. Not to mention I have a lot of room to grow after recently breaking through to expert."

I groaned, but acknowledged the point, crawling across the sandy floor of the training hall to a bench with a towel and water bottle to wash and wipe down my face. I considered healing up with a heal burst, but I was running low, and my Vitality was pretty solid, so I felt like it would be better to just wait it out for the moment.

To ensure maximum training efficiency I'd taken to sparring without my armor. It didn't do much good against Abel anyway, since it wasn't particularly effective against blunt force. My mask too was sitting to one side, since wearing just the mask and normal clothes felt weird. Callie, who was lounging nearby, grinned at me. "That was pretty impressive. Your new staff technique is coming along well."

Chuckling, I pulled myself up onto the bench. "You say that, but your growth over the last few months has been absurd. Not quite as much as that first burst, but still, you've already hit the halfway point of F-rank. I'm scrambling to catch up as it is." Though her soul growth was only up to sixteen percent, the one department she couldn't quite keep up in.

She grinned proudly. "True. I AM pretty amazing. I'm so close to forming a Path, I can almost taste it. Though I don't think I'm likely to form a Solid Path like you have, at least not anytime soon."

"Killian says that's actually less useful in the early days. Makes it harder to use." I said with a shrug. "I've progressed pretty far with that theoretically, but he's seen people form a Solid Path early and get stuck because of it. People like you and Abel and Gabriel can use your path at will, while I have to try to align myself with it manually."

While Zeke was forbidden to help us too much, Killian had no such restrictions. Having an A-ranker around willing to answer questions (some questions at least, he claimed he couldn't tell us too much or it might fuck up our progress) was extremely convenient for our growth. Not to mention his son Blake had become a friend and a hell of a sparring partner.

Speaking of. "How's Benny been doing?" I gestured to where her fingers had slipped partway into the shadows, no doubt using them to keep an eye on all our friends. Callie tended to get bored and check in with everyone regularly. Benny, who had improved explosively under my nearly complete attention, had been working with some new gear and a massive bump in stats, trying to improve as the rest of us did.

His growth in the soul department was particularly impressive, having managed to grind his way up to twenty five percent of the way through orange by virtue of his Spiritual Calming belt. I'd grown a bit more than that, reaching fifty percent, but mostly because I was using my Solid Path to push me ahead.

According to Killain. Forming a Path was a necessary and important step, but most Paths started as Illusionary Paths. Illusionary Paths, like Abel's, Gabriel's, and Callie's, were much easier to use and alter, as well as being more intuitive. This particular step was considered integral to refining your path to be more closely aligned with your personality and combat style.

Solid Paths were the NEXT step in the process, creating a literal Skill for your Path. He refused to expand on the later steps of the process, saying it wasn't important, but the fact was I'd skipped some steps. Unfortunately that didn't seem to be a good thing. Instead of mapping my Path to my combat style, I was forced to map my combat style to my Path, slowly finding a way to bridge the gap and activate my Path as I fought.

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The only saving grace was the my DS Mastery was my main combat Skill already, so I didn't have to completely reinvent the wheel, but I'd always used it more as a utility Skill, ignoring the underlying elements of the Fatewalker class in order to lean into my strengths. Now I was forced to learn how to form a cohesive whole, and it was much harder than it would be for most people because I was feeling around in the dark instead of defining my own way.

Callie clicked her tongue. "Only you would be upset that you're somehow accidentally much further along than the rest of us. Sure you have to catch up to where you're at, but there are plenty of people who never take the step of forming an Illusionary Path, much less a Solid One. As long as you can figure out how to stick to that, you shouldn't have any problem advancing all the way to C-rank right?"

"Other than the obvious problem of actually GETTING there." I snorted. "Bit premature. Wishes are lagging behind in terms of stat buildup. I need to get my name out there the normal way too. The godslaying fight was a good start, but we all have a long way to go before we can even think about D-rank, let alone C-rank."

She leaned down to peck me on the cheek. "Can you try to enjoy yourself a bit please? All this hardcore training is making you a bit too results focused. You're missing the forest for the trees honey." Which was easy for her to say...but also fair.

I sighed. "You're right. I never wanted to become someone who cultivated just for the sake of getting stronger. I'm too wrapped up in accomplishing as much as possible. Luckily we should be approaching the Temple soon. I can relax now, because I won't be able to accomplish much before we arrive anyway."

"Close enough." She said with an eye roll. "Tell the others to slow down too. Not Abel, of course, since he's a lunatic, but the rest of the team has been hard at work following your example."

My wince at that was hard to hide. "They have been, haven't they." I sighed in frustration. "I didn't want to push them into overdoing it, I was just kind of worried. We're going to be pretty disadvantaged as it is. I know that we can't actually die in the temple but if something happens in there that wounds our souls..."

She took my hand, squeezing it gently. "I know, honey. But you've done everything you can, both individually and as a team leader. Everyone has seen how much you've been helping Benny. Celine says he's really started to buckle down. Even Cass has been trying to do her katas more rigorously because she thinks you've been so cool." She giggled at my grimace. "It's cute. Jessie's been patching her up and Cark is making sure she doesn't go too far."

"I guess." I said with a sigh. "But you're right. We need to make sure everyone calms down to relax a bit. Proper rest is a key aspect of growth too, something I should probably have thought of earlier. Jessie's lifeforce can only do so much for us. How long until we get there?"

"A week." She said matter of factly. "The traffic as we approach the Temple is pretty dense apparently. Killian said he didn't expect to run into this many obstructions. In any case, as to your earlier question..." She winced. "Benny isn't doing great. He's training with Blake right now, and we all know how that ends."

That made me wince as well. Blake was Killian's son, and had inherited the Zayne family soul stitching method. He used, like I was told Killian did (I'd never seen the older man fight) ghost binding techniques. Like Zeke had sniped at Killian, they had some downsides relative to Zeke's Voltomancy, but it was essentially a quantity for quality exchange. Fighting an army of high F-ranked ghosts was obnoxious and painful.

"Well, he can heal up and come find us when he's done." I said with a shrug. "I think since we're getting close we should do like a team movie night."

She smiled sweetly. "Sounds like fun. I'll gather everybody. I think Cark took Cass to the entertainment district. We barely managed to get her to stop practicing." She turned to glare at Abel. "Which we all blame you for, Abel!" He just flipped her off and went back to doing cool down pushups.

"Ignore him." I said with a laugh. "Just tell her I'll make Pepper jack mac and cheese tonight. It's her favorite, so it should be plenty of motivation to sit still and watch a movie. Although, do we have anything good?"

Her shrug was carefree. "I'm sure one of us has something from the can box saved to a ring we can watch. If not, Cass probably saved some of her cartoons. If nothing else it'll be hilarious seeing Celine have to sit through them. She seems like the type to dislike childish antics."

Despite the teasing I knew she didn't want to really upset Celine. The two of them had gotten much closer during the time we'd been here, along with Nat, they were basically always together. Nat who had been working with Celine constantly helping her keep up with Benny. Our elven friend was writing a lot of checks her family would need to cash, which I thought was pretty hilarious.

Standing up, I helped Callie to her feet, turning to the still exercising Abel. "Hey, quit the cardio and come on, we're doing a movie. Callie already reached out to everyone." Her shadow abilities were particularly useful for carrying messages around the ship, since she could either drop off written notes or pass her mouth through to shout.

I mentioned to her as we left to invite Blake too, and Annalise if she could find her, our friends could use the downtime too. It had been a hard few months, but now that we were coming up on the end of the journey, I couldn't wait to show what I'd accomplished. We'd all gotten stronger, and those assholes at the Ruined Soul Temple would never see us coming. After killing a god, I wasn't even scared of meeting an F-rank master. We were going to train our souls to the limit and win some of those rewards, and nothing they could do would stop us.