Turns out, he did NOT have a map. Which, given that it was private property and had been built a century or two ago, wasn’t surprising. So we had to go and case the place ourselves. Finding it was pretty easy, but on arrival, we ran into the obvious problem of the extremely dense security.

I’d been expecting Bael to be our all access pass, since DeWinter was the daughter of a count. I was a count, technically speaking, or count adjacent, so he was just D-rank. It should have been a breeze getting past his defenses.

Of course, I’d been thinking small. DeWinter, it turned out, was an OLD count. He’d been at D-rank for a while (possibly stuck behind making his Path solid), and accrued a lot of money and power. He had C-rankers working for him, and not just a few. Bael could bypass some of them, but given his daughter had a magic Perception necklace, it would be stupid to assume that he didn’t have some other methods of scanning his place.

So the first step was to try to identify what all the elements of security were. To that end, it was time to finish a project I’d been working on for a while. Namely, my divination form.

Which was why Ray and I were posted up across from the manor in question, inside the top floor of a building that was currently housing a fairly popular pub. We’d managed to easily bypass their defenses and sneak into the storage room that looked out the window we needed, and now I was collecting myself to make another new form.

The creation of this one was something I’d been working on for a while. The problem running round and round in my head. How to balance it all. How to include the overlay when it wasn’t technically a Skill.

For a domain it would have been doable. Working it in was simple enough, because my Pseudo Domains were fundamentally different. The domains weren’t constructed like a skill, they more…mixed them together. Different abilities and skills bleeding into each other in a complimentary way.

Forms needed to be more stable. More replicable. So I started with senses. Sight was easy. Eye of Revelation was my go to for sight. I could see the truth of things, look beyond the surface. Next up was sound. Song of the Soil was based on music, and it was perfect for that. Rhythm of the Wild worked for touch, oddly, but I didn’t question it, Scent of Truth obviously being smell. For taste, I had to kind of improvise something, and I used Danger Sense. Which wasn’t…wrong, exactly. Just not completely right.

It was close enough though, and that was all five. The next part was a bit tricky. The overlay wasn’t a Skill, so adding it stably into the construction should have been impossible. But I’d had an idea, based at least partly on my creation of Beelzebub.

Carefully, and drawing on Callie to help me, I began to trigger Piece of Mind. Six parallels was a LOT, even for an Amethyst soul, but between us we managed it, even if only because we weren’t doing anything too strenuous with them.

Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell. All five sense represented, each parallel completely devoted to them. Once that was done, I triggered the overlay with all of them, letting it congeal into one solid overwhelming mass of information, doing what it did best and molding that information into a single coherent form.

Reaching out with my soul, I harkened back to my early days as an Ascendant, when I hadn’t known anything about Skill creation. I wrapped my intent around the power and SQUEEZED. It condensed, pressing inward inexorably, until finally, something clicked, and the skill formed.

Then of course, i had to pry the damned thing open and FIX it. Slowly, methodically, I adjusted the remains of my perfect skills, shoring up some that had broken too badly, leaving some alone. But more than that, I used my Eye of Revelation to map out exactly where the skills weren’t. Made a mold of the skill as it was, then reverse engineered the shape of the overlay from that.

It took hours. Exhausting and painful hours. I had to keep the parallels active, and that was a huge strain on my soul. I ended up activating my mask to offload some of the strain. Luckily the parallels weren’t anywhere near as dangerous as my domain fragments, so it handled the extra load perfectly.

Once I had a map of what kind of shape the overlay would take, I shattered the Skill, breaking it into component parts painfully, and then rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up.

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Throughout the process, I expected to be barely cognizant, running on instinct, or to need more help from Callie…but I didn’t. I was in pain, sure, but it wasn’t enough to derail or deter me. I’d gotten so used to the unrelenting agony of the trials that the pain in my head seemed like a light twinge in comparison. I had apparently trained my pain tolerance to absurd levels just by surviving to this point.

Trying to construct a Skill using senses from that Skill was tougher than expected, but once I was able to drop the parallels it mostly became just annoying instead of agonizing, and the last hour of creating my new form was actually surprisingly peaceful.

Finally, I came to the end, and I added the one ingredient all my forms needed. Afterburner slotted in easily, given the familiarity with the Skills in question and with Afterburner itself after using it so many times. Supercharging all the senses was a good way to finish it off, and when that final stat clicked into place, I beheld my creation with awe.

My eighth form had, funnily enough, eight parts. More different components than anything I’d made up to this point. The overlay was actually the secret to combining them, it was, though not a skill, built to agglomerate multiple skills together without degrading or falling apart. It was a framework I could base this form off of, something that showed me the way to take my power to the next level.

Standing, I stretched, pulled out my staff, and held it up in a ready position. I’d been considering exactly what kind of martial stance this form would have as I made it. I’d decided it would be entirely reactive. An open stance focused entirely on perceiving the enemy and responding to their attacks in the optimal way.

“Goetia staff art, eighth form,” I murmured aloud. “Dantalion.”

And time…stopped. Not literally, of course. But my brain was flooded with so many inputs it kind of stalled out. I could smell light and taste sound, I could feel color brushing across my skin and see the feel of the wind ruffling my hair. I could hear danger, not just its existence, but WHAT the danger was. A whisper of a possible stray arrow through the window, a rustle of someone finding us in this room.

It took me a minute to parse. My Focus wasn’t massive, and only the six instances of Piece of Mind built into the form kept me from passing out from overload. The closest sensation I’d felt to this was becoming D-rank and gaining access to my full Impact based senses. But even that was orders of magnitudes less.

Then I opened my eyes. A hammer of pure data smashed into the frontal cortex of my brain, or the back, or the left? I wasn’t sure I even had a brain anymore. Wasn’t sure I was a person. It was swallowing me, consuming me whole. I’d always likened Focus to a computer, increasing the max capacity rather than the day to day usage. Hardware instead of software. But now the hardware was crashing, and I couldn’t-

I felt something shift, and suddenly, Callie was with me, in my head. Her Focus was bolstering me, giving me the tools to process the new data, to sort and categorize. My brain unlocked, and I forced myself to focus on the overlay, on the way it sorted and managed the information it used to function.

The overlay boiled down a ton of very complicated info into…arrows. I didn’t want arrows exactly, that was too vague. So I decided on something a bit more productive. Words. I condensed all of that excess data into visible descriptive words that would give me a synopsis of the data in the shortest possible form, drawing conclusions and using my brain to distill it all down to brass tacks.

“You ok?” asked Ray worriedly. “You just said something really dramatic and then started hyperventilating. I think, it’s hard to tell with the mask, but your breathing got weird. You seem better now.”

I swallowed, pushing all of my new senses back to the place where the word generator was in my head, making a new, seventh parallel and then holding up my hand, taking about a half hour to work it into the structure.

Once that was done, I blinked a few times, letting my mind get used to all that bullshit. Dantalion was heavy on the soul, even using the mask. Seven parallels would normally be pretty much impossible, given that they basically doubled in soul strain each time, but I’d used the overlay to condense them, and after adding the seventh, managed to push them all down to minimum usage, like a kind of subroutine.

I glanced at Ray. Paragraphs of information scrolled through my vision. Name, temperament, current emotions, information about his past that I had no way of knowing, but that my brain had somehow mined from past interactions and current observation through a variety of absurdly overpowered senses picking up things they shouldn’t.

Averting my gaze, I cleared my throat. “I’m fine,” I said lamely. “Just need a minute.” This information overload felt weird, but also kind of familiar. It reminded me a bit of my fate sense. Not in specifics, but in the feel. Of course, this particular sense was actually USEFUL and told me things directly instead of just giving me vague insights.

So, with that in mind, I walked slowly to the window, focused my gaze, and stared at the house.

First I got the layout. Not just from the outside. I was getting the whole thing, a series of words describing exact dimensions, what rooms were for, and a dozen other things. I grabbed some paper and started sketching, drawing the details I was getting, going back and filling in random bits here or there.

It wasn’t anything as cohesive or useful as directions. I’d start a room, then get a flash of insight on another and have to start that, then I’d jump back to the first to draw a mantlepiece and then have to start a third. I grabbed paper after paper, not just drawing a map but actual pictures of the inside of the house, lining them all up next to each other, sometimes stacking new pictures of older versions of the room, though I had no idea how I was getting those.

It took me about an hour, drawing out not just images, but writing descriptive essays on some of the security, on some of the PEOPLE, and on one notable occasion, on a particularly storied coatrack in one of the foyers.

Eventually I had to drop Dantalion, my brain burning from overuse, and I slumped over, panting, as my eyes started to tear up as if to try to self cool my mind. “Fist!” said Ray anxiously. “Are you alright? Seriously man you’re scaring me.”

I groaned, rubbing my temples as I sat up. I flared Zagan, which repaired my body, even if the soul was beyond what I could do myself. I looked down at the piles of paper littering the floor, some of the pictures overlapping several sheets. “I’m good. But I have a feeling this will take a while to sort. Not to mention we’ll probably need more. Good thing I have another six days at this. I might need a little time to get the hang of things.” Once I did though, I had the feeling this was going to be one of my most potent forms yet.