Jace drew himself into the dreamspace plane with ease. He simply sat cross-legged on the shaking floor of the Luna Wrath and shut his eyes, then, with intent, pulled himself into the vacant swath of dirt.

  With concentration, he found himself immediately in front of the sapling—instead of having to walk all the way across the plane.

  The sapling, however, was hardly a sapling anymore. It was a head taller than him, though its trunk was still only thick as a toonie. Its buds were beginning to split apart into glowing yellow leaves.

  As usual, the roots formed into a map of his body, and attribute shards—golden crystals of condensed Aes—emerged from the soil beside it. Where he put them would determine where his body distributed all his attributes. Of course, when he strained the muscles needed to achieve each attribute.

  He was becoming stronger and more durable, and his Vital rating still sat at a high level. His Resistance was respectably high, too, but it was his other attributes that were lacking. He couldn’t let them get left behind. So that left Strength, Agility, and Potency.

  But Potency was only useful for curse-heavy Wielders, and he had no cards that applied curses.

  So upgrading Potency was off the table. It wouldn’t help him.

  He placed four attribute shards into Strength, and two into Agility, raising them both to a rating of eighteen. Nearly twice the power of a regular, maximum ability human.

  But that was only if he directed his body and directed the advancement properly.

  He pulled himself out of the dreamspace plane with the same coordination of will and intent that he used to pull himself in, then stood up and brushed off his pants. By now, the card he’d used to draw in the Aes had cooled off, and when he tapped it, the plastic still felt like a laminated sheet of paper—durable, but not like it’d had been exposed to too much heat. The runes were legible, and he could still use the card.

  It was time to work. If he could get this to work, he’d advance faster than ever before—at least, until the nodes ran out of juice.

  Over the last eight hours of their journey through hyperspace, he used the same strategy of timing the drainage card with the fluctuation of his unstable core to drain two more accumulator nodes and form one more foundation pillar when he reached seventy-five advancement percent progress.

  As soon as he had enough Aes to begin forming his next foundation pillar, he took a break and cleared his mind. He sorted boxes for Kinfild to help advance his true strength rating, so his body knew to catch up with where it was supposed to be. Then, he practiced agility with Lessa.

  She handed him her rifle—with its magazine detached—and had him run through different shooting positions and exercises, helped him practice reciprocating the bolt (or simulating it) and moving from different positions of cover.

  Though his main weapon would always be the Whistling Blade, he needed to learn the other weapons of the world, too. If he picked up a plasma rifle, he needed to know how to use it efficiently.

  Once his mind had cleared, he sat back down in the center of the cargo hold and split the Aes in his three pillars.

  With all his will, he compacted it into a fourth sphere, and imagined it in his mind as smooth on the outside as possible. A billiard ball, or a ball bearing.

  When his will began gliding off its surface, striking and deflecting tangent to the surface, he knew he’d made it smooth. It was smaller than the others, too.

  A shockwave blasted off his body. It toppled all the crates he’d just stacked up, and even the heavy table with the holoprojector shifted. That had to be good.

  The tiny pillar shifted in place, moving to join the other spheres, and adjusted to the same size and shape in the ring. There were four now, but there was room for a fifth in the last open spot of the ring of pillars.

  The fourth pillar adjusted to the same size as the others, but even as it grew…it was perfect. No cracks, not even a filament of damage to its surface.

  When he activated his sheets and assessed the core, it was mythic grade. It was perfect.

  He breathed a sigh of relief. Now, to do that at least two more times.

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  He absorbed one more accumulator node’s power, bringing him to ninety-five percent advancement progress, but stopped there. For one thing, the card was overheating again, and he needed to give it a break. For another, his channels were bulging from such extensive use, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d strain them beyond an easy repair.

  But, as well, if he wanted more than five pillars, he’d have to go about it strategically. Drain all the nodes, and he’d push himself well above the advancement threshold. He’d need to form as many pillars as he could as fast as he could as soon as he drained the nodes, and there just wasn’t time for that. They were getting close to Ifskar.

  But, in case they encountered trouble, he distributed his next four attribute shards. He placed them in Resistance, and with his Path bonus doubling his Resistance, they counted for two rating points each. It left his overall attributes at:

  Strength: 18

  Vital: 44

  Resistance: 44

  Agility: 18

  Potency: 1

  Still, it’d take a little time to get his body to adjust to the new power of all his new attributes. It didn’t change him instantly.

  He pulled himself out of the dreamspace plane, then tucked the empty accumulator nodes into a bin beneath the bottom bunk. The three nodes that still had Aes in them, he returned to his backpack, along with the card for draining them. It’d come in handy. There was no need to keep his load too light, though, and with his enhanced strength rating, the pack barely pressed down on his shoulders at all.

  He dropped the rest of the soldering coil back in his bag, then the rest of the card templates. Finally, he pulled his black overshirt back on, then his gauntlets and plastoid cuirass. It wasn’t perfect armour, but from the past few months, it was the best he could find—regardless of how formal or cohesive it looked.

  Slinging his backpack up onto his shoulder, he walked to the cockpit. He was the last to arrive. Lessa had already strapped down in the radioman’s chair, and Kinfild’s hands hovered above the transmitter in anticipation.

  Jace dropped down in the copilot’s seat and said, “Alright, then. Let’s see how this bypass card works.”

  “If it does,” Lessa said.

  “If?” he exclaimed.

  “Uh…well, Kinfild said something about telesignals…”

  “Kinfild?” Jace demanded.

  “It’s possible that they registered the stolen card ahead of time and changed the clearance codes,” Kinfild said. “Possible, but not likely. It’s a good thing you two stole as many templates as you did, not to mention the soldering wire. That way, they’ll assume it was a hit and run, and not look any deeper for missing cards.”

  “How would they even know to change the hyperspace net codes in time?”

  “Telesignals,” Kinfild said. “They travel through the Split faster than most starships, though they’re often slower when they’re wireless. You’ve never seen a telesignal wire, have you?”

  Jace shook his head.

  “Ah, fascinating things. Generally, the Starrealm has a few crossing its space, as do the Koedor-Ter—”

  A blaring alarm cut him off. The scanners, currently in Split-lane scanning mode, detected a disturbance in the lane, and demanded that they exit hyperspace immediately. Jace tapped it. “Ten seconds until impact,” he said.

  “More than enough time.” Kinfild pressed a button on the transmitter’s side, and it blared out a high-pitched tone. Its Aes cells fired, triggering the technique card Kinfild had loaded, and a set of golden runes flared into the air above the transmitter. They were made of golden Split-dust, pure Aes, though they weren’t as cohesive or tight-knit as his own sheets.

  They vibrated in turn with the frequency, sending resonance along the Split channel ahead of them.

  The alarm stopped blaring as soon as the card triggered, and Jace melted into his seat with relief.

  A millisecond later, a bar of orange flashed across the edge of the golden Split channel, before fading away behind them and allowing them to pass undisturbed.

  Jace grinned, then glanced at Kinfild. “It worked.”

  “Thank the Split…” Lessa muttered.

  “Now, we must land. I figure that’ll be the harder part.”

  Again, the alarm blared, warning of a collision course, and Kinfild pulled back on the silver lever on the dashboard. The Split peeled away from the edges of the viewscreen, and the Luna Wrath dropped out into realspace with a boom.

  On one side was a mesh of neon orange—the hyperspace net they’d just passed through. On the other side was the surface of Ifskar. Aside from its poles, which were a deep green with a slight misty white, the majority of the planet was made up of turquoise ocean, vast sandy shoals, and tropical forests. The equator seemed mostly uninhabited, except for a few glowing, heat-shielded mining facilities under domes of blue Aes.

  “We need a place to land,” Kinfild said. “I tried getting a little information about where the dungeon entrance was back on Braka, but the scavengers were being awfully tight-lipped about that.”

  “I wonder why,” Jace muttered. He leaned forward in his seat until the crash harness pressed against his shoulder and dug in. “Look.” He pointed ahead, where a cluster of starships orbited, slowly descending toward the planet’s surface. Most were dropship-sized, though they escorted a larger frigate—nearly three-hundred feet long. “Scavenger ships. If we go where they go, we might at least find someone who can tell us where to head.”

  “Just…don’t follow too close,” Lessa said. “We’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Good news is that the Wrath can fit in with scavengers,” Jace said, then motioned around, as if pointing at the rough outer hull. “As long as they don’t hail us, we shouldn’t stand out too much. Right?”

  “She is a freighter,” Kinfild said, then gripped the control yoke and adjusted the thrusters. “To the surface we go, then.”