“The power he displayed is not permanent,” Master Oswald informed me with an expert’s confidence.

  “Interesting.” I let the Holo of Aerbax’s actions on Caul Island fade away, grabbing another bar of worldbone to Energize. “The instability of the fire among his secondary tentacles?” I hazarded.

  “You never saw the original Aerbax, and so have no real basis for comparison on the visual or magical levels,” he pointed out to me confidently. “His size was unstable, and he was leaking energy, the fluctuations in his tentacles indicating a temporary and massive infusion of energy. It indicates he had absorbed a tremendous quantity of energy to boost himself for some purpose, but he had not made it all his own.

  “I rather think you interrupted him in the middle of something important, and once you got away, he probably realized that he isn’t going to achieve his goal.”

  “Especially with the Caulcano erupting, and him pissing off the Elder Leviathans?” I guessed.

  He pointed at the corpse of the Ravager, spread across a half-mile of beach. All five sections of it were breaking down under vivus, all of them being stripped of their scales by Phantasmal Servants and men with adamantine long knives, while their Burning flesh had stained the entire beach white and stopped all Withered Summons in the area. “Give me a mana figure on Summoning a creature like that, and expended on some of the spells thrown after you, given what we know of Virindi and Shadow magicks.”

  “The Summoning is by far the largest. A conservative estimate would be ten thousand mana, and it could be over twenty thousand,” I conjectured. “Especially with how fast it came up. If done over days or hours, much less. The War Magic…” I considered the power, range, and area of the spells he’d thrown at us. “At least a similar amount, if not more. That Tradition of magic is not very mana-efficient compared to Matrix-style magic. You pay for power, and it paid a lot.”

  “Although that looked wild and impressive, it was likely the simple fact that Aerbax was leaking so much power that was contributing to your impression of it. Now that it is out of the Caulcano and not blocking and absorbing the ley lines there, its power is likely falling rapidly down to something closer to its original power. It might be stronger, but since you interrupted a power-up Ritual and it didn’t contain you before resuming in time, most of its time and effort was likely wasted.”

  “Does this mean you think you could go in and Ruby it?” I asked lightly.

  Regrets slid smoothly into his hand, out of sight against his leg, red as crystalline blood. “I’m an assassin, not an idiot. The answer is ‘fuck, no’,” he responded in equally casual tones, making me chuckle softly. “I think I can go in there and survey the situation, but I’m not going to try to kill the bastard. Killing that automaton that spawns in the center of the Obsidian Plains is annoying enough. The shifting immunity to attacks is aggravating.”

  “Almost forces you to have a multi-talented party in order to fight the thing, right? So unfair!” I lamented in quite unbelievable fashion.

  “Indeed,” he agreed dryly. “I also have some good and bad news for you, and by extension, almost everyone.” I inclined my head at him. “The Temple of Forgetfulness is not as destroyed as I believed it had been.”

  I measured the implications of that. We hadn’t been up there to check as yet, although it was something we needed to verify. The Temple of Enlightenment had been located off the Southern Landbridge, now basically turned into a crater in the ground and filled with the rubble of the cliff that had collapsed into it. “Part of it survived? Did you test it out?”

  “I was extremely foolish and did indeed ask the Guardian for my options. There was only one, and oddly enough it did not match the two choices that were available in the past.”

  I went through that list of options, it being pretty short. “As the Mick told us and has been verified, you could untrain a Skill in the Isparian schema, and be refunded the Karma and Skill Points needed to train another. You could also swap a certain number of your foundational Stats for one another, eventually allowing yourself to completely transform from, say, a skilled warrior with great physical Stats to a skilled and intelligent spellcaster with equally high mental Stats instead.”

  He nodded at my recounting. “Correct. This time, I was only offered the option to train back my last Level of experience.”

  I frowned for a moment. “Restriction?”

  “Once per week.” His eyes were neutral, but knowing.

  “That basically does nothing for you as a Paramount in the Isparian system at all. There’s literally nothing for you to invest in, and your Level is a derivation, not a tool. It might return a nominal amount you invested in a Skill or Stat, but the difference is negligible overall, unless you just invested in a Skill and want to refund the choice.

  “That means it changed so it could affect the Matrix side of things, too.” I saw the beginnings of a smile. “You refunded a level in Magical Rogue...”

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  His green eyes gleamed. “And next week, I’ll go back to do it again.”

  “It’s like using Psychic Reformation, without the Karmic hit. You’re peeling back your raw level to… Eight, I’m assuming? So you can pick up a ton of side Levels and go both Wide and Deep…” I guessed, measuring him.

  “That is the proper way to play things, isn’t it?” he grinned ferociously. “I can rely on my Paramount skills to do things for those weeks. Regrets already has the ability to help me Teleport around, so that most essential part of my skills I’ll still have access to. My selection of spells through the Fourth Valence was solid and I can get by on them until I have what I want.”

  “Well done and well-planned,” I complimented him. “A Psychic Reformation would have cost you a full Level of Karma. You’d have gone all the way back to the start of Eleven, and you know how much Karma that involves. You do know you can’t take ANY Class Levels until you peel back all the way to Eight, correct?”

  He nodded shortly, confident of his planning. “A month, and then I start building a new future for myself. I doubt I could change my Primary Class, and oddly enough, I find I do not want to. My abilities are not spells, are much harder to shut down, and I know them well. But my life has been based on my versatility, not my raw power, and I find that the wide open doors of the Matrix system has truly aroused my curiosity after so many years.”

  “Well, take it from one who knows. It is bloody annoying to be restricted to a Level a day, a Mastery a day, a Feat a day, and a hit point a day. The Masteries alone slow you down so much…” I sighed, shaking my head.

  “Yes. I will be at Eight for likely months, but I find I do not care. By the time I choose to walk into Nine once more, I will be far more dangerous than I was as a Twelve, and the road before me will be far more open and broad than it was before.” He had a look of anticipation on his face that actually looked pretty impressive.

  “So it will,” I agreed with him. “Do you intend to go to the Caul Island, Elder? If so, I should first like you to visit the two islands to the east of it. It should prove enlightening.”

  His keen eyes fixed on them there on the horizon, small and easy to miss when the long black bulk of the Singularity Caul was right there. “Your reason?”

  “I believe one of them has been Nuhmudira’s base for these past many years, probably the fortress island. Still, an island occupied by golems all over it would be extremely suitable for an unseen buried abode.”

  “I will reconnoiter both locations and go over them carefully,” he assured me. “I admit to being somewhat startled that you are not at all concerned that I found a way to rectify my mistakes, given my past deeds…”

  “You are an Emerald soul, Master Oswald. Those tend to be extremely rare, and do not come about without extreme soul-searching and formulation of a formidable internal philosophy. Green, I would perhaps be worried of a relapse to your prior views on life, when faced with dire choices. Brown, assuredly, you’d be little better than the mindset of a bandit chief.

  “But Emerald? You’ve decided on things. I’ve even gone and completely removed from you the temptation of wealth. As soon as we get ahead on the pyreal ingot curve, you’re going to be richer than emperors back home as far as material wealth goes. You’re going to be making items of magic and power for yourself you couldn’t even picture a year ago. The planes are going to open up, and you are going to find whole other worlds and realms to wander and explore, and you’re going to be facing the things which made you knuckle down and embrace that Emerald mindset.

  “You’re the Green Hunter, Master Oswald, and I am not what you are hunting. The things you are hunting, well, I don’t even think they can believe that you are hunting them.”

  “You are as nastily insightful as that hulking ape of a hammer wielder,” he informed me with an aggravated sigh. “Aren’t you too-devoted zealots of Good supposed to be converting all the wayward souls like me?”

  I had to laugh at that. “Outright conversion of an Emerald? Well, that would be interesting to attempt, but you’re far too cynical to make it easy, Master Oswald. You’ve just come to the realization on who is good neighbors and friends, and who is shit neighbors and will take advantage of you. Then you got your Human/3 and realized that humanity has enough goddamn problems threatening it from without that you didn’t need to be contributing towards the shit within it, and that those who did weren’t worth your time anymore.

  “Once you realized that, it was just material wants, and you never really had many of those to begin with. Goldweight for the new system might have been a problem, but we’ve just solved that one for you.

  “So now it’s just you, free of anyone trying to lean on you, walking the road of an Independent. You know that Briggs, Kris, and I, and most of the Freehold elites, are essentially good people with good intentions and willingness to help others, and that we’re the kind of people who build good places to live and work.

  “We’re also the kind of people that a lot of fools like to take advantage of and tear down what we’re trying to make. If you judge what we are trying to make is worth your time and effort to support, then you also know you’re the kind of guy to get rid of threats to it that we might not see coming, because we don’t normally work in those gray areas.

  “You cleaned up the last of the Assassin’s Guild and the Tanakas, didn’t you?”

  He tapped the Ruby Dagger in his hand with a finger. “They are as gone as me and my people could make them,” he confirmed softly. “Some of them fled to the Freebooters and likely Nuhmudira, they’ve disappeared. Some of them were wise enough to give it up and retire, such as it is. They’re amoral and will work for anyone.”

  “So, they’re going to need to be locked down with a Geas, or they’ll turn again,” I sighed.

  “Between the Geas and a slit throat, they’ll likely choose the former. All of them are on the Crimson Road, Lady Magos. They’ve earned whatever happens to them” he assured me.

  “I respect freedom of choice, but I lament the waste of talent, Master Oswald. My sympathy died with their choices.”

  “Killing old associates was hard. Killing old friends was harder. They’ve done both, and would do the same back to me. The Crimson Road is paved with blood, after all.” He was grimly fatalistic about it all, but the cheerful smile that flashed up for a moment was unfeigned. “Although I admit I were rather happy when her Highness informed me her mother destroyed the Assassin’s Guild back home!”

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