Kael remained still as blood ran freely between his clenched teeth and dripped onto his coat.
What was that arrow? He had never encountered such a mote, or whatever it was. From the brief contact he'd had with it, it seemed to climb in rank by consuming the flesh of whoever it passed through. But how was that possible? If refining motes was already considered going against the heavens, then what was something capable of advancing five ranks in the span of a single breath called?
He pushed himself up and walked with shaky steps toward a wall to steady himself.
Whatever it was, it would have to wait. The commotion he had caused down here couldn't have gone unnoticed.
Kael walked over to what little remained of the Luminaires, gave them a glance and stepped over them.
He picked up the bow and studied it. Really studied it. But even after activating Obsidian Shard he found nothing. He tossed it aside and crouched over the young Luminaire who had fired it, attempting to pour his Will into him. No response. Completely dead, his inner realm already gone.
Kael sighed, grabbed a coat and fashioned it into a crude bag. Then the tedious work of gathering resources began.
This was usually the part he looked forward to most. But after the arrow had torn through everything, the market was a ruin. He felt less like a victor and more like a homeless man picking through scraps, which was a strange thing to feel after winning a forty against one.
Just as he was about to pick up the first mindstone his mouth bulged.
He retched, and a mouthful of blood poured onto the ground. Kael clamped a hand over his mouth desperate to keep more in, only for it to pour straight through the hole in his palm.
'What's happening?'
He stopped completely and stood there, thinking.
His mind turned, but every thought felt clumsy. Slow. Like it was wading through something thick. He was operating at a pace he could only describe as beneath a crawl.
Then his eyes widened.
How could he have forgotten. His soul had taken damage. It had happened mere moments ago and somehow it had already slipped from him entirely.
He shifted his consciousness inward toward his inner realm.
The white void emerged around him instantly, replacing the dim ruins of the black market. His colossal river of Will moved along its usual path, unhurried and unbothered, the Thoughts inside following its inevitable current.
But the white space surrounding it told a different story. Cracks ran through it in every direction, just as they had when his soul-bound mote was first destroyed. Only this time it was worse. Far worse.
"How is this possible?"
Kael had experienced the loss of a soul-bound mote. So why, looking at his soul now, was it more damaged from Point Aegis taking a single hit than it had been when a mote literally bound to his soul was destroyed?
The moment he thought of it, memories that had felt distant sharpened back into focus.
"Right. What happened to Point Aegis?"
He reached for it within his inner realm. Nothing. He raised his hand and tried to summon it. Nothing again.
'Is it really gone?'
The thought left a bitter taste on his tongue. He couldn't afford to lose Point Aegis. Not only was it the remnant of a Paragon, but its effectiveness to Thought ratio was unlike anything he had encountered. Even among other motes from the strength path it stood apart. And with the war so close, losing not just his defensive mote but one of such value could mean the difference between living and dying.
Just as he was about to begin re-strategizing, a familiar sound reached him.
Thud. Clink. Thud. Clink.
Kael's gaze dropped toward it. Then something close to relief washed over him.
Point Aegis rolled past with its usual indifference, and Point Blank close behind, bumping into it with a clink.
But something was wrong. Point Aegis seemed unbothered by its own rolling, yet with each turn fragments of its matte metallic surface broke away and fell. It was no longer a perfect cube. It looked battle-scarred, thin cracks webbing across every face.
Kael lunged forward and snatched it up.
"Stop rollin, you lowlife."
How Point Aegis had survived the arrow he didn't know, but he wasn't about to watch it fall apart in front of him.
He lifted it and studied it carefully. Fragments continued to break away, dissolving into golden sparks before they ever reached the ground.
"It's holding on by a thread."
No wonder he hadn't been able to sense it in his inner realm. Even now, holding it directly in his palm, he could barely feel it.
His mind turned.
Did motes heal after taking damage? Could he simply wait, or did he need to act? Would activating it again finish it off entirely?
He pressed the cube against his forehead.
"Think. Think."
But his mind was blank. Every answer felt just around the corner and completely out of reach at the same time.
As he thought, Point Blank seemed to completely lose track of what to do and began circling him in slow, perfect loops.
Kael gritted his teeth and gave it a firm kick.
"Get away bastard."
Unable to offer any resistance, Point Blank shot away in a grey streak and vanished straight into the river of Will.
Kael scoffed and returned to his thinking.
He couldn't remember exactly how a mote responded to damage, but he knew he couldn't risk Point Aegis getting destroyed. He had to act.
So how?
He knew of no reliable way to ensure a safe recovery for a damaged mote. Well... he knew one. But it was unrealistic given the circumstances. And the worst part was he needed it repaired quickly.
No matter how long he thought, he couldn't arrive at a single valid solution. Which left him with only one.
He sighed and withdrew his consciousness back to the market.
He raised his hand and the battered cube materialised in his palm. Unwilling to risk Point Aegis rolling loose inside his inner realm and destroying itself, he kept it summoned in its true form and pocketed it, where he could watch it himself.
He resumed his looting.
The one solution he had settled on was entirely theoretical, at least in his own experience. He had read about it, heard it discussed, but never once attempted it himself. Theoretically, no matter how slim the odds, you could refine and create a mote of any rank. Kael had refined one rank one and one rank two before, but even those had pushed his limits, and the successes had been more luck than skill. He had failed the refinement more than once just to get there.
But just as rank one and two were refinable, so were three, four and five. The difficulty, however, climbed steeply. If a rank two refinement carried perhaps a thirty percent chance of success, rank three sat closer to ten.
Kael's affinity with refinement might push that ten to thirteen. Slim by any measure.
But what if you didn't have to start from nothing? What if you had a baseline to work from? What if you began with a mote that already existed, damaged or not, rather than building one from scratch?
It was a solution, but one that everything he had read advised strongly against. To advance the damaged mote directly to rank three.
When refining a mote from raw ingredients you start from nothing. That has both its disadvantages and advantages. The essence of refinement was understanding your ingredients and aligning their laws in a manner that held. Starting from scratch meant the refiner had a cleaner path to that understanding, because they had built the foundation themselves. Take mathematics as an example. Someone who learns from the fundamentals will find complex equations far easier to grasp when they eventually appear. The logic is already in their bones.
But advancing a mote that already exists is something else entirely. It is like handing a complex equation to someone who has only just learned to factorise.
And there was another layer to it. When refining from pure ingredients the worst case is backlash and lost materials. Painful, but recoverable. The advancement refinement carried a different price entirely. Fail, and you didn't lose ingredients. You lost the mote itself.
This was why it was so rarely attempted. The risk to reward ratio was too steep for anyone reasonable to seriously consider it.
However.
This was precisely where Kael believed he held an advantage. What made the advancement so difficult? Aligning new laws with those already laid within the mote. That was the problem, for most.
But wasn't that exactly what Obsidian Shard excelled at? He had used it on a mote before, only out of curiosity, and only briefly. But that had been enough. Even that short examination had made one thing clear. If he invested enough resources, enough time, enough Thoughts into studying a mote, he was confident he could unravel the laws woven into it. Reverse engineer them entirely.
Not only would this theoretically allow Kael to reconstruct the recipe for a mote from the mote itself, it would also dramatically increase the success rate of advancing one through refinement.
A smile played at Kael's lips as he moved through the remnants of the market.
If he managed to reverse engineer the recipe, the advancement success rate would climb by a margin large enough to shatter any existing economy within the refinement market. Kael wasn't even certain he could stay clear of Royal Noble families if word of his mote ever reached them.
"Obsidian Shard." Kael murmured. "It's the one mote I can never let anyone know I have."
He weighed one of the makeshift bags in his hand. It was full of mindstones, more than he had ever carried at once, close to three thousand. Collected from the stalls and the Luminaires he had killed himself. They hadn't even thought to use them toward the end, to fill their Thought reserves when it might have made a difference.
A scoff escaped his lips.
Their greed had been great enough to risk their lives protecting a few stones. Perhaps it would have been difficult to live without those savings afterward, but where had the caution gotten them? They hadn't lived to suffer through it either way.
He lifted the second bag.
It was filled to the brim with ingredients ranging from rare to nearly unobtainable. He was pleased, though if not for the arrow tearing through the market he would have had tenfold what he carried now.
Still. He had achieved what he came for. Mindstones, refinement materials, and a blow dealt to the Valthorne on Eireindaile's behalf. The battlefield, at least fractionally, was more even now.
Kael continued gathering what lay scattered across the ground until he reached the stairs. He set three filled bags beside him and crouched down to inspect the arrow.
It looked nothing like the mundane arrow the young Luminaire had fired.
The shaft still carried the deep red metallic hue it had taken on from everything it absorbed. Its fletching was blood moon red, with a metallic black bleeding through in places.
Kael's fingers tightened around the shaft and he pulled. The hole in his hand had only just stopped bleeding, but the moment he strained it tore open again, blood running freely down his fingers. He ignored it, planted a leg against the staircase and pulled with everything he had.
Nothing.
He released the arrow and shook the blood from his hand with a low hiss.
It wasn't simply lodged in the stone. It felt locked in space itself.
He climbed a step and drove his foot down with full force. The stone shattered with a loud crack, fragments exploding outward.
The arrow clinked down to the lower step and stilled.
Kael pinched it and tried again. It didn't move.
'What? Is it really locked in space?' He raised an eyebrow. 'No... That's not right. It's more like its density is beyond reasoning.'
He tried kicking it to make it roll. Nothing.
The idea of it being fixed in space was illogical. If that were true it would never have fallen when the stone shattered, but it had. Density made more sense. He had no idea how, or what the arrow even was, but it felt like a reasonable guess.
Then he looked at the arrowhead and recognised it immediately.
A bodkin tip. Simple, old, and still used by some mortals. Originally designed for piercing armour, but it worked equally well against the tough hide of lesser beasts.
He let his fingers brush against the point.
It was sharp, sharper than anything a mortal hand could forge. And ice cold, almost as though it were drawing the warmth directly from his fingers.
'I can't sense a rank from it anymore.'
He gave it one last look, collected his bags and climbed the stairs. He wanted that arrow. Needed it. But it would have to wait until things settled.
Kael paused at the top and looked at the pile of bodies.
It was a perfect opportunity to gather ingredients for soul pathway motes, but did he really need that much? There was also the question of how decomposable material even worked inside the stone coffin.
'I'll have to test it...'
He walked past the bodies and into the nave of the church.
The stone coffin emerged the moment he crossed the threshold, pushing benches and furniture aside as it opened.
Kael tossed the three bags inside, then grabbed two bodies at random and threw them in after.
It was late evening when Kael stepped back onto the street. The air was still, and the only light coming from poorly placed streetlamps. He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, his breath forming a thick cloud.
The few people he passed glanced his way and stepped aside, yet none of them looked frightened. Perhaps it was the faint light softening his edges. Or perhaps it was the trauma of Eireindaile's recent attack, leaving them too numb to be startled by one more unsettling sight.
Still, it made things easier.
He stopped at a dead end and cut his hand through the air in a sharp arc. Ripples danced across its surface the moment he did, and he stepped through.
Beyond the invisible wall neither Adam nor any of the Pale Ones were waiting. Only Syleena, sitting cross legged on a bed with a sketchbook open across her lap.
"Still drawing?" Kael asked softly, shrugging off his coat.
Syleena's hazel eyes lifted to meet his for a moment, then dropped back down.
"It's a great way to pass the time. You should try it sometime."
Kael sat down and rested his chin in his palm, studying her.
"I'll need to stay at your place for a while."
Her pen stilled. This was the second time he had asked that, yet the situation was essentially unchanged. They needed each other. Even now, with Kael looking like a torn rag compared to the first time he had stood in front of her and asked, she understood his value clearly. And there was something else worth noting. He had somehow advanced to rank three, same as her.
When Syleena first reached rank three she had felt almost chosen. People in their early twenties were never supposed to manage that. The fact that he had kept pace with her was both frightening and, in a way she hadn't expected, comforting.
She snapped the sketchbook closed and gave him her full attention.
"For how long?"
"The foreseeable future."
She thought for a moment, but there was no real deliberation in it. She already knew her answer.
"Sure."
Kael nodded curtly and Syleena returned to her sketching.
This was precisely what he needed. He wasn't about to collapse, but he was close. With a safe space like Syleena's rank four mote to hide within, he could rest, heal, and most importantly, study Point Aegis. Learn it well enough to give the advancement a fighting chance.
He had no idea whether it was even possible with Obsidian Shard. But for the first time in a while he felt something close to anticipation. The prospect of sitting in silence with nothing to do but think and study was, by any measure, a luxury.