Ivy took a sip of her water jar, swished it around her mouth, and swallowed it down. The proportions tasted nearly right. She took a pinch from a pot of ash and sprinkled that charred, chalky mushroom powder into the jar. Sat down on her bed, she closed it and shook it, before pouring it uniformly in Lyra’s pot. She went for Noryn next, who was currently in the best spot to enjoy the moonlight. That’s where she’d strategically placed it for the week, where it would consistently get enough light from the moon at night to truly flourish in about two months. Taking one last pinch of mushroom powder between her fingers, she fully put herself back on her bed to better water the two last ones, Verdina and Sweety. She stared up at the moon through her window while sprinkling the powder near Verdina’s roots, whose leaves had shown signs of lapsing strength. Maybe now she could finally go back to sleep.

  Ivy sighed as she finished up, letting the closed jar roll on the ground. She’d pick it up tomorrow. Since she wasn’t tired enough yet, maybe she should sit down on the nook of the window, right next to her plants. She licked her powder-stained fingers. She didn’t know why she’d woken up, perhaps it’d been the crash of a merchant’ cart in that old street. The subsoil of this district’s hill had a layer of gypsium deep underground, which water dissolved over the years, which made the city’s attempts to build straight, even roads fruitless in time. Even the walk to the academy had become bumpy, and she certainly wasn’t travelling there by cart. It wasn’t like the holes there were going to get filled any soon there. She sighed, a hand holding her head up. Since she couldn’t back to sleep, she might as well talk a little. It was routine. Talking a little, taking care of her plants, all of that, until her eyes, as usual, became too heavy to keep open, and she could finally return to blissful slumber without much issue. It was a relieving routine. It wasn’t working very well this time.

  “I don’t think my parents have noticed anything out of the ordinary,” she said to Noryn. It had always been the best listener. She put her hands beneath her chin. She didn’t pet it, its leaves were at its most sensitive while it took in the moonlight. “I really wish they had, even if that’s a little selfish.”

  Noryn’s leaves glowed lightly two times. It sometimes did that when she finished her sentences. She softly smiled.

  “Father would probably be the one to disagree most on me changing courses. Agromancy’s too instinctive, too close to ritualistic craftmanship, and I know that’d be dangerous for me, because I know he knows something about what happens to sorcerers.” In the darkness, she could ignore how overgrown Blossom had become, its vines webbing across one of her walls and clinging to the ceiling. She shouldn’t have tried the simplest agromancy ritual that she’d come across in “Agromancy made plain and easy: Heston’s three guidelines for a plentiful harvest”, a textbook for first years in agromancy that she’d borrowed from the library. How was she going to clean this up without getting caught? Ah. Tomorrow. She would take care of that tomorrow. It could wait.

  “It wouldn’t be worth it…” she said to Noryn. “He thinks I haven’t figured it out yet, but I’ve seen how worried and forgiving he is once he returns from work.” Yes, she wasn’t a child anymore, it hurt that they wouldn’t share those kind of family secrets. If he worked as an honorary guard, she was a toad. She chuckled, and that felt bitter. “They probably would have been happy with me never learning that I have this magical gift with plants… That must have been the goal, pushing me towards the arcane arts course. It’s their fault. I’m not suited for it. I don’t have the actual talent for it all. So if I can do one thing right… that should be worth it, right?”

  Noryn slowly glowed two more times.

  “I know, I know…” she said. Her voice was soft and low. “He’s just trying his best. And failing. But they don’t mean wrong… they just…”

  She looked back to the stars. That was a place she didn’t belong to. “In the end, I’m still one of the worst students of my class… if suddenly, I’m the best of the worst… even if I end up as a bumpkin mage of the fields, I’d at least shine… somewhat. It… would be nice to be acknowledged, but… Is that worth it? If I have a talent, does it mean I have to perfect it? Am I just a slave to the talent I was born with? Is that it?”

  Ivy dimly saw her reflection on the window’s pane. She’d never really wanted to change how she looked, it was fine. She was fine with how she was. A little pudgy, with eyes that looked a little too small, ears that weren’t the right length, just a little too little for an elf.

  That hadn’t really ever mattered. It was just the others that had made her feel like lesser. She hated people sometimes. It wasn’t her fault she wasn’t as powerful as the normal, slender elf. She was different.

  “But the thing… is… I don’t really care about being different, or special, or worse, a prodigy, I just wish people wouldn’t treat me as deficient for not being the same as them. I don’t want to become exceptional, Noryn. It’d be even worse with my… special life magic. Imagine if I shone. That’d be so much pressure. I… don’t… not really… I don’t want to go to the agromancy course. I… I wish I could quit school. I want to stop worrying about homework and running after grades I’m never going to reach. Imagine me in fifty years, Noryn, if I became that legendary thing I could become. Would that make me happy? Would surviving to become the best me… be worth wasting all my life? Is that all there is?”

  Noryn blinked two more times, and it was more than enough. Ivy softly smiled at Noryn. Perhaps life would have been easier if she’d been a plant. Something solid, in the wild, like a centenarian oak, having roots dig down so deep in the ground, communicating with micellium and all the surrounding trees while simply existing, far from that rush and push to become her best self.

  “Maybe I need to quit school, go walk away in the distance never to be seen again, live life somewhere quiet and simple” Ivy said. She laughed a little with her plants. “I’m sure dad and father would be happy that I’m wasting all the money they spent for my education.”

  Her smile abruptly faded as her eyes stared through the window.

  In the black night sky, filaments of sunlight blew out, high above the city. This was the second time in less than a fortnight.

  …The sun deceiver.

  “Oh. Alright.”

  Ivy softly closed her window shutters. Midway through the motion, she stopped, and left it like it was. No. Better wake up her dads. She breathed out and moved to leave her room. They needed to evacuate.

  ___

  Vic was running like she’d never had before. A wave of debris was falling from when the building had gotten split. She leapt out and saw a horizontal pane of distended exclamation points drag itself out to where she was going to land. She smashed her feet against a pan of falling wall, hurling it down while she gained height diagonally, accidentally spinning on her axis right as elastic thready loops replaced the Game System’s warning, cleaving everything that were on their path, including all falling debris. The debris were dispersed farther in tinier pieces. Dust and gravel blew out. She didn’t want to test if her magical rolling dodge would work with those attacks. She never wanted to have to try it.

  Upside down, she had a silly thought as she glimpsed at the blob. It looked more like a fuzzy hairball swelling outwards. She was back down, shadow-armoured feet slamming down. The ground abruptly became neon bright red. Oh. The hue stopped in a straight line ten metres away. That was part of a single, extremely big exclamation point surrounded by its box. It started distending from her, deforming back towards a vertical point beneath the fuzzball.

  Fuck. Fuck, she couldn’t dodge this one if she tried. She still tried running away from it, and saw the exclamation point beneath her feet keep up and stay centred on her. No. No that made no sense, no, actually no, it was bluffing, it would have used this attack before if it could have to nuke her into oblivion.

  Without looking back, and for the principle of it, even if it would do nothing, she shot a rainbow beam back from one hand, the other one holding onto the governor.

  The exclamation point beneath her feet abruptly rotated away and disappeared from sight. She glanced back, and saw a beam of light come from the tightened up, concentrated fuzzball that just looked like a single point and shoot down at some place, fifty metres away. A fifth of the boss’s circular health bar abruptly disappeared.

  Vic nearly stopped in her tracks.

  What?

  Right then the soundwave hit her.

  The blasts reached her. But she didn’t stop, she kept running, she kept running. She could see the circular healthbar regenerate before her eyes. Why hadn’t it done that before? She would have been- fucked, utterly fucked. Loss? Was it losing too much HP at the cost of this? High, it was to high up. Too high up for her to reach in its mind. Did it think it could afford it now? It was regenerating hp. It didn’t think that she could fly.

  Hide, needed to hide. Deep in the floating dust she ducked again behind something that looked like a wall and crouched there. Crouched. Safe, for now, temporarily, a respite, only a respite, as always, before it began all over again. She still could see the light that emanated from that fuzzball through the dense, ashen mist, light hitting dust particles, vaguely tasting like the morning sun barely piercing through a foggy valley.

  Wait, why had it aimed away? Had the fake god finally done something to get a participation award by the end of the fight? How would she ever know with that shit ass shittalker? The governor. She’d dragged him along. Oh. She brutally shook her head, snapping back into focus. He was actually still there, she hadn’t let go of him. The ground was beneath her feet, her lungs taking in air, and her thumb was still sizzling with its… reasonably sized pinprick that was eating up at her mana. Next to her, there he was, sweaty and all. He was breathing way faster than she was. Yeah. Yeah, not having a shadow armour spell on hand would do that to the normal human. He had the earpiece to communicate.

  …Needed. Needed to get it from him. “Hey,” she said. “Hey. Need the telecommunication airpod, please.” He was pale. A little shaken, a little shaky. His eyes went back to her, maybe realising he was alive and still kicking, sadly. Something self-depreciating like that.

  “…His eminence- has-”

  His mouth opened but closed. She motioned to her ear. He mimicked her, handed her the earpiece and looked back to the ground. Oh. Oh, no, she didn’t want to remove her shadow armour to put that on. Wait no. She didn’t need to in order to bypass her shadow armour’s layers. She could just put it in her inventory and then put it out inside her shadow armour like she’d just done with the health potion that she’d freely put out outside with no issue.

  “He’s said he needs to plan things out,” he said. “He said…”

  Vic tapped the device. It was turned on. Now for the unfun part of having to hear him out. The “fuck-you” beam from the golden blob god had convinced her that maybe she’d need some help to kill it.

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  “Hey, how do I know it’s turned on?” she said. The governor stared in her eyes and didn’t answer. “Wait, is it broken?”

  He answered shortly.

  “No, no. No, I’ve talked to him just now. It… isn’t broken,” he said. He sounded confused. Vic numbly blinked a few times before turning the device on and off.

  “Why the fuck isn’t it working now,” Vic hissed through her teeth, looking away, stomping on one of her feet. She had to look so weird, crouched up, stomping like a goblin, one hand on a faulty ear device and the other having a mini lightsaber of mass destruction coming out of her thumb.

  “It should… work,” he said. Vic saw a thread go right through the wall above them. The upper half was sent flying. Noise everywhere. Attacking blindly. It was attacking blindly. She would stay crouched. Safe. No sense moving. It didn’t know they were there.

  “HEY I fucking WON’T BEG if that’s what you’re WAITING FOR,” she whispered at the earpiece. “I’m not one of your followers, I’m not into that shit.” The governor was sweating so much while blankly staring at her. There was another moment of silence. She chewed her lips, biting down hard each time she did it. No, okay, that wouldn’t be working out. She put the earpiece back in her inventory and spewed it out from it, throwing it into the governor’s lap. He stared at it.

  Alright. Next plan. Evade. Separate from the governor. Preferably just throw him at an ally of his that could take care of the injury he’d just gotten or something like that. He needed a healer that could make a powerful healing spell for the injury across his arm that hadn’t been fixed by a mid tier health potion. It was fine. It just meant that the injury couldn’t be healed by a mid tier health potion, nothing more. A high tier one could work. There were probably miracle workers in this city that weren’t shams. Probably.

  “…His eminence. He asks why you’re…” the guy said. Vic snapped her head back to him. Huh? What? “…that it would be helpful for you to cooperate. Before the city- the. The people. All die from… from…” WHAT? Had the fake god just… decided not to talk? The earpiece was actually working? Now of all times wasn’t the time to play this sort of stupid game.

  The governor was vaguely motioning around with his unharmed hand.

  Vic stared back. Wait. Her… her shadow armour. She had her shadow armour on.

  On the outer wall of the city, her shadow armour had cut off Alberon’s connection to his spell back when they’d fought. He’d been fully cut off. From his magic.

  Her shadow armour… cut off magic.

  “My lady. I beg of you-”

  “Don’t,” she said. “My uh. My shadow armour cuts off magic. It’d… slipped my mind,” she lied. “I’m not removing it though, need to spare the mana."

  His breathing was weird. He nodded. He looked exhausted.

  “He says you need to keep attracting its attention. It’s starting to scheme once again. You… you,” he said. He faltered a little, dryly gulping down, looking lost. Had Alberon interrupted him halfway through his talking? It was kind of sad to see him try that hard to be a mediator between the two of them.

  “He’ll… be there,” he said. “He hasn’t left.” Vic glanced back at the bosses’ health bars. Yeah. He was still beneath the apostle’s one, whose name hadn’t changed. “Antiorus”, huh.

  [ANTIORUS, BELATED SUN TOUCHED APOSTLE]

  What was up with the capital letters? Kind of obnoxious.

  She tsked when she saw the name beneath it. With a bar of full health, the Cursedblood Emperor was still there, and had to be nearby, somehow. He hadn’t fucked off yet, at least. She could trust that.

  “…It won’t use that big attack often. It can’t. His Eminence will distract it when it’s about to- use that. You…” he said. A string of shaking exclamation points went through them. “Have to go to-”

  Grabbed him, she’d grabbed him beneath her arm, dodged, she’d dodged. How? How were they found? Luck? Terrible luck?

  She saw the shining fuzzball zooming in. But, no, it was levitating above the ground towards them.

  The were golden strings flinging so fast beneath her. Her feet dug on a broken wall and she leapt from one to the other. New place. Needed new place to hide? She couldn’t do much with the governor so close. Dodged again just in time. She would be dead without the exclamation points warning her of the incoming attacks. She nearly fell as one of her feet landed on a broken half-wall that crumbled when she leapt on the top of it. Something tasted very bitter at the back of her throat. She couldn’t keep dodging and attacking with the governor as a potential hostage. The blob had already used him that way as bait. It would do it again.

  Ah.

  She changed his position and delicately took the earpiece behind his ear, between her index finger and middlefinger, making sure that her thumb didn’t kill him.

  “Hey. I’m sorry,” she said. “That you’re involved in this.” He blinked back. She whispered then. His head was close to her. “And for this too. It’s the only way out I can see for you.”

  Leaping, she looked back up to the huge fuzzy hairball behind them. From the corner of her eyes, she saw him open his mouth to answer. She spoke first, but not at him. “HEY, you DOG. GO FETCH.”

  She threw him. A golden tendril missed him from a few hairs. He was flung in diagonal, slightly towards the core of the blob, not quite where she’d aimed, a bit closer to the blob’s path than she’d intended. She didn’t look back while she ran. She didn’t want to look back. She hoped it worked. What had she done? What the fuck had she done? She didn’t look back, but she heard it. The fuzzball didn’t slow down, its strings were flinging towards her at the same rhythm as before. The crashing sounds blanketed every other noise.

  That had to have worked, that had to. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She saw a couple hundred exclamation points right at the corner she’d been about to take. She changed directions. No more hostages. There were no more hostages. She could… go all out? It was fine. She rolled on the ground to dodge flung debris. They phased through her. She glanced behind her.

  Right behind her, there was just that golden reflective surface. Ah. AH. A metre away. Why? Why risk getting hit by her pinprick? Was it bluffing? Ah. AH. AH. It must have worked, it had to, not unless the blob could digest a whole adult man in less than three seconds, no, no, she must have been its priority. Right? Right?! There was nothing else she could have done. Where the hell had Alberon been? Where the hell was he?

  She abruptly stopped and threw her arm forwards, her pinprick shining bright purple.

  The fuzz ball turned fuzzier and dodged by turning just into threads that turned pale then white. It was going to wrap her fully. The white threads wouldn’t be affected as much by her pinprick, she assumed. It wouldn’t risk it otherwise. Rolled. She rolled on the ground. She phased through something, but she was out from its chokehold’s attempt.

  She ran. Her nose was bleeding again. It was still right there. It was keeping up with her, she could see its numerous pale threads fraying forwards on the corner of her sight. It was trying… to get her to be still? Was it playing? Proving a point? It… could actually go faster than her, it’d done before. This wasn’t going to work out. No, no, there had to be something. She needed to hide. As long as she could get away, she just needed to crouch behind something out of sight and the blob wouldn’t know where she was.

  How? How did she distract it long enough for her to hide? Where the fuck was Alberon when he was actually needed? Her inventory’s window was still open. She put the earpiece in it, then took it out inside her shadow armour. She struggled to put it in while she had to roll again on the ground. What was the point of that? She couldn’t call for help, her shadow armour would not let the signal out. Her eyes faltered on the many objects she had in her inventory. Distractions. She needed to pull new stuff out. It was adapting. It was trying to fully defeat her? Would she only get killed once she showed every single spell she had in store?

  The governor hadn’t died. He definitely would have died though if she’d asked for his name. And he’d probably be twice as dead if he’d then told her back his name after she’d asked it. Yeah.

  “HEY!” she yelled. “Hey. Hey, apostle. Hear me out, pretty please?”

  It did not slow down. Nothing changed in the rhythm, except she hit a wall and climbed up a building while threads tried skewering her just as she moved. It was playing. It was fucking playing.

  “Let’s make a bet?” she said, reaching the top of the wall, immediately flinging her forwards. “You like bets? You like sore losers? There must be something you like? Do you at least like yourself?”

  The shadow armour around her left leg got skewered by a thread that turned into fractal within the layers, pinning her to the ground. She abruptly fell down like she’d walked on an untied shoelace.

  She deactivated layers of shadow armour, folding herself in two, seeing an accumulation of white threads going through the roof, skewering it. That spike had gone right through where her head had been. She continued her folding motion and rolled backwards, letting herself drop down the building.

  It had been about to kill her. No, she needed to test out how resistant the pale threads were against her purple pinprick.

  “I WAS going to say-,” she said, and landed back down to the ground, “that we could make this more interesting by me running around without Shadow Armour, but I don’t feel like it anymo-”

  It threw down the building she’d climbed before towards her. She rolled away to the side. Several exclamation points appeared where she’d been about to go; she deviated slightly, leaping instead of rolling.

  Threads skewered the ground and inert matter, and not her, once again. Her pinprick plucked one of the threads like one would pluck a string.

  Her pinprick didn’t cut it.

  She didn’t die from touching it either.

  That was a win.

  Her hand grabbed stuff from her inventory that she threw towards it.

  Right as she did that, the string she’d just plucked vibrated. The ones nearby also grizzled. The sound made the hairs of her arms raise.

  She didn’t look back to see what would happen next. Some tendrils contracted a little while she saw the livers of demonhogs fly out, and she ignored the pain in her chest while she just threw out behind her a comically large, child-sized, bulbous gem. Alchemist’s dust was also flung behind her. That might just have been calficied ember that had just flown by. It hurt. It’d taken so much time to collect it all.

  A glance let her see that the reason she didn’t see the pale threads reaching out from both sides of her was because the big gem was just being held by the many tendrils, but it was at the same distance as before. The threads were just busy. It looked kind of fucked, the way they were all surrounding it, pulsating. It looked like the mouth of a whale, if it were round and fuzzier.

  She threw out a handful of tinier gems, spreading in all directions like rolling candy. She turned right at the corner of a house.

  It still stuck right behind her, having grabbed them all. Man. It was going to think that she was a damn pi?ata. She threw out an arm and threw a rainbow blast at it. The plasma flew straight at it. No dent was done on its circular healthbar. The blob was just shining brighter than before because of the plasma still sticking to it. The gems however were losing their glowing colouration. Oh. As expected. It was sucking the mana out of them. Maybe she should aim at them next. It had moved them out of the way of her attack. It would try to save them from her.

  She incanted her smoke spell and let it all come out from her mouth while running.

  Maybe she did have a death wish. She didn’t know what she was doing.

  It was busy sucking the mana. Maybe its attention was split.

  She took out an orange, melon sized, bulbous gem. No. No, change of plans, she didn’t want to ragebait it. If she melted that gem before it, it would actually rage.

  She turned right again at a corner. She was going in a circle, back towards the heavy clouds of dust. She needed to lose it. That’s all she needed. She threw the gem back.

  “I don’t have that many, you know. I’m running out of ideas,” she said. It was still right behind her. It’d collected the gem. “I don’t get you. Kill me or something. Or before you do, I’ll figure you out, and kill you instead.”

  It didn’t answer. It was still right there. She’d even begun to slow down, coming back to a spry stroll.

  “Do something. It’s your turn,” she said. It’d stopped attacking. “Come on.”

  She came to a stop and turned back.

  The fuzzy blob was still there, floating.

  It also came down to a stop. It dropped the dull gem stones. They fell with a thud.

  For a moment, everything was silent. Then Vic realised that she still could hear the sound of crumbling buildings in the distance.

  YOU WILL DIE.

  Vic’s nose was bleeding profusely.

  YOU HAVE ALREADY LOST, FOR I AM BECOMING YOU.

  Victorya got back up. She’d fallen to her knees. No need to make a spectacle out of it.

  Vic smirked at one of the corners of her mouth, showing a bit of teeth.

  “Is that a metaphor or are you referring to the old illness-quirky thing you had going?” Victorya asked. It’s not because it had adapted so far to everything she’d thrown at it by switching through its apostles that the fight was lost.

  OH. I CAN BE HEARD BY you.

  The bright fuzzball began dilating, leaving empty space in its centre.

  Vic’s eye twitched.

  MY.

  Her back found a wall.

  I SEE THERE IS A FRAGMENT OF POTENTIAL IN THAT ROTTING BODY OF YOURS.

  Bonus: