The Path of Ascension

Chapter 243

After doing the rounds to show Quill was fine and invincible, Matt quickly left the area, wanting to get as much distance between himself and the heavily populated capital system as possible.

There were just too many people, too many hidden blades, and too many agendas battling for supremacy for him to be able to relax. Especially considering such a recent attack on his life.

Luna seemed all too happy for him to be jumping at shadows, but even the few days spent on the planet after the attack were enough to fray his nerves.

He had been attacked before, but never in such a planned manner. Assassinations were by definition sneak attacks, and the smart ones could and would strike where he least expected it. It meant he always needed to be on high alert, and that was draining.

To counteract that, he spent five months delving a few rift slots he bought out. It would be a nice break until he needed to meet up with Liz, who was almost done with her training.

Happily vegging out on his ship, Matt flew through chaotic space while idly practicing [Mage Hand] by trying to eat using only the skill, when his AI suddenly pinged.

Getting a message in a chaotic space wasn’t common, as someone needed to specially relay information out of the physical world, and that involved quite a lot of effort and time.

After reading it, he realized why he had gotten the ping and why it had been sent to him in a chaotic space.

There was a kid with a Tier 1 detrimental Talent that the planetary AI had picked up and deemed worthy of manual evaluation, and he was supposedly the most conveniently-placed qualified investigator.

He didn’t have to take the job, but he couldn’t pass up the opportunity. If Dena and Eric had said no, he wouldn’t have been able to join the Path and his life would have gone in a very different direction. The Path wasn’t perfect by any means, but even just making it to Tier 5 while on it presented nigh-limitless opportunities, and he didn’t want to prevent or even delay that for anyone.

He accepted and started scanning the information packet he’d received, directing his ship on a slight detour to the planet in question.

His target was one Eleanor Mallick, and even just skimming some videos of her made it obvious what her Talent did. Each time she swung a sword, tried to cut meat with a knife, or even activating a light rune, an illusory twenty-sided die would appear at the start of the action, roll while she was acting, and finally land on a number that strongly influenced the outcome.

He watched as Eleanor struck a training dummy five times in rapid succession, with a die materializing at the hilt with each swing. As each blow connected, the dice struck the dummy just above it. The first hit was a three, and barely left a scratch.

The next two strikes landed on a six and a nine, respectively, with each doing more damage and the nine dealing slightly less damage than what he calculated her true output should be.

The fourth attack landed on a seventeen, and the cut was so deep, it penetrated the training dummy’s protective layer and hit its more resilient core. The strike was hard enough that he placed it at the level of a peak Tier 1 melee fighter's full-out attack and she hadn’t struck nearly that hard.

The fifth and final attack landed on a one, and her blade not only shattered, but Eleanor slipped and stumbled back as the dummy's counter landed hard on her hip and seriously bruised her. Matt was slightly taken aback, as the dummy’s counter attack should not have been possible with its built-in restrictions.

Other highlights included a light fixture overloading with a bang as she rolled a 1 for turning it on, and her steak falling into a set of perfectly bite-sized pieces as her attempted cut ended up rolling a 20.

It wasn’t a life-ending Talent, that much was clear, though certainly one prone to collateral damage, and the fact it pervaded basically every aspect of her life meant it would make it hard for her to ever have true stability. And it definitely limited her ability to partake in her clan’s steps as traveling entertainers.

Clans like that were fairly rare, but there were a few thousand still roaming the Empire; they were mostly holdovers of the Shattering, when families took to chaotic space to avoid the dangers and instability of the wars. As things settled down, they were some of the few people with chaotic spaceships and immortals to guide them and became some of the first interplanetary merchants.

As the realm had healed, and other factions began returning to Chaotic Space or set up teleportation networks, they tended to either settle down and become full nobility, become absorbed into the new merchant guilds, or keep wandering as entertainers.

The Mallick clan was one of the latter, and they seemed to hold spreading whimsy as core to their very purpose in life. They still did some trading, but mostly they held grand exhibitions of skill and wonder for the locals of worlds they passed through, favoring low-Tier worlds.

With a quick dive into the EmpireNet, he was able to watch a few recordings of the Mallick clan putting on performances that impressed even him, with their Tier 15s battling it out in a rendition of one of Lila WorldWalker's more famous battles. With them using illusionary skills or manipulations, the crowds felt like part of the battle as bits of sand and water pelted them and attacks passed overhead.

For low Tier worlds and their populations, it was an unforgettable and once in a lifetime experience.

Happily getting sidetracked to learn more about a part of the Empire he had never run into before, he looked into the roving clans and whistled.

From what he could glean of their tax reports, despite charging just a few credits for the mortals they admitted to their shows, the Mallicks were doing quite well for themselves. Some of it was the higher prices they commanded on higher-Tier worlds, especially when they visited the immortal party worlds, some of it was subsidies from the Empire itself for their low-Tier performances, but most of it came from their role as merchants. Apparently their enormous ships and meandering route throughout the entire Empire allowed them to pick up several trading routes that simply weren’t practical for dedicated merchant companies.

If he was being fair, it wasn’t that lucrative of a business model. They managed to keep their costs low in large part because they functioned as a family, and could leverage massive amounts of labor out of higher-Tier members that a more profit-oriented organization simply could never engender. It was basically volunteer work for most of them, but they certainly broke even on expenses, and nearly all of their profit, including most of the nominal salary of the clan-members, went back into improving their show in some way.

Eleanor Mallick and her older cousin Ethan were two of the youngest generation of the Mallick clan, and had grown up expecting to join the family business. Born to two Tier 6s, she was fairly low on the clan's hierarchy, but Eleanor had been expected to, and from everything Matt could see, wanted to join the smaller exhibition displays where they could entertain smaller amounts of people in a more close up manner.

It was a demanding role, requiring exacting effort and countless hours of practice to truly fit into the performance, a well-run machine of utter perfection.

Which meant Eleanor was completely incapable of taking part.

Those plays were choreographed down to the sweat patterns the fighters would leave on the stage, and simply avoiding endangering her and her opponent would be an endeavor unto itself.

Now, that in and of itself wouldn’t earn her a Path candidacy. She had a detrimental Talent, yes, but plenty of people got those and weren’t invited to join the Path. Now that Matt was on the other side of the data packet, he could see just what the recruiters were supposed to look for in these cases.

The most important factor was desire. If the person was very clearly content to remain a Tier 1 for their entire life, living out a mundane existence and perhaps cultivating ambient essence for miscellaneous health benefits, they wouldn’t fit on the Path.

Next was attitude. Plenty of people who awoke detrimental Talents grew bitter or depressed, oftentimes utilizing their poor luck as an excuse to themselves and to others to either lash out or waste away upon the charity others attempted to provide. Those kinds of personalities rarely turned out well, and the Path simply wanted no part of them.

Finally, the person had to have at least a nominal interest in the Path. That requirement overlapped fairly heavily with desire, but it was important that they didn’t simply want to Tier up simply because it was familial expectation, or because they wanted to become an artist or chef.

Eleanor fit all three. She certainly had the right desire and attitude, as she’d spent the months since her Awakening testing out her Talent for ways she might be able to get around it or use it for herself, feeling out what its limits were and thinking about all the ways it might get better with her next Talent. She was weakest on desire to join the Path itself, as she’d only expressed a desire to fix her Talent to try and be a part of the family business, but she hadn’t rejected the idea either.

Amusingly her cousin was fairly interested in the Path, having sent out a few applications to sponsors, but had been rejected. Given how close the two were, Matt agreed with the AI’s assessment that Eleanor would likely accept a Path offering so long as Ethan was included in the invitation.

While they were technically cousins, they were the only two of the clan born at the same time, and were raised as practically siblings, being born just days apart. Ethan's parents were Tier 15s, and his mother had paused the pregnancy in the early stages for two months to ensure he wasn’t born alone.

It was fairly normal practice for immortals, for whom even practically simultaneous pregnancies could in fact be decades apart. While a complete cessation of biological functions was inconvenient at the lower Tiers of immortality, most appropriate hospitals had healers trained in ensuring it was as painless as possible. Liz was in the minority, in that Mara hadn’t wanted to delay however many decades or centuries it would be before she had a peer, but Matt couldn’t really blame the phoenix either. When doing so the mother was unable to shapeshift or risk hurting the fetus and as a Royal Mara couldn’t take a few centuries off like that.

The rest of the metrics Eleanor was judged by were less important, but she scored well enough that she rated someone looking in on her.

From all the information, Matt knew he’d most likely accept Eleanor as his first sponsee, and would let her form a team with her cousin. While Matt didn’t have access to his information, Ethan didn’t seem like a bad kid, though if his Talent was useful it wasn’t apparent.

The real question would be if Eleanor would leave her clan. While the Mallick clan couldn’t and wouldn’t prevent one of their own from leaving the nomadic lifestyle by Empire law, the clans were known for raising their children to not want to leave the greater collective. Even those who were driven by advancement still tended to visit regularly, and donate much of their delving proceeds to the family coffers. Ascensions from within the family were even rarer, with the Mallicks only having a single person recorded as having reached the next realm since their founding.

Still, he would give it a shot.

Eleanor deserved a place where she could advance quickly, if for no other reason than to get to Tier 3, where she could hopefully get some way to hedge the bets of her Talent. He was no Aunt Helen, but that seemed like an obvious next step for the Talent.

While both children would likely be raised in Tier by their clan, their publicly-available itinerary didn’t have them passing through a Tier 6 or higher world, where they’d be able to cheaply reach Tier 3, for another seven years, and they wouldn’t be returning to their Tier 16 home system for another fifty years.

No single clan owned their shared home system, and through a deal with the Empire long ago, there wasn’t even a noble house that had control over it. Theirs was one of the very few systems governed without a noble house being involved. Their governing body was a collective counsel that rotated between five of the nomadic clans who were responsible for the planet's upkeep and oversight. It was all quite fascinating, and Matt fully intended to spend a lot more time reading up on it during the course of his assignment.

After he informed Luna that he was taking a detour and sent a message to Liz that she should meet up with him if her training ended early, or she was welcome to try and get some more time out of her teacher.

Luna actually seemed interested in his little foray, and he wasn’t sure if that was because he was dealing with the Path, and that was something she lived for, or if she was simply testing him and his approach to this situation.

Matt knew he could just walk in and give them a recommendation if he so chose, but he wanted to do more than that. This was the Path and possible Pathers; the situation deserved at least as much attention as Dena and Eric had given him.

With that in mind, he planned to spend at least a month on the planet where the Mallick clan had set down for the foreseeable future.

He wanted to have a good alibi and record in case the clan decided to investigate him, which, from everything he read about the nomadic families, he was sure they would. Once he offered some of their people a ticket to the Path he'd need an alibi so he decided to come in with his Quill identity. That had some risks, but he wouldn’t be going out in public at all in said mask, and would obviously not be using his real face, which minimized the risk to an acceptable level.

That, and Quill would have far more sway than any other false Pather identity he could whip up on the fly. Those false identities might technically provide him with all the authority he’d need and pass casual inspection, but when it came to the resources of what was essentially a noble family with a Tier 24 at the helm, it was better to be safe rather than ruin the children's chances. Or, in the worst case scenario, need Luna to salvage the situation.

He’d never live that down.

Entering the world's real space, he switched to atmospheric controls and let himself coast slowly into the inhabited planet's orbit, making sure to keep away from the five massive ships that the Mallick clan owned and operated. Each ship was nearly as large as the freight carrier he had boarded when he traveled to the Citadel for the Ascension of Yellow.

Checking the ship's identifications, he noted that three of them were actually shipping containers, but the other two held the thousands of clansmen. Not that they needed two ships for so few people, but he agreed with the additional space that the extra ship provided them.

While he didn’t have access to this exact ship's exact layouts, the EmpireNet had some schematics of similar vessels available for his perusal. Most had massive open spaces and areas dedicated to recreating things like parks and nature preserves, which prevented the inhabitants from going stir-crazy.

He also took note of the massive mana cannons that lined the ships. They would usually be hidden by the outer hull, but using [Telescope], he was able to see the masked and unmasked people performing maintenance on the cannons.

Noting all the unmasked Tier 15s, he mentally tallied the clan's strength and judged them to be at least as strong as a powerful Earldom or a weak March, which was impressive for a people without any subjects to earn taxes from.

Then again, perhaps he was thinking about it the wrong way again. Despite what their taxes said, they were a family, not a company, not a noble house. They were self-sustaining, and the mana cost needed to travel through Chaotic Space would be offset by the family’s own mana regeneration topping up their ships as they docked at a planet.

Nearing the atmosphere, Matt exited his ship and pulled it into his spatial ring before letting himself fall to the planet's surface, using his Concept to cut the air and keep his clothes neat. Catching himself with a flex of his Concept, he registered his false identity of Howard with the local teleportation hub, as there was no spaceport to report to, and he wanted to make sure he was reported.

Technically, that was all that was needed. He could drop his house in a remote corner of the planet and register that as his home base, then fly to and from the capital any time he wanted to visit, or just wander around without sleeping the entire time. But, he was planning on going undercover as a Tier 4, and he did not want to deal with Luna lecturing him about half-assing his cover story. It didn’t matter that he was officially here as Quill, it did matter that he wasn’t acting like a Tier 4 at all times when he was claiming to be Tier 4.

Using his [AI], he searched for any rooms near the outskirts of the city where the Mallick clan had set up, but found that everything was bought out. Upping the amount of mana his [AI] had access to, he started searching all of the inns, hotels, and rental properties' systems, looking for free rooms, but found very little.

Half the planet had come to the capital city for the Mallick clan's performances, and they had booked up everything in the entire metropolis except one luxury suite that didn’t work for his plan, let alone a hotel near the area of the performances. It also wasn’t like he could just put down his house and pretend to be anything but an immortal with it.

Finding nothing, he instead looked to the condos and housing market. Finding a few things for sale there, he immediately directed his [AI] to find him a couple who wanted to live in the city, but were currently staying in a hotel. Even in a Tier 5 world, there was always a plethora of people who wanted to live in the capital, and the variety of public profiles gave his [AI] more than enough information to locate a thousand couples who met his criteria.

Skimming through the information his AI had found, he stopped on a couple who had good jobs in one of the smaller cities that could be done remotely, so moving wouldn’t hurt their financial situation. He was swayed towards picking the couple because they were looking to adopt, but were lamenting to friends and family that they were currently unable to buy a house. They wanted to provide the child with the kind of lifestyle that they didn’t growing up.

Also, they had a prime hotel room right next to the outskirts of the city.

Letting his mask morph into a more average appearance, Matt moved to Mark and Felix’s apartment. It was perfect.

Slightly older and on the lower side of prosperous, but decently taken care of, it reminded him of Benny’s, and he felt that it was the best place to talk to Eleanor and Ethan from. He was pulling from his experience as a kid, his spy training, and his instincts, but he felt it was best to appear as an average person to get the most honest impression of the kids he could.

Matt needed to see the true version of Eleanor and Ethan. If the cousin was going to be sponsored onto the Path by him, he wasn’t going to get any easier treatment than the one with a detrimental Talent.

Except when he went to go through with his plan the planetary AI immediately shot him down for interfering with the mortal populations. He tried to reason with the AI but he was flatly rejected every time. He wasn’t allowed to build a house outside the city and give it to them. He couldn’t buy a house in a new development and give it to them. He couldn’t sponsor the building of a house in a new area and give them a massive discount. He couldn’t fund a contractor to build an entire suburb and offer discounted prices to the two of them. He couldn’t even fund a contractor to build an entire suburb and not give discounted prices without going through a whole book of paperwork with the local baron.

By the time he reached his wits end, he desperately wanted to punch someone.

Helping people shouldn’t have so much red tape but such was the consequence of blocking immortals from interfering with the mortals in bad ways.

In the meantime, he’d need some temporary accommodations. That it would be the royal suite at the best hotel was, genuinely, just a coincidence.

Despite being a Tier 15 and spending time in luxurious accommodations, Matt had no issues with shitty hotels with small rooms and leaky toilets. He didn’t even need to use the toilets after all.

After checking in with a flustered group of staff who struggled to be polite and accommodating to someone who told them to leave him alone, Matt watched the city from the top floor tub with a glass of expensive brandy. It was a wedding present from someone he didn’t care to remember. One of the nobles, he was pretty sure, but there had been so many.

Liz hadn’t liked the taste, but he found it delicious, and ordered a case of it.

Just because he could deal with the shitty things in life didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy the nicer things.

Using [Mage Hand], he carefully lifted the glass and toasted the air.

Luna appeared next to him and snatched the bottle off the table before pouring herself a glass and vanishing after returning the toast.

He took a small half-hour nap, as he wasn’t truly tired but it helped clear his frustration. After he woke up he spent most of the night researching the city, the local nobles, and more importantly, the local PlayPen.

Just as the sun was peeking over the horizon, he exited the hotel and went to a number of thrift shops and second-hand stores, buying low Tier and slightly worn clothes. Anyone with eyes could see that his current clothes were well made, which meant expensive, and that wasn't the impression he wanted to give to the kids. Not that he deliberately bought expensive clothes, but as a rule, by the time you were Tier 15 it was usually easier to get handcrafted, custom-made clothes than anything pre-made, and oftentimes cheaper as well. It just resulted in a sense of perfection that was hard to be rid of, but that was what he needed.

Once that was done, he started the annoying process of absorbing his spatial rings into his forearm where he could still use them, but they wouldn’t draw any attention to themselves.

With that finished, he took to the air and flew to the nearest coast and sea, where he paused to look at the teardrop-shaped island that would house the PlayPen. It gave him pause, as he hadn’t been back to one since he visited Lilly before his own Tier 10 tournament.

It was so similar, but oh so different.

The kids he could see partying on the beach nearest the hotels he knew the young Pathers would be housed in seemed like actual children instead of the young adults he knew they officially were. The buildings were identical to the administration and training buildings he had spent so much time in, down to the small opening in the trees that he knew signified the road leading to the few dozen rifts in the center of the island.

Sighing, he flew forward just to be stopped by a presence that rushed at him from the island.

They were Tier 20, but very obviously had recently regrown their left arm judging by the healing mana awkwardly hanging off of it.

If he was correct, this would be the head of the PlayPen, as that position was always staffed by a Tier 20, so he stopped and waited for the man to introduce himself.

The first words out of the man's mouth weren’t so polite. “Who the fuck are you?”

The frankness stole a laugh out of Matt. “Quill. And who the fuck are you?”

The man's eyes widened before narrowing into slits, and Matt didn’t miss the shifting of his hand as he prepared to summon a weapon and attack.

“Now, that's a bold claim I don’t believe for a second. One last chance. Who are you? Trespassing into a PlayPen as an immortal is a Imperial crime, and will land you on a work detail for a decade, assuming you can even pay the fine.”

Matt smiled as he heard that. The man had a backbone despite his injury and wasn’t backing down. He liked that.

Sending the man a ping with his [AI] that confirmed everything he said and his reason for being there, he watched as the man relaxed.

“Fuck, man. You almost gave me a heart attack approaching so fast. Damnit, if you had told me you were coming, I would have told you to bring bagels from the capital.”

Matt laughed outright at that. “What, no bluster now?”

The man blew air out of his lips. “If I was in top shape, I’d smack you around nice enough, but I’m not even on my last leg. I got no legs left, and I’m just a nugget floating around to look pretty.”

Putting that to a lie, the man waved. “Come on. Name’s Tally. What name are you using at the moment?”

“Howard. Guessing the arm is new?”

Tally nodded. “Yeah, the arm was just regrown, and it wasn’t a perfect job.”

Getting closer, Matt scanned the man with his spiritual sense and Domain and whistled. His Domain was like a piece of glass, once shattered, now put back together. “What, did you fail to make your Intent?”

Normally, he wouldn’t ask something so rude to a stranger, but Tally seemed like the type not to care.

“Yeah. Blew myself up in the process as well. I was sure I had everything right, but my Image was wrong, and my Domain nearly shattered. Waitlist for the right spiritual healer to put me back together was a couple fucking thousand years, but I got on the priority list if I took this job as Path staff and even then it’s still more a century before my first visit. Bunch of bull shit but what else can you do?”

Matt nodded. “That's unfortunate.”

Tally sighed with real feeling behind it this time. “Yeah, but whatever. I was already off the Path, so it really wasn’t that bad. Made it to Tier 16 a few centuries ago. Fucking slog that was. Not as easy as you make it look. I got a shit load of money on you making it to at least Tier 20, by the way, so I’d owe you a drink if you at least make it that far. Thanks in advance.”

Matt half expected to hear some rancor in Tally’s voice about his failure, but the man seemed unbothered by falling off.

“Everyone's Path is a challenge, and the only real end of it is death. But I’ll take you up on that drink.”

Tally toasted an invisible glass as they neared the island.

“So you coming to check the state of the island before you send the girl here?”

“Probably her cousin as well. They seem to be a package deal,” Matt answered as he spread his spiritual sense over the housing, noting that they were in good condition with no obvious defects.

“Feel free to check. The woman I took over for wasn’t lax in her work, and my Tier 15 second isn’t a moron. That said, the island isn’t running as smoothly as I’d like. We have a lack of qualified trainers and don't have any mace, axe, greatsword, halberd, grappling, or archery trainers beyond standard compound bows. Don’t even ask me about mages. My second is filling in for damn near every element, despite him only being a blade mage.”

Matt winced. That was a fairly large area to not have covered, but it wasn’t exactly Tally’s fault. It just meant people with those specialties weren’t taking positions as trainers currently in the area. Still, it wasn’t a great look for the PlayPen as a whole.

Tally nodded, seeing the wince. “Fucking trash. I don't know what PlayPen you came up with, but my PlayPen had at least one type of melee fighter and a decent coverage of elemental mages.”

Matt agreed without giving too much away. “While I can’t say I know the whole roster of trainers, we had classes available for damn near any kind of fighting I could want.”

That wasn’t exactly true, but it was close enough.

Tally shrugged as they toured the crafter's area. “It's not too bad. I can fill in for a number of those melee expertise, but I’m a spear fighter by trade. Speaking of spears, where is Torch? I’d love to get in a few rounds with her.”

Matt smiled. “Busy with some training of her own, but she might very well be meeting up with me here, depending on how long my observation lasts. I’m not going to rush into recommending someone after all.”

Tally nodded. “Good. Letting in trash will weaken the Path as a whole if they don’t die outright. Dying isn’t the worst, but dying unnecessarily is just… unnecessary.”

Matt raised an eyebrow at that weird phrasing, but agreed with the sentiment.

As they passed by the store, Matt chuckled as he saw a young woman holding two pairs of mage gloves and looking between them like they had personally wronged her.

Tally filled him in with a roll of his eyes. “Abigail, an innate lightning mage who keeps burning her hands due to shitty control and not having the time to train the skill to appear farther away from her hands. We’ve been telling her to buy a damn glove for weeks now. She’s been waffling between the two for days. Fucking kids, I swear they're brain-dead, but I know I was even worse, so I can’t really be mad. She’s spending more time and money on healing than the gloves would have cost her if she bought them when she arrived. Idiot. Maybe you can give her some advice as a mage, cause she's ignoring all of us. Thinks we don’t know our asses from our elbows since we aren't mages ourselves.”

Matt snorted as he landed and walked into the store, waving away the helper who moved to assist him.

As he entered the aisle, the girl moved forward to make room for him to pass, but he stopped near her and looked at the mage's gloves.

Some were better than others, and some had specific elements they were good against. That was where the price came into consideration, and Abigail was trying to decide between a set that was built to resist lighting but was unarmored and expensive, or a much better pair of gloves that were strong enough to resist her lightning while also being armored.

The price was ten thousand credits versus twelve thousand, which wasn’t even a rounding error to his current wealth, but he still remembered being a Tier 1 and worrying about every credit.

It might seem like a hard choice to Abigail, but she, as a low Tier mage, would get more value out of the armored gloves in case one of the Tier 1 imps got too close to her.

Standing there in silence, he picked through a few of the gloves before landing on the armored ones Abigail was holding. Bouncing the gloves like he was debating purchasing them as well, he turned to her and asked. “Which are you thinking of?”

Abigail saw right through him and rolled her eyes. “I’m not dumb. You and everyone else want me to buy the more expensive ones, but I can’t afford it. I’m trying to save up for a set of armor before I leave here. I can’t afford to spend even a credit more than necessary. I also need to buy rechargeable mana stones, which aren't cheap. By the way, I don’t need your help. I stand alone on my Path!”

The last bit was said with conviction, and when combined with how she turned to show him her back, Matt couldn’t help but laugh.

“And I thought I would be dealing with only one stubborn child here. Kid, you're being moronic.”

That caught the girl off guard, and her back stiffened. Before she could say anything, he refuted her point. “The Path of Ascension ultimately demands you stand on your own in a fight, but that's it. Before the fight even begins, I work with a team who makes sure I know what I’m doing. I’m the furthest thing from alone. Learning from others, taking advice, and adding lessons to our own repertoire is what furthers our Paths. The only time we’re truly alone is when we’re in a rift. Why would you choose to reinvent the wheel when there are others to pull from? That's just dumb.” Giving the girl a moment to process that, he morphed his mask into his Quill mask and added, “Also, indecision is the worst trait for a fighter.”

Seeing her muscles tense, he waited until she was mostly turned around and got just a bit of the view of his mask. Just when her eyes started to dilate and widen as she registered who she was talking to, he cranked his perception and abilities up to his Tier 15 levels and left the store.

It would look like he had teleported to Abigail, but that was what he wanted.

Rejoining Tally, they watched as the girl looked around, and seeing he was gone, finally went back to looking at the gloves. Matt was afraid she was going to go back to her indecision, but after closing her eyes, she put the cheaper gloves away and marched up to the checkout.

Tally snarked as they watched, “I said the same fucking thing. I guess I’m not famous enough.”

Matt laughed. “That girl just needed to hear it from a mage. Being a famous one just helped.”

Drifting off, he decided he wanted to spend a little more time before starting his mission on the PlayPen. It felt like coming to a second home, and he didn’t want to leave so soon. The mission with Eleanor and Ethan needed to wait until he got the apartment anyway, so he had a few days.

Also, Tally was an interesting character.

Turning to Tally, he asked what he was sure would be a dumb question. “Do you drink brandy? I got a good bottle I just cracked open.”

Tally rolled his eyes. “Is the Emperor fucking a Tier 50?” Hearing his own words, he corrected himself. “Well, no, he isn’t, probably. Is the Emperor a fucking Tier 50? Mixed up some letters there. Words. Whatever they are. Man, just pull out the brandy.”

Hearing that rambling display, Matt laughed.

This could be fun. His new friend cursed a lot, but seemed like a good guy. Best of all, Matt could pick his mind about the creation of his Intent. Sometimes a failure was better to learn from than a success.

Besides, he had a week to kill before he set his plan into motion.