Bellona sighed as she looked over her preparations so far. She didn’t have to pack immediately, but she was freed from all other duties for the few days while preparations were made to ehe tribe knew she was ing. Visitors could find reag them difficult, given their innate powers. This particur tribe had made its home far up in the snoed mountains, in a valley kept warm and lush by the abundant hot springs.

  Which meant the valley was actually a bloody caldera, but there were many promises from various divination sources that the volo was mostly dormant and any ces of aion were turies if not millennia off. That didn’t make her feel aer.

  This meant that she was going to have to take clothing for just about every ceivable weather dition orek, both for the traveling and for the training. Oh, she could catch a wagon headed that way or rent a horse, but that only got her as far as the own. Which wasn’t all that close. From there she was on foot, and without pany. Part of the training no doubt.

  At least there were ris on her gear, and she already had a backpated with dimensional expansion and traveling clothes with basic weather exposure protes woven into it. She suspected that once she was there however, she was going to not have the luxury of any ented protes until her training was done.

  After a bit of mental weighing, Bello with only a basic set of cooking implements. She loved to cook and bake, but the road wasn’t going to be the pce, and she would probably be too busy to indulge in her hobby whe there. Speaking of, she was going to need some provisions, including at least a little in the way of spices.

  Her left hand started tingling just before there was a knock at her door. She frowned down at her hand before moving to ahe door. At least it didn’t itymore. Distracted as she was, Bellona was not braced to receive a charging tackle when she opehe door and was quickly born to the floor. “gratutions!” bellowed her cousin Kansif, who was in the middle to force all the air out of Bellona’s lungs.

  “Thanks.” she mao wheeze out before wiggling out of her cousin’s embrace. “Bah, I should have known you’d rush here as soon as you heard.”

  The other orc sat up, running a hand through her hair with a grin. “What I say, it’s exg news! And I have to make sure I catch you today since I am heading out tomorrow, my little protege seems to have run into a problem child she wants me to beat some seo.” Kansif snorted. “Hey, before you pin about bei off to a dungeon after your training, be gd you didn’t have to babysit a spoiled princess for over a decade.”

  “Spoiled? As I hear it, you were the one who spoiled the girl.” Belloed as they both got bato their feet.

  “I have no idea of what you speak.” The older womaed with as much dignity as she could before psing bato a grin. “However, as long as I am here, I should help you out. And I am gd to provide assistan your time of need!”

  “Help?” she asked dubiously.

  “Of course! We don’t want any of that lovely grub you cook up to go to waste, would we? And yoing to be gone for a while, so it’s best to use up anything that might go bad.” Kansif replied with an i expression.

  “Of course.” Bellona said dryly. She admired the older knight, but the woman could barely cook a sb of meat without leaving the outside bd the ter cold. Bellona loved a rare steak, but she didn’t like char and wahe ter to at least be warm. “Though not airely bad idea. I cook what won’t preserve well, and start prepping everything else for travel. You have to help me though, I am going to be doing a lot of cooking.”

  Kansif no longer looked as certain of her brilliant idea to ‘help’ the younger woman with her excess of food.

  Kazue floated in the warm water of her deep bath, red hair radiating out around her as she drifted both physically aally. It took a while to feel better, and then only so much. Eventually she decided to get out a dressed, not because she particurly wao, but because she didn’t have aer ideas. She was about halfway through drying off wheopped and looked down at herself, thinking about the fact that she didn’t o do any of this. It was just old habits from a life she no longer had.

  The kitsune aowel disappeared.

  She did not respawn her avatar either. Kazue was now just her core, willfully not giving herself the expanded scioushat came with an avatar. Would this be easier? She couldn’t be sick or anything like this after all. The duurs attention back towards the pit trap that its avatar had created earlier, and geed another body to slide down onto the spikes, watg the same event happen again, with all the attendant gore.

  There was a sense of revulsion, a reje of having created this instrument of death, but wasn’t that just a pattern imprinted from its avatar? Couldn’t it just turn its power inwards, a that? Golden crystal began gathering energy to trad analyze the pathways shaping its own sciousness, sidering what the results would be to alter them, and how that might make it stronger.

  “Kazue? Kazue! Stop, whatever you are doing, stop that right now! Please?” Mordecai’s panicked voice resonated over the soul link and the fused edge of their mingled core, and Kazue’s thoughts briefly shattered. Stop doing what? What exactly had she been sidering doing? She remembered it, but the idea of what she had been sidering suddenly felt wrong. fused and uain, she maed her avatar once more, directly o her husband in the war room, grabbing onto him.

  “Mordecai? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to worry you. I’m not sure why I was thinking of doing that. I mean, I know I didn’t want to feel so weak, and I was thinking maybe it’d be easier to do it if I was just my core, and then I saw the part of me that was still reag and thought to myself how I didn’t have to think like that anymore, that I could just go and alter those paths.” Kazue felt like she was babbling, but the worst part was the spike of pure terror on his fad over their link, the keen edge of it spilling over to Moriko, who was immediately questioning them.

  “Guys? What’s wrong? What’s happening? Do you need me to e back?”

  Mordecai's thoughts tumbled over the link, disturbing in how scattered they felt to Kazue. “No! I mean, no, sorry. It, nothing actually happened, it just almost happened, but we’re good now. Just a mistake, um, give us a moment.” Verbally, he asked Kazue, “Love, this could turn a bit sensitive, but I think it would be good to just include her in on this. Are you okay with that?”

  “Yeah, I don’t want to hide anything from her.” She didn’t kly what had caused Mordecai to panic, but she was getting the feeling she had narrowly avoided doing something incredibly dangerous.

  “Alright.” He replied, then switched over to the mental link. “Let’s start with making sure we’re on the same page. Kazue, did this start from thinking about making the trap earlier?”

  “Yeah, I didn’t like that I was such a wimp.” Kazue's thoughts trickled over the link in a mutter. “I mean, it’s not like the ‘body’ was even real, if someone had thrown it out the entra would have just dissipated into mana again. But I felt like I’d just murdered someone. I feel like such a coward.” She saw Mordecai’s expression and Moriko’s exasperation came in clear over the link, but she cut ba before either of them could say anything. “I know, I know, I fabsp;what scared me, that means I was being brave. But that’s not what I feel like.”

  That caused a brief pause as they both took that in. “Okay,” Mordecai started “That’s something we o work on. But ter I am afraid, as what just happened is more urgent. A few minutes ago, something started feeling off, then I notibsp;Kazue had dismissed her avatar and had her attention focused on her part of the core. Then that wrong feeling intensified, and I interrupted Kazue’s focus. From what she just told me, she was sidering altering some of the patterns of her personality on her core, to ‘fix’ what she sees as fws. Thank all the gods that I interrupted her, that could have been really bad.”

  Kazue frowned a bit. “But isn’t that basically what you did?”

  “NO.” She bli his emphasis. “To be more specific, what I did was go in and y memories, creating more pact versions to take with me. I did not screw with any patterns involving who I am as a person, and I didn’t alter existing memories. I would never have dared to directly edit that. I am sorry, love, but we don’t get any shortcuts there, if we want to ge something about ourselves, we have to do it the same way as everyone else.”

  “Guys?” Moriko cut in. “I get the gist, and yeah, that sounds like a very bad idea. But it sounds like you are drifting into the teicality of why it’s a bad idea. So, here’s the deal. Kazue, listen to him on this, and if you still think you o work on things, well, we work on it when I get back with some meditation teiques. But I don’t think you o, I love you for who you are. Now, I am going to get bay running, this versation was a bit much to hold in my head while I was traveling like that. Love you both! And I’ll be able to talk after I get to the city, I’ll che with you guys then.” She sent them a st wave of warmth and affe, and then her mind ulling back from theirs to trate again.

  Kazue sent back her love to Moriko, then looked up at Mordecai. And then back down at his chest while she fidgeted. “How bad could it have been?” Her voice felt dry.

  “If you were lucky and mao not break anything, the sudden dissonan personality between avatar and core would have merely been tinually disorienting until you re-banced. Which I might add would trend in the avatar's favor, as there would be traces of the old pathways left in the core. More likely you’d have hurt yourself in one of a variety of ways that would have been difficult at best to heal and would have left a perma mental mark. At the far end of possibilities, you’d have done something to start a cascade of failures that would have killed us both a Moriko a widow and our inhabitants running for the surface as the dungeon started colpsing.” His tone was ft as he delivered those words, and Kazue gulped as she began to realize how badly that could have gone. “Oh, and your mother would have had to deal with her daughter dying, again.”

  Her world wavered a moment, but he was right there for her to g to, and he pulled her in close to hold her. “I’m sorry I had to speak so harshly,” his voice was more of a whisper now, “But I had to make sure you uood how bad that could have been.”

  She nodded mutely, face buried in his shirt.

  Mordecai’s voice turned wryly amused now. “Though I have to say, it was something of a prodigal moment. It takes most dungeouries before they sider doing something that moally stupid. Must be something about being a reinate.”

  Kazue tried to pull bad gre at him, but broke down into tearful ughter instead. “Okay, okay, it was a dumb idea. I promise to ry messing with our cain. I even pinky swear if you want.”

  “o pinky swear my love, you just made a promise to a priest. And if you break a promise to a priest, you’d certainly have to be punished.” His voice was teasing, and Kazue was suddenly sidering if there were any minor promises she could break, to find out what he had in mind as a ‘punishment’. She pushed aside those thoughts after a moment, though by the spark in his eyes he had probably been trying to put those ideas there.

  “Alright, enough bad one!” Kazue decred and pushed out of his arms with more than a touch ret. “I learned my lesson, and you said earlier that you were going to show me some safety stuff. Something about the sewers?”

  He eyed her a moment before responding. “Yes. But first, to be clear, I am n to ge you, I just want to train you to cope with the downsides of what I sider to be otherwise very good things. Like any training, it’s about pushing and then rec. I’ll use my own judgment oo offer more training, but you are always free to tell me not yet. And ter we still o have a talk about how it made you feel, certainly before we try training you again.”

  Mordecai turo the nearby hologram. “Now, about those safety features; the first thing we want is three more doors on each of the paths leading to the sewers, and another set right before you get to the actual slope. No more than one of each set of doors should be able to open at a time. This will keep anything from having a direct pass-through.”

  Well, that made seo her after a moment's thought, and soon enough she had it in pce, using some meisms modified from the first floor’s sele room. “This is to keep everything ihe sewers, right? Um, should we create some sort of wind spell to blow gasses and stuff back?”

  “Correct. But there is a slightly more effit method than a direct spell. You create a sort of spring, just like the water springs, only it’s air. You want to make sure it’s pure air, at least for this area. Hmm.” She felt him hesitate as an idea came to him, which told her that it was something dangerous. Dangerous to others that is.

  Kazue growled at him as a small spark of anger ignited, fueled by resehat she might be holding him back from what o be done and also not wanting to be coddled. Spoiled, yes, coddled, no. “Just tell me already. I o get used to this.”

  His gaze examined her, and she could feel the edge of his thoughts trag the emotions she was leaking across their bond, then he finally nodded. “Alright. But still, heart-to-heart talk ter. You aren’t getting out of that. Now, when you create your air springs, I want you to foot just on normal pure air. I want you to find the aspect of air that is what we o breathe. It’s nts make for us, the part that goes stale in a closed room, what lets us turn food into fuel for the body.”

  Kazue focused on his instrus, not uanding at first why this would be dangerous. It seemed like it might be healthy even, and as she finally started isoting that aspect of air, she felt like that initial impression was correct. A quick check with her core simuting something breathing that air showed her that it would qui its metabolism and mostly just make things ruer for a while.

  There had to be something else. Then she remembered that fires turned air stale quickly too. Kazue ran another simution, then stared at Mordecai with wide eyes. It wasn’t likely to do much harm unless someone walked in with a lit oil ntern or something, but she felt certain that there was another pieing that was going to make it so much worse.

  Zagaroth