Bodran’s eyes widened. When Sara had cut off their conversation, it was like she ceased to exist. She had overcome his connection affinity. He ran a dozen scenarios through his mind, but nothing made sense. There was no way they had gained magic and become proficient in its use in the short time he and Etta had been away. They’d have needed to absorb cores and learn to use them. He’d felt no cores on the wyrmcraft, so how the hell could they have …

  He stopped mid-thought as he gazed up at the monstrous strange core before him. He hadn’t sensed it either and Sara was connected to it. His mind started whirling through all the possibilities and the more he thought, the angrier he became. This ship with its unique technology could have been his and she’d taken it. A lower life form had taken it and fled and now she was hiding from him. He took another deep breath and exhaled. Then another, and another. He saw Keyth watching him, terror in his eyes. He hadn’t meant to let that rage out.

  “What’s happening,” Etta said. Her eyes were narrowed.

  “It’s been a long day,” he said. “I can’t be there to help my people as they deal with enemy gods who may hold them responsible for my father's death. The mana crystal tax will go up, hastening the destruction of the world and the people I love, and though I am confident that we will prevail over the tyrant Ziedda, I am angry for all the suffering they must endure on the path to freedom.”

  Etta’s lip curled in disgust, and Keyth pressed his tear-stained face to the floor. Bodran cursed inwardly at having lost control of his aura. The discordant note of Andonthan crying set his teeth on edge.

  There was an ebb and flow to the energy of worship, and right now Keyth was feeding Bodran the kind of worship that came from fear. That kind of worship was powerful in the moment, but it didn’t stick. It could be used to control the will of a worshipper, but that wasn’t the kind of God Bodran wanted to be.

  Bodran could see the energy of worship, just like any other energy. Fear worship looked like oil sticking to the core of a dragon only to slip away. It left the core looking stained.

  When Bodran’s people had first begun to love him, he’d seen a brighter kind of worship surrounding his core like a halo. It strengthened his core. It was the reason he’d grown so big. It was the reason his Affinities could grow.

  When the halo reached a certain intensity, he could use it to build cores in the priests who were sworn to him, little by little, and each time he did that, his own affinities grew a bit stronger. Keyth was his head priest. He was already halfway to having a level one core and the ability to use dragon magic. He’d stopped aging.

  But it also gave Keyth a sense of what Bodran was feeling if he wasn’t careful to restrain himself. Bodran bent and pulled Keyth gently to his feet. The man had nearly translucent Andonthan skin with a faint glow shining through from his phosphorescent blood.

  “All will be well, Keyth. I promise. All of these things are happening for a reason. You have but to remain faithful.”

  *

  Sara had made a wyrmhole to Shayla’s house and the three of them spent the day learning about their abilities. Sara freaking loved her teleport ability. Shayla complained she was going to forget how to walk if she didn’t quit it.

  Hammy pranced back and forth around Sara’s feet using his luck boost over and over. They’d been experimenting with it since it didn’t exist in the Eskil database, and it seemed to have a cumulative effect, though each pass added less than the last one. It seemed to reset after about two minutes, though it was damn difficult to measure the impact of luck with any precision. The first time they’d rolled the die without the luck effect they’d gotten two twenties in a row because that happens even without luck sometimes. Sara did some statistics and determined the chance of rolling the desired number on a d20 was about 50 percent at the peak effect, whereas a single pass made it about 1 roll in 10. Not bad at all.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  As for the speed effect, ESK1 knew the basics of it. Hammy could move as fast as he wanted, but the cost increased exponentially as he moved faster up to the speed of light, which cost basically an infinite amount of mana. Because Hammy’s affinity was so high, the skill was free up to about 2 times normal speed, and there were progressively smaller discounts at each doubling. Hammy seemed to have an instinct for knowing exactly how fast he needed to move to be exactly as far as he needed to be in just enough time. Unsurprising, really. Sara had seen videos of cats avoiding snake strikes and it was pretty much like that, except used in combination with his spidy sense, Hammy could probably avoid a lightning strike. There would be no giving him a pill against his will ever again.

  He could freeze time once per core consolidation at level 1, twice at level 2, and so on. According to Eskil, Core consolidation happened ten times per level.

  ESK1 explained core leveling to Sara, and it was pretty simple. Mana behaved like a gas in a layer of reality that could not be seen by most. Dragon cores were surrounded by an invisible reservoir that compressed mana for use by the core. At level one, the reservoir could compress the mana sufficiently to contain 2000 units. Any mana in the reservoir could be used to do magic, but if the reservoir is filled, a compression occurs. At Sara and Hammy’s first compression, they’d get a level 1.1 core, then it would take 2000 x 1.1 to fill it again.

  2000 x 1.1 = 2200

  2200 x 1.2 = 2640

  2640 x 1.3 = 4804.8

  4804.8 x 1.5 = 7206

  … and so on.

  Ambient mana could be drawn in via a sort of gravity to the core, but to really take it in at any kind of speed at low levels, meditation was required.

  Spending mana on abilities delayed leveling the core.

  At each level a new skill or upgrade to an existing skill would be acquired for each affinity.

  Every third level would net a new affinity with one skill attached, but there would be no more synergy skills after the first level affinities were gained.

  Affinity skills were instantaneous and instinctive, but for everything else, there was pattern casting . Sara had access to every pattern Princess Gorskaria knew. Pattern casting required practice and focus, and couldn’t be used in situations where focus was required elsewhere.

  But Sara and Hammy had an advantage. The unsolved pattern could appear in their HUD, and all they had to do was solve it. The first one Sara tried, was the atmosphere bubble. It was less complicated than Etta’s bonding pattern, and Sara solved it easily, but for some reason, it still required all her focus. She could tell that moving the trigonometric pieces around required not just knowledge but some kind of metaphysical muscle Sara had never used. She managed to cast it, but it left her exhausted. Still, the spell duration was pretty much infinite as long as she had mana, and it didn’t seem to use much. She just left it up.

  While she was working on it, she lost focus on her stealth. It had been about six hours since she’d cut Bodran off. She’d done it to buy time to figure out what to tell him, but she’d procrastinated on it. Her last words had probably seemed a bit confrontational. Oops.

  She had just enough time to get the message, “If you don’t talk to me soon, I am going to have no option but to…” before she put the stealth back into place.

  “Shayla, you have to help me figure out what I’m going to tell him,” Sara said. “I need to come up with a good story. How is Hammy going to keep it all straight?”

  Hammy started weaving in her feet to give her luck.

  Shayla shook her head. “Sara. You can’t lie to save your life. Besides, if you go up there acting like a child in trouble, that’s how they’ll see you. They aren’t your parents. This is some sort of fucked up platonic marriage that you can’t get out of and they are being toxic. Tell them the truth, but not more of it than you want to. You have the power to go anywhere in the universe and hide from them. They can’t fly the ship without you. They have nowhere else to go. You have been delt a nice hand. Play it.”

  “How did you get so wise,” Sara said.

  Shayla grinned, “I read Reddit stories on YouTube for a living. I’m an expert at telling other people how easy it is to get out of toxic situations.”

  Sara snorted, then hugged her and picked Hammy up. “You ready buddy?”

  “Can we bring my blanket this time? And some food?”

  “We’ll stop by the apartment and pack,” Sara said.

  “Then I’m ready.”

  He turned to Shayla. “Tell Max I’m going to get more views than him.”

  Shayla laughed. “I think your team ups are going to be the biggest hit.”

  Hammy thought about that for a second. “Tell Max he better be nice to you or I’ll make him trip over his own tail.”

  And with that, they were off.