We didn’t have a ton of time to establish my new idea as an actual Ritual. Not with the Scarthralls heading out into battle early next morning.

  That was fine because I could Sacrifice some of my sleep.

  The Scarthralls didn’t have that sort of ability, unfortunately, though a few of them had picked up Sacrifice as their main Aspect for their cultist Path. That said, they didn’t need as much sleep as regular people, so we were still able to take decent advantage of the time we had.

  “Uh,” Vandre said. “Are you sure we have to fight as part of the Ritual?”

  “You doubting me all of a sudden?” I asked.

  “No, no! I just didn’t think a Ritual would need something so… I don’t know, it’s like, I was thinking the Ritual would be performed before the battle to help us power through it, and not need the fight itself to be completed for the Ritual to be successful. Because we already have a kind of Ritual that rewards us for effort, right? Can Rituals overlap?”

  Hmm, I supposed he did have a point there. The Ritual of Growth did have a similar goal, if not exactly the same kind of process. However, a key difference was in their intended goals. The Ritual of Growth helped boost permanent growth in one’s Aspects, Attributes, and so on. For my new one, the goal was to win this war we were embroiled in.

  “That’s an astute observation, Vandre,” I said.

  Vandre tried flicking up his cultist robes, though the lack of an actual collar ruined the effect. I knew his pain intimately. “I am a mage, after all.”

  The others rolled their eyes.

  “You’re right, the new Ritual feels like it’s overlapping with what a different Ritual does,” I said. “But there are some key differences. Like, if you think about it, the Ritual of Growth is about effort put in. Doesn’t matter what kind of effort. Doesn’t matter what you’re trying to achieve. So long as you’re doing something, you’re gaining something.”

  “Whereas in this one,” Atholaine said. “We’re specifically targeting battles.”

  “Right! The main difference, though, is in the intention behind the Rituals. Growth is, of course for growing. Regardless of what we’re attempting to perform, a Ritual of Growth will help us improve and do it better. The new one I want—the Ritual of War—is about gaining whatever prowess and buff and regeneration and whatever else we need to win. Makes sense?”

  That got them all thinking just like I had been doing in the back of my mind for a while since the battle had been imminent. We were lucky to have gotten off Rituals beforehand.

  It had been kind of rushed, though, because we had been pressed for time to complete both Rituals of Precaution and Growth. That wasn’t going to be as much of an issue here because, well, the ritual’s main component was something we’d have to go through. Battles weren’t going to fight themselves.

  But first, we’d need practice. The Ritual had to be established, since Liturgize held a steep requirement of genuine adoption by others who had no ulterior motive of creating a new Ritual like I did. I had no time to waste.

  I showed the Scarthralls the process I was envisioning. It was just a few simple steps—equipping, readying, fighting, then acknowledging.

  “Wear your weapons and armour,” I said.

  I didn’t need to tell them what we had to think alongside that. They were well aware that Rituals only worked when there was a willing connection with the divine when the component acts were performed. In this case, it was pretty easy to connect things. We were battling for the sake of our homes and families, for the sake of the land we held dear, for the sake of our very lives.

  Those were the things that we had the most faith in. If we couldn’t even believe in ourselves, how in the world were we going to believe in almighty, unreachable deities?

  “Then we give the signal that we’re ready for the upcoming battle,” I said after I had pulled on my breastplate and brought my mace forward. I tapped the mace against the metal of my armour to let off a loud clang. “Doesn’t have to be exactly that. Can be anything, like a war cry or a collective roar, or what have you.”

  It felt odd to vocalize that, and it was clear my fellow cultists were a little dubious of it all. Nevertheless, Vandre and Lujean tapped the ends of their spears together with a loud clink.

  The others performed their own little signals to indicate they were ready for a fight.

  “And now…” I smiled at them challengingly, cracking my knuckles. “We give it our all.”

  We fought. Or rather, we sparred. I took all of them on at first, but I got overwhelmed within about five minutes, taking hits from multiple Scarthralls. I had just blocked Lujean’s desperate, overly fast spear thrust, the blade bouncing off my mace. He went down as Gravity threads turned the entire weapon heavy.

  But he was wise to my tricks and let go of the spear the instant it started dipping. Then he jumped at me.

  A feint. He was still close enough to the ground that he was able to slam his feet down to harshly stop his own momentum. I whirled around just in time to nearly catch a face full of Vandre’s sparking blood. Except, I was channelling my Illumination Aspect’s Reflection Affix. It was a gamble, as I hadn’t fully tested Reflection yet, but one that paid off.

  My skin glowed reflective silvery-yellow and Vandre’s blood quite literally bounced off my skin, leaving behind only minor stings.

  Then I countered with Field Manipulation and Infusion instantly.

  All reflected blood went straight down instead, as did the Scarthralls close to me, all of them slamming to the floor of the temple. A Gold-ranked Gravity Aspect was frighteningly strong when my opponents weren’t Gold-ranked too.

  Vandre and the others already had a countermeasure for that, though. Just as Lujean had known to let go of his spear the instant its weight changed, Atholaine was smart enough to kick backwards as soon as she was dragged to the temple’s stone floor. Her flailing feet hit Sigrouen hard enough to send him flying out of Field Manipulation’s zone too.

  He didn’t even bother trying to recover from flying backwards. Sigrouen just chucked his spear at me hard, and I was forced to dodge upwards.

  Which was what the Scarthralls were waiting for.

  Sigrouen had jumped after his spear, as though he could throw himself straight at me. As soon as he got close enough though, Field Manipulation started dragging him down sharply. Except, he landed on one of his fallen, trapped comrades.

  Ah, crap. I had been figured out completely.

  Field Manipulation’s biggest drawback was the fact that it could act on only one body at a time, so long as the body covered the field’s entire area. Anything behind the body wouldn’t be affected by the field. It was a strange limiter, and I still hadn’t figured out what exactly counted as a body.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Air, after all, wasn’t affected, though common sense suggested air had no body. But then, I was sure a blob of water would definitely feel Field Manipulation’s effect. The liquid called up by Ascelkos during our friendly duel had certainly been affected.

  So there was clearly a certain level of density that acted as a threshold.

  Considerations that flashed through my mind a second before Sigrouen had leaped straight up. Conversely, I tried to raise my own weight and shoot downwards past him. But it was a risky manoeuvre which didn’t work in this case. I failed to properly block Sigrouen’s upper cut, which left me terribly stunned.

  And then I was overwhelmed by the rest of the Scarthralls. Field Manipulation had continued acting despite me losing control over it, but Sigrouen had kicked the rest of them right on top of me.

  Maybe I had trained them all a little too well.

  I wasn’t miffed. If anything, I felt proud. They had improved a lot. Sure, they hadn’t individually grown fast enough to even start catching up to me.

  But they had fought and practiced as a single unit for long enough now that they could tackle foes much stronger than them without huge difficulty. I had just received first-hand proof of that.

  “Good work!” I said as I got back up, rubbing my chin. “And now, the last step—we acknowledge the fact that we’re still alive. That we survived the battle and live to fight another day.”

  We all took a moment to be thankful that we could continue. That we were able to go through difficult battles and still come out on top. That we could exercise our powers with the kind of control that we had just so we could practice them with relative safety and gain even better control.

  Nothing happened. That was expected, in all honesty. New Rituals didn’t arrive after just one trial run. We’d need to repeat it. We’d need to make it authentic. We’d need others to do it.

  And then it would hopefully arrive.

  “We got the gist, though,” Vandre said. “So we can definitely show it to the others.”

  He meant the other Scarthralls and such, not just the cultists who weren’t present.

  Lujean raised a different concern. “The real question is if it’s going to work like this. We’re not doing actual battles. So unless we start fighting actual bugs, I don’t know if it’s going to manifest.”

  “Good point,” I said. “But that’s fine. If you and everybody else who takes it up can start believing it’s real, then by the time an actual battle starts, we might just see it working.”

  There wasn’t a whole lot of time left afterwards before the Scarthralls had to head off. Their little excursion was drawing closer. I, Sreketh, Santoire, and Guille all waved them farewell.

  Though, not just them. The Councillor was leading his whole sortie through Ring Four with no small amount of fanfare. I supposed morale was hugely important for things like this, so it wasn’t like I didn’t see the point.

  After they were gone, I spent some of the day talking with the locals again and making sure everyone was ready for the next battle. It would be happening. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon enough for certain. A part of me was afraid the Councillor’s excursion would be turning tail and retreating hastily into Zairgon before long. Well, we were going to find out soon enough.

  “Why the long face, Ross?” Sreketh asked later that day.

  “Just trying to make myself write the letter to Brasvay,” I said, trying to smile. If Sreketh was spotting my moroseness, then that wasn’t good. “Making sure he pays the full amount before the next Swarm invasion.”

  “So we’re really selling it for now, huh?”

  “Temporarily. If my plan works out.”

  “No way around it?”

  I sighed. “Seems counterintuitive, but sometimes, you have to act like you’re losing to score a bigger victory.”

  That made her eyes sparkle. “Are we acting, then?”

  “Obviously! Well, we’re making it appear as legitimate as possible, and then when we pull the rug out from under Brasvay, that’s going to be legitimate.” I tried matching the glint in her eyes and the grin on her face, though the latter was harder to emulate with my lack of fangs. “It’s just going to be a very legitimate trick.”

  Sreketh laughed. “Alright, that sounds great! Anyway, I was here so I could ask permission if I could leave my paintings where I want. Sort of paint them beforehand so that they can activate when they’re triggered.”

  “Aren’t we already doing that?” I asked, recalling the trap we had set for one of the bugs in the battle.

  “Yes. But I’m trying to get an Affix that lets me paint on people.”

  “Oh. So you’ll need to hit Silver soon, right?”

  “Yes. Sooner rather than later.”

  “That’s great. You have my full permission to paint on me. Just… don’t paint anything weird where it’s visible.”

  “Yay!” She began dashing off, calling back with a dwindling voice, “I’ll come back later when I’ve figured out what I want and…”

  I chuckled, wondering if the last bit I hadn’t heard held something about what I wanted painted on me. But that was going to come later. For now, I took a deep breath, finished writing the letter, and sent it off to Councillor Wargrog to formally indicate that the temple was for sale.

  “They tried to drag you back to the military?” I asked Gutran when I went over to train at his smithy the next day.

  It was maybe a little selfish of me to go seek his help and input at a time like this. Gutran was far from the only blacksmith in Zairgon—in fact, he was actually one of the smiths with the lowest clientele around—but even he was being called upon for the war effort.

  Apparently, rather directly too.

  “They did,” he said, then snorted. “Idiots really believed I’d go back after what happened last time.”

  I felt like that was a mite selfish, but considering where I was and what I was doing, I was hardly one to throw stones. Plus, I figured that what Gutran hated was less the actual fighting that was necessary and the fact that they were trying to drum this up as another war. I had a feeling he’d step up if it was ever really needed for him to do so.

  Besides, he was already contributing. Gutran had lots of orders for weapons he was fulfilling, most of which came as commissions straight from Zairgon Council.

  “But you’re not here to hear about my gripes about wars,” Gutran said. “You wanted to train your new Power Augmentation, didn’t you?”

  I nodded. “Yep. I was thinking of it in… not quite the right way, I think.”

  When he asked, I explained what my intention had been. My goal had been to use my blows to deflect back any kind of attack that came at me. Knocking fireballs out of the air, bashing back someone rushing at me, punching away blobs of acidic spit… those were all extremely handy capabilities.

  But a good chunk of those were covered by my latest Illumination Affix already. Reflection could stop laser beams from Eyelined Beasts, and I had a strong feeling it would work on other kinds of magic too. After all, that sparring session against the Scarthralls had shown I could deflect back most of Vandre’s magical blood.

  “I was thinking that generating enough Power could do something like create a coating of mana around my fists,” I said. “A shield that could deflect back any attack. That should be possible, right? Maybe you can tell me if I’m crazy or not. But I figured that even if that doesn’t work on mana, it can work on direct, physical impacts.”

  Point was that I felt like I was conflating reflection and deflection. The former would mirror back energy-based attacks, and the latter would deal with physical force. I’d need a combination of both to fully defend myself.

  Gutran was nodding like he had made sense of what I had said, despite me jumbling up what I had said. “Sounds like a good plan. Usually, I don’t see anyone thinking of Power defensively. There is the potential for a trade-off in the sense that, if used incorrectly, the defensive applications can interfere with offensive output.”

  That was news to me. “Oh crap. So I could have messed up all the hard work I’ve done so far? That’s crazy. What if someone didn’t have, you know, access to information like I do?”

  Gutran’s expression didn’t turn very sympathetic at my concern. “There are worse things in life than simply making one little mistake in your Path.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, but I didn’t argue. It felt like I was unearthing a side of Gutran I hadn’t really witnessed before. So far, he had been willing to help me train and learn and progress, to help me grow stronger and stronger. I recalled that he had first agreed to help me because of the imminent threat of the evil Scarthralls

  But over time, that had changed. I had started training to explore the heights I could reach via the Weave. Gutran hadn’t seemingly minded that shift in direction, at my motivation changing as my life circumstances changed. He had continued helping and teaching, had continued being a mentor I could depend on to assist me to the best of his abilities.

  Clearly, that didn’t mean his own feelings on the matter were gone. He had just suppressed them for my sake.

  It made me wonder what had happened during the Krayle Dungeon wars he had participated in. I wondered what he had seen to ingrain such a distaste for overly focusing on the Weave and other facets of progression.

  Was I obsessing overmuch? I didn’t think so. Gutran hadn’t really berated me for it yet.

  My musings on things like that were cut short by the blacksmith himself. Gutran gave me a short but fang-filled smile.

  “You’re starting to look bothered, Ross,” he said. “Was it what I said?”

  “Well… I was just wondering what made you, uh, think poorly of… you know, Paths, Aspects, all that.”

  Gutran tutted, then waved a hand like it didn’t matter. “You’re here to train, aren’t you?” My eyes widened when I saw his throat glow all of a sudden. “And to train, you need to face some real Aspects. How about I show you mine?”