As Christie waited in the rain, she couldn’t help but shiver. Not just because of the dampness and the cold, but also because she felt like she had committed a terrible sin.

  “Should I have helped her?” She muttered as she embraced her torso and rubbed her arms. Not even under the canopy of the trees did she find refuge from the rain. “But what should I have done? What can I do?”

  She felt so miserable.

  She felt so minuscule.

  Even after acing all of her exams, Christie still felt small. Mostly because she didn’t care about scores and qualifications. The only reason she came to the Skyscraper Academy was to control her sea of stone, yet after a whole year her progress was minimal.

  She had thought that the physical education classes had helped her, not only by building her body, but also by making her able to tolerate her inner sea.

  “But has it?” She no longer saw things so clearly. “What kind of lithorist collapses after summoning their agates for a single, fractured minute?” Christie chuckled to herself as she continued shivering. “I am so pathetic…”

  But what could she do? She had fallen unconscious just trying to make a simple bridge, so what use could she be of against a behemoth? A monster of legend?

  Christie recalled those chittering mandibles, those massive claws, that thick carapace, and the myriad of legs far thicker than logs.

  What use was the useless Christie against that?

  A flash.

  The redhead turned her head to the sky to see how the sun had come out amidst the rain clouds.

  “No…” She realized. “That is not the sun…”

  The light was moving, slowly ascending, but it also shone far more strongly than the sun itself. And besides, it was a full circle instead of a torus. Christie only knew of one lithorist able to bring the day into the darkest night, for she always shone with far more radiance than the sun.

  “I need to do something.” It wasn’t a statement, but a command. To herself.

  The moment Christie saw that light, something ignited deep within her. She didn’t know what she could do to help her roommate, but she comprehended the meaning behind that ascending light. Agatha had put all her hopes in René Dago, yet they had no way of knowing where the man was. The valley far too massive for a single man to cover.

  Perhaps her help was wholly unneeded and uncalled for, but the fire kept gathering in her veins.

  She had to do something. Otherwise, she felt her heart might burst.

  A crazy idea assaulted her mind with almost the same violence of the behemoth’s charge. It was utterly lunatic.

  “But it might work…” She whispered under her breath as she walked out of the protection of the tree’s canopy. “I can make walls and bridges with the ‘Grow’ command, but surely I can do much more. Much, much more.”

  Christie squatted and pressed her hands against the muddy floor. She took a deep breath and released the Sleep command from her agate amalgamate, but most importantly, she uttered a single word.

  “Grow.”

  It wasn’t a real command; it was all in her mind. Agates couldn’t grow, and hers weren’t an exception, but at the same time, her lithic sea cared not for such sophistries.

  She told it to grow. And it did.

  There was solid ground right beneath her, so the agates could only take one of two paths. Either it penetrated into the ground or it took the path of least resistance.

  When Christie blinked again, she had risen ten meters into the air. She was still squatting, but now her hands were pressed against a floor of agate instead of mud.

  She didn’t dare stand up.

  Her heart beat faster than ever before.

  The fast-moving sun – which had begun to descend – illuminated the forest harshly, so the redhead could easily see how high up she was. She was towering over the surrounding forest.

  “It is fine, it is fine,” Christie repeated to herself in a mantra to stop herself from panicking. She had moderate success. “The platform is big, you will not fall, Christie.”

  The pillar of agate she had created was, indeed, big. Not only did it raise up to ten meters – the limit of her recalling range – but it was quite wide with a two-meter radius. And even with all that volume, her sea of stone still ached to pour out.

  Much against her body’s wishes, Christie stood up. She was against the clock now. She wouldn’t be able to hold her inner sea for long; she had to release it as soon as possible.

  “Depths, it was easier to fly on Agatha’s platform when it was dark,” she chuckled grimly as she took in the sights.

  She was high up.

  “Still not high enough,” the young lithorist was well aware that gaining a bit of height wouldn’t help her roommate. She needed far more height. “The Control command is self-sufficient,” she recalled the words she had said herself a long time ago, “and can lift itself with some room to spare…”

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  She was trembling out of fear.

  She was trembling out of cold.

  She was trembling out of giddiness.

  “So if someone were to accumulate enough agates…”

  Christie pushed a single and silent Control command into her sea of stone. Nothing seemingly changed, but she knew better. The redhead pushed her Grow ‘command’ on the sea of agates making a branch out of the pillar extending toward the falling sun. The branch was eight meters in length and as massive as the pillar, so logic dictated that the structure should topple to the ground from the unbalanced center of mass.

  Yet it didn’t.

  Hesitatingly, Christie took a step forward.

  Instantly, an equivalent distance grew from the tip of the branch.

  So she took another step.

  More branches grew.

  Christie started walking and more branches grew from the extremes. Soon, the pillar found itself at the border of her recalling range, and the branch was twenty meters in length by that point, yet it still didn’t fall down.

  She broke into a dash.

  Like a road on a charcoal sketch that was being erased at one end and drawn at another, Christie ran atop the trees unimpeded. It was a bizarre sight to her already, as more road appeared before her no matter how fast she ran, and she was sure it was far more bizarre from the outside.

  It’s still not fast enough! That was the cruel reality. Perhaps she didn’t need to trudge through mud and topple trees like the behemoth, but she was awfully slow and tired. I need to move faster!

  It was simpler said than done, however.

  Her agate was floating in the air, so it was impossible for her to push it against a surface like she had done with the ground to first take off.

  But she still had a terrain advantage.

  The sun had disappeared, probably because Agatha had recalled her agate, but the direction of the agate had been down the valley. It was a very slight incline, but it was an incline, and there was a lot of distance to cover.

  “I cannot believe I am doing this…” She muttered under her breath for the umpteenth time as she wordlessly guided her lithic road with Grow to slightly growing downwards.

  A gentle angle.

  Yet an angle nonetheless.

  Once the whole road was at an angle, Christie did the craziest thing she had ever done in her entire life and sat down. With a deep breath, the redhead pushed herself with her hands on the lithic surface and took part in the world’s deadliest slide.

  It didn’t help that the slide was made of agate, which was already known for being slippery, but it was also drenched in water. Far more water than when she had made that bridge.

  “Why did I do this?” Christie shouted as she descended and moved at literal breakneck speeds.

  Yet no matter how fast she moved, there was always more slide. For the first time in her life, Christie didn’t feel her sea of agates pummel down at her body. It was as if it were like a family with a myriad of children and they were all saying ‘I had my turn’ whenever they were recalled by the rapidly shifting recalling range.

  It was the oddest of feelings, not having her agates fight against her.

  If Christie had to give it a description, she would only need a single word: freedom.

  It was far more liberating than walking bare. She felt shackles the weight of mountains being lifted from her. All the exhaustion she had accumulated from the two days of trekking evaporated, as if it was a mere suggestion to the sheer effort of keeping her inner sea contained.

  Christie felt limitless. Indefatigable. She now realized that what she considered her default state was the lowest of lows. This was her true, peak self!

  A bright light surprised her.

  It was hard seeing it from her prone angle, and as she tried to find it again by peeking with her head over the green and red slide, she was unable to. But another flash greeted her. It was as sudden as the previous one and equally short-lived.

  Then a third!

  There! The light allowed her to see the silhouette of the behemoth, which – as massive as it was – still camouflaged perfectly in this rain and darkness.

  A fourth flash.

  Uh… how do I stop this thing? Only now Christie remembered a small thing called inertia.

  Yet her doubt didn’t escalate into fear as there wasn’t a fifth flash. At that exact moment, a powerful single-mindedness took over her. There wasn’t enough time for thoughts, not even to ponder the worst of scenarios.

  Instinctively, Christie shouted a single command.

  “Range!”

  And she became encased in a lithic coffin.

  A lithic coffin the size of a behemoth, weighing hundreds of tons, and moving at the speed of a galloping horse.

  ***

  Death came from above.

  Yet it wasn’t the kind Agatha expected.

  A thunderous crash echoed throughout the valley, her promised death forgotten. Mighty was the noise, but the dirty-blond girl had become numb to sound with all the Amplify Speed agates she had just shot.

  As she opened her eyes, she wasn’t met by the behemoth’s claw, but a planet. An orb of perfect dimensions – just like her agate – awaited in front of her. It was massive. Even more so than the behemoth. But most importantly, it was green and red.

  Agatha sobbed as she realized that.

  She couldn’t care about the fallen pincer to the side that had been awfully close to smashing her into a mush, nor the terrifying proximity the orb was from her, measly two meters away. She could only cry as she realized that she was still alive. But even more importantly, thanks to who she was.

  The whole valley had seemed to fall into an absolute silence after that crash, even the rain itself had stopped as if intimidated by the mighty orb.

  Then, change.

  Sudden and jarring.

  The perfect agate, bigger than the behemoth, disappeared without so much as a blink. One moment, there was an orb pressing down the corpse of the legendary monster into the earth, and the next one, there wasn’t.

  Instead, from the heavens, a girl materialized where the core of the orb had been.

  Agatha looked in awe at the redhead who was tens of meters in the sky. Then the dread kicked in. She’s gonna fall! Even though she didn’t have enough strength to lift her own body as she had already resigned to survive, Agatha still tried to move. Unfortunately, ‘tried’ was the keyword. Her body didn’t bulge. It was utterly and completely exhausted, and her mind didn’t fare much better.

  Fortunately, however, her assistance was unwarranted.

  She should have thought about it when Christie had appeared from the heavens, but her body had acted before her mind.

  Somehow, her roommate had obtained her own means to fly.

  Before she started plummeting to the ground, a cloak of pure agate appeared around Christie. Yet it was found in a constant state of growth as it quickly evolved – or devolved, depending on who you asked – into more of a dress. A lithic dress with a skirt as extensive as the canopy of trees and the glimmer of a geode. As heavy as all that agate should be, the redhead descended slowly and softly as a feather.

  As the tall girl reached the ground, the agate mass first collided against the mud, awkwardly impeding her from going downward. But as she was rather close to the ground, Christie seemed to take her loss and recalled her agates. She landed in the mud with a grunt, and the moment she stood up, the behemoth’s corpse exploded.

  Agatha wasn’t sure how it happened as the academy’s biology classes didn’t cover crustacean anatomy, but the blood that had been previously blocked by the sea of stones was now released with an explosive delay. Even though the storm had ceased, it was raining once more.

  Only that it now rained blood instead of water.

  Her roommate didn’t seem to care as she approached the seamstress-in-training with a limp gait, even if her body was soaked by the monster’s blood.

  Christie slightly bowed down and extended a hand to Agatha, “Are you okay?”

  Truth was, Agatha wasn’t listening. Her ears were as numb as the rest of her body, and her mind was too tired to process words. And even then, only one thought formed in her mind as that blue, monstrous blood covered the redhead from head to toe in a marvelous contrast.

  You are so beautiful…

  That bloodstained visage was the most alluring thing Agatha of Malachite had seen in her life.

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