Jace hoisted up the Halcyon Spear and set it down atop the bunk with a thud. He wasn’t sure what to do with it, exactly, but at least moving it out of there had stopped it from trembling and quaking.

  It was less of a spear and more of a splinter. The outer coating was a translucent, bluish-white substance which clinked like crystal when Jace tapped it with his nails, and inside it, there were Luminian mechanics of some kind. A technique card coiled in the center, but he couldn’t assess its description through whatever coating it had.

  Clearly, it was able to cut stuff, though.

  “Still,” he muttered. “Not too special, if that’s what a Whistling Blade can do.”

  “If that’s all it can do,” Lessa stressed, leaning over the spear beside him. Behind, Err-Seventeen watched, broom in-hand.

  Jace glanced back at the little kyborg. “Don’t tell Kinfild, alright?” he asked. “But I think we need to test the spear.”

  At the moment, it was the biggest advantage they had. And hopefully, the Generous Hand didn’t even know they had it. Sure, he’d have known that Rallemnon failed, but who was to say who killed Rallemnon and took the spear. No one had even known that Jace, Kinfild, and Lessa were on Ifskar in the first place.

  He turned around, looking through the cargo hold. There were still a few crates in the corner that they’d used to carry non-perishable ration supplies, but they were empty now.

  “What are you going to try?” Lessa asked.

  “Well…” Jace shrugged. “I don’t really know. This spear has abilities, and I’d like to know what it can do, I suppose. You can’t just…I dunno, engrave a hole in the side of the spear, and we could pull out the card?”

  “That coating is veiling whatever’s inside it against my candlefolk senses, even against direct contact,” she said. “I can’t feel anything, and that means it’s really strong. The hard king of strong, but also the insanely powerful kind.”

  “As long as I can actually figure out how it works.” He sighed, knowing he was repeating himself, but part of him didn’t want to actually try using it, unless he damaged the ship.

  He knew a spear didn’t really suit him, but figuring out what the weapon did was the first step in incorporating it into either a fighting style, or finding a way to break it apart and make it useful.

  Or, you know, just not having it rip apart the starship while you’re trying to have a tender moment with a living candle.

  Tender moment? Jace thought, catching himself. He glanced at Lessa, then back at the spear, then back at her again and sighed. Alright, she was kinda dropping hints.

  More than just was. Hell, a while back, she’d pretty much asked to be princess-carried.

  But not right now. He needed to blow things up. Or whatever the Halcyon Spear could do.

  He and Lessa stacked up three crates in the center of the cargo hold. They were all empty, so it wasn’t like they’d be damaging any supplies. Kinfild probably wouldn’t notice if the crates were missing. Ash and Perril? Well…

  They didn’t have as much say about what went on in the ship as Kinfild, though.

  Jace pointed the spear at the top box. Unlike the Whistling Blade, it didn’t heat up when it moved. As far as he could tell, it hadn’t been obviously warm at all when it was cutting through the wall of the drawer.

  There was no blade along the side. It was a round side down to a pointed tip, like a high school track and field javelin (which he’d never been good at, anyway). He lunged forward, holding the spear at its central balance point, then jabbed it into the stack of boxes.

  It pierced in maybe a centimeter, but beyond that, nothing happened. It was like he’d stabbed it with a spear made of regular materials. He wiggled it out of the box, and examined the tip. A sharp point, but nothing obviously wrong.

  “Clearly, it had been empowered by something before,” Jace said. “There’s not anything special about that drawer, is there?”

  Lessa shook her head. “I’m not sensing anything special about the drawer itself.”

  “Itself?”

  “Well…” She bent down and narrowed her eyes. “It looks like there’s a slightly higher concentration of ambient Aes there. Just the natural ebbs and flows of the world, and something that turns up. The Split is a little stronger there.”

  “So it’s got something to do with ambient Aes,” Jace said.

  “Or the Split directly,” Lessa hypothesized.

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  “We can test that. If I draw directly on the Split, like, with [Questforger] or something, I should manipulate it directly into the spear. But if it relies on high concentrations of ambient Aes, then it won’t do anything.” He tilted his head. “[Questforger] should call on the Split and…I dunno, bring it to me in higher quantities? No, that’s not the right word. Improve its presence, I guess? Draw it in, concentrate it?”

  Lessa nodded. “It should.”

  He reached out and activated the card, thinking about the kitchenette and a late night snack. He couldn’t think of anything else reasonable to hunger for, so that was the target. Sure enough, [Questforger] worked.

  A blue sheet displayed: [Subquest available: Find one (1) handful of wyvernfruit hoops cereal. Reward: None]. A needle of forged Aes sprang up in front of him, pointing toward the pantry beside the kitchenette.

  He chuckled softly, then concentrated on the spear. For a second, it did nothing. He moved it around a few times, but there was no noticeable alteration to the tip of it.

  And then he passed the spear’s tip directly through the forged needle of Aes. A golden light appeared on the tip. Not exactly hyperspace Aes, nor plasma Aes. If anything, it was pure Aes, but it was a little too bright.

  And, instead of manifesting above the tip or around it, like it did on the cutting edge of Jace’s Whistling Blade, it was like it was inside the spear. There were ripples and white whorls, like it was a fragment of hyperspace itself.

  He squinted, then stabbed at the boxes. This time, the spear penetrated nearly instantly. Instead of melting or burning the wood, though, the wood…melted. Around the impact point, a streak of wood crumbled away, first like liquid, before turning to dust. Jace pulled the spear back and raised it, about to stab again, but the enhancement was already wearing off.

  “What was that?” he asked. “That was hardly the same reaction as metal.”

  As soon as the spear’s tip had dimmed, he set it down on the deck, then ran back to the storage drawer he’d left it in. The gashes in the wall had cooled, leaving only a pattern much like melting metal…and dust at the bottom of the drawer.

  “Not too different, then,” Lessa remarked. “It’s like…it destroyed the substance on a fundamental level. Ripping apart the metal, the wood…”

  Jace blew out a puff of air, then glanced back at the spear. “We have to keep that in a safe place. Park in the wrong spot too long, and it’ll rip apart the ship.”

  Lessa scratched the back of her head. “Lean it against the side of the bunks. At least that way someone can keep an eye on it.”

  He picked it up and rested it against the side of the bunks, like she’d said. The tip didn’t activate again, so whatever vein of the Split it’d been in couldn’t have been too large.

  “At least we know it activates…where the Split is in high concentration,” Jace said. “But that doesn’t explain what it actually did or how it did that.”

  He began pushing the crates back to the corner where they’d originally been, making sure to turn the impact point toward the wall so Kinfild wouldn’t see that they’d wrecked a perfectly good storage box and get mad at them.

  “Lessa?” he asked. “How much do you know about hyperspace?”

  She shrugged. “Depends on the question.”

  “Well, a while back, Kinfild gave it a few alternate names. One that stuck out to me was Splitspace.”

  “That’s an older name for it,” she said. “Back…I dunno, maybe ten ages ago, maybe fifteen. When Wielders had to manually operate all parts of a starship, and hyperspace-aspect Wielders were really important. Really, only Wielders could travel through hyperspace and visit different planets, and if a mortal travelled, it was like…a once in a lifetime experience.”

  “Any reason why?”

  “Kinfild might know better than me, but I think it’s more to do with the nature of hyperspace and the Split. They aren’t really all that different. Hyperspace follows channels along the Split, following wherever the Split touches.”

  “Could they be one and the same?” Jace asked. “And that travelling through hyperspace is travelling through the Split itself?”

  “I…I suppose so.” She pursed her lips. “But how does that help with the spear.”

  “I just think there has to be a relation between my abilities and the Split itself. If this spear is interacting with matter on a deeper, more fundamental level, almost like my sword pressing up against hyperspace, allowing it to cut faster than normal, or being able to scan through all matter and work directly with the Split to show a destination.”

  “It’s worth looking into.” She leaned down beside the spear. “If only we could get that card out. It was almost like it was forging something in its tip, and if that card is a forging card, and compatible with your abilities?”

  “You wouldn’t happen to know how to get it out, would you?”

  She shook her head. “No idea how to even break open the spear.”

  “Well, we’re not out of tricks yet.” By now, [Questforger] had come off cooldown, and he activated it again. It was good for locating objects, but what if he could use it to tell him how to get into the spear?

  He triggered the technique card, concentrating on his desire, a burning need to understand what that card was and how it functioned. It could be a key to them defeating the Generous Hand, to hitting people well above their current ability and level.

  Nothing happened. The Split wasn’t registering a way to do it, or wasn’t able to seek out a quest for him that was succinctly able to do what he needed.

  But the card hadn’t finished activating yet. He still had time to switch up his target and use its hidden ability.

  Concentrating on the spear, he stepped closer, then set his hand against it. Maybe, if he tried looking into the spear’s future, he could create a somewhat predictive model of what it was supposed to do, almost like when he was fighting enemies in the dungeon of Ifskar.

  The moment he pressed his hand against the side of the spear, his mind clouded over, and a vision ripped into the backs of his eyelids, clouding over his sight.

  At first, he saw only an empty, starry sky. A ridge of nebulae swirled in the distance. But the scene shifted, pulling him closer, until he stood right in front of an enormous megastructure of steel and stone, inserted into the dust clouds of the nebulae, blocking out a massive swath of space.

  The Wall.

  A knot of golden light appeared overtop it, winding through its form. There were three points of concentrated power, where the strands of the knot overlapped and grew the thickest. Something pierced the center of each point, though miniscule. Jace was too far away to even see what was doing the piercing.

  The knots broke, the golden strands snapped into dust and crumbled, and with it, the wall began melting, just like the box when he’d pierced it with the spear.