The first few days after the Batcave Challenge were calm. They spent a lot of time in the Registry Library, searching for Challenges to fit into the few days they had available. Sophia, Dav, and Amy also spent some time in the Izel Registry’s practice areas. Most of it was spent on weapons training, but they made certain to spend some time each day practicing their Abilities; they didn’t do much good if they forgot about them in the middle of a fight.

  Sophia was pretty unhappy with some of her aura-based Abilities. They were useful if the circumstances were right, but the impact was so small that those circumstances were rare. They also didn’t mesh with her spellcasting at all, and she still hadn’t figured out how to make the primary features of her Sphere really work with anything. It was frustrating.

  From what she saw in the Library, it also wasn’t unusual. Marcie was able to find scores of examples of people changing their Spheres significantly once they reached the first upgrade. People like Amy, who knew what they wanted and had to get a specific upgrade to get there, were the exception.

  Los’en visited Amy every other day. He had a different excuse each time, but Sophia could tell that some of it was because he missed his niece. He didn’t seem much like the daredevil ne’er-do-well that Lan’ti’s letter sounded like; instead, he was a serious, caring, and worried man. Every time he visited, he talked about the situation with the Broken Temple. It wasn’t getting any better, but at least it wasn’t getting any worse so far.

  The good news during those few days was that they’d found two Challenges that sounded interesting. Neither was restricted, but they were still likely to be available because they were both unpopular, though for somewhat different reasons.

  The first, the Waters of Izel, was completely underwater. While you didn’t have to be able to breathe underwater yourself, because the water was completely safe to breathe, it was also intensely unpleasant. Only people who really wanted the reward would bother, and the rewards were notoriously difficult to earn and even once they were earned, they were hard to control. The only one their group had a good chance to reach was Summon Water Flower. That obviously got Dav’s interest, but even more interesting was the fact that they hadn’t found any mention of the Challenge in the records of any of the Summoners they examined. Even the Verdant Summoner hadn’t bothered with Summon Water Flower.

  Instead, it was mentioned in a journal written by a second-upgrade Pandemonium Conjuror. He’d learned the Spell easily the first time he tried and had turned it into a staple of his combat style, which focused on conjuring or summoning things to disrupt his enemies. For most people, all the Water Flower did was sprout and produce water that evaporated too quickly to even be useful as an emergency water source. For the Pandemonium Conjuror, the Water Flower could either flood the area and make everything just a little slick or it could tangle an enemy in its fronds. He didn’t always know which it would do, but either one was useful.

  According to the journal, the key was letting the Flower choose what it wanted. Controlling it made it small; letting it act in accordance with its nature made it useful. Whether he was right or not, Dav wanted to find out; he compared it to his Eldritch Bud and noted that he didn’t have a good way to control the battlefield; they really only had Sophia’s Root Grab.

  Sophia was pretty sure his Eldritch Aura could also be useful, especially when combined with his Eldritch Aurora spell, but she had to admit that the effects weren’t particularly predictable. It also wasn’t something they could exactly test, since Sophia was nearly unaffected and everyone else started to hallucinate. It was undeniable that they needed a way to protect Amy and Taiki before Dav could really use the Abilities.

  A soft knock on the door of the private room surprised Sophia. Surely Marcie wasn’t bringing more things for them to review? The last few she’d brought weren’t particularly relevant; it was almost like she was making up excuses to come in.

  When Amy answered the door, it was indeed Marcie. The Mouse-eared librarian had a shy smile as she held out the single small book she carried. “It’s getting hard to find things, but I managed to locate that reference you wanted on the Shardblade. This is the only copy I could find of her Ability list. It was in the restricted section, so please make sure that it stays in the room until you return it to me.”

  Sophia frowned at that. “Why is it restricted? I mean, I know why the Pandemonium Conjuror’s was restricted, he had a lot of Abilities that could go wild and hurt his own team or himself, but the Shardblade seemed like a very straightforward variant of a Bladestorm Mage.”

  “It’s always in the first-page addendum,” Marcie answered, then flipped the book open and read from it for a moment. “This says that damaging her blades hurt her somehow, in ways that weren’t always obvious. Registry Master Hivek, the Registry Master at the time, wanted to make it difficult for others to pick up her weakness since it was the reason she had to abandon her team after they returned from their third Maze attempt; whatever happened there hurt her enough that she never created another Shardstorm.” She paused and looked up at Amy instead of Sophia. “The restriction is that it can only be given out to people in stable teams, so that you can watch out for each other.”

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Sophia sighed. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard that particular restriction; the Pandemonium Conjuror’s memoir had a similar one. For him, it was so that the entire team would know what they were getting into if their teammate went down that path with their Sphere. It seemed annoyingly common. All too many of the powerful Spheres seemed to be dangerous to either themselves or others in some way.

  “So, uh,” Marcie scrubbed the hand that wasn’t holding the small book against her robe. “Amy. Would you, uh, like to go out to lunch?”

  Amy tilted her head to one side, then smiled. “You know what? Sure. Do you know a good place?”

  Sophia watched them as they left. That couldn’t possibly be what she thought it was, could it? Had the mouse actually just asked the wolf out to a lunch date?

  Was that the reason Marcie was being so attentive? She wasn’t that worried about Aric; instead, she was interested in Amy?

  “Be interesting to see how that goes,” Dav commented with obvious amusement. “It’s good to see she worked up the courage to ask.”

  Sophia blinked at Dav. “You knew?”

  Dav seemed just as surprised as Sophia was. “You didn’t? Amy’s been watching Marcie every time she came in, obviously hoping Marcie would take the next step but not willing to ask herself, and at least half the books Marcie brought in were just excuses. You didn’t think she stopped by at dinner last night by chance, did you?”

  Dav waited a moment, then chuckled. “I see you did. My mistake, then; if I’d realized you didn’t see it, I’d have said something.”

  Sophia ducked her head, then snatched up the latest book brought by Marcie. Her initial hope was that it would hide the flush on her cheeks; she probably could have known if she’d paid any attention at all. Dav’s translation Ability only worked for him, but when Sophia looked back, it was obvious that the couple were anything but subtle. Everyone around them probably knew, except apparently Sophia.

  Fortunately, the book about the Shardblade was surprisingly interesting. It was well written and detailed her journey from Spellblade to Bladestorm Mage, with a significant amount of attention paid to the Ability set that got her the name Shardblade. She gained an Ability early on that let her form a blade out of nothing that she called a Shardblade.

  The description was clear; it was what Sophia’s grandfather called a soulblade and what her father called a manablade, a blade that could cut through anything created from the wielder. The Shardblade learned how to use it to cast spells and move it like Sophia moved her Imbued blades, then she learned to shatter it into pieces so that she could control a swarm of shards. The ability to control many blades that could be used to simultaneously cast spells was what gave a Bladestorm Mage the title, so Sophia could see why the Shardblade was considered a Bladestorm Mage.

  The problem was that she’d done it by shattering her soulblade, which meant she’d shattered a piece of her spirit. As Sophia read, she noticed that there were signs of trouble from early on; each time one of the shards was damaged in one way or another, the Shardblade had to rest and recover. It was obvious no one realized that it was doing damage that wasn’t fully recovering each time, but it was easy enough to see how that was missed: it wasn’t common and the Shardblade grew more powerful before the next time it happened, which masked the problem.

  The final straw came when, on their third attempt to get through the Maze, the Shardstorm’s team ran into something they weren’t prepared for: Corrosion Titans. They could have handled one or two without much trouble, but four appeared ahead of them, two from one path and two from another. They seemed to have met up by chance, but they were all close enough to see the team as they turned to run. A minute later, two more Corrosion Titans appeared from a side path that they’d already checked and knew was empty. None of them knew what was going on, but the Shardblade knew what she had to do; she sent her Shards at the Titans to hold them back long enough.

  Her entire team escaped, but none of them ever returned to the Maze and the Shardblade retired completely. The book ended with the note that she took a Profession and settled into obscurity, but didn’t even mention what the Profession was.

  Sophia wanted a manablade, but she definitely wasn’t about to shatter it to make shards that she could use instead of other blades to become a Bladestorm Mage. Unfortunately, the page that listed the Challenge where the Shardblade got her shardblade was completely missing, obviously removed to protect others from gaining such a self-destructive Ability. Sophia could probably get the information, but she’d have to do it by convincing the Registry Master she could handle it.

  She’d probably also have to be past her first upgrade. That was when the Shardblade picked up the Ability, after all, right after she became a Spellblade. The Shardblade didn’t become a Bladestorm Mage until her second upgrade.

  The Ability the Shardblade used to split her existing shardblade was listed, as was the Challenge it came from. Sophia almost didn’t believe it when she saw it, because it was the Reflection Challenge. One of the few Leveled Stable Challenges in Izel, the Reflection Challenge was the other one that they’d picked out. It was one of the cheapest possible Challenges, so they figured it was worth the try simply for the experience.

  It was open daily and rarely used, which was obviously the reason it was cheap to enter. Most people didn’t bother with it, and those who did didn’t earn anything.

  Except that apparently the Shardblade had. More than that, it was soul or spirit-based Ability of some sort; that meant it might actually fit with her Grand Spell: Part the Veil. She wasn’t about to use it to shatter herself, but maybe there was still something she could get out of it.

  If she didn’t, it was no loss. They’d planned to enter and see if they could learn something even before Marcie found the Shardblade’s book; after all, they’d had extremely good luck so far. It still seemed worth a try.

  Sophia is her father’s daughter. Maybe not quite as hopeless, but … she’s never going to be good at people.