Dav’s new Ability was a Summon. It was called Eldritch Reflection, and it definitely sounded like the best Summon he had for his fighting style yet. He could summon a reflection of himself. That was all it said, but that was also all it needed to say to get Dav to immediately drop it in one of the open slots in his Summon list.

  He tried it immediately, of course. The reflection didn’t look like Dav. It was silver underneath a layer of black threads that formed an approximation of Dav’s gear. A pair of glowing purple dots formed its eyes, but they weren’t slitted like Dav’s; instead, they were plain purple orbs. When the reflection manifested Dav’s sword, more of the black tendrils seemed to grow quickly from its hand and stabilize in the shape of the sword. It was surrounded by an aura that looked like red, green, and yellow flames, which distracted Sophia enough that she took a moment to realize that the sword was held in the reflection’s left hand instead of its right.

  “Well, that’s something,” Dav muttered with a slight frown. The reflection moved a little away from the group and stretched, then seemed to move through a short kata before it wavered and vanished with a strange sort of ripple, almost like a bubble popping in slow motion. “That’s as long as I can keep it summoned, at least for now. It’s weird, though; I don’t have to direct it, but it seems to do what I would have directed it to do if I were controlling it. I also know what it’s seeing and feeling, even though I’m not seeing through its eyes. It’s odd.”

  “It’s a bit offputting,” Sophia admitted. “But it definitely seems useful. More useful than mine, at least for now.” She still had hope that she’d be able to move her Sphere in the direction she wanted; it just seemed like that had to wait until the first upgrade. “I wonder what happens if something hurts it? Can you use it to keep a monster’s attention? Does it share your Shield?”

  Those weren’t questions they’d be able to answer here, so Sophia added them to the list she’d started in her notebook of things to test when they got back to the Registry, along with Dav’s Flowering Firewater. They’d tested everything else she could think of in the days after the Batcave Challenge.

  Taika finished next. His new Ability was Reflective Light. He wasn’t very impressed with it, since it looked like all it would let him do was reflect light, like placing a mirror. Dav was the one who pointed out that placing a mirror in the right place might let them see something that was otherwise hard to see, like what was around a corner or inside a nearly-closed container and Taika agreed to think about it. Sophia added comments about lasers, but while that interested Taika a little more, she still wasn’t certain he’d ever actually slot the Ability.

  They had to wait several more hours for Amy after Taika finished. No one really expected her to manage an Ability, which made her Ability possibly the biggest surprise of all, surpassing the utility of Dav’s Ability and the weirdness of Sophia’s.

  Amy’s Ability made Sophia jealous. Reflective Shot allowed Amy to “reflect” an arrow as she shot it, duplicating it and all effects that were on it. Right now, she could only manage one reflection, but the Ability specifically stated that it could be improved to allow additional reflections.

  It was almost exactly the sort of effect Sophia was looking for, except that it was applied to the wrong Ability. Sophia wanted multiple blades or feathers, not just multiple attacks. The more she thought about it, the more Sophia liked the idea of having a lot of floating feathers she could use as either sensors or attack sources. It was a very different sort of magic than she’d used in the past, far flashier, but she really liked the idea.

  Naturally, Sophia had to ask what Amy had done to get her Ability. All Amy could say was that she’d tried repeatedly to get the sense of the symbol; she’d eventually settled on the four reflections and lines between them as the keys. She hadn’t pushed the Ability at her bow or arrows; instead, she thought it ended up there because the most straightforward Ability she had was Vigorous Shot, which simply made her arrows hit a little harder. She couldn’t test it, since she was saving her Wisps for the Abilities she needed to reach Night Owl, but she was pretty certain she’d place it once she had the spare Wisps.

  Sophia wasn’t entirely happy with that explanation, but she didn’t have a better one. What it did make her relatively certain of was that the Reflection Challenge’s bad reputation was self-reinforcing; the reason people didn’t get Abilities in the Challenge was that they didn’t really try because they didn’t expect to succeed. It took Amy far longer than in other Challenges, but when she had the time, she managed it. Sophia was pretty certain that while Amy was trained to gain Abilities and fairly good at it, she wasn’t alone in that.

  “So you don’t want to make a mirror for me in the morning?” Amy teased Taika as they stepped out of the Challenge. “I think it sounds like a great idea. Or how about for Dav, the next time he decides to do something weird to his eyes?”

  “Not a chance,” Taika quickly answered. “I guess I might take it so I can reverse directions on you and make you walk into a wall…”

  Sophia wrinkled her nose at that. She’d done exactly that more than once in the maze. Well, she’d walked into a mirror and that was basically the same thing. It was especially likely when she was hurrying.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Sophia stepped out of the Reflection Challenge and into the stone-lined corridor just behind Dav.

  He was a few steps down the corridor. As Sophia watched, he knelt in front of a bundle of cloth Sophia didn’t remember from when she entered and summoned a Healing beacon that looked like a green pyramid. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

  Sophia stepped forward for a better look. That wasn’t a bundle of cloth; it was someone curled up in a blanket in the corridor. The moment Dav moved out of the way, Sophia could see who it was, too: Marcie, Amy’s mouse-eared girlfriend.

  Specifically, it was Marcie with a black eye. The black eye disappeared as Sophia watched, almost like the Healing Beacon was erasing it from existence.

  Marcie pulled herself up into a seated position. “I’m a little sore from waiting here, but that’s all.”

  “Marcie!” Amy hurried past Sophia and Dav and knelt next to her girlfriend. “Why are you here? Are you all right?”

  “Amy.” Marcie held up a hand, then pulled Amy towards her until she tipped over into Marcie’s lap and wrapped her arms around her. “I’m not the one that just got out of a Challenge. Are you all right? You were in there for a lot longer than I thought you would be. Were you hurt? Did you have to heal?”

  Sophia blushed a little. She wasn’t sure why this felt like something that should happen in private; they hadn’t done anything more than hug. It still seemed somehow intimate.

  “I’m fine,” Amy answered as she twisted in Marcie’s arms to a more comfortable position. “It took a while to learn an Ability, that’s all. You were right; people just weren’t spending enough time there to actually learn anything. It was hard.”

  Sophia blinked at that. Marcie was the one who came up with the idea that they needed to spend more time trying in the Challenge, since it didn’t have a time limit? Sophia had thought it was pretty obvious, but she really didn’t remember who first said they should take their time. Maybe it had been Marcie, or maybe Marcie had just commented on it to Amy. Sophia wasn’t sure.

  “It’s good to see you, Marcie,” Dav interrupted. “But why are you here? I can’t believe you came here to wait with just a blanket and some bruises for no reason.”

  Marcie visibly flushed. “I, er, didn’t tell you yet. Uh. I escaped out a side entrance. The Templars attacked the Registry. There’s fighting all over Izel. I don’t really know where it’s safe and where it isn’t, but I didn’t want you to walk into it without knowing it was coming, and I did know where you were, so … I thought I’d wait here and…” She seemed to trail off, not sure what else to say.

  Amy’s arms crossed over Marcie’s as she hugged her girlfriend. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

  Marcie shook her head. “I grabbed some stuff from my place before I headed here, but it’s close to the Registry. I thought we could leave Izel, maybe, once you got out? You got here, so …”

  Sophia frowned. Amy was still missing the last Ability she wanted to reach her goal for her first upgrade. If they left Izel, she wouldn’t get it until they were able to return. Maybe they could sneak into the Challenge? That might work, but Sophia hadn’t forgotten that the quick list stated that the Ability required an escort if they wanted to do it before the first upgrade. She suspected that meant more than Dav, Taika, and Sophia, but she couldn’t yet know because she hadn’t studied up on the Wyld Hunt Challenge. They were supposed to have most of a week before it was available.

  Amy squeezed Marcie tightly once, then let go before she wriggled out of her backpack and flipped it into her lap. After a moment of digging, she pulled out a small wooden box, no more than two inches long on its longest side. Sophia recognized it as something Amy’s uncle Los’en handed her along with Amy’s Challenge tokens. She honestly hadn’t paid much attention to it.

  When Amy flipped the box lid open, it held a pair of pearls; one was silver-colored, while the other was the pearl-white. They weren’t quite the same size and they were both a little oddly shaped, more like natural pearls than ones that had been turned into jewelry, though Serenity didn’t think natural pearls came in silver.

  Marcie gasped. “You have a message box?”

  “Yeah?” Amy sounded a little puzzled. “I’ve had this since I was little; Modir wanted me to have a way to message someone in the family if I had to. My uncle has a homing bird, the same way I have one of his.”

  Sophia frowned. She had no idea why Marcie was amazed; the only odd thing as far as Sophia could tell was that the box or maybe the pearls could only contact one person.

  Amy fished the white pearl out of the box and held it close to her mouth. “Uncle, we’re out of the Challenge. Where should we go?”

  A moment after she stopped talking, the pearl seemed to shimmer and shift until it became a tiny, one-inch-tall figurine of a swan that walked forward off Amy’s hand, stepped off, and took flight instead of falling. As it got farther away, it seemed to shimmer and disappear faster than it should have.

  “What’s special about a message box?” Dav asked Marcie. “It doesn’t seem that strange.”

  Marcie made an odd “heh” noise. “I forget you guys are rich. There’s no way I could afford to replace a messenger bird after every time I send a message.”

  “It’s worth it for this,” Amy defended herself. “Uncle Los’en will know what’s going on and where. He’ll have a plan, too.”

  It took a lot of work to get Marcie’s hands in this picture to look more or less like normal hands. I’m still not particularly happy with them, but they are better than when I started, at least.

  I’d have liked to do the image where the swan took off from Amy’s hand, but given how well hands generally work out … yeah. I just did the swan.