A brilliant, yellow-orange light shone from the top of the mountain like a new sun. It heralded the rise of something new and powerful. Something Legendary.

Reid exhaled.

The heat from his breath left wispy trails of condensation in the air, lit from behind. He flexed his back, and felt the pull of muscle against the bone anchors holding his wings.

A look over his shoulder confirmed how things felt. Bones connected with glowing, visible mana rose up and out of the sockets on his back, but not in the way he'd first envisioned.

When he pictured the skill, Reid imagined the wings - and skeletal structure - of birds. A pair of rigid things with 'fused' fingers, and draped with some kind of arcane feathers.

Reality was... better.

A set of bat-like wings protruded from his back, like a set of short arms with four incredibly long fingers pointed towards the ground, and a stubby thumb set directly atop the wrist. A yellow, semi-translucent sheen formed the 'skin' that stretched between the elongated fingers, and formed the actual wing's surface. The mana-made skin stretched over the entire wing, and back into his body all the way down to his legs.

Reid explored the sensations he felt.

The mana-skin was anchored into his metaphysical self, and the not-muscle groups that he'd spent so long practicing with to boost his metaphysical dexterity. He promised himself a dive into his metaspace to 'see' things from a different angle once he was done searching himself out.

The sockets in his back allowed for a wide range of motion, and Reid lifted and lowered the bone and the wings until he felt the strain at the edge of their flexibility. He straightened the wings to let them stand at their full length, and realized they were easily three times as wide as he was tall. His 'fingers' flexed at the edge of each wing, curling and stretching as the folds of mana compressed and shifted to match. Each 'finger' felt oddly flexible, like the bone itself was meant to bend.

He curled the wings completely around himself, shrouding his front in that soft, yellow-orange glow. His wing-thumbs hooked into each other, and pinned the arcane wings to him like a cloak.

"This is... incredible."

Nyx responded with warm emotion, but left him to continue exploring on his own.

He probed the thin mana skin, and found it surprisingly resilient and flexible - but more importantly, he could feel the flex in his metaphysical self, as if it were another set of metaphysical muscles for him to catalogue and understand. The same was true for how the wings connected to his legs.

He had wings. Amazing, neat-looking wings. Now all he had to do was figure out how to use them.

His first test failed. Flapping up and down was not the right way to achieve flight, though it gave him a bit of understanding. When he flapped down, he could feel the movement in the air and the force pushing against the wings. It distorted their shape, and make his 'downstroke' less efficient. His 'upstroke' had the same thing happen, though the force actually pushed him down towards the ground.

He carried the results into another set of physical tests. This time, he splayed his fingers on the downstroke, and scrunched them together like a collapsed umbrella on the upstroke.

The sensation was better - he actually felt himself rise a little, though his body never left the ground. Maybe more importantly, his upstroke didn't cause so much drag and downforce.

Reid gave physical tests another seven tries, slightly adjusting his movements each time. Despite physically feeling like he was getting the hang of the motions, Reid still failed to make it off the ground.

Worse, he was seriously feeling the strain of his efforts.

Manifesting the wings had been an abhorrent drain on his mana, and then manipulating and flapping those same wings had further depleted him.

With more than a little hesitation, Reid stopped pushing mana into the skill.

Bone started to erode into the air as the wings disappeared from tip to base. The mana-skin faded into nothingness as well, following the disappearance of bone. Reid bit the inside of his lip, and forced himself to focus on the sensation and the disappearance in an attempt to find any potential hidden clues.

The fact that it revealed nothing did little to dissuade his enthusiasm. And if he couldn't continue using the skill itself, Reid had other ways to make progress.

#

He frowned as the simulation in his dexterity metaspace moved through his flapping motions once more. Reid had set a goal for himself to understand how the skin of the wings was anchored to his body, how the bones moved with the mana, and how the rigidity of the wing itself worked.

So far, he'd almost finished making it through cataloging where the wings met the rest of his metaphysical self. They were hooked and woven in intricate ways into his metaphysical muscle, and if Reid didn't have the ability to study the connections like he was doing now, he expected it would have taken him days or even weeks to achieve the same level of understanding by manifesting and using the wings for real.

He let himself wrap up mentally cataloguing the connections before finally pulling out of himself, and summoning a meal. The nutrients it contained flushed themselves quickly to his slightly overtaxed nutrient stores, and out into his body. Half a million ideas and possibilities flew through his mind, and Reid smiled. He pulled out his Dreamroll, and stuffed himself inside for some overdue rest.

Reid awoke more than seven hours later, if the quest timer was accurate. It was the longest sleep he'd had in a fair while, and went to prove just how far he pushed himself in the prior session. Part of him wanted to resummon the wings and do more physical work - but he promised himself a complete catalogue of the metaphysical components, and he was going to keep that promise.

Hours passed as he meticulously picked his way through the structure, shape, connections, and movement. It was an arduous task. There were hundreds of individual, strand-like metaphysical muscles that linked together and shifted with one another. The more he studied, the surer Reid was that his prior attempts were marred by a misunderstanding of what he was actually doing. Like the difference between standing in front of a stove, and actually using it to cook a full meal. Like he was now starting to understand how the meat would sear, and onions would caramelize, how adding salt would -

Reid took the lead from his subconscious and broke his concentration to have another bite to eat.

It took nearly another full day to finish his work. When he ended the self-study, Reid was drained - but not completely empty.

He weighed two options in his mind.

Option one, he would pull out the dreamroll, get some shuteye, and come at the attempts fresh and rested, with a fully catalogued set of metaphysical muscles.

Option two, he would try experimenting with something that had been tugging at the back of his mind throughout most of his self-study work. If he was wrong, he would waste more reserves, sleep a little longer, and start again tomorrow.

If he was right - his path to success could change.

He pushed a heel into the dirt, and itched at an eyebrow. Partially intact pieces of the great web floated on a gentle breeze.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Aw, heck. Why not?

Reid pushed his focus into his back, down to where the skill had built his wings.

The thing that truly drained him before wasn't the use of the skill manifested, but manifesting the wings in the first place. Maybe - just maybe - he could take some strain off that requirement.

Mana flashed forward - uncompressed - and gathered where Reid knew the skill would try to send it. He formed the mana into the set of bone plate bases with the sockets for his wing bones to hook into his back, and tried to replicate the process of the skill's activation manually.

Energy fought against his body as the mana solidified itself into bone. It pushed against his muscle, and stretched against his skin. He could practically feel it fading before it had completely formed.

His body really didn't like bone that wasn't supposed to be there. It would disappear soon - but he didn't need it to last for a long time. Just enough for the experiment.

Reid shifted his focus from the bone bases, to the skill itself. He fed in a small string of mana, and watched.

The skill took his energy, filled out the dissolving sections of the bone plates, then started to generate the humerus bones seated in the sockets. He dropped the skill and cut off the energy to it, then let out a cheer.

The level of energy required for Reid to manually control, place, and craft bone was orders of magnitude less than what the Arcane Wings skill had required. As soon as he activated the skill, it fixed small flaws in his work on the bases, and pushed forward to the next step of the manifestation process.

If he could accurately memorize and recreate the bones that the skill required, he could cut a major portion of the mana drain out of the process... his head spun with further ideas. Tests. Options to chase down and tease out.

Reid barely finished shoving himself inside his Dreamroll before he drifted off to visions of manifesting the skill more efficiently. This was... fun.

#

The next 'morning' saw Reid continue to experiment with the activation requirements for his wings. He achieved major improvements to efficiency by making a few changes.

First, he grew the humerus, radius, ulna, and finger bones for the wings, and kept them outside of himself. It was easier for him to reach out and 'connect' the pre-existing material than to have the skill attempt to generate bone for him. That idea got another helpful boost when Reid decided to try shoving the bone pieces onto the back of his armor. He set depressions into the armor for each bone in each wing, arranged to look like the wings themselves, folded up and around himself. They added to the overall 'filigreed' design of Ivory Regalia, and - though it wasn't part of his goals - they looked neat set into his armor. Two hollows to allow for the wings to protrude from his back and rotate through their full range of motion even with his armor in use.

Those advancements were the real forward progress he experienced. He tried, repeatedly, to recreate from memory the mana-muscles that made up the 'skin' of his wings. After the first few dozen attempts, Reid even managed to succeed in getting all the details correct and 'manifesting' the skin manually. It was a testament to his efforts to memorize and catalogue the mana-muscles during his metaspace work.

The issue was speed.

Manually manifesting the skin had an unavoidable, unrealistic requirement for Reid to focus and methodically work through each mana-muscle in the magical appendages. As much as it pained him to admit, he would need far more time to master that process in a tangible way. It wasn't a poor result, by any means. He would hold energy where it needed to be, use his pre-made bone, and let the skill itself be a mana-hog to push him the rest of the way.

At Nyx's behest, he let himself rest again to top off his reserves, and awoke ready. She had been a driving reason behind his slow and steady approach to the legendary skill.

Reid checked the quest timer.

-

Next Wave (15 Enemy Beasts) begins in 0d 16h 05m 20s for Ferber Compound, Dayo Sovni, and Dayo Wolte.

-

He rolled his arms, and his neck. Stretched each leg, and his back. Donned his armor, and stared at the dirt for a moment before he lifted his gaze - and began.

The end result of all of his effort - the testing and theory, study and trials, tedious movement and cataloguing that had taken him the past 4 days to accomplish - was magnificent.

Reid flooded energy into his back, and into his mana compressor. The dense, vibrant output of that process pooled and strained against his attempts to contain it. The mana threatened to leap out of his control - but he held fast even as he divided his attention. Two ropes of the dense mana were spun off the pool, then snaked out the holes in his armor and up to the waiting wing bones wrapped around his center, lighting each with a yellow-orange glow. The energy he manipulated spread, taking the shape of the wing skin, and circulating in place where his bone plates needed to form. The effort pressed against his ability, and bits of compressed mana shot loose of the pool he was still working to contain. Reid clenched his jaw - and let the pool connect to his skill.

An energetic, transformative wave exploded out from his back. Bone and wing solidified as the wave traveled, and pulled the components down and into one another. To an outside observer, the process would be a simple light show, followed by a pair of wings peeling themselves free of Reid's torso, chest, and shoulders.

He knew it was so much more.

He felt the thin muscles connecting to the rest of his metaphysical self, like they had always been a part of his body and his self. He experienced the electrifying jolt up his spine as his mind snapped the possibility of two new limbs into the rest of his understanding. He flexed the fingers on the tip of each wing, shifted his legs and felt the light pull and strain against his new metaphysical muscle. He experienced the second massive jolt and reflexively spread his wings to their full width as the manifestation truly completed - and solidified.

With that, the mana requirements to maintain the wings' form dropped to almost nothing, and he flexed each section of his skill-based appendages once again.

Reid's mouth turned a smile.

It was only a rough estimate, but Reid thought his initial manifestation had taken more than three-quarters of his mana pool to accomplish. He guessed that this time, with his new process and results, the manifestation only sucked down thirty percent of his reserves. An absolutely massive improvement.

That also meant he had seventy percent of his pool left, to get airborne and prove his time spent trying to understand the mechanics of flight were worthwhile.

And he had a shortcut.

Takeoff was supposed to be the hardest part of flight. His time in contemplation, testing, and trials within his dexterity metaspace had brought back fragments of memories on old nature specials about bats. They, in particular, tended to have issues getting into the air. It was one of the reasons they benefitted from roosting in a space where they could drop down and already be airborne before even flapping their wings. Generating lift from the ground was a difficult proposition. Generating lift anywhere was difficult - but he'd dedicated a solid portion of the recent days to getting the fundamentals of his 'strokes' down.

Reid didn't have a hanging perch - but he had something even better.

He folded and tucked his wings tight against his back, and lowered himself into a crouch. Power welled, and Reid used some of his remaining mana reserves to send a jolt of explosive energy down to his legs. They swelled with power and potential - then exploded into motion.

Ground compressed and cracked at his feet as Reid shoved himself skyward. The massive rush of motion carried him well clear of the ground, air rushing past his face and body as his momentum slowly waned.

Reid clenched his fists, and unfurled skeletal batlike wings, wreathed in yellow-orange light.

A complex set of metaphysical muscles flexed and clenched with intricate and fine control to force the mana skin on his wings into a rigid form. He strained his body as his wings pushed down and forward, like he was trying to shove the wind out in front of himself. The act caught the air, and lifted Reid slightly.

At the end of the stroke, he collapsed each wing by pressing the 'fingers' together, bending the wrist, then pulling the entire appendage in close to himself before raising it up as high as it could go. Then he extended and flexed again. This time, he let the ends of his wing-fingers curl ever-so-slightly more before he set the muscles rigid. A second downstroke caught better against the air, and pushed him even higher in a sudden jolt of motion.

Collapse up, flex down and out. Over, and over, and over again to gain jolts of upward momentum

He strained and fought against gravity itself with each repeated motion.

And he was winning.

Reid's mouth was parted in a beaming smile as he pushed himself up into the air. He climbed, higher and higher into the sky. High enough to see the tops of a massive mountain range far in the distance that stretched clear across the entire landmass he could see. High enough to pick out the remnants of former roads and walking paths that led directly towards where he knew Dayo Sovni waited. He had the presence of mind to pulse his bangle, but didn't have the spare attention to inspect the results.

Instead, he shifted and changed the motion of his wings. He altered and adjusted the wingstrokes, over and over as he worked through how to properly - and effectively - push himself forward through the air. He lost altitude, gained momentum, then recovered his stability. He was doing it. Moving forward through the sky with each effortful flap, while maintaining his altitude.

He was flying.

Waves of emotion flowed through him. Awe, and calm. Hope, and relief. He achieved his goal of using the skill - but more than that, the accomplishment represented something profound. True freedom. The ability to go wherever he wanted, to traverse the world in an entirely different and incredible way.

It wasn't a fix-all answer that would trivialize travel time. He could clearly understand that from the amount of energy it took him to stay airborne. But it was a transcendent experience, and a magnificent advantage.

Reid shifted his attention to the questline timer. With each stroke, he gained speed and covered ground between himself and the settlement. He focused on the race to reach them.

The system's timer, against his flight.

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