It was a rare cloudy Monday in Phoenix, and I shivered when I got off the bus outside the Peoria GC center. Not that it was cold. It hadn't been cold since January, when it had actually gotten below freezing for a few hours. But a windy, cloudy day was enough to get a shiver out of me.

Two whole days, and the egg hadn't been discovered by anyone not named Jessie. It also hadn't changed at all. That gave me a lot more confidence in my decision to keep the thing. But if Ellen and I couldn't come up with a build plan that would keep whatever monster hatched from it both under control and inconspicuous in the real world, I'd decided to get rid of it. And I'd set a deadline of one week from today.

That would be enough time to figure out if this was possible and start putting together the build plan. I'd re-evaluate once we had something concrete—or evidence that this was stupid. It would also be enough time to get my second skill merge finished. But only if I pushed it. A lot.

There was just one problem: it was 9:30, and I was right where I needed to be. But Ellen wasn't anywhere to be seen.

Men and women in shorts and tank tops packed the gym to the left, their bodies slicked with sweat. Weights crashed as fighters and tanks with the strength of elephants pushed their muscles to their system-enhanced limits. A blur zipped by on the track overhead; whoever that was, they weren't fast enough to create a sonic boom, but the air roiled behind them.

A and B-Rankers. They had exclusive use of the gym from five AM until noon so their workouts wouldn't accidentally hurt a lower ranker. S-Rankers had their own buildings, specially built for their beyond superhuman bodies. After noon, the next five hours were low-rank time, and after that, open gym for two. Then the cycle repeated, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

That meant most of the lower ranks were in the archives, at day jobs, or heading for portals right now. Maybe she'd already gone inside; she'd wanted to meet at 9:15, after all. So, as the higher ranks worked out, I headed right, into the library.

A Governing Council library was a weird mix of paper books and journals, computer-stored information, and film footage of portal breaks and interviews with delvers. I'd spent hours watching videos of delvers using Grassi's Greater Swordplay and its components, or breaking down Flowing Stream Stance, but today, I ignored the viewing rooms. What I was looking for wouldn't be on film. Instead, I headed for the—

"Hey, Kade! You got started early, huh?" Ellen barely suppressed a yawn from the library door.

I turned. Then I stared.

I couldn't help it. Outside of her battle robes, Ellen looked like a completely different person.

Sweats—or pajamas, I couldn't tell. Messy hair in a bun. Glasses, which definitely hadn't been present during the portal clear. A paper coffee cup in one hand, and her identification card and car keys in the other. The effect was a tiny bit unsettling, and I couldn't help but look at her for any hint that this was the same woman who'd ripped chunks out of monstrous wolves with her magic. She was too…cute wasn't the right word.

Sleepy-looking. That was it.

The hip pouch was the only thing that gave her away—that and the way she fiddled with it as she tucked her delver registry card away. "I reserved a study room in the back. We can talk over what we need there without too many people overhearing us."

I shrugged and followed her, still bemused. "Did you just roll out of bed?"

"I'm running a little behind, alright. Some stuff came up that I had to deal with," she said.

"Like?"

"Family stuff last night. That's my business, sorry." She let the yawn win, flushing a little, but I didn't miss the almost microscopic way her eyes narrowed.

I decided to let the matter lie. If she'd overslept, that was on her, but it also wasn't my problem. She'd gotten here at almost the time she said she would, and that was good enough for me. We had a shared goal: figure out the best merged skills for making a portal monster into a familiar.

And the moment we sat down across from each other and Ellen started pulling notes from her pouch, I knew she was taking it seriously. "I did a lot of digging into how familiars work with delvers over the weekend, as a refresher for myself. Video clips of different archetypes and roles, how they interact, and how delvers keep their familiars out of danger. None of them came with skill names, but I think we can reverse-engineer the merged skills based on what they do. That is, if we can't find any that'll work here in the archives.

"So, the first question is…what do we want these familiars to do? I think with my magic, I can do plenty of damage, and I'd like to shore up my weaknesses," she said. "I want either more Mana regeneration, a second Mana pool, or something similar. And then I want my familiar to be able to protect me. I'm not exactly building for toughness, and unlike some people, I don't like pain."

I waited for her to rattle off the dozens of things she wanted her familiar to be able to do. Then, when she'd finally finished, I cleared my throat. "First, I don't like pain. I just accept it as the cost of fighting. Second, I think you're approaching this wrong. Which skill merge are you planning on using for this?"

"Probably my third, so four skills coming together for the one. My build's a little bit in flux right now."

"And one of them has to be Familiar Bond, right?"

"I think so. So that gives us three extra skills to work with."

I shook my head. "That gives you three and me two to work with, and we need to think about what our familiars have to do before we can think about what we want them to do. They have to exist in the middle of Phoenix, inside the walls, most of the time. We'll need to be able to hide them from everyone else until we prove to people that they're under control and too valuable to get rid of. So, I've got two open skills in my merge. At least one of them has to protect the familiar from being found out. The second one, for me, is extra."

For a moment, Ellen looked irritated. Then she took a deep breath. "You're doing this as your B-Potential merge? It won't be a powerful familiar."

"No, it won't have many skills in the merge, but I have a feeling it'll be plenty powerful," I said. Then I stood up. We'd only been sitting for a handful of minutes, but I had a goal in mind, and I needed to get to work. "Let's look for stealth skills. That's a good place to start."

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Ellen headed for the computers and started searching for known familiar-based skills and merge combos.

I had a different plan. My search took me into the paper stacks, where I'd slowly pieced together the specific combinations of skills for my first merge. It wasn't that Mana Sense or Arjun's Script were rare. It wasn't even that combining one or two of the four I'd put together was uncommon; many supports learned Arjun's Script and Tonya's Binding as part of a greater library of written spells.

It was that Mana Sense and Skill Control didn't work with Arjun's Script and Tonya's Binding. The kind of magic Ellen could do, with her shadow-based skills and spells, wasn't the same as Scriptwork. Written spells didn't need their inscriber to sense mana or control their skills. They did all that work in advance in return for being wildly inflexible in their execution.

So, when I'd built the merge plan that had eventually become Stormsteel Core, I hadn't been able to rely on anyone else's builds. I'd had to figure out the whole puzzle myself—which component skills would have which effect on the final product.

And I had a feeling that binding a familiar and keeping it hidden would be similarly complicated—and it would require some weird skill choices.

Familiar Bond was almost certainly the starting point, though. I'd already mentally selected it, even though it'd take some work to learn. It created the conditions for an actual bond to occur. Sure, humans would pack bond with anything; Ellen and I almost certainly weren't the first to drag a live portal monster back through a portal.

It had probably been a cat the size of a rhino.

But just because we could pack bond with anything didn't mean that particular 'anything' wanted to pack bond with us. The skill took care of that problem. It was the basis for communication and an understanding between an utterly foreign mind—a nonsentient, animal consciousness—and a human one. Not slavery or mind control. Just the seed of a kernel of trust.

But even after two days—even though I was starting to relax about it—the egg's presence was still a sword of Damocles hanging over my head. That would only get worse whenever…whatever it was…hatched. I didn't need a familiar-based stealth skill to hide it.

No.

I needed summoning magic, and somewhere to put it. Somewhere where no one would be able to look unless I let them.

So, in the two hours it took for Ellen to find dozens of skills that she thought would work for her, I'd found only four.

Jemma's Sigils fit in well with my current fighting style. It used Sigils to trigger summoning effects directly from the inscribed spell. That matched up with the lightning Bindings and wind Scripts I was already using, but I had no idea whether I could tie the Sigils to a specific being. If I couldn't do that, using Jemma's Sigils would be all but pointless.

The other option for the actual summoning was Dimensional Anchor. I could literally tie a summon's existence on Earth to a single object. If I did, channeling magic into that object would cause the summon to appear. The drawback was that if the object was destroyed while the summon wasn't summoned, that creature could never be summoned again, and if it was on Earth when the host object broke…it would go feral, just like any other portal monster.

Luckily, I had an object I could summon and unsummon at will. I just had to figure out whether the Dimensional Anchor could be applied to a summonable object to begin with.

As far as putting the monster somewhere, I had two solid choices.

First, I could use yet another written spell and entrap it 'temporarily' in another dimension. That had a few massive drawbacks. For one thing, it would require a complete redesign of my build, because the merged skill would take four skills at a minimum. I couldn't afford that—not if I wanted to fit everything in for spellblade. For another, relying on four, five, or even six different scripts to operate sounded like a headache and a half. Arjun's Script and Tonya's Binding were plenty already.

Second, I could create an extremely limited nondimensional space just big enough for the monster. A lot of different skills could accomplish this; limited 'inventory' skills even interacted directly with the system. Most of the time, supports ended up with at least one of these for both looting and providing potions, buffs, and other tools to their teams. The one I'd had my eye on was Spatial Sheathe. It allowed a delver to store a single weapon—any weapon—outside of reality.

The other problem, though—and maybe a bigger one than just which skills could work—was which would synergize with each other, which would synergize with Familiar Bond, and what would happen when I combined all three together. I'd gambled last time. That had been fine for Stormsteel Core, when the main goal was getting a usable merged skill out of it, and anything that didn't kill my entire team and me was better than Stormbreak.

But while I'd had an entire build planned around swordsmanship, and had even learned some melee combat skills, I could have adjusted if the final merged skill had forced me toward full mage, or tank, or any other role. It had worked out perfectly, but I hadn't known it would.

This would be my last skill merge before my build was settled. And that meant I'd have two skills—skills that I'd already earmarked for the remnants of Stormfeather Scriptologist—to fix anything that went wrong. Two basic skills. That wasn't much wiggle room. I couldn't rely on luck.

"Kade, you okay?" Ellen asked. She peered at me from under white-blonde hair that was slowly but surely escaping her bun as she worked on her own build.

"Yeah. Why?"

"You've been staring at that page for almost five minutes, and your eyes haven't moved once." She shrugged. "It's kind of…I don't know. Weird?"

"Ah." I shut the notebook and looked at her pile of papers. She used sticky notes—she'd pulled at least ten different-colored ones from her pouch, and had covered several sheets of printer paper with dozens of sticky notes in every shade of the rainbow. "What are your thoughts?"

She pointed at the purple row. "I started with these. They're base skills that other delvers have used to conceal their familiars. Most of them are useless, but Tattoo Familiar is an option. My parents would kill me, but it's an option. So is some hardcore transfiguration magic, but only if you build into it early—which neither of us can. I could also try tying it to my shadow. That's something other shadow mages have done, but they tend to create a familiar from their shadows, not the other way around. So, I'm stuck on the 'how,' and I'm just focusing in on the two skills I'll be able to use to—hopefully—shape my familiar's growth."

I nodded. "That's what the other colors are?"

"Yep. I think I can get both the extra Mana pool and a defensive skill. What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking about nothing."

"Yeah, I got that from the vacant zone-out," Ellen quipped.

I rolled my eyes. "No. I mean, I'm thinking about combining Familiar Bond, Spatial Sheathe, and either Dimensional Anchoring or Jemma's Sigils. If I use both of my skills to make sure my familiar can't exist on Earth unless I let it, I think that's my best bet. And it's probably yours, too—or at least, something similar is."

She stared, one eyebrow raised, at the book in front of me. "Where did you find that?"

"The book?"

"No, the skill combo."

I shrugged and leaned back. "I spent months in the archives figuring out my Unique skill's merge to get the sword I use. That didn't give me an encyclopedic knowledge of how skills work together, but it did give me some insights."

"And what about your familiar's growth?" Ellen asked. She seemed genuinely curious, though some of the loose hair that hung across her brow was distracting her.

"I think whatever we hatch, it's going to grow strong whether we guide it with skills or not. It's a monster, and it'll probably be able to rank up. That's powerful by itself."

She looked at me for another few seconds, then pushed a pen and a piece of paper my way. "Write it down. I need a copy of your idea so I can play around with it myself. We've got some time before the eggs hatch; let's make sure this will actually work."

I scribbled my thoughts onto some of Ellen's hot pink sticky notes, then let her take a picture of them. We'd been in the library for close to three hours, and I needed to get a workout in—and learn the last skill for Grassi's Greater Swordplay.

After all, theorycrafting would only get me so far.

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