In the two weeks Jeff had been crashing on my couch, I'd learned a few things.

First, that Jeff was almost as broken as I was, but in a totally different way. While I couldn't delve, he seemed unable to. I'd agreed to let him sleep at my place for a little while so he could figure out what to do now that his life's goal was complete. When I had, I'd figured he'd be here for a day or two before he found somewhere to live. Instead, he seemed incapable of so much as finding an apartment of his own.

I wondered why. He had to have money. We'd all gotten paid for the convoy mission, and it had been a lot. But for some reason, he acted even more broke after the payment went through, and Jessie only got more irritated with him after that. She wouldn't explain why, but something had happened there.

Second, speaking of my sister, Jessie's patience was not infinite. She was getting sick of him, and I understood. She'd put up with me sleeping on the couch every day for almost a year. She'd put up with not having any privacy as the two of us made a studio apartment work until I could start earning money delving. She'd been patient, and now, she deserved that privacy, that space. She deserved a space of her own—or at least one she only had to share with me.

Instead, she had Jeff on the couch every morning, and Jeff in the kitchen when she got back from therapy or school. And while he might be my best friend, that wasn't fair to her.

And third, that while Jeff might not have any of his shit together, he, Ellen, and Jessie together were more than enough to run me ragged. If Jeff wasn't lounging on the couch, he was working out—and that meant I was getting dragged along. I was technically still a C-Rank delver in the Governing Council's records, so I technically had access to the Peoria GC center's gym.

If it wasn't Jeff, it was Ellen. I didn't have access to the GC's high-rank hours, so she and I went for runs every morning and evening, then used the open-gym time after. Long, painful runs—so brutal that she broke a tiny sweat even though her B-Rank body was barely trying, and she had to carry extra water for me.

And if it wasn't Ellen, it was Jessie. Meditation. Stretches. Body awareness until, after just two weeks, I had control over muscles I hadn't known existed—and those muscles were sore in ways I hadn't imagined they could be.

But it had been two weeks. It was time.

Jeff, Ellen, and Jessie were all home. I gave each of them a quick hug—Ellen's lasting a little longer when she wouldn't let go—and stared at the glowing golden portal in the middle of my living room. Then I nodded. "Okay. Time to fix this. I'll be back soon."

"Tell Eugene I said hello," Jessie said.

I wasn't any less pissed off at Eugene when I arrived in his portal world.

But that anger only lasted for long enough to take in the…

'Thing' wasn't the right word. 'Contraption' didn't quite cut it, either. It was hard to describe. Part of it looked like something out of the GC's gym. Another part looked like a medieval torture device—a rack or something—but with a cluster of pipes and tubes bent into the shape of a skeletal insect with a massive abdomen on it instead of a person. And even more parts reminded me of chemistry class in high school, with beakers, burners, and so many copper tubes I couldn't trace one through the tangle. And at the center of everything, in his human form, stood the God of Thunder.

His hand rested on a swirling mass of cloud and rain trapped within a grid of soaked, eroding, and reforming sandstone. I hadn't seen it before, but I recognized it: the Hurricane Paragon's core. It was trapped between a dozen bronze needles, each of which didn't quite touch it.

"Kade Noelstra," Eugene said as I got my bearings, "Welcome. I've been busy. Not engaged, but busy. Curious, isn't it?"

"You could say that. What is all of this?" I asked.

"All of this," Eugene said, "Is a process I developed a few millennia ago, in response to my own imminent core break. The basic concept is simple. You take a fractured—or, in your case, destroyed—core, and you replicate the damage onto a second core, but in reverse. Then you combine the cores and fill the cracks. It's a brilliant process, and one that mortals cannot replicate."

"Oh? How so?"

"Eidetic. Memory. I know exactly what your core looked like, kid. I remember every detail of it. Do you?"

I thought for a moment. Then I shook my head.

"Thought not. The concept, as I said, is simple. The process, not so much. You'll learn something about your own understanding of the Stormsteel Path here, and it will hurt." Eugene had warned me about pain before, but what came next was new. "Steel yourself, and let me know when you're ready."

Eugene didn't usually warn me and then wait. That should have been a warning. It probably was. But instead of taking it, I nodded. "I've been ready."

"Wonderful. This will feel like learning Laws. You may learn one incidentally. If you do, hold onto it, but do not attempt to bring it into your core right away. In fact, resist that temptation. Your core must remain untouched until I tell you otherwise."

"Understood." I braced myself. Then I remembered something. "Jessie says hello."

The God of Thunder smiled. Then he nodded. "Perfect. Simply perfect. Let's get started."

A moment passed. Then another. "Is something supposed to happen?"

Before the God of Thunder could respond, it did. One moment, I stood near the center of Eugene's tangle of torture devices and alchemical tools, next to Queen Mother Yalerox's core. The next, I stood in the wreckage of my core.

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I recognized the carnage. The wind-blasted surface of the ground. The cracked, lightning-burned bands of portal metal and the smaller structure I'd attempted to build to hold some of my core together. The smell of ozone that still hadn't gone away. And the shattered, shredded mountain at its center. That wasn't supposed to be here. It was from my mental space. But I'd destroyed that, too, in the temporary harnessing of the storm that had erupted from my core. It made sense for it to be here—and maybe the mental space was part of my core as well.

"Find somewhere comfortable."

The God of Thunder's voice echoed like his namesake across my empty core. I headed for the top of the mountain, climbing its wrecked, pitted surface. When I arrived, I waited for the next instruction.

"Our first step is to prepare your core. This will be the most painful part of the process for you, and you'll need to do it alone. Take the parts that exist and place them where they belong. If they're unsalvageable, get rid of them. Permanently. But be aware that every piece you eliminate will cause pressure, and that pressure will become overwhelming quickly."

"Understood," I said.

Then I got to work. The smaller core went first. I'd sped up the destruction of the portal metal bands that held my core together in an attempt to maintain some small fragment of it, but those same bands were the central, stabilizing feature of my core's structure. I'd need them—or if I couldn't have them, I'd need something that resembled them. Each band had to be painstakingly put back together, and I had to do it all inside of my mental space.

The first loop was easiest. It was the first one to have shattered, and its wreckage sprawled across the center of my broken core. But even as I started putting the pieces together, I realized that an entire section in the middle had been scoured smooth. It wouldn't fit right, and I started to throw it away. The God of Thunder interrupted me before I could.

"Keep that one."

"There's nothing left."

"Untrue. There's enough left."

The liar. He'd said he wouldn't help, and that I'd be doing it alone. I grudgingly kept looking for a way to put that piece into the ring's structure.

Bit by bit, the first band began to take shape. Gaps and cracks ran down its faces, and the entire structure looked like it had twisted into a spiral as it fell. The smoothed, mirror-polished piece at its apex seemed ready to slip and send the whole thing crashing down at any moment. I stared at it, heart falling. This wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be fixable.

"The next one," the God of Thunder said. "Hold it up with your will and get to work on the next one."

I took a deep breath and began.

The second loop met with the first at the weakened, polished piece—and worse, I'd gotten less than halfway through the rebuild when I encountered the first unfixable piece. I spent almost ten minutes—or maybe less, time didn't seem to matter here—trying to fit it into place, but in the end, I had to set it aside.

As I did, pressure started building across my shoulders. It pushed down on me like a bar of weights. I staggered, then recovered and kept working, this time more urgently. The second band's final piece clicked into place a few minutes later, and I stared at my handiwork. Cracks. Gaps. And an entire missing section where the unusable chunk of portal metal had been. Just looking at it, I knew that only my will was holding it together; if I lost focus for even a moment, it'd crumble—and the pieces wouldn't survive another collapse in their condition.

I kept working. The massive bands slowly formed, one after another. A second piece fell into the rubble pile, unworkable. This time, it wasn't like a weight on my shoulder. This time, my joints popped from the pressure that pushed on every surface of my body.

When the third chunk of metal wouldn't fit, it wasn't just pressure. Needles. Dozens of them, all digging into my skin. It felt like being torn apart. Like pain all across my body. Almost half as painful as the lightning that had poured through every cell as I'd fought the Queen Mother.

It hurt. But it was nothing. I had to keep going.

"Yes, you do. There's no turning back now, kid. I can't bail you out of this," The God of Thunder said.

I hadn't realized I'd spoken out loud, and instead of replying, I gritted my teeth and balled my fists, then kept building as the pins and needles turned into fish-hooks. The fourth ring finished, then the fifth. As more and more pieces fell into the scrap pile, the pain ramped up. Fire and ice surged across my skin in waves. Pressure built inside of me as well as outside. A droning sound filled my ears and shook my teeth.

And then, as the pain ramped up until it felt like my veins would explode in my neck, the sixth and final band locked into place, and the agony stopped.

I almost relaxed. Almost let the entire structure collapse from the sheer relief of it. But it wasn't finished, and even the slightest let-down let pieces slide and slip. The structure of my core—built up by the Stormsteel Core skill and my own will—was still fragile.

"You did well, Kade Noelstra," the God of Thunder said. "Next, we will reinforce the structure so it doesn't shatter the second you let go."

I opened my eyes. Instead of sitting on top of my mountain, I sat cross-legged in the middle of Eugene's world. The Hurricane Paragon's core hovered overhead, its structure not quite touched by the bronze needles. "Let me guess. It has something to do with those needles and my core?"

Eugene smiled, and even though his face was human, the dragon slipped through. Correct."

"Withdraw the core's energy using the needles, then bring them all around your own core. Do not adjust their positions. I spent a long time studying your old core and positioning each of those so they'd line up with the places that fractured first," Eugene said. "Then, you and I will push the Queen Mother's core into yours. If you keep them lined up correctly, the needles will apply her power directly into your core's weakest spots."

I stared at the device. The dozen needles were spaced more or less equidistantly around it, lined up with the six bands of portal metal that I was still holding together with my willpower. At first glance, none of the bronze spikes seemed to have anything holding them up, but as I looked more closely, the layers of positive and negative charge locking them in place became obvious. "You want me to move this without messing it up?"

"No. I don't care if you mess it up. There will be other pupils. You want you to move it without breaking the device, though. It cost me more than you know."

"Right."

I readied myself. Then I carefully nudged each needle across the fraction of an inch between them and the Queen Mother's core. Each touched at almost the exact same moment, and I felt…nothing. No, not nothing. An absence of static. A lack of charge in the air. Nothing.

But the core changed almost instantly.

The swirling cluster of stormwall stopped rotating and seemed to explode outward in a dozen churning tendrils of cloud and rain. Each connected to one of the needles, which started vibrating and whining like tuning forks. The storm slowly drained into the needles, leaving Yalerox's core nothing but sandstone bindings around an empty space.

Then the needles kept draining it—this time, ripping at the very sandstone and flaking off slabs of rock and grains of dirt. I waited for Eugene to tell me to stop, but no such order came. Instead, the bands of rock decayed and crumbled until nothing was left.

Then I slowly brought every fragment of my will to bear on the bronze needles. They shifted through the air. Hovered over my head. Lowered down around me until the dozen tips were each pointed at the spot right over my heart and below my collar bones.

"Connect them to your core."

I pushed them each forward. They touched my skin, then slid into it almost without any pain. I didn't move a muscle, didn't even breathe. My heartbeat slowed as I forced myself to relax and drop into the closest I'd ever gotten to really meditating. My entire focus was on holding the core together and touching it with the bronze needles.

They made contact, and power flowed into me.

My broken core lapped it up greedily.

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