The hungering void finished consuming all the excess Mana in my core, and I forced the Law of the Hungering Abyss to stop. It resisted; it still hungered. It would always be hungry. That pressure wouldn't go away. But now wasn't the time. What was left in my core was necessary to restart it.

"Perfect, kid. I lost contact for a while there, but you're back on track, and you're moving in the right direction. Just perfect." Eugene said.

I ignored him. Right now, the priority was on restarting the Stormsteel Core—or whatever it had become with the lightning-gold bands and Queen Mother Yalerox's storm's remnants. The storm had lost power, the swirling walls of hurricane-force wind and water-laden cloud breaking into a confused jumble of thunder and chaos. The obvious final step was to restart it somehow. A sufficient source of familiar Mana—in contrast to Queen Mother Yalerox's—would probably do it.

I checked my status to see if I had any options available.

User: Kade Noelstra Inert Core Stamina: 28/100 (380), Mana: 70/100 (490)

I did.

The core's status had changed from Partial to Inert. And with it, I'd gained the amount of Mana and Stamina capacity I'd had when my system had first awakened. I was, effectively, a fresh E-Rank delver, but with a full set of skills. My Inert Core wasn't generating Mana. But it had enough. My skills were active. I could use something to kick off the Mana generation within me.

And there was only one option: Cheddar.

I hadn't summoned the stormlight serpent since the battle against Tathrix. He'd taken a brutal wound, and I'd had to put him back into his dimensional space. But he was also a source of Mana, and if I had access to my skills, I had access to him.

And if I had access to Stormlight Bond, I had access to Shadowstorm Battery.

Cheddar appeared mid-air, and I flinched. His wing—his storm-touched, shadow-infused wing—was gone. In its place was a wing of pure darkness. It looked almost ephemeral, like it didn't really exist, and when he flapped them to keep mid-air, the real one pushed air down, while the second didn't seem to.

I stared at the missing wing. Cheddar stared back at me. A wave of…loss…hit me. Cheddar was sad about his new, replacement wing. And I was sad for him. He was part of the team. Part of me, in a way. And he'd been damaged, just like me. And unlike my core, I didn't see a good way to fix Cheddar's wing. It would always be shadowy and broken.

But the sun-scaled winged serpent stayed airborne. And that was enough.

I used Shadowstorm Battery and started siphoning Mana away from him and into me. Ellen would have been better; her Mana pool was massive in comparison to Cheddar's. But it was enough. Bit by bit, the storm within my portal metal and lightning-gold core started to move as one, to work itself into a proper Stormsteel Core.

The process reminded me of Queen Mother Yalerox's Eye of the Storm.

"It does, doesn't it? You have part of her core inside of you. I'm surprised you chose to lean on the shadow mage instead of trying to learn a Law of the hurricane, though. Yalerox would have been an opportunity to regain the Stormsteel Path in its entirety. Instead, you want to continue your deviation."

I ignored the God of Thunder as the Stormsteel Core convulsed once all around my mental space. Twice. Three times.

On the fourth, it stopped. The storm within stilled, and for a horrifying ten seconds, I thought it had died again.

And then a wave of Mana rippled down my veins.

It burned. Scorched my nerves and boiled my blood. I hadn't felt anything like it in…a couple of weeks. But the pain was…wonderful was the wrong word. Reassuring. It wasn't the out-of-control loss of Mana I'd felt when my core shattered, and it wasn't the agony of Stormbreak. It was more…a rebirth?

The core had restarted. The bindings I'd forged out of my first set of skills were holding. I pulled up my resources.

Stamina: 31/380, Mana: 72/490

They were moving up.

I was back.

"We need to talk," the God of Thunder said as I returned to consciousness inside of his portal world. The alchemical devices and torture racks were all gone. I had no idea where he'd put them, and I didn't care.

The deviation he'd mentioned—the infusion of shadow Mana I'd first developed well before my Dual Skill Advancement bond with Ellen—wasn't something I wanted to throw away. It had enabled too much power, and even though Eugene could offer all of that and more, he couldn't offer one thing: the mystery factor. As long as I deviated, I'd have a few elements in my build that he didn't know about. And that was extremely important.

The God of Thunder was a dragon again—a pulsing, lightning frame that linked balls of pure energy with bolts of self-sustaining lightning, thunderheads pouring from the gaps between, and two eyes locked on me. He was massive. If anything, he was larger than I'd ever seen him; his body wrapped between the massive pillars that hovered in the air and blocked out the blue-and-red light of the world.

"Examine your core, Kade Noelstra. You'll notice a few things. Tell me what you see."

I did. I closed my eyes and looked inward.

And what I saw worried me. The lightning-gold welds were holding just fine. But the main structure of the core was still…weak. It shook slightly, as if it wanted to come apart. I looked more closely.

There were no fractures. No weak spots. But the entirety of the portal metal structure threatened to collapse at any moment.

When I opened my eyes and told Eugene, he laughed. "Wonderful answer, kid. Simply wonderful. You see it. Think of your core as a clay vessel that's been dropped. You have repaired the cracks with metal and earth. You've even refilled it, and it's holding water. It's dried on the shelf. It's almost ready. But to become one piece, unbreakable, it must be tempered—and there's only one kiln that can temper it properly."

"What is that?"

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

"B-Rank. The process of unlocking your aura will harden the portal metal surrounding your core into a proper Stormsteel alloy. It will also bond it with the lightning-gold. But until that's done, your main goal must be to reduce instability. That means…"

The God of Thunder waited. I took a breath and looked at my skills.

Skills: 1. Stormsteel Core (C-10, Unique, Merged, God-Touched) 2. Thunderbolt Forms (C-09, Altered, Merged) 3. Mistwalk Forms (C-09, Altered, Merged) 4. Cyclone Forms (C-08, Altered, Merged) 5. Stormlight Bond (C-07, Altered, Merged) 6. Shadowstorm Battery (D-01, Altered, Merged, Dual) 7. Stormbreak (E-10, Unique)

Most of them were high-C-Rank. Stormsteel Core, my Forms, and the Stormlight Bond were all close to B-Rank. But Shadowstorm Battery was low-D, a fresh rank-up. And Stormbreak? That was even worse. It hadn't even his D-Rank yet.

"It means I need to focus on increasing my lowest skills' ranks, balancing them out," I said. I swallowed and continued. "It means I need to run solo for a bit."

"Wrong. You need to rank up Stormbreak, and then you need to clear a few portals with one or two allies. Getting it ranked up is the most important thing you can do right now. Trust me, kid."

I nodded. "I don't."

"Wise," the God of Thunder laughed. "But in this case, I'm being entirely truthful. More power in that skill will only benefit you—and not just in your rank-ups.

"We've spent a long time getting your build to this point. Take another look at it and tell me what you see."

I did. It took a few seconds, but then I saw it. My eyes widened.

Seven skills, every one of which could hit S-Rank. Unbelievable. Impossible.

As far as I knew, no one in the GC records had gotten more than one Unique skill. Even Angelo Lawrence was operating with only four merges and his Unique. The few people Ellen had told me about who'd attempted Dual Skill Advancement and made it work had six S-Rank skills, but they hadn't pushed past S-Rank.

"Is this the key people are missing?" I asked.

"Yes…and no. The key is the five-merge build. It enables the second Unique if the circumstances arise to force it. I apologize, Kade Noelstra. In order to make it happen, I had to put you in extreme danger. More importantly—to you, not to me—your friends had to be in that same danger. Otherwise, you wouldn't have taken the leap and attempted the tribulation you needed to survive."

"It was a set-up?"

"Of course it was a set-up! I positioned your core so it'd be in the correct shape for the breaking tribulation, knowing that Queen Mother Yalerox was too strong for you. I expected your core to shatter from attempting to fight me, though, not from trying to save your friends. Queen Mother Yalerox should have killed you. You got lucky, kid."

I knew that last part already. And I wanted to lash out. But…I'd already known that Eugene could have saved us all, and he'd chosen not to. The battle fury was still there. It hadn't gone away. Eugene would never be a friend.

But for now, he was still an ally. He still had a lot to teach me, if I could survive his lessons.

"So, what now?"

"Now, you continue to grow. You work on B-Rank and on balancing the storm inside of you. And once you get there, we sit down and discuss your growth to A-Rank. And I watch—and try to keep myself from getting too bored with you. Luckily, your deviation and all the weird things you do outweigh the value I'd get from consuming your core," Eugene said.

I stared at him. Sometimes, it was easy to forget that the God of Thunder wasn't just an annoying, mysterious benefactor. He was also an SS-Plus-Ranked Paragon, a portal monster with the same instincts and need to kill as any other—but with longer-term goals. He wasn't going to be an ally forever, and at some point, we would fight.

And I would win.

I didn't know where the thought came from. He was SS-Plus-Ranked. I had no business fighting him, much less winning. But the thought was still there. And I knew that, if I could survive long enough, I could make a good fight out of it.

"Oh, one more thing before I send you back. You're going to struggle with reaching B-Rank. It's farther away than you think. Lean on the shadow mage. Your Dual Skill Advancement partner can help you through it, like she helped you through this." Eugene paused, and the golden portal flickered to life. "I'm glad you didn't choose to let her die."

Ellen sat on Deimos's hood, eyes flickering between the White Tank Mountains to the west and the two dust clouds that were approaching from the east.

There was only one person who knew her exact location right now. Only one person who could have tracked her down.

Bob.

But Bob wouldn't put himself at risk by leaving Phoenix's walls without a heavy escort. Ellen could only remember one or two times when he'd visited the California cities, and they'd always been with a full convoy. The CEO of the Traynor Corporation was an unawakened human, and the wastelands were dangerous. He wouldn't come himself—and if he did, Ellen wouldn't listen to him anyway. He knew that.

But he would send people to talk to her, if he was desperate or frustrated enough—and their most recent conversation had probably pushed him over that second emotion's limits. He'd send the one person Ellen would have to listen to.

Ellen braced herself. She stood up and locked Deimos's doors. Then she stared as two cars pulled up a dozen yards away.

Seven people got out—four from the first car and three from the second. Ellen recognized six of them, not by name, but by role. Tank, Fighter, Healer, and Support from the first car. Mage and Archer from the second, the archer conspicuously ignoring the mage, and refusing to look at her. A ridiculously balanced team. They wore matching sets of C-Rank armor—the tank looked better-equipped than Jeff, and he'd spent everything on his set of gear.

The Traynor guild's team. All of them. Ready for battle, unlike her. She was still wearing jeans and a T-shirt, not her battle robes.

Ellen outranked them. At B-Rank, she could give them a decent run for their money. Her aura would help, and the powerful, B-Rank spells she'd learned would be even more of an equalizer. But there were still six of them, and with six of them, and a seventh unawakened human, and possibly two drivers, she couldn't summon Pepperoni for help. It was too likely someone would see.

So this couldn't come to a fight.

And then there was the seventh. Ellen recognized him. He'd been all but part of the family since she could remember. The black suit with the long tails, the polished leather Oxfords already dirty from the desert, and the impeccable posture. The neatly-trimmed, gray-white mustache. It was all so familiar, and Ellen forced herself to relax. "Edward, what are you doing here?"

"Miss Traynor, when you abandoned your regular meeting with Mr. Traynor early, he was unable to deliver an invitation. He instructed me to bring it to you, and on realizing your destination, he offered the Traynor guild's main team as insurance against any stray portal monsters."

Ellen ground her teeth as the team of delvers grinned and leered—and in the mage's case, stared emotionlessly. "Alright, let's hear it."

"Mr. Traynor requests your presence in hosting a reception and cocktail party on Wednesday night. The occasion is the arrival of a delegation from Overholz Company in San Diego. They are in the process of becoming part of the Traynor family, and the reception is a critical part of their induction," Edward said. He handed the embossed, raised-print parchment paper he'd been holding behind his back to Ellen.

She skimmed it, face between a frown and a glare. Then she read it more carefully. A small smile flickered across her eyes before she forced her expression back to neutral.

"A guest, huh?"

"That is correct, Miss Traynor. Mr. Traynor has assembled a list of potential, ahem, dates for you, should you need one."

"No, Edward. Thanks, but no thanks."

Edward grimaced slightly—for him, it was a massive display of emotion. "Should I tell Mr. Traynor that the young miss will not be attending, then?"

Ellen watched as the Traynor delvers tensed, readying themselves. Then she shook her head. "No. I'll be there. But I'm bringing my own guest with me."

"Very well. I will inform Mr. Traynor of your decision. Please ensure that your guest adheres to the dress code for the evening and is aware of proper decorum. The event will take place at—"

"The garden and reception hall at home. Thanks, Edward. You're the best."

"I most certainly am not, but I appreciate the sentiment." Edward opened the door to his car, turned around, and bowed. "Good luck, Miss Traynor."

Then the six delvers piled in around him and into the other car, and they both took off across the desert.

Ellen smiled as they disappeared. Things were coming to a head, but if she was right, Kade was back in the game, and him having her back during one of her father's receptions would change everything.

She just had to get him ready—and that would be a battle in of itself.

Next chapter will be updated first on this website. Come back and continue reading tomorrow, everyone!

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.