'Opening a portal for the Hope to enter the domain. You ready?' Kai called out to Syl through their connection.

"No time," Syl said as she appeared at Kai's side with Alicia and Gift by her side. "Temra took control as soon as I felt it. Kardain is acting as her second. They're more than experienced enough to manage on their own."

"But that leaves no one on the Hope that can contact us in the domain if something goes wrong. We either bring the ship through or one of us has to go back…" Kai said, thinking through all the emergency contingencies they had come up with.

Syl turned to look at Alicia, and she nodded.

"Wait, no, I want to-" Gift cried as Alicia disappeared, taking him with her.

"It is better this way. It should only be the two of you present. I will come merely to stand watch… If you will allow me," Talious said.

Kai looked at Syl, and suddenly the three of them were standing in the egg chamber.

The first thing he noticed was the pressure. It was like he had just jumped into the lake and sunk straight down past the point where his ears would pop and his head would ache from the sudden change in pressure. Only, despite the weight that was pressing in on him from every direction, there was no pain, no headache, no painful pop from his ears. In fact, the force pressing down on him was almost comforting, familiar as it threatened to overwhelm him.

"This is… different," Talious said as she eyed the two eggs.

Syl turned to her and asked, "Is there something wrong?"

"No, it just seems they have absorbed more energy than I thought was possible. I can't wait to meet them. You will find me right outside. The Kitsuné approach."

"Sicily, or the troublemakers?" Syl asked, sounding a lot more frantic than her usual calm self.

"The parents, Hoshi and Tsuki. Don't worry, they are here to provide protection to the domain as they promised when you let them enter."

"Why so much need for protection?" Kai asked as he worked down the uneasy feeling within him.

"Because, Kai, that pressure you are currently feeling, it is leaking out from the domain into the spirit realm. The three of us and some of the other denizens tucked away in the domain are working to suppress the flow. We will deal with any possible attempts of incursion," Talious explained carefully, her words calm and measured as if to keep those she was speaking to from panicking.

Kai turned to look at the eggs. The normally clear shells had gone completely opaque, fractal crystalline patterns covering each shell and making it impossible to see the shifting colours both of them had once shown.

With their arrival in the egg chamber, the calling he had felt had stopped. He had expected to see the eggs rock and shake as the dragons worked to break free, maybe even a crack or two by now. But the eggs were completely still. He would have been concerned, but with the pressure he could feel and the pulses of energy through the connection that was even now trying to connect to him, he knew something was happening. He just didn't know what that something was.

"What do we do?" Kai asked Talious without looking away from the eggs. "I can feel them, something deep within me even now. It's building."

"It could be the pressure in your domain. We are technically inside you, your soul. So even now, as they are forming, you feel that within yourself," Talious said.

But something about the way she said it told Kai she wasn't actually sure.

In the corner of his eye, Kai saw Syl shake her head. "They're reaching out to us, forming a bond. A bond to both of us and each other."

"That, that shouldn't be possible," Talious said with a curious tilt of her horned head, "Not yet, at least. They're way too young. I was just learning to fly when I made my first connection, nevermind my bond."

"You're bonded to someone?" Kai asked, unable to stop himself and think it through.

"I was… To the one who found me, the one who raised me, the first Emperor of Dawn… he is… gone now," Talious said, her voice growing strained as she spoke.

Kai turned to see the young woman looking up at the sky above. She was trying to stop the shimmer of a tear from falling down her cheek as she smiled fondly at memories of something lost.

"Talious, I'm sorry. A broken bond is... it's something I can only imagine," Syl said softly, a hand clutched to her chest.

"All dragons can do it. It's built into us. It's why we are driven to find someone suitable to give our young to. But no one levels quite the way we dragons do. No one lives as long as we do. At least not on Alea as it is. Those of us with sense avoid it now. We even reach out to the young and eager to explain the pain, share the experience, a little part of it. It's why there are so few dragons. And even fewer dragon riders."

Kai tried to remember what Atheos and Trengor had explained to them at the end of the trial dungeon. Dragons were artificial beings created in a time of war. One gifted to those that showed promise to act as guardians and warriors. To fight side by side, and protect one another. He wondered how that had evolved, if it even could even evolve.

One thing that was clear to him was that at no point had the potential of another bond been mentioned. But with Talious laying it out now, it made sense to him; it was an effective way to make sure the two would remain together.

But Talious made it sound entirely optional, like it was a choice of the dragon themselves. If that was true, then why were these two young dragons trying to form a bond already? And why, as Syl had said and if he wasn't mistaking the feeling within him, were both eggs trying to connect to both him, Syl, and each other?

"I thought we were given an egg each. How come they are reaching out to both of us?" Kai asked as he looked at Syl, the look in her eye confirming he was right.

"I don't know. The eggs didn't exactly come with instruction manuals," Syl said almost frantically.

"It's because you two are already bonded. If they wish to connect with one of you, they have to connect to both of you… it will take a tremendous amount of power," Talious said, her calm voice keeping Syl somewhat grounded.

As if to punctuate what she had just said, the pressure coming from the eggs increased and Kai looked over to see one of them tilt slightly in the nest Syl had made them.

"I must go. There are things out there that can crack this place open if their curiosity is sufficiently peaked. As that would most likely kill both of you, I'm going to see what I can do to stop that from happening. Atheos is on her way, but she says travelling through the spirit realm can be tricky. Luckily, there are two Kitsuné out there that are both intimately familiar with the spirit realm and illusions."

"How long will this even take? What do we do?" Syl asked.

"No telling. As with all births, patience is key. Just accept the connection… or reject it. That is your choice. But know that if you harm those two innocent souls, I will kill you both. Now please, lift your suppression. I may need full access to more cores today."

Kai turned to address the clear threat from Talious, claim that he would never… Talious was already gone. How she had moved so fast without having access to the powers of the domain told Kai never to cross the dragon that wore the form of a teen girl. Wait, she was over three thousand years old, so was teen woman more accurate?.

Looking over to Syl, she was standing still, rigid.

"Syl, are you okay?" He asked her carefully.

She nodded slowly, "Concentrating, trying to help them. But it's… difficult. They are trying to do so much… but they are so small. They're working purely on instinct. It's not enough."

"When we bonded, it was so quick."

"That was different. We had access to higher levels of the system itself, that and the energy you had acuminated."

He looked about for somewhere to sit and meditate, somewhere he could reach inside himself and help. He was nowhere near as good as Syl with this stuff, but he would do what he could.

The problem was Syl kept the hidden location she chose for incubating the eggs in the domain as natural as possible. The vegetation was rich and varied and now that he looked, full of all kinds of signs of life. All this meant there was actually little room to settle down. The only clear area was around the eggs themselves. But the pressure there was the strongest.

When he thought about going closer, to sit in that clear area and embracing the pressure, he felt the call again.

Kai stepped into the clearing; he legs nearly buckling under him. He couldn't help but wonder how so much power was coming from the eggs. They had incubated withing his domain, his soul, and he sure as hell didn't have this much power, did he?

Syl caught him when another wave of pressure washed over him, forcing him down to a knee.

"It's all they have accumulated, coming out at once," Syl said in answer to his unasked question. "Not just the time within us… but the time spent dormant in their parents' divine domain."

Syl gestured in front of them both and the couch from the living room appeared before them, but as she lifted his arm to drag him forward, her own knee buckled.

Kai caught her, and together they carried each other round to collapse onto the couch.

Placing their hands in one another's, they nodded to each other as they let the pressure wash over them.

Kai looked up to the sky above to see a shower of meteors streak by, "Syl-"

"I see them. We need to hurry."

Kai didn't even have to ask what that meant. Each point of light above was a being, a spirit or soul near to them within the Spirit realm. Seeing them pass over like shooting stars meant they were close.

He closed his eyes, and reaching into himself, found his core.

It was as he remembered, a single large core that was his mind and soul. Then two smaller cores orbiting the first at equal distance, his physical and mana core.

Though now, there was a something extra, something layered over each core, something that when he probed out to feel what it was, he understood it to be the dragon scale gauntlets he had merged with.

Satisfied that everything that was in its place, he looked further out, trying to find Syl's connection to him.

He struggled.

Syl had always been more apt at using the connection.

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He, however, had always just accepted it was there, using it from time to time to communicate.

Not that they did that anymore. They had long ago moved on to communicating through their advanced party system, in an effort to include Alicia in their private world.

Pulling further back found the field of system energy that he was producing, but still he struggled to find the connection.

He could feel it was there, he could even feel the incoming connection that the eggs were trying to form, he just couldn't see it.

"Syl?" Kai called out.

'Yes?'

"How do I find the connections, yours and the eggs?"

'You can't find it? It's everywhere.'

"I've accessed my core, just like when I manually level up. But even when I pull back, all I can see are my cores and the cloud of energy I produce. But there's no essence or anything to follow back to you."

'It sound's like you are a little too focused on yourself. Think of me and the eggs… try to feel it out like you would with your mana sense.'

Kai had never actually tried to see anything but his own core this way. All the past interactions he had observed between his core and Syl's, he had been from watching the cores from the domain and not within himself. Which was an odd thought, considering he was within himself when within the domain.

He cracked an eye to look up at the sky, and he could see it all, his core, Syl's, and even Alicia's and Gift's in the distance. Even the energy field was there, though it was much harder to see it than when he was looking inwards, lost in all the noise and the backdrop of the sky.

There was a pulse of pressure again, and as he looked up, Kai noticed two more lights, but they were indistinct, ephemeral. Their own tendrils of energy reaching out to them as Kai thought he saw something from Syl's core reaching back.

But as the pressure eased back to the level it was at before, he lost sight of the two new cores and the connection.

Closing his eyes again, Kai concentrated and dived back within himself. This time, however, he activated his mana sense, hoping it would help as he used the skill to feel out to Syl and the eggs before him.

He had expected to be overwhelmed, thinking about the pressure he was feeling, but there was nothing more than the usual sense of another person beside him and two dense points of magical force where the eggs were. His mana sense didn't actually respond as he expected to the force that washed over him. There was definitely something there, but he wouldn't call it mana.

He tried to follow the feeling, see it from within, and as if in answer to his attempt to see beyond himself. Thinking of Syl and how she always seemed to have a handle on these things, her core flared into view besides his own. Tendrils of energy appearing to tie the two of them together, anchoring their souls to one another.

Something shifted and moved as it circled Syl's core, a cyan light with its unusual orange glow, the warmth, the feeling of it familiar.

"Syl, is that you?"

"Hard to tell what you are talking about. I am a little busy right now," the presence pulsed with each word.

"It's you," Kai said with a grin, feeling the satisfaction with his progress.

It approached him; the form reminding him of Syl's old wisp form, only larger, more vibrant.

"Oh, good. Come with me. I'm trying to guide them in closer, set the four of us into a kind of orbit with one another. The hope is that it will make forming a stable anchor easier and allow them to form the bond naturally."

Kai didn't hesitate, following Syl down towards the cores. His perspective shifting as things warped and moved to surround them.

"Each time they form a connection, it expands and stretches out to encompass us both, weakening what they have done to the point it breaks and they have to start again. Those breaks, they are the pulses of pressure we're feeling."

"And getting them into a better position will fix that?"

"I am hoping it will stabilise things, make it so they don't have to reach as far, or spend as much energy. But I'm not sure. I still had some system access when I did this last, and I was dealing with just one connection. Now, we're adding six more to one that's already established."

"Six?"

"Effectively, no. Both of them, they're trying to form a bond with each of us and then the other. That is three each, that multiplied twice is six. Though their bond to each other seems stable… so four?"

Kai had nothing to add, he just needed to be useful, and he followed Syl past both their cores out into the black.

"Here we are. Wait here and then when I give the signal, guide them back, try to match the position I take up alongside our cores."

"Syl, I'm sorry, but there is nothing here."

"Have you really never explored our bond? Stop looking within yourself for a second and try to see what I see, feel what I feel."

Kai tried, but this was something he felt was invasive. His past attempts to interact with his connection to Syl actually had the opposite desire of withholding information, in the vain hope he might keep something secret and surprise her.

After what felt like minutes of trying but failing, Kai had an idea.

"Can you use sense share skill on me? Maybe if I know what I am looking for, I can-"

Syl sighed, cutting him off, "That is not how that spell works, it shares the neurological signals of our senses. The problem is I'm not using my senses here, and neither are you."

Kai looked around. He felt like he was using his senses. His perspective certainly felt like he was using his eyes. And when Syl spoke to him, it sounded like she was standing next to him. He could even close his eyes, and pick out where Syl was from her, talking as if he had two ears.

This place was weird, even weirder than the domain. He needed to spend more time here in the future to figure things out. Maybe whenever he meditated, he should start coming in here.

"It still gives me an idea. I don't strictly speaking need sense share…" Syl said as suddenly Kai's inner world came to life, with details big and small he had neither seen nor looked for.

"Did that help?" Syl asked, sounding strained.

Kai was too busy looking at the little swirling core before him. It called eagerly to him for help as it flared and pulsed with power. Tendrils of that power reaching out in three distinct directions, each one stronger than the last.

He reached out to embrace the juvenile core. It was so small he could easily cup it in his hands despite all the power that it radiated.

It was familiar, inviting, and warm. How he hadn't sensed it before, he didn't know.

He felt a feeling of triumph that was not his own pass through his connection with Syl, but when he turned to her she was already travelling down the strongest conduit of power towards another small core. When she reached it, her form shifted and enveloped it.

"Now!" Syl called, as she started moving.

Kai in turn followed, keeping a parallel path as they traveled back to where their cores were intertwined, the core he held feeling eager and joyful within his grasp.

"Good. Now, match my position and distance, but with your own core."

Kai did as he was told, and it wasn't long before he held what felt like a mirrored but stable position to Syl, who was holding the small core she had close to her own.

He watched as the conduits of power seemed to pulse with new strength, reaching out to connect with both his and Syl's cores.

"It's working, we just need to hold them here until things stabilise," Syl called to him.

Kai relaxed. He didn't even realise how much effort he had been exerting to hold the little core until he let go. The moment let his hold loosen; he felt the core start to drift away.

He knew something wasn't right when he received two notifications.

… is trying to form a bond. Do you accept the Bond from … Yes / No

Warning: This bond is unstable and will be a drain on you.

… is trying to form a bond. Do you accept the Bond from… Yes / No

Warning: This bond is very unstable and will be a significant drain on you.

A feeling of frustration and dismay flooded into him as Syl called out to him, "Kai, I- I don't know what to do. Do we accept, fix it later?"

Kai immediately dismissed the notifications as he felt the little core he held onto push harder as it tried to improve their connection.

"No," Kai said quietly as he looked about for an answer.

There had to be one.

Details he had never seen before surrounded him, so there had to be something they were missing.

Looking over to his core, he saw the field of system energy. He could probably use that, but not when things were unstable. It could work, but it would be like applying an expensive patch to an unstable system. Other issues were bound to come up.

He looked at the connections between him and Syl. There was the initial connection, then a hundred if not a thousand more, that seemed to bind all three of their cores to the others, pairing and sharing their powers in ways they both barely understood.

He didn't know enough about what was happening there to draw any useful conclusions.

But he felt an itch. There was something here, it just wasn't the connections.

He observed, looking into anything and everything. There was something here. The solution was here. He just needed to find it.

He watched as his core spun, the dark spots where his lost memories glowed dimly with the lingering experience, a network of brighter channels that looked to form rivers and lakes now covered his core in a slightly thicker mesh then he remembered as new experiences connected and reached out to the old.

He highly doubted the solution was in his soul damage, so he moved on to watch both his mana and physical cores orbiting on opposite sides of one another. That wasn't it. Syl had already had them move into a stable configuration.

Yet, the little core had drifted away.

He looked at Syl's core.

Where it lacked his field of system energy, it was a mess of broken connections. It too was in balance with her mana and physical cores orbiting on opposite sides of one another.

He pulled his perspective back a bit, watching as his mind itched.

"Kai, what is it? You feel like you're on to something."

He barely heard Syl as he watched how both their main cores were anchored and their other cores orbited one another. His physical and mana core orbiting clockwise while Syl's seemed to be inverted to his own as they rotated in an anticlockwise orbit.

The cores were in sync with one another.

His mana core passing through the middle of them both, followed by Syl's mana core, then his physical and then Syl's own physical core.

They worked like teeth on the cogs of a machine, each core empowering the other as they moved in sequence, in balance.

The young dragons, their cores were too small, they didn't even have their own mana or physical cores yet. They couldn't slot into the existing mechanism if they were just latched onto the side of his and Syl's already established system.

Both his and Syl's cores were actively pushing the dragons away, destabilising things.

"The balance is all off, the two of us. We are the problem. It's us vs them. The difference is too much to overcome. But we can change that if we invert things instead of mirroring them as we are now," Kai explained quickly.

"But I don't see how that would change things."

"Don't have time. Does that little one call to you as much as the one I have?" Kai asked, trusting a gut feeling he had.

"No, that's why I brought you to the one you have. That is the one you received, and this, this little one, was mine."

"We need to swap."

"What why?"

"Again, don't have time to explain in detail. But it will make the central bond stronger. You trust me, right?"

Syl didn't answer. She simply moved to his side, and they swapped, the connections that had been waiting to form snapping with another pulse of energy.

"You wait around here. If I am right, once they anchor, there should be balance. We just have to reach out from our own cores, anchoring them, giving them a position, a tether to work from. And…" Kai trailed off as he thought about how the four cores would slot together once in position.

Kai looked off to a distant forgotten set of cores he was connected to. He hoped he could use them.

"We need to use Alicia and Gift to get everything perfectly balanced," Kai said as he drifted off through the center of both their cores to position himself in a location that was inverted when compared to Syl's own.

The feeling of confusion from the core he was holding was potent, but there was something else there: trust.

"Kai, we don't have the power to make bonds. Especially not one with Alicia and Gift. We can only guide the bonds that the dragons are forming. They may not even want to form that connection."

"You're wrong. I have all the system energy that's been accumulating since I empowered the final rewards of the dungeon."

"That- that… that should work," Syl said as she probed their connection, working through what he was planning.

Kai reached out mentally and touched on the connection with Alicia and Gift.

It wasn't a bond. But Gift was literally made from the domain, and the domain was him and Syl. And in turn Gift was definitely bound to Alicia.

It was about time they improved that connection.

He saw no other way. He needed them for this to work, for the whole to mesh, so that they could empower one another.

He called on the system energy around his core and let it loose with a mental push.

You are sharing <erRor> Progenitor <ErrOR> system energy to form bonds… calculating.

His head flooded with pain as he heard a distant panicked call, the core he held onto flooded with concern as Kai realised the system was going to help. It wasn't what he had intended, but he would work with it. He pushed his plan out.

Intended Bond pattern recognised, result… stable and… synergistic.

Warning nascent cores detected, warning one nascent core is attached to a host needs to be established, significant ego detected.

Would you like to aid this nascent core in separating it from its host? This will decouple its power sharing from its host and the new core will require its own essence to level and grow. Yes / No

Kai struggled to accept, as he was pulled deeper into a pit of pain.

Request to separate sent to host and nascent core… Request Accepted… Request Accepted.

There was a flare in Kai's vision, but things were shifting rapidly, and he couldn't make out what was happening as he struggled to hold on.

Insufficient energy to force bonds…

Utilising existing bond attempts…

Insufficient energy… Sending requests…

Kai felt the confusion from the little core he held onto.

Did they understand what he was doing? Could they even accept the prompts?

New achievement.

Bond Smith. You have successfully brought six souls into a synergistic bond. Most bond smiths work to connect two into one, you however have skipped this step. This feat has… Error while loading shared libraries… <ERorr>

Achievement corrupted. Purging corrupted achievement.

CRACK.

Kai felt something inside him break as everything disappeared and he opened his eyes to look up at the sky where a series of six cores now orbited, the sky beyond them cracked open and a faint sickly green eye with a twisted squid-like pupil peered in.

Trait Paired Individual Evolving…

Synergistic Bonds: Six souls, six minds and twelve connections. Everything that can be shared will be. Greater than the sum of your parts, six plus six equals <error>. Nothings adds up the way it should. The loss of one will destabilise the whole.

"What did you do?" Talious said as her head appeared to look down on Kai. "We had everything under control. Then there was that burst of strange power." She looked up at the eye. "I think we need to get everyone out of the Domain."

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