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895 Words
Finally, Liz turned to her and asked, “How does your team do it with you and your Talent?”
Hearing the question, Melinda had to resist brushing it off. Liz deserved a true answer.
“They all do things without me. I think while similar, the situations aren’t identical.” Melinda paused before finishing, “We work together, and yes, they rely on me to delve, but when we’re out of the rift, we do things together and apart. We each stand on our own. For example, you have your alchemy, and Matt has his rift building. You help each other, but you don’t need each other for it.”
Liz seemed to mull that over for a while, and Melinda let her. The other woman wasn’t dumb; she just needed time to process her own thoughts.
Finally, Liz said, “I just worry, you know. This rift has beaten us three times now. While we’ve gotten a lot farther, I’m not sure how to counter the new sub-boss. It’s a water monster in an ocean, and I just don’t have the control yet to keep my blood from diluting.”
The taller woman clenched her hand. “I fear that Luna is right, and if we can’t beat this rift, we don’t really deserve to be on The Path.”
Melinda grinned. It had taken some getting used to knowing that someone was always watching you, even if they didn’t want to, but she knew Luna would hear her next words.
“You can always tell her to pound sand.”
Liz snorted, “We could, but that would be the same thing as giving up. Are we supposed to give up any time someone challenges us? No. I don’t like that answer. She even said she stacked the deck, but this is beatable.”
Liz talked on for another ten minutes, mostly just going over the same worries in slightly different ways, but Melinda listened and reassured Liz where she could.
Melinda was a healer. She was a healer in every way.
And her Intent would reflect that.
She would make sure of it, no matter what she had to do.
Aster padded through the snow in the new Tier 6 rift that Matt made for her.
There was a particularly nasty type of ice bear that roamed the windy ice landscape, but she was pretty sure that she had killed most of the ice monsters.
She settled in next to the exit rift and started to absorb the ice mana in the surrounding air.
What had once been instinct, now took conscious effort.
She didn’t absorb the cold mana itself, but mixed it with her own mana, and as her mana absorbed some of the cold from it, she separated them and grabbed the next handful.
While she loved and thought of herself as the prettiest fox in the Empire, she was growing ever more irritated with her body. Every day the limitations grew more obvious.
Her frustrations had gotten so bad that the stupid cat had even taken her aside and talked about it.
She said that they all went through it, but usually only after Tier 10, when their minds fully awakened.
Aster didn’t regret or blame Matt and Liz for giving her that part of the tree thing, but it was inconvenient at times.
She still relished being a true member of the team, and able to contribute more than her irritation at being unable to open doors and not having thumbs.
Luna had tried to use that as motivation to get her to practice her Concept and object manipulation, but Aster had bitten the woman instead, and earned a dunk in a hot bath for her troubles.
Really, the cat needed to chill out.
Aster chortled at her joke.
As she sat and cycled her mana, she flip-flopped between daydreams of how she would make her human body, and wondering how she would kill that stupid water snake.
Her first idea was to turn enough of the water into ice so that the monster couldn’t control the element.
She was the best ice mage, after all. She had a little more than two thousand mana, and with her bond to keep her full, she knew she could do it.
After all, she had beaten the chicken that had roasted Matt’s flying sword. He loved that flying sword almost as much as he loved her, and despite getting a replacement, he was still upset. She could feel it.
Wiggling deeper into the snow, she decided that she would sleep on his chest tonight. That always cheered him up. He liked the cold!
It was also the comfiest place to sleep for her, so it was perfect.
Now that she had that problem solved, she started thinking about the perfect human body for herself. She wanted to be tall, like Matt! That one was easy.
She’d keep her tail because her tail was the prettiest thing around. Her hair would be white because what was better than pure ice?
Her ears, she wasn’t sure. Human ears would be nice, but her ears were adorable! After all, they were hers, so they were perfect. And Matt scratched them just right. But most other humans didn’t.
She put that down as a maybe.
Probably. She moved the ears to a probably.
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