Ian recoiled as Soolemar stepped in close. He swallowed as the necromancer held up his arm and ran fingers along its length, paying the thick outer layer of the jacket no mind. The necromancer's eyes narrowed in concentration as he lowered the limb and moved onto Ian’s torso, planting both hands upon his chest.

What on earth is he doing? Ian wondered, mildly uncomfortable with the impromptu pat-down. He didn’t feel any energy coming from the man at all.

Soolemar eventually inspected the other arm, each leg, his head, and even his feet, forcing Ian to remove his boots for being too dense.

“Give me your hands,” Soolemar said, holding out his own.

Ian acquiesced, his gloved hands falling upon Soolemar’s long, bare fingers. He looked the necromancer in the eye and raised an eyebrow.

“Gloves off.”

Ian took the gloves off and returned his hands to their original expression, eliciting a grunt of approval from the necromancer.

“I’ve never done this with someone on your level before,” Soolemar admitted. “Just do what feels natural and if I want you to do something specifically, I’ll tell you.”

The man looked at him expectantly, as though waiting for permission. Ian nodded his head and pushed his hands slightly downward.

Soolemar’s eyes suddenly flared a bright green, though the energy covering his body appeared undisturbed. Without other warning, a slow trickle of foreign Death energy began to flow into Ian.

From where is he sourcing his energy? Ian wondered. Ian often used his soul gems as a power bank, but he didn’t sense any on Soolemar’s person.

Ian felt the trickle as it started to course harmlessly throughout his body, almost...tickling him internally. It felt strange, but he didn’t feel any need to rebuff it: He’d be able to tell if the energy started doing anything more nefarious.

The energy flux started to slowly increase. For the next two minutes, Ian had no trouble allowing Soolemar to pump his conduits full of dark, green-tinged Death energy.

Soolemar grunted and the flux of energy jumped three-fold, causing Ian to flinch.

“I don’t know about you, but I was getting bored,” Soolemar chuckled.

As the flow of energy became a veritable torrent, Ian began to feel a more intense discomfort. He began to push back at the foreign energy, encompassing it with his own and forcing it back out into Soolemar through his hands. After starting to resist, his energy had no trouble clamping down and stifling the flow of the necromancer’s energy, allowing him to rid himself of it in short order.

Soolemar’s eyebrow twitched, the corner of his mouth quirking upward. Suddenly the level of energy increased by an order of magnitude, barreling past Ian’s defenses and re-entering his body.

Ian grit his teeth and redoubled his defense, leveraging his own energy to rebuff Soolemar’s intrusion. Soolemar’s body began to flicker as it did earlier when Ian was seeing the world while touching the green orb. The necromancer almost seemed to be unraveling, the dead, black-gray energy covering his body revealing progressively more patches of textureless white and red.

“Enough,” Soolemar crowed, pulling his hands away. Without Soolemar’s energy input, Ian overcompensated and jetted a small fountain of energy intended to block the necromancer’s intrusion into the ground.

Ian clapped his hands once and shook them out, his fingertips feeling strangely sore. “That was interesting. What next?”

—

Soolemar had a hard time keeping his composure.

First, he was drained and exhausted. The energy reserves coiled inside of him weren’t sufficient to test Dunai’s limits, so he’d been forced to draw on the energy he used to cover and cohese his body.

But more than that...he was incredulous. Peak decemancers didn’t just appear overnight. Someone might have taken him in and tried to hide him, but it was ludicrous to think that they would have kept him hidden for so long, only revealing him once he became a peak practitioner.

He cursed himself for not paying more attention to what was happening outside of the Northeast: His disregard for the West left him unprepared to assess Dunai. Before Selejo’s announcement about Dunai being a half-step ascendant, he had only heard the decemancer’s name because he won the Fassari Summit. After Selejo’s announcement, he’d watched the summit footage out of curiosity, but hadn’t been overly impressed by what he saw: The battle had been full of theatrics and wasteful use of Death energy, showcasing raw power more than skill. If Dunai had been as strong as his opponent, Soolemar thought he would have lost.

He hadn’t considered how much Dunai had been holding back, taking his youth at face value rather than thinking deeper at how a half-step ascendant would duel without incurring suspicion. A negligent, careless mistake.

Within the past hour Ian had mentioned something called the Infinity Loop, but Soolemar didn’t know much about it other than that it sounded like a new kind of dilation chamber. He’d intended to look into it once they left Yurusi Canyon, but perhaps he’d need to sacrifice his cultivated air of wisdom and inquire about what he suspected was the missing piece of the puzzle.

“You said that you learned decemancy from a book found in the Infinity Loop,” Soolemar began, clasping his hands together. “You also said that you were self-taught.”

“Well, I don’t consider a book a proper teacher,” Ian replied, chewing his lip. “It gave me ideas, but I had to figure out how to do much of my practice on my own.”

Soolemar shook his head slightly; Dunai misunderstood where he was going. “Did you start learning decemancy before the Infinity Loop?”

Dunai exhaled a puff of air, his breath fogging in the winter chill. “I awakened my latent Death affinity in the Infinity Loop.”

Now there’s some critical information, Soolemar thought. Death affinity was a bit of an odd affinity in that most people awakened it after a jarring experience, but the bar was typically quite low: Many people awakened Death affinity in a nightmare or when confronted with one of their fears.

For myself, it was staring down the edge of a glinting pike. Soolemar snorted internally. Of course, things were different back then.

For Dunai’s affinity to lay dormant was exceptionally uncommon. Either he’s not afraid of anything, or the bar to unlock his affinity was stupidly high.

“Would you mind sharing how you awakened your affinity?”

Soolemar noticed that Ian’s energy quavered at the question. He seemed uncertain, his mouth curving downward. When Dunai finally spoke, his voice was low: “I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone the precise specifics.”

“If it’s too sensitive, you don't need to divulge; I was merely trying to get more context.”

Dunai shook his head. “It’s fine, I’m just trying to think of how to explain. What do you already know about the Infinity Loop?”

Literally jack shit, Soolemar thought. “Assume I know nothing; I’ll let you know if you’re boring me with details I already know.”

“Fine. I entered the Infinity Loop as a participant in an experiment aimed to awaken people with latent affinities. As I understand it, the experiment was designed to subject me to conditions of extreme duress to achieve this end.”

Dunai sighed, his gaze peering beyond the temple and into the gorge. “Once inside, I quickly found that I needed to defeat animated skeletons before they killed me first. My other options were dying of thirst, drowning, or killing myself.”

So let me get this straight...Dunai entered this loop chamber...and was immediately confronted by a life or death experience? I suppose that would make sense if he was part of an experiment.

“It took me at least...Oh, I don’t know, at least thirty tries before I actually started to be able to use Death energy.”

“What do you mean, thirty tries?” Soolemar asked.

“I failed before I succeeded,” Dunai replied. “The skeletons killed me tens of times before I finally snapped and became a decemancer. And of course, that was only the beginning of my time in the Infinity Loop.”

For almost anyone else, coming face to face with violent skeletons would be enough to awaken an affinity in a heartbeat. Perhaps the loop wasn’t realistic enough?

“How does dying work in the Infinity Loop?”

Dunai swallowed. “Dying...is painful. I’ve never died for real, obviously, but I like to think what I experienced was close to the actual thing. I’m convinced that I died in every way imaginable before I finally escaped: disease, drugs, explosions, being torn to pieces...thinking back on it only makes me realize how ridiculous it all was.”

Soolemar was struck by the casual tone Dunai used to describe his experience. He almost couldn’t believe what the decemancer was telling him: What kind of scientific experiment got away with subjecting people to literal torture? It didn’t matter who the scientists were associated with–if someone did that to Soolemar, he’d make them regret it.

“...You did kill the people who put you in the Infinity Loop when you escaped, right?”

“No.”

Soolemar massaged the bridge of his nose. “Why not?” People who tortured others couldn’t complain if the man they subjected to misery came back and ruined them.

“Weren’t you the one saying we shouldn’t waste time talking about things that aren’t immediately relevant?”

I suppose, Soolemar thought grudgingly. This is what I get for using Divian’s dinner as an excuse to avoid talking about myself.

The decemancer had a point, however: Soolemar needed to continue with his assessment. He’d already tried and failed to test the limits of both Ian’s natural ability to detect souls and the limit of his body to take in Death energy. For the first, Ian had a cheat in the form of soul sight, but for the latter...while the decemancer had been straining a bit by the end, as soon as Soolemar stopped funneling energy, Dunai didn’t show a hint of exhaustion. Unless he planned to put himself in a temporarily vulnerable position, Soolemar had no way of pushing Dunai further.

Soolemar hoped that the next method of assessment would provide more useful information. He twisted the ring on his middle finger and envisioned the form of a blank mannequin.

“In all honesty, from what I’ve seen so far, you have a commendable degree of control over your energy. Your vital conduits are clean and healthier than they have any right to be. Your ability to manipulate the energy inside of yourself suggests either ungodly reserves of energy...or ungodly control. And unless you were sourcing from soul gems–and I like to believe I would have noticed–I’m betting on it being the latter.”

I can understand why Achemiss would reach out to Dunai even before his ascension. If he successfully ascends...

Soolemar forced himself back on track. “Part of my domain of expertise lies in creating constructs. I believe you have experience making a number of different types out of bone and flesh, but I would like to see what happens when you try to make one out of this.”

The mannequin dropped to the ground before Dunai with a clatter.

“This is an example of a simple construct, for reference.” Soolemar twisted his ring again and a wooden vessel materialized to the left, its body hovering upright over the ground rather than falling lifeless to the floor.

Dunai’s brow furrowed and he walked over to the hovering construct, tracing his fingers along the inscriptions. He turned Soolemar’s way and asked, “Did you kill someone to make this?”

Soolemar snorted. “Utterly unnecessary.” Why kill people for their souls when I can just pluck them from the air?

Dunai’s lips pressed into a line as he walked over to the inanimate mannequin, nudging it with his foot. “What exactly are you expecting me to do with this?”

“Just because this is an assessment doesn’t mean I expect you to figure that much out on your own.” The necromancer walked over to the green orb and placed his hand over it. He could feel the surging, swirling mix of compressed souls and green energy thrumming against his hand. He pinched his fingers on a section of the orb and pulled, extracting a soul. He flung it over to Ian, watching in amusement as the decemancer took a step backward.

Soolemar smiled and crossed his arms. “Step one: grab the soul.”

Dunai brushed some hair that fell into his eyes and approached the disembodied soul, raising a hand uncertainly. As he did so, the blue-colored soul began to float away in the opposite direction.

“This always happens when I try to touch them,” Dunai explained, his expression exasperated. “I’ve only been able to get close to the souls of people I’ve killed.”

I almost forgot for a second that Dunai isn’t some sheltered university attendee, Soolemar thought, considering the decemancer’s words. Just a week ago he would have been conquering Godora.

Dunai didn’t seem like a soldier who’d just come from a battleground; he was so...open. He didn’t so much as pause when talking about people who had died by his hand.

Soolemar walked over and grabbed Ian’s wrist. “Let me show you something. Do you see how your energy flows through your skin and into your fingertips?”

“Yes.”

“Now tell me, why might the soul of someone killed by your hand be more amenable to your touch?”

“...I suppose it has something to do with my energy,” Dunai murmured unhelpfully.

“Forget that question for a moment. Try and change the flow of energy such that you completely remove the vital flow in your hand. I want you to make your hand–” Soolemar held up his hand– “look like mine.” In other words, lifeless, but devoid of even Death energy.

Dunai’s eyes widened slightly. “Won’t that cause permanent damage to the tissues there?”

Soolemar smiled. “Not if you’re careful; from what I’ve seen, you should be able to do it. You only need to divert the flow of energy long enough to touch the soul.”

The decemancer exhaled, then pulled all of the energy in his left hand back to his wrist, the limb turning the same dead black-gray as Soolemar’s own. Part of the test here was how well Dunai handled pain tolerance: drawing out all vitality from one’s limb was excruciating. But more than that, it tested decisiveness: Dunai clearly knew that if he made an error, he’d lose the limb or sustain permanent damage. All the same, he peeled back his energy and unhesitatingly jabbed at the soul. While Dunai’s fingers lay submerged in its watery blue interior, he reestablished the vital energy conduit as it was before. This time, instead of floating away, the soul remained docile.

“Like I said, once you can touch the soul, you’ll be able to keep handling it indefinitely. Now, can you hazard a guess about why you can handle the souls of people you kill?”

“I suppose it’s because by killing them, I’m touching their soul with my energy the moment it leaves the body.”

Soolemar nodded. “You have the general idea. For people who can’t see souls, it’s nearly impossible to do anything with souls at all. And for those who can sense them...killing is the only feasible way to gain the ability to handle a soul.”

“Unless you’re able to do what I did,” Dunai muttered, flexing his left hand. “I’m going to guess that most people get stuck before completing step one.”

“Like I said, it’s easy enough if you kill someone.”

Dunai chuckled. “Sounds like a good reason to make necromancy forbidden.”

If you only knew the half of it.

“Step two: Draw the soul into the construct.”

Dunai pinched and tugged the soul over to the mannequin and draped it downward until it smooshed up against the wood. With a small push, the soul entered the mannequin’s chest cavity. When Dunai removed his hand, it began to float upward again.

Soolemar was about to explain the next step when Dunai began to work. He sat down next to the mannequin and created a stringy matrix of Death energy, forming small inscriptions all over the mannequin’s surface. Each inscription point was the size of a pinky finger and consisted of a circle filled by three horizontal lines. Death energy pooled into the inscription and formed an anchor from which Dunai pulled threads of energy, layering them over one another to form a veritable tapestry.

To Soolemar’s trained eye, he could see that Dunai was making something almost like Death energy muscle fiber. Before long, the mannequin’s entire torso was covered in energy. Now when Ian took his hand away, the soul remained in place, unable to move.

“The soul’s in the construct. What’s next?”

Soolemar realized that he needed to change routes and recalculated the next step. Dunai’s chosen method was a bit unorthodox, but it should work. “Step three: Expand out your Death energy fiber to cover the entire surface.”

Dunai completed the task without issue, then turned to him expectantly. Soolemar almost wanted to slap him for being so innocently proficient.

“The next step is the hardest part. I want you to imbue will into the soul so that the construct can autonomously move.”

“I’ve seen a necromancer’s constructs before,” Dunai said. “They didn’t look like yours, not to mention mine. Yours has no markings that I can see at all, and mine has small anchor points and threads; instead, those constructs had layers of markings that seemed to imbue meaning. Were those markings directly affecting the soul?”

“I wouldn’t be able to say for certain unless I saw the constructs myself, but what you described is a common but limited way of doing things.” Soolemar smiled devilishly. “Now, as for your own task, just try your best and I’ll intervene after you struggle for a bit.”