Val was drowning.

She might have had the strength of a demigoddess, but raw power would not bring her to the surface before her lungs would have already filled with water. As she moved closer to the surface, her chest constricted with the need to take a breath.

Luckily, Val possessed an ability which could help her. The propulsion from Mind Blast could also shoot her to the surface. Concentrating on her feet, she tried to launch herself upwards.

Instead, the blast came from near her head as always, and shot her horizontally and slightly downwards. If not for the fact that she was underwater and about to drown, Val would open her mouth to scream. Clearly, she was not well-practiced enough in Mind Blast to actually use it in a life-or-death situation.

If she could only produce a blast near her head right now, then Val swirled herself around in the water, face down. Again, she tried to produce a Mind Blast and pushed herself closer to the surface this time. The distance she traveled was rather depressing. Compared to the oxygen that her brain used up from the ability, Val would be better off swimming.

At this rate, she would drown for certain.

Where pure strength failed her, so too did her abilities. Mind Blast was unusable in this situation. Aside from that, Val had a measly two abilities in her skill set, neither of which would help her in a situation like this. If she were to survive, it would not be by strength nor skill. She would need a miracle to happen to her.

Sometimes, those with divine blood could spontaneously develop a new ability in extreme circumstances. Val tried to concentrate all of her mental energy. She called upon every amount of power which flowed through her blood.

All the while, her life ticked away with the elevated beats of her heart. As a demigoddess, though, she would not die. She willed a miracle to happen.

Let her breathe underwater. Oxygen existed all around her right now, so allow her body to sift through the water and gain the particles of air to use for her own purposes. This air could stream into her blood and allow her to continue to live and swim.

Still, she was drowning.

Let a focused blast of energy propel her to the surface—a more powerful version of Mind Blast. She needed concentrated energy to burst from her feet and send her up to the surface in a dolphin's leap.

She was drowning even more.

Her head felt as though it would burst any second. Her eyes squeezed shut tightly, more so to keep them in her head than anything else. The salt water did not even sting anymore compared to the burning sensation that occupied her chest.

If these were the last moments of her life, then she could make them last longer. Val gave up on the present moment and moved her consciousness to an average day with her other ability: Past Insight. Time moved slower in her visions, so now she would get to effectively extend the last seconds of her life.

Val chose to transport her mind to Brillion City, three months ago.

The apparition of her old apartment manifested, complete with her mother, her brother Ross, and Val’s old self in the kitchen.

That morning, her mother had made pancakes like she did on many mornings. Everybody loved pancakes, so there were many smiles around the table. They were always a happy family, at least until Ross had disappeared. On this day, Val made casual conversation with him, not a worry in the world that he would ever leave her back then. So too, her mother was nothing but the simple, cheerful mortal woman without a secret to hide—the one that Val had always loved as her mother.

That was the entirety of their happy family right there: mother, son, and daughter. Even though their father had no presence in their life, Val and Ross were said to be full-blooded brother and sister. That was what their mother had told them, at any rate, and she should know. Their mother had been embroiled in an affair with a god long enough to have not one, but two children from him.

Despite their mother's entanglement with a god, she did not have any applicable knowledge about life with immortality. She had not been able to help them with their powers, nor did she know where the Summit of Ascension was located. Their mother was kind and caring, if not a little overbearing, but her biggest fault in raising them was something that she could not help. She was just a mortal woman.

All things related to their divine blood, Val and Ross had discovered with the support of each other. They had no one to guide them, but they had learned how to develop the modest powers that they had acquired, nonetheless. Their biggest task was to find the Summit of Ascension.

It had always been their plan to leave on an adventure and find it together. Even so, Ross had left without her. He had not even bothered to say goodbye. Every phone call and text that she made went unresponded. He had simply disappeared from her life.

Everything had changed when Ross had left. Val's life had become unbearable at home, so she followed suit and ran away too. Once she had managed to strengthen the quality of her visions enough, Past Insight allowed her to follow Ross in the most literal of senses. She followed the exact path in which he went to the Summit of Ascension, and he had indeed found the way.

Val had been on the ship set to sail for the Summit but now she was off of it, drowning in the waters between the mortal and immortal realms. She was so close to her goal, and yet it seemed that her adventure would end here. She would die here, never getting to reunite with Ross on the Summit.

Never, would Val get to talk to her mother one last time. Neither would she get to set things right after their relationship had come to a boiling point when she had left. The last time that she had interacted with her mother was through a short, mean text. At the brink of death, these would be her regrets.

Since she had realized that she was a demigoddess at age eleven, Val had expected to live a long, never-ending life. Instead, her life would be brief, even for the standards of a mortal. Eighteen years old, she had turned two weeks ago.

If she could scream or weep or huddle herself into a ball, Val would do all of those things. However, she had no bodily representation in her visions. Only the senses of sight, sound, and now smell were available to her.

Val watched the movements of forks cut into pancakes and bring the fluffy, syrupy bites to smiling lips. With great focus, she paid attention to her family's faces. She listened to the cheerful conversation and gentle laughs of Ross, her mother, and herself. Val had desired to add smell to her visions in these last moments in her life, and she was glad that she could smell now. It was as if those freshly cooked pancakes were right in front of her.

This little moment, she savored. It came to the point where Val hardly had enough oxygen in her head to create this vision, much less think a coherent thought.

She would keep this vision up until her body convulsed, water rushed down her throat to fill her lungs, and she lost consciousness. There was no way that she could make herself survive this, so at least her final thoughts would be ones of home.