I don’t know whether to be proud of the captain or angry at myself for having missed the obvious.

Clan Lord Atius’s left behind spell list was pretty extensive, with quite a few just being speculation on his part since he’d passed by the pillars on his older expedition underground. The few spells he’d picked up over time were things he’d honed over decades of practice until it came to him as easily as he breathed and he could weave it into his combat style effortlessly.

The men and I didn’t have centuries to dedicate to this, so we all knew we had to narrow down the list of spells to a few that could be used if we were going to add anything to our list of combat abilities. If any. We were all well prepared for the possibility of coming up short, that there wasn’t anything we could learn fast enough. In which case, the winterblossom techniques and new school of combat we’d trained will have to be enough. It was a matter of time before To’Aacar and his minions possibly showed their face. And there’s a reason I banned him from coming to any of my dinner parties.

I had an advantage in that I wouldn’t need to be fighting on top of casting spells, since Cathida could take care of the swordplay for me. But even while completely focused on just using the mirror fractal, I could barely manifest a part of my arm for a split second. The lord Deathless had entire copies of himself running around for half a minute or more even, doing all kinds of swings and cartwheels if anyone made the mistake of giving him a single free second in between sword swipes.

See, when I’d received his notes, I knew I had to be a specialist rather than a generalist if I was to get even a single spell up and running by the time I might need to use it. So I’d leafed through the list of abilities, tunnel visioned on the mirror fractal, and spent all my free time training that one since it seemed to have the most potential.

Why? Because a sudden massive increase in the number of occult blades flying around was too big of an advantage to simply sit on.

I ignored the more humble and down-to-earth spells, not realizing just how practical - and downright abusable - they really could be mixed in with our set of unique advantages, until Sagrius sagely pointed out one obvious spell to his eyes as a candidate to look into. Something he could make use of, even in the middle of combat.

During the clan lord’s fight with To’Aacar, he hadn’t used a second sword to fight with. Instead, he kept his left hand free, in which he’d manifest an occult barrier of sorts.

Atius mentioned it required a free hand to use and would draw upon ‘willpower’ to block hits. Here, the limiting resources wasn’t skill - manifesting that wall of occult isn’t the hard part according to the notes, but rather sustaining it was. And that he could only summon it on his left hand after practicing, but he’d seen other Deathless use this in different locations, popular places being arms and such.

Sagrius simply asked, “What prevents us from using multiples of this spell, in different locations?”

One idea spiraled into another, and that got our group brainstorming just how we could end up walking occult tanks, completely immune to everything by sheer stubborn desire to be as annoying as possible to the enemy.

I have no idea how such spells work with the Deathless, but we had our hands on the actual fractal itself, so we got it etched out on a spare plate of metal.

Holding our collective breaths, I brought up the test plate and held it aloft. “Journey, put an electric current through this.”

My armor did as instructed, and the fractal lit up occult blue. A dim constant thing.

“Did it work?” Sagrius asked. “I don’t see any effect?”

“Try punching it?” I asked and held it in position for him.

He shrugged, took a short stance, and tossed an experimental punch. The hit struck against an invisible dome. We all gasped, cheered, and proceeded to win every fight that ever came after.

Just kidding. Nothing happened.

The occult dome looked invisible - because it hadn’t manifested at all. The captain’s punch contacted the plate, no occult dome had been manifested, and the fractal’s light winked out the moment the plate dented just slightly enough to break the pattern, which crushed all our hopes and dreams of being walking occult tanks. There’s no luck for the wicked.

So we had to go right back to the books and figure out what we were missing. Namely, that all Deathless spells seemed to require the soul in some way to connect to the fractal. Only Talen’s basic fractals needed electricity running through to work. But since Atius didn’t have the Occult sight, nor did was he aware of anything to do with the soul, he never mentioned it in his notes. It was like Deathless got to skip the whole soul part of the equation somehow. On the other hand, they were limited to a number of spells and could only swap around at a pillar. Meanwhile, there didn’t seem to be any limit for us, so long as the physical fractals were etched somewhere and we’d had a soul tendril spread out enough to reach it.

It took us an hour of playing around before we made the discovery of how to properly make a soul tendril work with the fractal.

And only after that, did we understand what he meant by ‘willpower’ needed to power the stupid thing.

The mechanical fractal did work in making an invisible half-dome shield - albeit tiny compared to Atius’s. By that point, we’d cut out five different plates and passed them over for everyone to try out individually until one knight got the thing figured out first.

He brought his plate to the center of our group, where we all stared in wonder at a faintly glowing dome hovering above the fractal.

“Should we attempt another punch?” Sagrius asked.

I waved him forward, and the knight and him squared off. The plate with the floating dome was moved into place, which also answered another question - the floating invisible dome also moved with the plate, in a direct one to one motion to wherever the fractal was.

When Sagrius punched, this time his fist connected against the dome and was stopped flat. The knight on the other end grunted, but otherwise held the line.

“It’s harder than it looks.” He said. “Feels like trying to lift a weight. Nothing I can’t keep going, but deceptive still, m’lord.”

I nodded, motioning him to bring the plate over. “Let’s sprinkle some dirt on top to see the dome better and get some measurements.”

They did as asked, and what I found out basically gave me a heart attack. “Why is it like this.” I muttered, retaking the measurements again. “Journey, are these numbers accurate?”

Cathida scoffed. “You don’t trust me all of a sudden?”

“This is going to be stuck in the back of my head and annoy me endlessly.” I said. “Feels almost like the occult is trying to be as inconsistent as it possibly can be, and personally wants me to suffer.”

“Sir, is there something off with the measurements?” The knight asked, looking at the occult dome on the plate.

“Maybe. Measurements are as follows: It floats just about six inches above, approximately two inches to the right, one inch up and tilted slightly to the northwest. All of this is approximations from the relic armor’s sensors, so until we have a full measuring tape to do science, this is all up in the air. It can’t just be simply centered can it? No, that would make too much sense.” I sighed, standing back up. I feel personally attacked here. It’s really messing with my head in a way I have no words to describe.

The other knights gave me confused looks. “I’m not sure I follow.” Sagrius said. “It might not be centered over the plate, but the effect we were looking for appears to work.”

“I’m not sure how to say it.” I said. “All of it feels so eccentric, hobbled together with magic duct tape, barely working. Like someone did the bare minimum and called it a day.”

I assumed there were variations of this fractal that would fix all these strange deformities, but experimenting with it got absolutely nowhere. Even expanding any of the lines by so much as a centimeter made the whole thing stop working. I needed to find out a way to decode the equation that generated the fractal and work from there. At least that’s my running theory.

I had a running theory that I was only seeing a two-dimensional projection, while the real thing is actually three dimensional. It was like trying to predict what the shadow of an object would look like if the object rotated - and the only data to work on was the frozen image of one single shadow from one single direction. Basically impossible.

After a few minutes of helpless tinkering and the realization I wouldn’t be able to fix this at all, I gave up and continued with our battery of tests.

Two other quirks came with the shield, besides the strange placement. Powering it with electricity wasn’t enough. You had to touch it with a soul tendril and command it to truly manifest in a very specific manner. If done correctly, activating the fractal felt like picking up a heavy dumbbell and the result was a tiny pinprick of shimmering occult like we’d seen from the first success. Then, we had to ‘force’ it to widen out by thinking hard on the concept of stretching it out, which became harder and harder to do as it grew larger in circumference, like lifting more and more weight. Blocking any kind of attack would magnify that effort for as long as the occult edge remained in contact.

Similarly, the shield seemed to slice through anything it appeared inside of, like a discount occult edge that triggered once. That’s going to have some nasty applications in the future once I’ve got a full workshop and minions to boss around.

As for finding out the limits of that spell, that part was easy. We simply pounded at a loose sheet of metal with that fractal active until our occult blades broke through the spell and cut the metal. All good family fun around the campfire, playing with eldritch mystical magic that mocked common sense in a personal quest to piss me off.

The occult shield wasn’t invincible, and it took the mental wind out of the user leaving them a little scatter minded and unfocused when it finally broke. So we concluded that this made for a good final layer of defense. If the relic armor shields failed, there were still a few extra hits that could be mitigated.

Not a great first-layer of defense. If the shield broke, the user would be left mentally fatigued, and that might cost the rest of the fight.

The number of hits a shield could take changed depending on the individual. Naturally, all my knights could manifest a much larger shield than I could and block a lot more hits with it. Show offs. They’d spent a lifetime training and were well familiar with pushing past their limits. Sagrius was nearly twice my age, and he hadn’t ever put the sword down since he’d picked it up as a kid.

Atius’s notes mentioned that willpower was used in a lot of different occult spells, not just the buckler. But, like all the occult so far, the answer ended up being a cosmic shrug and dice roll. Even among Atius’s pick of spells, each one required a different kind of input.

Case in point the fractal of mirrors required extreme imagination and focus, the dome shield spell required sheer willpower to overcome mental weight, and the ‘Arc strike’ - a spell that let Lord Atius swing an expanding arc of occult from his blade outwards - that one required strong emotions and a bit of time to power the thing.

As it stood, this little parlor trick would require a few decades of mental training until the shield could be manifested at a good enough size, and still be able to block enough hits to be worth something.

We had about three days. Give or take one day, depending on how often we camped.

That said, we’d come this far, and Sagrius had a few suggestions that we still needed to really test out before we could rule this a flop or a success.

And succeed, we eventually did.

Now out of all the spells Atius wrote down, how did we take this humble little shield fractal with all its many eccentric quirks, and come out with a cheat code when even the lord Deathless himself hadn’t been able to do more with it?

Let’s count our blessings, specifically the ones we had that Lord Atius did not. First, the Winterblossom technique allowed us to move fast - really, stupidly, fast. So unlike the Deathless, Sagrius’s argument was that we didn’t need to resort to a large dome if we were fast enough to move the shield right to where it’s needed. That would cut out years of training to widen the shield out. We could leave it as a tiny buckler and compensate for the rest. No bigger than the palm of a hand, while Atius’s shield could stretch to cover a good meter in every direction.

Second - Atius practiced and learned how to manifest the shield in his left hand, even going as far as to forgo a second weapon just to make it easier for him to work with the occult shield. It took him focus in order to get it where he wanted it to be.

We didn’t need that focus to manifest the thing like he did.

Even better, we didn’t need to stick to one single fractal etching either. Anywhere we scratched out the rune, we’d have a shield on tap to use, so long as our soul tendrils could reach it in the right way. That left the number of hits the shield could take before the user was too mentally exhausted to keep it up, which admittedly we didn’t have a way around. We tried layering the shields, but that made us mentally tired faster, for no real benefit. When one shield broke, there was no mental energy left to maintain the second one under it. And the second one under was wasted resources while the one above did all the heavy lifting.

While keeping the size of the shield small would do wonders on increasing the number of hits it could take, this was the one part where we had to accept that getting to block over ten hits would require some years of training. But that’s still up to ten more hits that would have ended someone’s life. Practically a second relic shield.

Now, if we were a group of shameless cheating cheaters looking to exploit everything to the absolute limits like any good Winterscars - and I’m not saying we were, just implying it - I would scribble this fractal on every inch of my gods damned armor like I was a raving lunatic. Then it wouldn’t matter where the enemy hit from, or how fast I could move my armor to block the hit. I could pop out an occult shield in any direction instantly.

Was it overkill? Absolutely.

Would it be a pain and take Journey hours of work to inscribe them? Also yes.

Would Cathida screech in horror and complain the entire time about how hideous it would look? I’m not even sure why anyone would ask that question. Of course she’ll complain, she’s Cathida.

So did I end up vandalizing the entirety of my venerable ancient armor and muzzle Cathida the entire time, just for this slight advantage?

Don’t be silly.

I made everyone else join in, too.

- Dinner is served early