The Banksi mansion was bold on the blue beyond. It stood there as if conjured from the storybook of a child. It was perfect. Lukas imagined dragons and wyverns chained in the menageries of the outer courtyard, because if such a mansion could exist, why not? Every single stone was even and square, as if those who built it were set on perfection, obsessed with the art they were making. The massive edifice of stone was built into the face of a sheer cliff, the massive mansion hanging in space, as if magically fused to the vertical precipice.

Then again, knowing what he did of ‌this world, it probably was.

Crafted to become a seamless part of the forests and streams penetrating into its heart, the mansion endured the relentless pull of gravity for who knew how long, never slipping from its original purpose — to insulate its occupants from the world around it.

Ironic, that the residents are the ones hosting an Outsider, while the rest of the world stays ignorant of it.

“Feeling an impulse to jump?”

Before he knew it, Lukas was jumping to his left, away from the source of the voice, fire and lifeforce pulsing on his palms, ready to scorch and blast away the intruder. The moment his eyes landed on Tanya, his brain switched gears and pushed himself out of his fight-or-flight mode.

“.... sorry,” he said finally.

“That was some reaction,” she said. “You weren’t this jumpy back in the anomaly.”

That was different. The anomaly was a wild zone, but it was familiar territory. After traversing through the endless tunnels for days on end, he had gained an instinctual familiarity with the place, knowing what to expect and what not to expect . He knew what ate what, what to hunt and what to avoid and how.

But this mansion?

This was foreign territory. Staying inside that room, having breakfast with Tanya, had a way of maintaining an insulation from the world outside. But once he got out and began exploring the area, the lack of familiarity hit him like a ton of bricks.

“New place, new people. It’ll take me some time to get used to this.”

Tanya smiled but said nothing. Instead, she took a step towards the precipice and stood, gazing at the town below.

“Uh…” Lukas ventured, “what was that about jumping?”

“Oh,” she grinned, “Just a lil' trivia I learnt during my aeromancy training. Looking from above disrupts one’s mental image of reality. It makes you want to get back to the sense of normalcy that existed when you were on the ground.”

As if to prove her point, she gently rose above the ground, the wind beneath her feet propelling her upwards with a grace that reminded him of Inanna. Her Aeromancy was much more limited than Inanna’s kinetomancy, but it was still leagues better than what little Lukas could do.

But maybe, just maybe—

He ejected lifeforce out of his feet. The process was neither subtle nor graceful, and propelled him upward into the air, making his knees bend all the way until he was practically squatting in mid-air. Employing Tachypsychia, he could detect the subtle pull of gravity as it pulled him downward, but not before he could employ kinetomancy, reversing the direction to a minor extent. The result didn’t exactly leave him floating, but locked him in a constant struggle as the two forces tried to overwhelm each other before he faltered and fell down in an unceremonious heap.

Tanya chortled.

And after a second of scowling, Lukas joined in.

The blonde slowly descended and extended her hand towards him. Lukas grabbed it and stood up.

“That wasn’t Aeromancy, I think.”

He shook his head. “Just minor lifeforce manipulation.”

She cupped her cheek. “You must be quite talented at subtle lifeforce manipulation. I’ve seen no one balance against gravity that easily.”

“I assure you, it wasn’t easy.”

“Say,” she asked, “I’ve been wondering. How do you do it? Using fire and ether at the same time? I — You don’t smell like you have a kami.”

“Smell?”

Tanya scrunched her nose. “It’s kind of my sixth sense. I can smell if there’s a kami nearby, and you don’t smell of smoke or sulfur.”

Huh. Interesting. “I don’t. I can conjure mana by myself. But I wouldn’t say no to getting a wind kami. I’ve… always wanted to fly. You know, high into the sky.”

Tanya lifted her nose in mock haughtiness. “You are high if you think you can master sustained flight like that. Took me years before I could do just this without falling on my butt.”

And now he had a cute mental image with that.

“Must help that you’ve a body that matches your style to a tee.”

Tanya gave him a ‘Duh!’ expression. “How else would it be?”

Lukas frowned. “I don’t understand.”

The blonde girl took a step closer to him and sought his eyes, studying him intently. After three precious seconds, she finally replied, “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Must be one of your Outsider-things,” she murmured, before exhaling out loud. “You know your body reflects your skills, right?”

He bobbed his head.

“And every time you level up—”

“The body reflects the current skill set and—Oh!”

It made sense. The more someone leveled up, the more their body reflected and synchronized itself into a form that allowed using those skills at maximum efficiency. Tanya was an aeromancer who favored high-speed attacks and extreme maneuverability. In that context, long legs and a light-weight, athletic physique suited her better than a well-developed buxom figure would.

In that light—

“Though that makes me wonder,” Tanya replied, cupping her chin, “For someone with physical power like yours, you’re awfully lean.”

He knew why that was. Because he didn’t just have strength-based lifeforce skills. He had kinetomancy that needed him to be light-weight and yet strong enough to hold his ground against the forces. Shatterpoint Intuition and Seismic Sensing were skills that belonged to a slime monster and translated into him developing musculature that allowed impossible flexibility and greater resistance to strain.

And that was without counting the effects that having a natural Ley Line Network within him had on his physiology.

“One of my Outsider-things, I assure you,” He replied with a lopsided grin.

Tanya snorted. “Sure it is. Either way, I came to tell you that Zuken’s back. And he’s got the Overseer of Haviskali with him as a guest. Zuken asked me to fetch you.”

“For what?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “Might be nothing. Might be something to do with your documentation. You need a legitimate history to gain employment here. My advice is to keep your wiseassery to a minimum and just go ahead with the motions.”

Lukas snorted. “Seriously? Because I'm not much for keeping my mouth shut. Especially in front of authority figures. I’m pretty sure I physically can’t. Probably because I was—”

“Lukas,” Tanya said, her voice suddenly tight. She put her hand on his arm, and her lean fingers felt like heavy wires. “You’re going to meet the Overseer of this town. He’s the top dog in the town, and he answers directly to the Shogun of the Kingdom. No one dares to fuck with that guy. I’ve seen what happens. We all have.”

Lukas pursed his lips and studied her hand thoughtfully for a moment. Then he nodded. “Okay,” He said, “I hear you.”

Tanya exhaled slowly and nodded.

“What about Zuken? I doubt one’d need to fetch this Overseer fellow for lil old me.”

Tanya’s expression cracked. “Zuken’s… a special case. He holds the ear of the Shogun, so you can say he’s a professional peer with the Overseer.”

“Big man then?”

“You’ve no idea.”

Contrary to what one’d think, this world wasn’t exactly stuck in a pre-renaissance, swords-and-kings era. On one side, they hadn’t quite upgraded to night clubs and ripped jeans, but on the other, he could classify even the most random object as Smart technology.

Even a freaking wall.

Every single surface had sigils inscribed upon them, the graffiti on the walls hiding them in plain sight. These sigils stored the sun’s energy, akin to photovoltaic cells, and used it to run a multitude of functions inside this place. The defensive systems built into the castle had been laid by someone with a particularly thorough breed of the crazies. Even his analysis tool could only touch the surface of their functionalities. Hell, the only reason he felt like he knew what he was talking about was because of the strange similarity of these sigils with the ones he had seen on the walls in the yokai territory.

Given what he knew about the War, it was entirely possible that a mansion this old had been the work of one of those Yokai craftsmen of old.

Maybe the Kasha or the other yokai prototypes could make more sense out of them, but to try them out without a definite reason could be potentially dangerous.

It kind of gave him the feel of living in a Smart House. Only old. And engraved out of a single stone.

Oh, and with no shadows. None‌.

Talk about a stark, alien dichotomy.

When Lukas followed Tanya into one of the waiting rooms, he found several people immediately come up to their feet — a couple of warriors, complete with chain mail and swords, Olfric Bergott—looking like he had seen several miles of bad road recently, a bald, fifty-something man with tattoos engraved on his skin, starting from the tip of his scalp and running all the way downward. Olfric was covered in bumps and bruises and still-healing cuts and looked absolutely wary of his presence.

And finally, there was the man himself — Zuken Banksi, dressed in robes of Prussian Blue, with Elena standing right next to him in a tight bodycon of floral patterns.

“Uh, easy,” He said, “I won’t attack anyone, I promise.”

Every single person in the room eyed me warily. They had their hands inches away from the hilt of their swords. Except for Elena, who did her best to ignore his presence, and Zuken, who just looked plain amused.

Lukas closed the door behind him and walked forward, the excessive light everywhere giving his pupils more of a workout than they’d had in a while. He had really thought about trying to conjure sunglasses, but the entire concept of ‘source-less’ and ‘all-pervading’ Eternal Light kind of defeated the point.

“Banksi,” He replied. The trick to facing a crowd was to ignore everyone else and focus on a singular person. It took some of the psychological advantage of numbers away. “Tanya said you wanted to talk to me?”

“Oh yes,” The terramancer replied, “Lukas, meet Tatun Kinosu, the Overseer of Haviskali. Overseer, meet Lukas. He’s a private hire from Maluscion. The one I talked to you about.”

“The metamancer?”

“Same.”

About that. Tanya had briefly talked about how the ability to synthesize Ether — natural or otherwise, and contain it in standardized containers governed the economy of these lands. Unlike the other elements, Ether signified change, transformation, creation and a lot of other concepts that made it into the most prestigious element out of the five. Every nation, heck every town, had a minimal number of Ether-manufacturing sites, employing both machinery and metamancers to synthesize raw ether from the natural energy of the world.

That ‌made being a metamancer a highly lucrative job option. The only problem was, finding kami capable of metamancy, especially high-level Ether Creation, was outrageously difficult.

And it was here that Lukas had struck gold. Not only was he capable of synthesizing Ether, he didn’t even need to depend on a kami to do that. His Conjuration skills were still a decent Level 2, but raw ether synthesis? That was way above average.

That made him significant. Significant people stuck out in people’s minds. A petty psychological trick, but at least, it gave him a decent presentation.

“You don’t look like much,” said the Overseer, giving him a peeved look.

“What can I say?” Lukas replied in laconic defiance, “I forgot to upgrade my ‘look-like-a-fashion-model’ skill while working on mana synthesis.”

The look on Tanya’s face was priceless. It looked while she realized ‌he had just mouthed off to one of the top brass. She didn’t exactly have the frame of reference to understand how. Lukas had been expecting a similar ‌reaction from Zuken, but ‌his smile widened.

Okay. Yes, Tanya had warned him from trying to be a smartass, but that didn’t mean he’d succeed at it.

Zuken snorted. “I told you, he’s independently minded. But Lukas here hides many skills. I was rather… impressed when I got my hands on him. But you know how it is with Maluscian hires.”

The Overseer scrunched his nose and replied in the wry tone of a man engaging in understatement. “As always, you bring me the most vulgar of requests, Banksi.”

“You know I’m owed a couple of favors, Overseer,” Zuken replied. There was an undercurrent of sternness in his voice. “Compared to what I could ask, this is but a tiny little arrangement.”

The Overseer shook his head like an old elephant trying to shake off fleas. “This is neither tiny nor little. You ask me to make a no-name nomad into a full-fledged adventurer of the Empire and enlist him under the Shrine. That’s as close to sacrilege as one gets. Especially this close to the Choosing.”

“I do not want you to enlist him as a member. Merely an affirmed citizen of the state. He’ll prove his worth by trouncing the ones the High Priests throw at his face.”

“That’s a bold claim you’re making, Banksi.”

“The only kind of claim there is.”

Lukas glanced around to meet Tanya’s face. She hadn’t told him jack about fighting others. The way they were talking about this Choosing or whatever made it feel like some kind of gladiatorial event. It was, poetically, mirroring his experience at the yokai camp, where he had had to fight against Quonnan. But in a world where Potential and skill meant everything, he supposed such things made more sense than back on Earth.

When in Rome… He mused. With a deep breath, Lukas decided what his course of action was.

He stepped forward. It probably said something that the very act made Olfric look more alert.

Lukas gave him a little smile. It wasn’t quite the same as blowing him a kiss. But it was enough to let him know that something was coming.

“Thank you. I just love it when people talk about me like I’m not even present there.”

Tanya choked. Lukas could almost see the aneurysm she was developing. Well, her and Olfric. He wondered how long it would take for the former aquamancer to explode.

“Hah!” The Overseer chuckled at his blunt response casually. Lukas was getting the impression that he was rather laid back. “Did you not inform him about this?”

“My apologies,” said Zuken, giving him a small nod. “I thought of bringing you up to snuff in time, but The Overseer’s presence has sped up my schedule a bit. We’ll speak of your obligations and your stay here after this. Do you think you’re fit enough to display your prowess in battle?”

Good question. Could he?

Lukas considered it. His body felt fine, and stronger than before. A battle would allow him to test out his new abilities and showcase a little metamancy for his audience.

Their eyes met.

Can you justify my confidence in your power? His eyes said. Zuken wasn’t asking him to win. He was asking him to dominate. To utterly destroy the opponent and make a show out of it.

That was fine. He could do shows.

“I can,” Lukas replied, “though a little forewarning would have been nicer.” He tried to keep the annoyance out of his tone. “When do you wish that to happen?”

Zuken’s mouth twitched as if he was about to smile, but thought better of it. “Now.”

Lukas blinked. “Against?”

“One of my men should do,” The Overseer replied, giving Lukas a thorough one-over. “Suketh here has been part of security for over three years.”

He turned to Zuken. “If your hire survives him, then we’ll talk.”

“Humph!” said one soldier, whom Lukas recognized was probably Suketh. The hulking, armored man looked at him with condescension. “I won’t blame you if you run away, kid. It’s almost impossible to gain status after losing face in front of the Overseer. Go back home to your bunch of tree-hugging vagrants and no one will think less of you.”

Lukas arched an eyebrow at him but said nothing. He watched as the man walked ahead of him with a strut in his step, no doubt already preparing his victory speech post his supposedly easy victory. He saw Zuken and the rest of the crowd follow Suketh towards the courtyard and sighed.

When in Rome… He repeated to himself.

Half an hour later ⸻

The dull fight that just occurred couldn’t be called a duel. It was too fast and uneventful to be called that. For the few that were watching the spar, it was all about watching a thirty-something man, covered in mail from head to toe, fire off some moderately strong wind-based attacks using his broadsword, at the strange, young metamancer wearing a sleeveless shirt and pants, miss every time, and then beaten bare handedly by said young man until he couldn’t stand anymore.

Heck, when the elder fighter attempted to stab Lukas with his weapon, the poor tool snapped as soon as the pressure of the attack came into contact with Lukas’s palm. Lukas really couldn’t tell if it was because the ‘Decay’ technique he had grabbed from the ‘Dranzithl’ was really that effective against physical weapons, or if the blade was simply fragile, but ‌it was disappointing all the same.

Lukas idly watched as the other guards took the downed man away to get treated for the bruises and a minor concussion. The last bit was more of a precautionary measure, just in case Suketh turned out to be a stubborn idiot, or worse, a sore loser. Even if you broke their arms and legs, there was always a chance that they’d cast some kind of potentially dangerous hit as a last resort at your back.

Lukas shuddered. Even to this date, he remembered being caught off-guard by that bastard Olfric’s attack.

“You’ve gotten faster.” Zuken walked into the ‘duel zone,’ as the other guards took away the downed ‘Suketh’ to get treated for bruises and a minor concussion. “You didn’t even need to use metamancy to defeat him.” His eyes flashed knowingly. “No, it was more like you knew what his skill set was before the fight even began. You weren’t concerned in the slightest when he attacked you with that blade.”

Lukas glanced at Tanya, and then back to Zuken. He could lie about using Ether to shape Suketh’s wind and use it against him. That Suketh had projected his attacks too clearly. That he had used his lifeforce to fortify himself and pinpointed his blows to shatter Suketh’s blade.

Then he opened his mouth.

“What can I say? I mean, really, he’s kinda weak.”

Tanya’s eyes twitched.

It took him everything to not chuckle out loud.

In hindsight, now that he was using his siphoned skills against regular people, he was finally getting why a Level-2 skill was such a big deal over a Level-1, and why Zuken had been so surprised at him having a possible Level-3 skill. Even the passive effect of Seismic Sensing told him where Suketh was without needing to look at him and seeing the bremetan’s trajectories through Shatterpoint Intuition felt like watching a snail in action. Especially with tachypsychia doubling his perception speed.

“Well?” Zuken asked.

“I’m not sure I actually heard a question there,” said Lukas, more amused than offended by the discussion. He hadn’t expected Zuken and his ilk to just trust him sight unseen. If he had, Lukas would have merely assumed he was naïve at best, and a fool at worst.

“The Overseer does not suffer fools. Every single one of his security is Level-15 or higher and has enough skill to go toe-to-toe with a Bronze-tier adventurer like Tanya and Olfric. And you defeated one of them without even trying.”

Lukas glanced at Tanya, wondering how in hell was she placed in the same tier as Olfric. Even without the power of that strange Frost, she was easily leagues above the former aquamancer. Part of him itched to see where he stood against her now that he had leveled-up again, and had a greater well of power at his fingertips.

“Well, other than the fact that you're wrong, I didn’t actually hear a question there. Again.”

He could see that brief twitch in Tanya’s body movements. She was barely keeping from face palming.

“Wrong? Wrong in what?” Zuken inquired. “I’m a hundred percent sure about the competence of the Overseer’s security staff.”

“Oh no, you’re not wrong about that,” Lukas easily admitted, wiping dust off his clothes. “I meant your comment about Tanya being in the same league as him.”

He thumbed at Olfric, whose reaction was more muted, and much to his surprise, filled with acceptance.

“When did this discussion become about me?” Tanya demanded. Lukas didn’t need to read her mind to see her growing anxiety. It reminded him of his own situation back at the yokai camp. Just what kind of agreement forced her to play ball with these guys?

Time would tell.

“Ask him,” Lukas thumbed at Zuken. “Also, what’s this Choosing business? I know we had a deal back then, but I’d like a full accounting. Details of my job, work hours, perks and benefits, you know, the usual.”

“Someone’s in a hurry,” Elena noted.

Lukas cocked his head and looked directly at her. “It’s called taking precautions. So that next time, I have a legal reason to say no, when I’m dragged into someone’s freak-show.”

Elena looked taken aback by the bite in his tone.

It was Zuken who broke the tension. “I agree. You’ll get your documentation as soon as we can clear out a few terms.”

“I’m listening.”

Zuken actually stopped to consider that. “Not here,” he replied after a moment. “I have a couple of businesses to take care of with the Overseer. “Come to my office in the evening. Tanya can show you the way. And Aguilar, honesty is the only thing that works with me. Please keep that in mind.”

With those words, Zuken turned around and left, with Elena and Olfric following shortly behind.

“Well…” Lukas trailed off, “that went well.”