"Back so soon, little trickster?" The Trickster sat cross-legged before her, bobbing as though in unseen currents. Their current environment seemed to be underwater, but full of clouds.

Maya shrugged apologetically, watching her energy bar as it began to slowly refill. "I know you're likely to appreciate creative solutions."

"Indeed. Though I do wonder how you managed to make such a simple dungeon so difficult?"

"Simple? Hardly."

"Your team was entirely competent, and yet—"

The rest of his words were drowned out by a rush of wind, piercing and shrill, like an angry snarl that built and built on itself without stopping.

The world around her glitched, fuzzing into red-rimmed darkness at the edges. Suddenly the Trickster was standing up, striding forward, his mouth moving as he spoke faster; still the rushing sound of wind drowned out his words.

"WE SEE YOU LIAR!" snarled the wind, and everything flared red.

Then Maya was back in the boss room, so abruptly she almost toppled from her precarious perch atop the half-melted throne. Her energy was only partially refilled, but that was hardly her main worry.

"Bloodline?! What the ——- was that? You can’t just—" she leapt into the air to avoid another beam of light, the attack forcefully reminding her that she was in the middle of a fight. She could deal with Bloodline later.

But before she could fully refocus, something else intruded into her view.

New mission: Escape Bloodline. Find a way to free yourself of the entity calling itself Bloodline. Time remaining: 1 week. Rewards: Trickster's Blessing (14 days), increased reputation with The Trickster

New Mission: Trickster's Guardian. Find a way to eliminate the entity calling itself Bloodline. Rewards: Trickster's Blessing (100 days), significantly increased reputation with The Trickster, Trickster's Guardian unique armor set, Trickster's Boon

Maya stared at the notifications, her confusion deepening into worry the further on she read, then all the way into alarm.

The Trickster had a vendetta against the Oracle, and had done a lot to disrupt Maya's life when she chose to align herself against him in that particular conflict. But he'd never done anything even close to this level of extreme.

If she weren't in a boss fight right now, she'd probably drop everything and confront Bloodline immediately. But as it was, she dodged another beam of light and tried very hard to push away questions of who and what Bloodline could possibly be to make the Trickster this angry with it.

Without success. She couldn't focus on the fight, couldn't remember any of her half-formed clever plans. She felt the quickness of her pulse, the battering of her heart, the overwarmth of her face beneath her feathers.

What was Bloodline to evoke such an extreme response? Was it an innocent, as it claimed? Or some entity so dark and evil that even the Trickster would align himself against it?

Eliminate. Not kill, but eliminate.

Maya jumped just in time to escape another beam of light, but she’d lost her edge of alertness and now her time was up, her perch unable to hold up any longer under the relentless barrage. The attack cracked the throne down the middle, splitting it into two halves that fell away to the ground with a slam, and leaving Maya without anywhere safe to land. The flurry of starry blades immediately filled in the gap as she fell toward them.

She almost didn't care, her thoughts entirely consumed by all these new questions.

You've been killed by Draconias Crystalstar.

Character Maya Starborn has been locked for 8 minutes.

She tuned out the un-world around her and let her thoughts return to her new all-consuming conundrum.

Trickster's Blessing... from what she'd endured while under the Trickster's Curse, which forced every roll to be negative for its duration, it stood to reason that this would be the opposite, forcing every roll to be positive. Two weeks of guaranteed good luck, just for ditching Bloodline? She might well have evicted it then and there - assuming she could figure out how to do so - were it not for the second quest.

Eliminate Bloodline. Which would give her the Trickster's Blessing... guaranteed good luck... for over three solid months. It made her mind race with possibilities.

With that much time at her disposal, she could do anything. She probably wouldn’t be able to reach level 50, but she could burn through the lower levels so much faster than anyone else. Even Cydrin and Domitius had to deal with rolling low luck days, when they couldn't progress at their usual insanely fast rates. If Maya could advance without worrying about that? Just start grinding and never stop for 100 days? How high could she get? It sounded too easy.

And that was without considering the other rewards! A unique armor set? Trickster's Boon? And 'significantly increased' reputation? She'd never seen a quest with that modifier before.

But she shouldn't get too excited. She didn't have any idea where to start even if she decided to follow through on the quest. And apart from the how, there was the more important question of whether she should.

The idea made her deeply uncomfortable. She still didn't know if Bloodline deserved destruction, if eliminating it would be worth it. Killing bosses and NPCs were one thing - they would for the most part respawn, and even if they didn't the game would arrange for someone else to fill their slot. But Bloodline? It was lost, hijacked far from home. She didn’t know what would happen if it were killed.

And then there was the fact that it had somehow yanked her out of the Trickster's private domain. How was that possible? Why do something so dramatic? If Bloodline only wanted to get home, why provoke the Trickster when its best interest clearly lay in staying quiet and dormant in Maya’s head until she could safely transport it north?

She was growing more and more convinced that her negative luck on the day she’d obtained Bloodline - been forced into accepting Bloodline - had done more to hurt her than simply impaling her and giving her an unexpected augment and unknown faction change. Whatever Bloodline was, it clearly did not get along with the Trickster. At all.

Eliminate.

She kept coming back to that word. It felt so deep, so final, so wrong. As tempting as the quest rewards were, as much as she wanted every single thing the Trickster offered, she couldn’t quite get past how wrong it felt.

When the lock period ended, she respawned in her room at the academy, then crossed to the bed and lay down, intending to sleep immediately to confront Bloodline.

But it was not so simple to quiet her mind as usual, and it was many minutes before she finally began to drift and found herself in the half-asleep haze where Bloodline’s windy voice waited for her.

"We we we regret to have interfered," it whispered, voice soft but proud and not in the least contrite. "You should not have gone there without telling we."

"What the —— — —?" Maya shouted, pausing when she realized her voice had stopped making sound. Huh. She swore so infrequently she’d never tripped the content filter before. It felt very strange to be saying words and know she was saying them while nothing happened.

The feeling only distracted her a moment before she refocused, her anger unsatisfied. "What was that? How did you do that? Why?"

"You put we into the Liar’s dominion. We panicked and fled before knowing you had not brought we there in malice but ignorance. We regret the mistake. Do not send we away. It will not happen again."

"What are you?" Maya demanded.

"We are bloodline."

"That's what you're called, but what are you? Are you a spirit, a demon, a parasite?"

"No no no, we are bloodline. The... line of the life that flows, the pulse of the existence that is."

"Like veins? Blood vessels? Something like that?"

"Yes, bloodline."

"I don't think you understand the language quite well enough to go naming yourself," Maya grumbled, her mind racing ahead through the implications. The name Bloodline initially made her think of genetics and inheritance, but the impression she now got from its description of itself felt more like... world-tree or leyline, or something of that vein.

But that only confused her more. What did the Trickster care about any of this? When he had an enemy, he sent people to make their lives miserable, but at its heart it all felt like he played a game. He harassed the Oracle's followers, tried to make them give up, but never promised extravagant rewards for it. If he'd offered her this kind of loot for giving up her diviner's orb, she'd have taken it in a heartbeat. But that wasn't how he operated. Either Bloodline’s existence was some sort of threat to the Trickster - not impossible, but it seemed unlikely - or its removal would benefit him in some way.

So what did he have to gain? What could possibly make Bloodline's destruction of so much higher importance than anything the other deities could do?

"Why does the Trickster want you gone so badly?"

"The Liar envies, and would seek to destroy we for the power we are."

She thought of how she'd been instantly yanked out of the Trickster’s private world, thrown back into the dungeon without time to even realize what was happening.

"Bloodline," she asked slowly, "just how powerful are you?"

"We are powerful," it echoed. "Yes yes yes."

"But... how much?"

"Much."

Yes. Whatever Bloodline was, she no longer doubted that it had power deeper and stronger than the Trickster's.

Bloodline, leyline, life-veins of the world. If Bloodline were that deep, that powerful... what would killing it even do? If it had a niche, if Bloodline were some essential part of the world, then the game would have to put someone else in its slot…

…it wouldn't be any ordinary NPC tasked to take over.

This was a power play. The Trickster wanted to usurp Bloodline’s position, become the pulse of life itself. Maya could think of no other reason for him to offer so very much for Bloodline’s destruction.

"Do not send we away," Bloodline repeated. "Promise you will not. Promise you will never."

"I don’t plan to."

"PROMISE," Bloodline hissed, and Maya felt the intent behind the word, the deeper meaning.

It wanted to be soulbound as her augment; she wasn’t sure how she knew, but felt absolutely certain.

"We we we can fix the broken spell. And more, we can do whatever you need. We will help you in every way we can, forever, if you promise never to send we away until we are home."

"Broken spell? Do you mean... Inferno?"

"Yes yes yes, we know the back ways and the hidden paths. If you bind we safe and reject the Liar's promises, we will be able to help you more."

"I'll have to think about it. You're asking for a lot on trust."

Bloodline went silent for a long time, leaving only a distant wind brushing against the inside of her mind, gentle, soothing.

"We will give it to you as proof of we're value. As proof we know the paths and can show you them. Please do not send we away," it said softly, and for the first time its tone sounded genuinely concerned. "Please do not let the Liar destroy we."

"I'm not planning to kill you, even if I knew how, but you have to admit that something weird is going on with you." Maya hesitated only a moment before continuing. "I won’t banish you, but I’m not going to soulbind you either. I’ve had enough of letting my future be locked down."

"We have already bound you into the future of we. If you abandon we, there is no one else we can use. We are trapped with you until we are home."

"Well, that was your decision. I won’t be made to feel guilty about your choices."

"We know you are true in your words, but truth does not always remain true forever. You make plans to send we away if we displease you."

"Contingencies, that’s all. They’re not plans."

Bloodline didn’t answer for long enough that Maya had to struggle to maintain her hold on the lucid dreamspace in which they resided. When it finally spoke, it sounded flat and inflectionless. "Use the broken spell ten times without doing anything else. When the window appears, select ‘no’. Do this five times without stopping. The fifth time enter max_e_inherit=1."

"Max E inherit, one."

"Max underscore E underscore inherit equals one," Bloodline corrected.

"Right, right. I know how underscores work. Max E inherit one," she repeated, wishing she could access her in-game journal while in this strange dream space. But it did not appear at her call.

"Then, do the same thing a second time, but input dmg_limit=4."

"Damage limit four."

"D M G underscore—"

"Yes, I know. Shorthand. Anything else?"

"Dev_test_reset:"30982" - this is the most important and must go last."

"Max E inherit one, damage limit four, dev test reset 30982. 30982, 3 0 9 8 2, 309 82."

"You will see," Bloodline whispered as the dream began to fade apart. "We are of most value to you."

Maya did her best to repeat the words over and over to herself as she drifted back into wakefulness. "30982!" she said aloud, adding it to her journal immediately before she could forget. "Max E inherit one. Damage output four, Dev test reset 30982. With a colon."

She took a deep breath, then selected Inferno. Which, as usual, did nothing. She did the same thing nine more times, until an error window appeared.

Input error. Disable?

Maya selected 'no', then activated the ability ten times more.

Input error. Disable?

No.

Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Then she paused. Had it been five times more, or five times total? She mentally typed in 'max_e_inherit=1', and the error window disappeared. She hoped she was doing it right, and wished that Bloodline were accessible sometime other than when she was asleep. It was very frustrating, having to rely on her own faulty memory instead of written notes.

She repeated the process again, inputting 'dmg_output=4' the second time and ‘dev_test_reset:"30982"’ the third. This time when the error message disappeared, Inferno wasn’t greyed out.

Inferno. Energy cost: 100%, deals 4T+4%e dmg per second to all targets within range. Lasts 2%e seconds.

The damage output wasn’t as awe-inspiring as she’d hoped, but 37 damage every second for 8 seconds would still come out to… around 300 damage? Hm, that was substantially worse than Heart of Magma. She frowned in disappointment. 450 damage was much better than 300, even if it took a couple seconds longer…

Wait. No. This was 300 damage per target. Over an area. She grinned. This was… this was Runestrike on fire, Magestrike up to eleven. This was… well…

This was Inferno.

She wouldn’t be able to single-handedly take down armies of higher level creatures, at least not right away, but she could certainly do more damage with this than she could have before. And the scaling damage and duration meant that the bigger her energy pool grew, the more damage she could dish out.

Once she leveled a bit more, she’d be incredibly dangerous. It wouldn’t be ideal against a single target, Heart of Magma still held that distinction, but against a group? She’d be a one mage firestorm.

It hadn’t specified the range. She had to know.

She ordered Hunter and Snappy to wait for her, then jogged out to the forest beyond Windy Creek Village where the driles roamed in their little packs, and kept going until she found a nice big clearing. She wasn’t sure how destructible the environment was, but had no desire to start a forest fire. There were three packs of driles wandering around the edges of the clearing but they had ignored her, recognizing her as too big of a threat.

She stood in the center of the clearing and, finally, cast Inferno.