At my word, Cark dropped the shield as soon as the stalactite hit the ground, letting the huge cloud of ash and debris cover us as everyone grabbed onto me, and I used Seek Hidden to find a safe place to hole up. I had to shove a bit at the skill to make such a vague idea work, but I was able to trigger it and I dragged everyone over to a space where there was much less ash and no lava splashes cooling after being flung free of the large pool the Heart was suspended over.

Once we were clear I dragged everyone behind an outcropping and took cover, hoping against hope no one had seen us in the debris. I turned to Cark and the others, and I resonated my stealth skill with my voice as I whispered, trying my hardest to completely mask my words from any outsiders. "Ok guys, I'm hoping they'll go back to fighting each other if they run into the others in the ash cloud, but assuming that doesn't happen I need ideas. No wrong answers here, all we need is some way to delay them."

Jessie, who was looking a bit pale but still in good condition, raised a hand. "I can probably do a golem if I try. It won't last long. Like at all. But if we can make it the same size as one of us we could probably bait them into chasing after it. The only issue is I don't have a sculpting skill. Any of the rest of you know how the hell to make a reasonable facsimile of a human being out of rocks? Because if it isn't at least close there's no way it's going to work."

Benny looked pensive. "What about Solomons Sucking Mud skill. " He turned to me. "Could you use it to slightly weaken the stone? Not enough to turn it full liquid but enough to make it easy to mold? Because if so I bet we could make something about the right shape." He gestured to a nearby rock formation, which while the right size was absolutely not the right shape in any way. Everyone else looked excited by the possibility too, but I was personally skeptical I could manage that level of control.

The more radical the shift from the original skill, the harder it was to force the thing into that configuration. It wasn't exactly a completely different application, but making it do something so unusual was going to take a ton of effort and might even put me out of the fight, if not knock me entirely unconscious. I just shrugged. "I...don't know. I can try, but you guys might have to drag me out of here if I do. I'm not sure we can handle that me being a burden when we're trying to fight people this strong. Does anyone else have a better plan?"

Unfortunately, no one did. Everyone just sat and looked at me uncomfortably until I finally sighed and nodded. "Well, we won't know until we try. Guess I'm giving this a shot." I had to psych myself up a little. This was one of the most extreme changes I'd made to a skill up to this point. I'd done some tweaking, but it was usually more shape or scope. I knew intellectually this was the same thing, but it seemed a lot closer to just breaking the skill to do something else with it, and I knew that even my own perception of that was going to make it much more difficult.

First thing I did was block out all the extraneous elements around me. The ash in the air, the sound of movement, the heat through my costume, literally of these things were distractions that I had to suppress. So I did. I mashed them down with every bit of Focus I had and dedicated myself wholly to my task. Once I had completely detached from the situation around me (which took longer than expected because my girlfriend was still out there putting her life in danger) I was finally able to begin the process of changing the skill.

I'd done this plenty of times now, and while I'd been in pain through every one, I'd also learned. Firstly, that skills were more likely to accept smaller changes, and secondly, that the further you changed them, the more difficult it became. Paradoxically, the best way to work on a skill was to do a lot of very small changes, but to do them all at once. As difficult as I would have once found that, it wasn't impossible or anything. My Focus stat made almost anything mental much easier, but especially anything pertaining to the dexterity of my thoughts.

So that was what I did. I changed a bunch of little things. I changed the shape of the spell, which I'd done before. I changed the speed of the spread, which I had to do to make sure it applied to the whole rock evenly. I dialed back the severity of the change to the stone itself, making it more cohesive, as well as trying my best to spread out the time available to us, which was actually easier because of the lowered intensity. I did all of these things at once, and every one of them hurt, though not much, but the pain from all of them sort of superimposed to become more than the sum of its parts.

Despite being literally eye wateringly painful though, it wasn't as bad as I'd expected. The new method of working on the skill had saved me some of the agony I'd known was coming, which was good. I jerked a hand at the others, too overwhelmed with pain and strain to speak or anything close to it. Luckily they had been watching for that and leapt into action. As I watched, barely coherent, through pain wracked eyes, Jessie and Benny stepped up and started to slowly sculpt the rock.

Jessie I'd expected to be impressive. She'd spent most of her time before joining the Unity doing floral arrangements to get her name out there, and she'd been popular for it. She had a definite flare for aesthetically pleasing design, so it wasn't a shock she seemed to have a solid handle on shaping the rock. Benny though, Benny was doing surprisingly well. He was mostly handling the major shaping, leaving the details to Jessie. I assumed they had discussed it when I was tuning everything out, but still, I was impressed by how well they were working, both together and apart.

As Jessie shaped the stone she pushed out a steady stream of green energy. The glowing life force seemed to be almost swallowed by the dark stone, vanishing into the stygian depths of the rock like a rock into a lake, but without any of the ripples. Still, Jessie didn't seem to be worried about it, so I could only assume whatever she was doing was actually taking. She swayed a bit, and I would have tried to catch her if I hadn't been in the middle of experiencing what it was like to feel my brain melt.

She stayed standing though. After topping up Cark this was clearly a strain on her, but she was made of tougher stuff than even we gave her credit for most of the time. I could see a stubborn determination in her eyes that I recognized from plenty of conversations we'd had before. She wouldn't be giving up on this. She kept pushing for a few minutes before finally signaling that she was done, and I let go of my tenuous hold on the skill and slumped to the ground, landing on my ass shakily as the tension drained out of me.

Jessie looked too exhausted to juice me up to help mitigate the exhaustion, which was fair. I didn't want to get too dependent on her energy jolts to get through my training anyway. She slumped down herself, and then flicked her glowing eyes at the humanoid lump of rock they had made. The thing, which looked semi human shaped but didn't really have any detail or definition, took off into the clouds of still settling ash and I sighed in relief as I heard the sounds of shouting.

My sigh was interrupted sadly, by a fucking metal hook slamming into my calf. I barely had time to scream before there was a roar of a gunning engine and the hook was yanked tight, causing excruciating agony as it jerk my leg hard and started pulling me across the floor of the cavern. Fisher, it seemed, had gotten his hooks in me, pun very much intended, and my friends didn't even have time to stop him as he hauled me full speed across the chamber. I don't know how the hell he had the space to gun it like that even in a cavern this size, but I suspected it was something to do with phasing.

Sadly whatever that was did not save me from the impact against the wall as he swerved and let all that momentum send me slamming into the dark rock. Apparently he was a big fan of that move, since he'd done it to the rock woman too. Regardless, even though the rock wasn't high enough rank to break me, I was extremely sore and tired and my leg was on a hook, all of which added up to me feeling pretty sensitive to pain and the impact against the wall been teeth rattlingly unpleasant if not outright horrible.

I heard the crunch of boots on the gravel strewn cavern floor as Fisher climbed off his bike, yanking the chain in my leg taught and dragging me toward him. His face was cold and impassive, but I was pretty sure he was annoyed. I was kind of curious why he hadn't hooked Cark, but I was guessing it was because I was already on the ground. Still, the pain in my calf was so horrible I wanted to throw up. I wasn't sure I'd ever been in this kind of pain. It was literally making me sick, as if my body was rejecting the agony like an infection.

I expected him to attack me or something, but he just dragged me over to a nearby outcropping and looped the chain around it. Then he stepped over me and headed back towards the bike, clearly ready to return to his mission and try to get the Heart. The Heart that Callie was supposed to be stealing right now. I didn't think, or plan, or even give myself a chance to worry. I hauled on my injured and bloody leg, pulling the chain enough to give me some slack, and hurled myself at him, grabbing hold of one leg.

He grunted in annoyance, trying to pull free, but I wouldn't let go. Fisher was dangerous, and could seriously hurt Callie if he found her, and I wouldn't let him. I was brain fried and sore and had a hook in my leg and barely coherent, but I refused to let him hurt my girlfriend. He snarled a bit, the first real sign of emotion I'd seen from him, and I felt something...shift. Like he was trying to slip away. Except he couldn't. I was holding him, and the chain was wrapped around a big ass rock. That chain was like a circuit. It was designed to carry his ability to whatever it was attached to as long as he was in contact with it.

This situation was only barely within that definition, but it WAS within it. So he kicked me in the face. I felt my mask smash into my nose and break it at the first blow, though it didn't come off. Apparently the ability to nullify attacks was NOT one of it's many useful features. He grunted and kicked me again, driving the mask harder into the injury and almost making me black out from pain. He lifted his foot again, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to take another hit, but when it came down it stopped cold on a red barrier.

I blinked, wondering how the haze of pain I was in had stopped an attack, before realizing the barrier was coming from my emergency beacon. In fact, forcing myself to look around I saw everyone's emergency beacon was active. A voice split the air. "Attention participants. The four thousand eight hundred and seventy sixth annual freshman scavenger hunt of the Ascendant Academy has now come to an end. Please cease all combat and return to your accommodations to await further instructions." I started laughing, though it mostly got cut off by me choking on my own blood, still, I was giggling a bit as I lost consciousness. I guess we won.