“How far can I trust her?” Serenity felt more than a little uncomfortable as they left Innat’s home and place of business. The two hundred tiny monster cores he’d given her was a lot on Zon, but it really wasn’t that much elsewhere. Realistically, at Tier Three he was only going to bother even picking them up because he had Loot Core; tiny cores were simply very low value, so most people didn’t take the time to dig in a monster and find out if they were there. The thousand Etherium, however, was a significant amount no matter where you were. At Tier Three, at least; the amount required to do anything went up significantly at higher Tiers.

It seemed to go farther here; he didn’t think that it would cover the amount of work he was asking for elsewhere. It certainly wouldn’t have covered a year of effort, even with the apparent value of the tiny monster cores.

The real question wasn’t if he could trust her, it was if he could trust her enough to stop working on the problem separately and if he could leave the planet to work on the more important problem of the Eternal Church. He didn’t really want to stay on Zon to babysit the recovery effort.

“Pretty far,” Ceney answered. “Mostly because you brought her a unique problem. If you hadn’t, she’d have told you to go elsewhere.” Ceney paused, then chuckled. “Of course, you can also trust her to spend everything you gave her on trying to find the people you want found. She won’t waste any of it or use it on anything inappropriate, but it will all be spent. I said she doesn't come cheap, and I meant it.”

That made Serenity smile. “If spending the entire advance on the job is the worst thing she does, I’ll be happy. As long as she actually does what I’ve hired her to do, it’s all good.” He’d return when he could to check on things, because you always had to, but for now he’d trust that others would do the work. He didn’t have a choice; there were other things he needed to be doing.

Especially finding out what the heck all the kidnapping was about. He couldn’t believe that selling people here on Zon was the reason for it; instead, that seemed likely to be payment to Djen for the task of collaring and keeping them. Unfortunately, all he had to go on so far was the attack by the Eternal Church on Djen’s building.

Perhaps he should have followed up on it more quickly, but he hadn’t wanted to go haring off on a wild goose chase while he was still waiting on Rissa to catch up. He’d thought there would be plenty of time to handle the problem on Zon, then head to Lyka and look into it there. The invasion of Zenith seemed unlikely to be related to the kidnapping scheme even though it was also the Eternal Church, but it had certainly derailed Serenity’s plans.

Once they reached the run-down Inn owned by Xarx’s aunt, Serenity tugged on Andarit’s arm to get her to follow him into the room they shared. “Next is Lowpeak, isn’t it? How long will it take to get there?”

Andarit took a seat on her bed and grimaced. “It won’t be fast. Not on foot.”

“How about by flyer, then?” Serenity knew Andarit still had the one they’d used in Zenith and a flyer was faster than walking. It ought to be quite a bit faster, even though it wasn’t as fast as driving on a good road. It was probably closer to driving offroad, except that the limit was the vehicle rather than the road.

Andarit frowned. “It could save us some time, but the cost would be that we’d be out of mana if we needed to fight. I don’t think I could power it continuously for more than about an hour at top speed.”

Serenity blinked. He hadn’t thought about the limitations on long-distance travel at low Tiers for a long time, but Andarit had a point. The ones they’d used on Tzintkra were well-made and used monster cores from creatures of a higher Tier than Serenity was at the time; he hadn’t bothered to check how high Tier they were, but probably Tier Five or so from how they’d felt. They’d been able to run for several hours before a core had to be changed out.

The core cost was one of the reasons Serenity hadn’t cared that he’d lost the one Raz picked up on Tzintkra. The main reason was that he’d been headed back to Earth and who needed a flyer that was slower than a car on Earth?

It might have been convenient here, but he’d have needed to supply the cores. Mana was a better choice, but one that was usually used at higher Tiers. Flying two people on mana at Tier Three … yeah. Flying was expensive, similar to trying to maintain a shield but probably even worse; even with two of them charging it and his oversized mana pool for a Tier Three, they’d be lucky to have it continuously active for a travel day. Even so, her estimate seemed short. “Only an hour? Just how inefficient is the enchantment on it?”

“Uh,” Andarit had a momentary poleaxed look before she pulled the flyer out of the pocket she’d stashed it in and set it on the bed next to Serenity. It was just small enough that it didn’t run off the foot of the bed, but a fair bit of it did hang over the side. “It seemed pretty normal to me. It’s just for running around Zenith, not for long distances.”

Serenity took a look. He was no crafter and he never would be, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t known his way around electronics and tools as Thomas. As Vengeance and the Final Reaper, he knew very well how to use them and tell a good tool from a bad tool.

In the case of the flyer, it was obvious as soon as he took the time to look at the mana receptacle. It was a plate with some sort of inscribed pattern; it reminded Serenity of a mana acceptor rune, though if that was what it was it was both formatted differently from the runes he knew and exceedingly poorly drawn; he could visibly see wiggles in the lines.

The other side of the plate had a small knob that slid into what had to be a socket for a monster core; the knob was loose in the fitting, which didn’t seem like a good sign. There had to be quite a bit of loss there; mana didn’t travel across space well without a guide, whether it was Intent, a spellform, a Skill, or any of the numerous ways to indirectly form a spell. Surely items had the same issue.

Serenity lifted the plate out of the socket and looked deep into it; as expected, he could see a fairly standard item core socket. The nonstandard part was that there was a large amount of crud in the socket, much of which looked like it had been singed at some point. That was unusual, since monster cores didn’t tend to leave significant residue as they were consumed. It was probably due to the poor connection.

Serenity was actually kind of amazed it had worked as well as it clearly did; they’d had no trouble with the flyer in Zenith.

The first thing to do was obviously to clean it up. Magic wasn’t electronics, but crap in the way didn’t help magic any more than it helped electronics. The best way to do that was obviously to use magic. Solid Affinity was probably the most obvious, simply shifting the material, but the thought of movement made Serenity think of a very different Affinity, one he was much better at. SpaceTime would work if he could isolate the material.

For isolation, he could perhaps use Liminality? Yes, Liminality could work; then get rid of it with SpaceTime.

No, there was an even better Affinity for getting rid of something than SpaceTime. Nihility should move it to nonexistence. Perhaps a construct with Liminality to define the flyer, SpaceTime to set the area, and Nihility to remove the undesired material would do?

Yes, that should work well.

Serenity started building the spellform without realizing that Andarit tried to talk to him twice before she gave up and lay down on her bed for a short nap. There was no danger and this was an interesting project.

When the spell finished, the socket was dull and clearly unused but at least it was no longer filled with crud. Serenity turned over the plate to see if there was a better way to fit the converter on, but it looked like it had lost bits of itself with time, and it had probably not fit all that well to begin with. Serenity wasn’t about to try to reform a magic item, which was what the converter plate technically was.

The flyer might be a bit more efficient now that the crud was gone, but it was still unlikely to be able to do more than speed up their journey by a few hours a day at the cost of draining both their mana pools. Serenity didn’t want to deal with the physical symptoms and unconsciousness that came from allowing his mana pool to get too low, never mind the reduced combat capability if they ran into something worse than those weak bandits.

No, using the flyer using mana wasn’t an option unless they were able to follow a ley line so that Serenity could recharge his mana pool as they went. They’d be better off using monster cores; it would really burn through them, but it wouldn’t be nearly as inefficient as the poorly-fitting adapter plate. It was too bad he couldn’t directly feed it and replace the monster core; Serenity had the precision to simply push mana into a spell, but he knew that items designed to take monster cores didn’t work on just mana. There was something about a monster core that was simply different from mana.

The moment he thought that, Serenity felt like a total idiot. He knew what the difference between a monster core and mana was: a monster core was mana bound in a matrix of essence. On top of that, Serenity had an essence pool just as large as his mana pool. His control of essence wasn’t nearly as good as his control of mana, but he couldn’t believe that a monster core was exactly controlled either; it was probably just a matter of getting it close enough and feeding it in slowly enough, and he could manage those. Even a tiny monster core was large enough that it was bigger than the minimum size of essence trace he could reliably make.

He had to test it out.

Serenity stretched himself partway onto the flyer so that he could easily reach then spun a thread of essence and wrapped it around a thread of mana, then directed both at the core intake. He felt a tug that was primarily on the mana, but it also took some essence.

No, wait. It felt like it was primarily on the mana because the mana thread was thinner; if he thickened it, it seemed to pull both, more or less equally.

The flyer lifted into the air and Serenity started to slip off it. He cut the mana and essence threads and the flyer settled back onto the bed. “Andarit? I think I can make this work!”

Andarit didn’t reply, but he did hear a sound from her.

Serenity looked over at her bed.

Oh, she was sleeping, even snoring. Oops.