After failing to complete the stealth challenge, things weren’t over. Now they had to review what had happened. That meant Spymaster Velvet telling Chidi what he did wrong. Or Aconite, maybe, but this one was mostly on him.

“What was the objective?” she asked.

“To retrieve the information parcel and return unseen,” Chidi explained. “But obviously that didn’t happen when I was spotted along the way.”

“Obviously,” Velvet agreed. “What were the restrictions?”

“I had to take the route through that area, with Aconite.”

“That’s right. So, why did you fail?”

Ugh. It was going to be like this huh? Way worse than just being told how he screwed up. “Well, I got spotted. I wasn’t able to find a path past the guards…” he admitted. “I’m not sure if it was even possible.”

“It likely was,” Velvet said. “Not everyone can maintain perfect attention forever. The guard on either side could have lapsed for a moment, and you could have taken advantage. However, even if it was impossible to get past them without getting spotted, there was still a method to succeed.”

Chidi frowned. He couldn’t think of how. Though wracking his brain, he came up with an idea. “Should I have tried to knock out the guards? I don’t know if that could have counted as not being spotted, though. It would make things pretty obvious.”

“In a real world scenario, you would have had to make that choice. However, I think that would have been impractical with the other parameters given. There was still another way.”

Chidi looked to Aconite, who was of no help at all here. “I can’t think of it.”

“You could have simply left and come back later,” Velvet said. “It’s usually more important to not be caught at all, especially if you have no pressing time limit.”

“Hmmmmmmmnnnn…” Chidi folded his arms. He didn’t like that solution, but he couldn’t disagree. And he could have just waited to see if the situation changed. That could theoretically have led to him being spotted as well, but he knew as things were he couldn’t practically get by. “I don’t like it,” Chidi voiced his displeasure. But it didn’t stop it from being both technically correct, and he would later admit reasonable.

-----

What to do with Tenoun’a and Shrenn? Even as Anton was returning with potential solutions to their situation, he honestly didn’t know if anything was a good idea. For the sake of storing more, he’d brought along an entire ship. He was the only individual aboard, and he left it sitting on a small rocky planet at the edge of their system. Unlike Ekict which was relatively close in the grand scheme of things- a few months of travel by their normal interstellar methods- this system was approximately four times as far. An entire year, and the same back. Anton couldn’t justify bringing people so far into hostile territory where they weren’t strictly necessary.

At some point, eager scientists would want to survey the star, but it wouldn’t be reasonable while the area was a war zone. So Anton flew a relatively small ship by himself- he wasn’t a trained pilot, but it handled enough things in an automated fashion that he could get it from point to point. And if things had gone terribly wrong, he would have been able to rip himself out of subspace and finish the journey on his own.

But it was much better to store things within its hold than to carry around a hundred bags strapped to him. He couldn’t store extradimensional spaces inside of other extradimensional spaces. At best, the spaces would overlap, but if there were problems with the enchantments or simply too much material between the two for the space required they could explode quite violently. It wouldn’t hurt Anton, but everything inside that wasn’t destroyed would be scattered everywhere which ruined the whole point of having storage bags.

Things would be so much easier if Anton could just wipe out one side. While he could certainly say that the current acts of Tenoun’a were in the wrong and Shrenn was innocently defending itself, that didn’t excuse wiping out a planet full of people. Regardless of the lacking populace. It wasn’t a matter of the numbers, but how much they individually deserved the consequences. By this point, they likely didn’t think they had a choice to do anything but raid to survive. They lacked any sort of malicious intent. Or at least, enough of them to not take any drastic measures. Their leadership… while they somewhat took advantage of the situation, most would probably prefer to improve everyone’s way of life if they thought they could. Especially if it elevated them a bit as well.

Specifically Aurelianus fell into that group. Centuries of bad habits had made people forget they could just… go somewhere else. And while picking up and moving the entire population of a planet would be difficult- even one severely lacking population- something could have been managed over the course of time.

Then there were other measures. If it was difficult to feed people, though Anton wasn’t a fan of authoritarian measures, it was probably best to just forbid people from having children. Tenoun’a instead seemed to have gone with the natural balance- few people felt confident supporting a child, so there weren’t many. But the population had maintained its levels and even grown somewhat.

Anton considered his options, even at the last moment. He was physically capable of forcing the issue. He could make Shrenn take in everyone from Tenoun’a, and intimidate everyone to stop them from fighting. All he would have to do was bind their star. And while they likely wouldn’t know they lost anything from that, it was their star. They lived here. Anton was just passing through. If there later came a time where someone else achieved a similar cultivation, his binding the star could interfere with that- or they might find some other way to draw on the star’s power, and his interference might reduce their rightful gains.

There were a lot of reasons to not take that approach, because even if giving the two planets a common enemy might bring them together, it wouldn’t really be an optimal solution by any definition. And stealing a group’s power to bully them with it was distasteful. If they chose to be Anton’s enemy he would not mind taking such power to fight them, but as it was they were just people trying to get by, and not doing very well at it.

With him, Anton had brought tens of millions of pounds of food, along with a vast quantity of seeds. That food sounded like more than he could ever need, but in truth it would at best sustain Tenoun’a for several weeks on its own. If they were conservative. That likely meant they could stretch their food stores to a season, enough for some of the various crops he had to grow, but he couldn’t count on things being done optimally. Hungry people would prefer to consume what was given to them rather than endure further hunger for some sort of promise in the future.

Because he could remain floating in space forever, debating how exactly he should go about things. First, he needed to talk to people… and see if anything had changed. Years could do that, and even if things had been the same for centuries Anton knew there was one factor that could have sparked something recently. His arrival. Hopefully, if it did anything, it would have been for the better. Aurelianus seemed like he had a decent head on his shoulders, maybe he’d looked into some of the ideas Anton suggested.

-----

Though it was a day of great import, Ty Quigley knew that very few people would actually understand. Matters important to him might not seem like much to anyone else, and Chikere was not exactly social. She didn’t hate people or anything, she just didn’t seek them out unless she had a reason to. That reason could be that she was already friends with them, but few people fulfilled that requirement if they didn’t train with swords.

Though Chikere wasn’t the sort to announce this to many people, there were enough interested parties present. Elder Vasu of the Million Sword Vault- both a friend, and the sort of sword fanatic that absolutely had to be present. The rest of the crowd was the latter, except for Annelie and her daughter Anishka, just reaching the age of womanhood. Ty didn’t know the woman well, just that she was the head of the Fire and Ice Palace, a position she’d shared with her husband until his death.

“Is she really going to cut apart space?” Anishka asked.

“Most certainly,” Annelie nodded. “She’s done it before. This time it is just likely to be more… spectacular.”

This was the day. Chikere’s second ascension. At one point she’d theorized it would coincide with reaching Augmentation, but apparently her training was stunted here in the lower realms away from access to upper energy. That was what she was supposed to be using now, having ascended and only returned with shifting tides of the world.

Ty almost wished he could follow along. Perhaps he could, someday. Though he was an Assimilation cultivator, being bound to the lower realm was only a matter of upper and lower energy- and bridging the gap between. Nothing said he had to remain in the lower realms forever, especially with him being bound to a ship and not a place. From what he knew, Anton was the rare exception that it was completely impossible for. He didn’t hide that information, so Ty had overheard it somewhere. Though a ‘normal’ ascension would surely be the easiest route for those who could manage it.

Chikere showed up with no further warning. One moment she was not present, the next she was. But she did come to this particular place to fulfill her promise to those watching. “I will be leaving now,” she said to everyone in general, though Ty caught her eyes for a moment. “It is unlikely I will return. If I do, it will be half a millennium.”

With that, she turned away, her vision tangent to the peak of the hill she’d chosen. Swords simply poured out of the sheaths she carried openly as well as the storage bags around her. Ty watched intently, prepared to see the most powerful sword strike of his life. He wasn’t disappointed… though what he witnessed was nothing like what he expected.

Each blade slowly curved, tracing patterns in the air in what seemed to be a leisurely fashion. Only the two held in Chikere’s hands remained still. Both her flesh-and-blood left hand and robotic replacement.

Ty’s training in the sword made the hair stand up on the back of his neck as flashes of light appeared from nowhere amid the gently swirling swords. Instead of a sudden burst of energy, Chikere put out a constant pressure.

Then her blades finally slashed out horizontally. Logically, that should have cut a horizontal line to go with their movement- and it did. But it also cut a vertical line. And every diagonal. And every angle in between those, an infinite number of lines forming a perfect circle.

Chikere stepped forward, a wave of upper energy passing over her as she disappeared. The opening disappeared immediately behind her.

Ty couldn’t help but cry. Both at the amazing display of swordsmanship, and the loss of a friend. Though maybe he’d live to see her return… or follow after her.

The others all reacted in their own way. Several of the swordsmen dropped their weapons, seeming to realize their limits. Others were inspired, attempting in vain to recreate the effect with their limited abilities.

Anishka’s reaction was perhaps the strangest from Ty’s perspective. “Huh,” she said. “I suppose things will be quite different in the upper realms. I’ll have to go there after I learn everything here.”

Some people said they wanted to know everything, but in truth their interests were quite limited. For some reason, Ty thought that young woman meant it. He wished her good luck. She’d need it.

As he walked away, he couldn’t help but swing his sword idly. He certainly wasn’t going to try to chase after Chikere at the moment. His ship wouldn’t function in a place filled with upper energy, after all. It would take some modifications to function both here and there. He certainly didn’t want to leave behind his home forever… but he could certainly think about doing some touring of the galaxy.