That night, once again, Derivan cast [Starry Night]. They took a break on the side of the road for it, though they could have let the caravan keep running through the night; this was important to them, and they needed to use some crystals to refresh their connection to the system besides. So they gathered in a small circle, and Derivan allowed the magic of the skill to flow.

As always, he paid attention to the way the mana flowed.

Derivan had cast this spell a number of times, since the first time he had tested it back in the forest with Vex; each time, he told himself to pay attention to the mana, and each time he found that he couldn't quite keep his attention on it, like something was obscuring part of the process. Vex found he had the same problem. There was a point where the mana seemed to vanish, obfuscated by something that wasn't quite an infolock, or Shift.

This time, he looked at it with the new sense he had gained — with Patch — and he realized why.

[Starry Night] wasn't a spell. Maybe it had been, at one point — Derivan saw the way the mana flashed into shapes that looked remakably similar to glyphs, even while it was being absorbed by the system — but this was a system skill, and the mana was simply being pulled into the system, used to turn some metaphysical gears and call the effect of the skill into existence.

He wondered why. What made this a skill, and most other similar effects a spell?

The last of the mana finished running into the system. A few hundred points in total, something like a puddle's worth of that liquid energy; he felt something click in the gears of the system, and...

...something in the nearest reality anchor responded. The one Misa was holding on to, that was being held inside her interface, somehow.

Once more, those balls of fire manifested in the sky, this time smaller and brighter than before. Once more, a cool mist flooded out among the stars in striated shades of blue, creating what looked just for a moment like a living painting. Gently, he pulled on those mechanisms in the skill, watching with Patch as the reality anchor responded, and the stars shrank and multiplied accordingly, until it was as close as he remembered to how the Serpent of the Night Sky had looked.

That, presumably, was what the night sky had looked like. They still didn't know when it had vanished; only that it had most likely been recent.

"Looking at it always makes me feel a little sad," Vex said into the silence, staring up at the sky.

"Because we know it's supposed to mean something to us," Sev said quietly. "But it doesn't."

"We'll give it new meaning." Misa folded her arms. "It's what we've always done, right? We're the ones giving meaning to things anyway. So if some shit takes it away, we'll invent something new, and we'll hold it even closer than before. See if these fucks can take it away then."

"Misa." Sev chuckled a bit, the word more affectionate than anything else. Derivan noticed, though, that there was something about the cleric that was just a little bit tense — the topic had touched on something personal for him. "Not everything is a fight, you know."

"I think they made it one when they took the stars away from us," Misa said with a shrug. "I'm not an expert on sentimentality, but the sky is one of the things that stays mostly the same no matter where you are. If I had to guess, they were one of the things different cultures had in common; something related to the stars. I bet there were skills and classes centered around them, even."

"We know there are skills centered around them," Derivan said, even as [Starry Night] slowly faded from his control. "And that means there were classes. I wonder what happened to them."

"Knowing the system? Nothing good," Misa said with a sigh. She picked out the four mana crystals she'd brought out from the caravan, tossing one to each of them. "Time to use the crystals?"

"I will keep an eye on what they do," Derivan said, because he thought perhaps he could observe something about how this usage of the crystals functioned. A tap on the system's interface brought up the appropriate window.

Fill this week's mana crystal quota? Your System link will degrade if you do not.

0/1 crystals required

ACCEPT

For a moment, Derivan thought about how absurd it was that the system box didn't even have an option to 'reject', even if he could back out of the screen if he wanted. Then he reached out to tap the button anyway. They'd agreed to do this one by one, in case there was anything Derivan needed to focus on in the process, and so he had the time to figure out if there was anything different for each of them. He would go first, then Vex, then Misa, and finally Sev.

In the dark of the night, with nothing but the moon to light up the grass and the road around them, Derivan felt Patch resonate. He almost flinched as he felt the heavy machinery of the reality anchor suddenly expand around him, descending upon him; he saw Vex give him a worried look, and realized he probably had flinched.

He couldn't help it. The machinery was enormous. Was this happening everywhere, every time a crystal was 'donated' to the system?

Metaphorical pincers reached down to grab the crystal he was holding on to, and he saw with his eyes as it began to dissolve; in his mind's eye, with the combination of [Mana Manipulation] and Patch, he saw what was actually happening. The mana was being drawn up into the system, and then something happened to it; whatever that something was, the mana that fell out afterwards seemed dim and lifeless. What was left of the crystal — the 'shell' — disintegrated into blue dust, and that blue dust was fed back into that complicated core at the center of his soul, where he was attached to the system —

— except for him, that dust simply fell to the floor, his particular system too broken to utilize it. Derivan frowned.

"Vex," the armor prompted gently, and the lizardkin nodded, and tapped his own system interface.

Once again, the same thing happened. This time, that dust took root somewhere in Vex's connection with the system, reinforcing it; he saw the entire line trailing back to the nearest reality anchor shimmer as that blue poured into it.

It was the same with Sev and Misa, too.

"I do not think I need to use a crystal to stay connected with the system," Derivan said slowly.

"What?" Sev blinked.

"Are you sure?" That was Misa.

"That's — that could help so many people, if we can figure out how to break other people's systems like that," Vex said; his tail curled around again, a little nervous tic, and for a distracted moment Derivan thought about how endearing such a small thing was; he shook it off after a moment, not certain why his mind had gone in that direction.

More importantly, Vex was right.

"I am unsure if we can break other systems the way mine is broken," he said carefully. "But if we can, then perhaps we should. It is best we first make sure I am right, in any case."

"We'll skip this for you next week?" Misa proposed, and the four nodded in agreement. A quick dinner again, this time with some prepared, preserved food rather than cooking any large meal, and they were back on the caravan; Derivan's mind, however, was still spinning with thoughts about what he had seen.

Because he had just the faintest nagging feeling that he had seen that machinery before.

It would be another day before they arrived at the town where the next sidequest was situated — they debated rushing ahead to Elyra and ignoring the quest, but it seemed to be a short and relatively harmless one, and they didn't expect it to take more than a couple hours of time.

For now, they had most of the day to themselves, even if that time would be spent in the somewhat cramped interior of the caravan.

"I don't get how you can look at your notes," Sev grumbled; he looked a little green, and Derivan blinked curiously. He'd never seen a human look like that before.

"Are you doing okay?" he asked.

"Just a little nauseous," Sev answered, waving a hand a little dismissively. "Shouldn't have tried to read."

"Can't heal yourself?" Misa raised an eyebrow.

"I can only heal these kinds of status effects by absorbing them, remember?" Sev grimaced slightly. "Can't exactly absorb my own pain. Don't worry about it, I'll be fine."

Vex looked rather unconvinced, but he continued going through his notes anyway — the ones about what had happened in Teque were a little sparse, and evidently not as filled out as he would've liked them to be. The lizardkin sighed after a moment. "Hard to look through these notes without thinking about what happened back there," he said. "Maybe if I understood those glyphs a little better..."

"That is what we are trying to do now, is it not?" Derivan prompted. "We will return — I am certain. And if we want to break the barrier or make our way back here through the dungeon, we must first understand glyphs."

"Yeah." Vex glanced outside the caravan, staring at the passing trees. "...Do you think those Patchers are going to become a problem again? They didn't seem to be able to fight off glyph-spells very well. I don't know how they'd fare against system-spells."

"They'll definitely become a problem again." It was Misa that spoke up, that time, her tone grim. "I've been thinking about that too. I don't like how useless I was against them."

"You fought three of them at the same time," Vex pointed out.

"And I didn't kill a single one," Misa said. "Holding them off isn't good enough, and considering what they're doing, I just... we need to figure out something more. If we'd killed all of them back there—"

"The system might have just sent more," Sev said. "Let's... try not to dwell too hard on the what-ifs. Stick to what we need to focus on — which is that we need a way to deal with Patchers that isn't just shoving them back where they came from, since they still get to do whatever they want if we do that."

"Didn't you manage to kill two of them, Derivan?" Misa asked.

"I shattered the core of one of them," Derivan said. "And they... fixed it, after that. When I gained the new stat, I used it to shatter a second one, but the stat resonated strangely, and I thought it unwise to push without understanding what was happening."

"Resonated?" Vex asked, perking up a little bit. He'd started to look worried and withdrawn again, but this seemed to give him something to focus on.

"Like the stat was decreasing, if only slightly." Derivan did his impression of a frown. "I am not worried about losing it... but I had the feeling that something worse than just a stat decrease might have happened, if I had pushed it more. I am uncertain."

"The stat is for patching, but you were using it to break?" Vex guessed.

"That is my suspicion," Derivan said. "I will have to test it carefully, when I get the chance. It is difficult to do so now, since all of us are attached to our systems, and my tools are still limited; I suspect working with any complicated mechanism is likely to break it entirely. For now, you wanted to focus on signs, did you not?"

"I did," Vex said, and glanced over his notebook again with a frown. He sighed, closing it after a moment. "But I don't really know where to start. It's a whole new magic system..."

"You have the perfect way to start," Misa pointed out. "Your sign lets you learn about things. So... use it on itself. And the concept of glyphs."

Vex paused. "I feel like that shouldn't work," he said, uncertain.

"Do it anyway," Sev smiled a bit. "We're long overdue some new exploits."

"I don't think I'd call it an exploit," Vex complained. "I don't even know if glyphs will work, now that we're back under the system..."

But the lizardkin obeyed anyway, a little nervous, beginning the process of drawing that glyph into the air; in front of him was the notebook where he'd recorded what his sign look like, as soon as he'd gotten the chance. Derivan gave him an encouraging little smile when the lizardkin looked over at him, and it seemed to settle what remained of his nerves.

Mana flowed. It hesitated, arriving at the glyph in the air — but then something seemed to change.

And for the first time in a long time, in a world dominated by the system, magic happened.