"Goddamn that took a while," Misa grumbled.

Vex... had to agree, although he was too tired to actually say anything. He let out a small groan in response, leaning most of his weight onto Derivan — who accepted him with grace and put an arm around his shoulders, despite being the one that had actually done most of the work.

They'd had to spend the last several hours cleaning up the errant, overgrown system. Or, well, Derivan had to. They'd chosen to stick together while he did so, though, just in case anything else decided to happen, like it so often did around them. Vex had his notes to work on, and he'd plugged away at the glyphs every once in a while, trying to understand them and make the anti-Wisfield glyph he'd had an idea for.

For the most part, he'd ended up nowhere. He'd wanted to talk to Derivan about it, but the armor was busy, and looked... not exhausted, exactly, but Patch seemed to take a lot out of him.

Vex was pretty sure he had the right idea. The glyph for Communication was a glyph that fundamentally represented the sharing of thoughts and ideas; it was enough to touch on the very same thing that Wisfield's mental skills operated on. The problem was that this was magic, and that didn't work the same way system skills did.

He still had his sample of Drunkard's Beard, and he used it periodically to test if his experiments were working. He didn't need to block the effect — he was planning to use Derivan's Sign for that, anyway — but he wanted to see if he could latch on to whatever signal it was releasing. For testing purposes, he would try to amplify that signal instead of blocking it, directing it towards a willing victim.

Which was Misa, in this case. The conversation had gone something along the lines of:

"Hey, Misa, can I test this Glyph on you? I'm trying to amplify the effect of Drunkard's Beard."

"Is that the weird moss that makes people drunk?"

"Yes, but I'll make sure—"

"Fuck yeah do it."

It was good to have someone like Misa on the team, Vex reflected.

Unfortunately, it had been a disappointing failure to both him and Misa. Misa had hoped that being drunk would help relieve the boredom of following Derivan around, and the failure of the spell to do anything made her grumble. On the other hand, it had been a relief for Sev, who was concerned about having to heal yet another hangover, despite Vex's insistence that Drunkard's Beard would do no such thing.

Ultimately, he'd ended up spending mana he hadn't needed to, and his legs were sore from walking around the unnecessarily large Guild to tear out strips of the system.

But at the end of the day, Derivan's efforts paid off.

[Guild's Hope] was eventually stripped down to just the bare essentials of a working system, a skeleton that was attached to the spine of the building — according to Derivan, anyway, though Vex had no idea what exactly the spine of the building was supposed to be. The Patch stat had increased several times in the process, which... was a little worrying?

But Vex trusted Derivan to say something if the stat began affecting him too much.

With the system mostly repaired, Tibeus was able to disable the [Bond Familiar] skill; the structure around the Guild building didn't go away, but it seemed to dim a bit, according to Derivan. [Reinforcement] wouldn't be disabled, but the effect would slowly weaken and eventually fall off entirely, as long as the adventurers with it were rotated out.

Which was Lendel's responsibility. None of them wanted anything to do with the management of a bunch of egotistical adventurers that had been slowly guided to think that they deserved better than everyone around them. Though part of Vex did feel guilty for using his status to get them past the guard; that was one of the issues Rekka had mentioned...

He sighed. Nothing was ever simple. Nobility would benefit the Guild, it was true, but the current 'buff' would hurt them and ruin the Guildmaster's careful planning as far as maintaining the Guild's culture in foreign territory went.

They were all back in their room in the Guild, now; this one was just a single large room that was set up for all four of them. It was simple, but it worked well enough. There were curtains around every bed that ensured they could each have a small degree of privacy, small dressers to keep their things in, and the classic enchanted cupboard that came with every Guild room.

"This definitely took longer than I expected," Sev said with a sigh. "And now we have this Wisfield meeting to worry about. Vex, you said you wanted to distribute the food ourselves? I wanted to ask about that earlier, but..."

"If we let the noble houses take charge, they won't distribute it fairly." Vex grimaced slightly, remembering his conversation with Rekka. "If we're in charge we can at least make sure it gets to the people that need it, and not just to the people that the nobles like."

"Should've known," Sev muttered. "That's going to be a lot of work for four people, but... good call."

"I can get us some help," Misa suggested. "Summon a few people with Anchor. And that should give us the opportunity to learn a bit more about what Elyra is like away from nobles and the like."

"There are a few people we could get help from," Vex said. He smiled slightly; part of him was excited to meet his old... he wasn't sure he could call them friends, really. But there were a few people that had opted to help him when they didn't have to, way back when he was trying to leave Elyra to begin with. Rekka had been one of them, and then there were others, too; small merchants, like the one that had given him the materials for his dagger; a librarian that had helped sneak him spellbooks that his family deemed unnecessary; a cartographer that had given him a map and directions to the nearest Guild branch. "I think it's better we talk to the locals. It'll help us connect better than bringing in half your village. No offense."

"None taken." Misa grinned, apparently entertained by the thought. "I can always bring them in if we need them."

"Were you able to make any progress with the glyphs?" Derivan asked curiously. "If we are to meet with Wisfield..."

"Rekka did say he'd set up a meeting for sometime tomorrow, didn't he." Sev winced slightly.

Vex nodded. "I haven't made as much progress as I'd hoped," he said. "I was pretty sure that Communication would be able to do something, but it's not really letting me amplify or work with Drunkard's Beard at all, and it's what I've been using to test my ideas. Mostly just slight modifications to the glyph."

"You are working with it the way you do with runic circles," Derivan noted. "Perhaps glyphs require a different method?"

"You're probably right," Vex admitted. "But the other glyphs I have access to are just for the basic elements; I don't have any ideas what a new one would look like for specifically targeting mental skills... I do have one last idea."

Vex rummaged through his tailbag as he spoke, feeling his fingers eventually catch on the mana sliver. He pulled it out, staring at the way the light caught on the off-white fragment of something; at some angles, always right around the edges of the shard, it shimmered with prismatic fractals.

There was still the question of what it was. The system had been trying to identify it, earlier; maybe it had made some progress?

[Reality Shard] [Grade: Unknown]

Item description still processing. Data collection in progress. Data collection at 30%.

Vex blinked.

That was... rather more information than before. They'd already known the system was studying the shards, but now it was quantifying the amount of progress it had made.

More importantly, it had a name.

"It's called a [Reality Shard]." Vex stared at it critically, holding it a little bit further away. "Not a mana sliver? And not unknown, anymore."

"System's figured something out, I guess." Misa eyed it, too, clearly thinking about something. "...My anchor integrity went up the last time you did this glyph magic. And your glyph magic produces reality shards."

"Reality anchors, reality shards, magic," Vex muttered. "And reality shards have been used to amplify magic — we saw that. None of us could get past the Teque barrier."

"It was Shifted very deeply across all the wavelengths of reality I could reach," Derivan agreed.

"Which is something that Helg accomplished by using reality shards." Vex breathed out. "Magic doesn't work the same way as the system. The system manipulates... the fabric of reality directly. Magic is the manipulation of mana within reality? But the system can do magic, kind of; it uses runic circles, which I want to investigate further, because they look like an iteration on glyphs."

"And magic can manipulate the fabric of reality, with the help of reality shards," Misa said. "Something like that?"

"That's what I'm thinking." Vex frowned; something was tugging at his brain. "There are a lot of parallels here. Maybe just a couple of pieces we're missing, like where divinities fit into all of it, or 'monsters', as the system deems them."

"Aurum still hasn't said much. And I have nothing new from Onyx." Sev fingered the holy symbol he used, tracing over the rough sculpt with his thumb; his brows were drawn together. "I'm a little worried."

"I'm sure we would have heard from Jerome if something happened to Aurum," Misa said, though she sounded sympathetic.

"Probably." Sev sighed, dropping his hand. "You think you can use the reality shard to do something?"

"I think so," Vex said, staring at it; an idea was sparking in his mind, and along with it came a touch of confidence he wasn't used to — a touch of confidence that he was finding came to him more easily, these days. "...Yes. I believe I can."

This was the element he was missing; something inside him resonated.

"Derivan," Vex said. "Can you help me out?"

"How can I help?" Derivan asked.

"I think the Magic stat will help with this," he said. "I need you to hold on to the shard and channel mana through it, the way you would if you were going to cast a glyph. And the glyph you need to draw is..." Vex paused, but only for a moment; he'd already been thinking about this, the whole time they'd been walking through the guild, trying to fix the system. He had a good idea of what they needed.

The communication glyph was a series of loops that pretended to be letters; he knew he needed to lay them on the inside of Derivan's shield-Sign, but it occurred to him as he began to draw that he didn't actually know what that Sign looked like. All he knew was what it looked like when it was combined with his own.

But then, Derivan had done much the same thing, hadn't he? He'd created a combined Sign without ever knowing what their individual signs looked like. Vex felt a small warmth within him at the reminder, and closed his eyes, trying to touch upon what he thought the armor's Sign might look like.

Derivan was a source of comfort and warmth. More importantly, around him, Vex had always felt safe — and that feeling had only grown the more time they spent together. In Derivan he found someone that was always willing to listen to what he had to say, that always took an interest; someone who never shot down his ideas or told him to focus on something else that was more important.

Derivan was interested because Vex was interested; it was that simple, to him.

In battle, Derivan often took on a secondary tank role, using what Vex now understood to be high-level tricks to defend against blows that would have decimated any of the rest of them, except perhaps Misa, who had to be aware of the blow first to block it. The shield made sense — it was protective.

But Derivan was more than a protector. Misa was their protector; she would stand in the way of any blow, and in defiance of any fate that would befall them. Derivan protected them in ways both visible and invisible, acting like a buffer against any blow that missed their shield...

Vex almost laughed. Of course. He was their armor.

His Sign, then, was not a simple shield; it looked like a shield, but it was a series of interlocking plates. It gave them protection without restricting them, and sought to keep them safe so they could grow. His role in the team was a little different, now — he was more a strange, esoteric sword, than a form of armor — but his personality hadn't changed. He sought to keep them safe, even now, in his own way.

Vex laid down the glyph for Communication in looping lines around the edges of that armored shield, humming happily to himself — and then as a final detail, he drew that shard of reality in the center, like it was empowering the armor-shield; little threads of power sliding into those interlocking plates.

Something inside him was humming. Something within his soul, perhaps, though Vex was only distantly aware of it.

"There," Vex said. "I think this will work. I'm not sure, but..."

"I rather think it will work," Derivan said quietly, and pointed. Vex blinked, and glanced back to the drawing.

Right where he'd drawn the shard, where it should have been placed — was another one of those reality shards.

"Huh," Vex said. "I guess we can still get these outside of Teque."

Now to make sure the new glyph worked the way he was hoping it would.