Cal would freely admit that she would jump at any chance to level up her Stealth and strengthen her class skills. Especially when it came to her class-granted invisibility skill, there was very little that she wouldn’t do to power it up.

As such, when a literal god had offered to help her with just that, of course she went along with it. Not that she really had much of a choice in the first place -- Hexaura seemed pretty intent on teaching her something -- but even so, she couldn’t complain.

At least, that had been the case in the beginning.

Ah, how she missed those lackadaisical, idyllic days. That was back when Hex had used normal training aids to help Cal. Normal, harmless, painless training aids.

For the first few weeks, Hex would conjure up blobs of darkness to serve as stationary “guards” for Cal to sneak past (and on occasion, assassinate). Whenever her invisibility dropped or she was otherwise “caught,” the enemy in question would explode into a cloud of black, signaling her failure. It was frustrating, but only just that.

Bit by bit, however, Hex had outfitted the guards with better and more varied senses, until even when fully invisible, Cal might have been waving her hands directly at them. There were guards that could detect air flow, able to spot even the miniscule eddies created by her breaths. Guards that could sense intents and emotions, forcing her to fully empty her mind.

And then there were all the senses that Cal just couldn’t do anything about. Heat vision. Life vision. Dozens and dozens of other methods of detection she couldn’t cancel out.

Not without help, at least.

In a single month, Cal had been stuffed full of more skill shards and spellbooks than she had in over two decades of being royalty. Either Hexaura was conjuring them out of thin air, or she had a near limitless supply of them.

Skills to mask scents, sounds, thoughts. Spells to act as a thermal barrier, to become permeable to the surrounding air. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.

If that’s all that had happened, Cal would have welcomed it all with open arms. Sure, being trapped in an eerie realm of darkness for months on end with essentially no human contact wasn’t her favorite thing in the world. Yes, maybe she was going a little insane. Still, some light insanity was a small price to pay for all the help she was getting.

And then, Hex had gotten bored.

“Okie doke! Tutorial time is over!” Clad in her spiked boots and choker, the dark goddess Hexaura’erevaila’vailaora pressed her hands into her hips, addressing her young disciple.

For some reason, said disciple seemed to find her words slightly distressing.

“At the risk of getting smote, what part of that could possibly have been considered a tutorial? I’ve barely dropped out of stealth a single time in over a month by now.” For whatever reason, the rogue treated that fact like it was some sort of a big deal. Sure, Hex was more accustomed to the inner workings of mortals than most gods were, but seriously, who got worked up over a single month? There were just so many of them.

“Booo, you snuck past some stationary guards I made, and they weren’t even trying to hurt you or lock you up. Is that what comes to mind when you hear ‘training with a god?’ I’d be a laughingstock if I promised to help you out and that was all I did. Plus, you’ve been doing the exact same thing since we got here. Gotta switch it up a bit!”

Without consciously trying to, Hex was tuned in to all surrounding thoughts, which is why she immediately heard it when Cal leveled an entirely unfair accusation against her.

> As if recalling that her thoughts weren’t private here, Cal jerked upwards, both her body and her mind going completely still. Nonetheless, it was too late.

“Hey! I resent that!” Of course it wasn’t because she was bored.

As a god, Hex was more familiar with the way the system worked than just about anyone out there. Even relative to other gods, it was a speciality of hers. She had a knack for intuiting how skills would evolve and combine. What sorts of augments they’d get. How they’d interact with class skills. Something that young children even knew, however, was that the system rewarded those who pushed themselves.

If Calilah wanted a lame-o set of stealth skills and some third-rate invisibility, she was welcome to keep sneaking past harmless guards. Or rather, she wasn’t welcome to do so, because Hex wasn’t about to let her.

Naturally, that was why Hex was switching things up. It was to help! She was helpful, and that was the end of it. Being helpful.

And.

Well.

Fine.

Maybe she was a little bored too.

“I’ve given you everything you need, so try to level up you stealth skills and explore your class space a bit. I’ll consider this phase of your training done if you escape, all right? Oh! And don’t die.” Man, that would be so embarrassing for the both of them. Aarris would probably get cross with her too.

>

So dramatic. Well, time was wasting.

“Good luck, disciple of mine! See you in, like, half a year maybe?” That felt like a reasonable amount of time, right?

Cal started to shout something out, but whatever it was, Hex was sure it could wait a few months. With a snap of her fingers, she sent the rogue into the far depths of her realm.

With barely a thought, she brought forth monsters of all shapes and sizes, rendering them from pure darkness. When she was satisfied that they’d prove particularly hard to avoid, she moved onto the traps and wards. She lost herself in the task, sinking into a sort of fugue state as she made the challenge more and more exciting.

Oh. Oops. I meant ‘more and more of a valuable growth opportunity for my cherished disciple.’ Right! That.

When at last she came out of it a few weeks later, she surveyed her work with a broad grin.

And then as she took it in a second time, the smallest of frowns.

Huh. Maybe I went a bit overboard here.

Ah well. Calilah would be fine.

Probably.

Hopefully?

Still, I’ve been working kind of hard, haven’t I? Maybe I’ll take a few months off. See Aarris for a bit. Wonder how the other girl is doing. She has to be training pretty hard, too, right?

Hartha luxuriated in the soft sensation of the fur-covered chair supporting her. As if to compete with the fur in a contest of creature comforts, the platter of food spread across her lap emanated a rich and heady aroma.

I shouldn’t get used to this, she remarked to herself. At this rate, I’m not going to know what to do with myself when I go back.

Sure, there’d been some snafus earlier on. Aarris, for all that Hartha didn’t hold it against her, didn’t seem to know how to play hostess to a mortal. The idea that Hartha might not be thrilled with spending her days surrounded by an endless expanse of blinding light was simply something the goddess hadn’t considered.

Nor had Hartha thought to inform her. Looking back, perhaps she should have, but she was already receiving direct training from a god. Who was she to complain or whine about her accommodations?

To some extent, it was only happenstance that things had ended as they did. Lacking the same ability to read minds that Hex did, Aarris frequently asked questions about the mortal world and Hartha’s life. At some point, concepts like “sleep” and “meals” and “comfort” came up, and, thoroughly mortified, Aarris had changed things immediately.

Though she wouldn’t have minded more company, Hartha had been living very well ever since. She now had a colossal tent. Furniture. Four meals a day. She found herself wondering if this was how Cal had lived while being raised in her palace.

Speaking of -- hopefully something similar happened to Cal. Then again, she was sure it had. Somehow, she doubted the rogue would have similar hangups about complaining to her own mentor.

Almost idly, Hartha used a single hand to tear off a piece of bread from her platter and cast it forward. Before it even hit the ground, a few pigeons descended from their scattered perches, honing in on the offering.

The pigeons were… a stranger part of her stay. At the start of it all, Aarris had brought them to serve as practice dummies for soul magic. Once Hartha had stopped accidentally blowing them up, however -- something she still felt sorry for -- Aarris had left them roaming about instead of sending them back. Secretly, Hartha suspected it was because the goddess could tell that their presence soothed her.

For all her relaxation, however, it couldn’t be said that Hartha wasn’t working hard.

“All right, little pigeons. Let us see if we can’t give you a new brother.” Starting to feel some strain on her soul, she hastily finished as much of her food as she could with one hand.

The reason she only used one was that her other hand was presently occupied: Cradled between her fingers sat a tiny and unremarkable soul. Hartha had been holding onto it for a few hours at this point, which as far as she understood was a feat in and of itself.

Rushing outside before she gave herself soul-strain, Hartha immediately spotted what she was looking for. There, right by the entrance to her tent, was the body of a pigeon.

It was debatable whether the pigeon was truly dead or not. Preserving light kept its biology perfectly intact. Still, said body was notably empty. The wrongness of it called out to her now that she knew what to look for.

It was a wrongness she’d attempt to right.

Hartha bent down to the inert form, bringing the soul in her hand in contact with its soon-to-be vessel. Carefully and through well-practiced steps, she deposited the soul within the pigeon, bit by bit connecting the metaphysical entity to the physical shell.

And then, just like that, it was done.

You have successfully resurrected a pigeon!

Soul Magic has increased to level 21!

The pigeon awoke. Equally groggy and startled from its recent time as a free-floating soul, the hapless bird wobbled off to join its siblings.

As soon as it was out of sight, a voice called out to her.

“Good. Another morning where you have successfully completed the basic routine. Come. Let us move on to the advanced training.” Aarris’Sett’Elemera’loratel, standing well above Hartha in the form of a massive winged valkyrie, beckoned her over. With the easy soul magic out of the way, it was time for something harder.

The child progresses well.

Aarris glanced at the tent filled with a multitude of pigeons, smiling warmly as she did so. It had been quite some time since the forest shadow girl had failed a resurrection.

Of course, that wasn’t saying too much. Preservation and resurrection were the simplest facets of soul magic -- Aarris was fairly confident that all soul mages could do something that easy. Even so, however, she still made sure her student practiced each morning, preserving a bird soul for as long as she could before re-anchoring it to its vessel.

And then there were the advanced lessons.

Which lesson should we work on today, then?

In some sense, soul magic was easy to teach, as there were really only three things it could do.

The first was the aforementioned skills to stave off death: preservation and resurrection. If a mortal’s body perished, it was up to a soul mage to reattach their soul or keep it from dissipating until it could be re-anchored.

The second was being magic. Much could be gleaned from a being’s soul, both about its past and its predisposition towards the future. For those properly trained, it was a simple affair to peer into one’s being and detect whether their soul was steeped in sin or bathed in virtue.

Of course, being magic tended to be restricted to visual techniques only. The skilled enough soul mage could modify one’s soul, altering their very being. Aarris had a vague understanding that such a thing was mildly universally taboo, but perhaps it would still make for a good extra credit project for the child.

And then, to close out, there was system magic. In addition to serving as the house of sentience, the soul also functioned as the main access point through which the system acted. As such, any competent soul mage could initiate a class change or allow someone to remove their class if they so desired.

Let us work with the system today, then, yes? In a literal flash, Aarris shifted into the mortal realm, expanding her soul senses out as far as they would go. Quickly, she spotted what she was looking for -- hundreds of unanchored souls, all of them from the recently departed.

After verifying that no one was about to resurrect any of them, Aarris snatched them all up.

No sense in letting them go to waste when they are about to permanently dissipate. She immediately returned to her deific realm, spreading her hundreds of plundered souls out around her before placing them into stasis. Grabbing one, she handed it to her student.

“Good. This soul belonged to a crafter. You will pass if you can modify its class to Warrior. If something goes poorly, you may move onto the other souls.”

Feeling somewhat weary after her impromptu realm shifting, Aarris decided that she would leave her disciple to work on the problem for a while on her own. She was enjoying this “teaching” project of hers, but it had been too long since she’d visited Hexaura.

“I will return at some point.” She made sure to inform the young forest shadow so as not to needlessly worry her. “Please save any questions until then. Good luck, child, and farewell.”

Right as Aarris shifted off for some much-deserved relaxation, she took one last look at her disciple and the sea of souls surrounding her.

Odd. She appears less excited at this prospect than I would have imagined.

Had she unintentionally done something wrong once more? There’d been that debacle with the lack of food and housing earlier on, so she’d been trying to be extra considerate of the mortal’s needs and sensibilities, but she was hardly infallible.

Oh well. She’d only be gone for a day or a month or two.

And with that, she vanished, leaving Hartha to her own devices.

In a forest clearing under the light of the moon, one particularly amped-up bartender brandished her club, ready for action.

That made one of them, at least. Across from her stood a figure who looked as if he had one foot in the grave, with papery graying skin, sunken eyes, and a gaunt, malnourished form. A web of vein-like radiant cracks covered his entire body, but even they looked worse for wear, letting off the weakest of glows.

Indeed, the preceding months had not been overly kind to Rock.

Clearly something had happened to the man, but whenever Nadja had tried to pry he shut her down immediately. Whatever had put him in such a state, he seemed to have no desire to speak of it.

“Was it something or someone?” she wondered. Because if someone did all of this to him, I hope they’re having a horrible, awful day.