Based on the last number ticking down by the second, she surmised the first number was for hours. Krahe observed for a few moments more, and thereafter decided to smash apart the calcified layer so she could take-with the scornbeast’s synthetic components. The substance crumbled remarkably easily, and before long she had stuffed her Kenoma Sack to near-full with graft-beast hardware. Altogether, the scornbeast hadn’t been particularly mechanized, its sheer size had simply demanded a great deal of equipment even for light mechanization. Besides the omniphage container, labeled a “Vessel-Controller,” the only items of interest were the busted up Blasting Array, some miscellaneous power-train modules, and a two-thirds-empty tank of off-color thaumine fuel, all presumably somehow involved in the array’s operation. Besides these, Krahe also took several interesting skeletal reinforcements, but that was it. She tossed the rest — various reinforcements and armor plates — into Jas’raba from various angles, ensuring the pieces all landed in wildly different spots, just in case. As she undertook this endeavor, laborious even with Rocinante’s aid, she considered whether she might be able to develop the ability to drag external objects into the Astral Gulf with her. Her clothing and immediate possessions already came with her, why not something she wanted to get rid of and didn’t need to get back? That was what happened to the items in the Kenoma Storage of the dead, after all.

  Regardless of how laborious it was, in the process, Krahe at least had the opportunity to get a grasp of how Six Maxims Thauma affected Tar alone, especially tendrils formed of it. In short, they behaved as she would’ve liked them to behave when she first began using them. Her Tar’s elevated flexibility and resilience was one thing, but Tar-tendrils now seamlessly behaved as extra limbs, requiring none of the conscious control she had dedicated to them before. Were they cybernetics, this change would be as if she had switched out their control unit for one three generations ahead. The strength of a single tendril, naturally, had grown by leaps and bounds, and with their seamless obeisance to her will came a behavior similar to that of her obscuring smoke — when she reached out with a tendril to grab one of the scornbeast’s armor plates, it would wrap around the plate or split apart to better grasp it without explicit input, in the same way she would adjust her hold on something without thinking about it. She supposed that it was high time to stop viewing the tendrils as separate from herself. They weren’t, not any more than the Wound-like Grin.

  Having thus disposed of the scornbeast’s last remnants, she made her way around the pit, and thereafter through the desolate prospector town. She slowed Rocinante down to a leisurely gallop once the prospector town crossed the horizon. Sheer, breakneck velocity had its own appeals, but, for now, she wanted to take it easy. Not due to the battle, if anything she wished it had gone on a touch longer; testing things on a corpse just wasn’t the same. No, she simply wanted to take in the scenery, both of the outward and inward kind. Once she got her fill of the unending grassland and of the night sky, that is to say after nearly half an hour, Krahe finally took a closer look at her left arm — and found nothing different about it. At least, in the absence of thauma. So much as a trickle of thauma and a mere thought induced the limb’s surface to shift, cracks widening to better facilitate the possible expulsion of thauma, like the apertures of a thruster widening. Turning inward, she assumed the system readout will likely have changed to reflect its newly-evolved characteristics, but what met her wasn’t the usual, immediate popup of her profile. She felt a faint, membranous resistance as she turned her attention in the system’s direction, accompanied by the feeling that she shouldn’t do this if she was in immediate danger.

  The system gave not words or images at first, only an unsettling outburst of pins-and-needles, thrumming through her skull. It faded as quickly as it had come, and in its wake came the deluge of flashing messages, each in turn accompanied by a substantially weaker, but nonetheless noticeable thrumming sensation.

  !!!ARCHETYPE EVOLUTION DETECTED!!!

  PARSING PROFILE…

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  PARSING…

  PARSING…

  !!!AUTOPARSE FAILURE!!!

  REQUESTING RE-PARSE…

  RE-PARSING…

  RE-PARSING…

  PARSE SUCCESSFUL

  FOUND ARCHETYPE EVOLUTION TRIGGERS:

  EXTENSIVE COMPREHENSION OF ONE OR MORE DISCIPLINES

  EXPLORATION BEYOND BASELINE SYSTEM LIMITS

  MAJOR QUALITATIVE TRANSFORMATION

  RECLASSIFYING…

  RECLASSIFYING…

  RECLASSIFYING…

  NEW ARCHETYPE ASSIGNED

  BLACK SUN LUMINARY

  ADDITIONAL COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES ASSIGNED

  DYNAMIC SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY EXPANSION AUTHORIZED

  The archetype name snapped back, just like it had snapped the first time from “Deathsmoke Mage” to “Cherno Caster” — this time, somewhat uncreatively, to “Cherno Caster ver. 2.” However, she could see it. Krahe wasn’t sure why, but behind or perhaps within the shifted archetype name, if she looked at it in her mind’s eye just right, she could still glimpse what the Seven Spokes System had actually intended to assign as her evolved archetype.

  However, when her full readout came up, the new archetype hadn’t simply replaced the old, it was now right below it, with the two archetypes labeled as First-order and Second-order respectively.

  Moreover, her profile now quantified her Isotope Tolerance and Dissipation, or at least attempted to, assigning them the same base ratings as their Entropy counterparts, in accordance with the effects of her Deathsmoke Blessing boon.

  She thought that if she could now adjust her instance of the Seven Spokes System, even if only to a limited extent, she may as well use that privilege right now. First, she moved the archetype names to the line below their markers, and then manually added notes of the archetypes’ true names.

  [NAME: Brunhilde Krahe]

  FIRST-ORDER ARCHETYPE:

  Cherno Caster Lvl. MAX (Deathsmoke Mage)

  SECOND-ORDER ARCHETYPE:

  Cherno Caster ver.2 Lvl. 1 (Black Sun Luminary)

  TITLE: Blackhand

  RACE: Human

  SEX: Female

  AGE: 43/0

  MIGHT: D3

  CONTROL: C2

  ATHLETICISM: D3

  DURABILITY: C1

  THAUMIC THROUGHPUT: B1+C1

  ENTROPY TOLERANCE: C2+D3

  ENTROPY DISSIPATION: C1+D3

  ISOTOPE TOLERANCE: C2+D1

  ISOTOPE DISSIPATION: C1+D2

  BOONS

  FLESHGRAFTS

  EIDOLON VAULTS

  THAUMATURGIES

  STORAGE

  OTHER

  While it was nice to see her growth expressed through concrete ratings, it was also somewhat hollow compared to the feeling of actually stretching her wings. She waited to return to the city before pushing on, mostly because “sitting down to pore over system readouts” and “riding a mechanical horse” didn’t mesh so well in her mind.

  The silver steed soon passed through Audunpoint’s gates, and mere minutes hence, Krahe was back at the same safehouse from which she had departed. A phantom masked in black salt rode it through the streets, noticed by few and properly seen by none, a smear of black and silver. After Krahe dismounted, Rocinante galloped off into the night in the same manner as it had first arrived.

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