The next few days passed with incident.

  The crew's undesired interest in him diminished each day, as he was rarely seen outside of the sage's deck without Alicia.

  The rumour that the two of them were actually sharing a room was confirmed when some promising young lad was promoted to the position of the sage's aide and assigned Alicia's now vacant room.

  Kai had thought sharing a bed with Alicia was going to be awkward, and the first night was just that. The two of them awkwardly getting into bed and taking up a position that would be considered respectable without putting them at risk of falling out of the side at some point through the night

  Foolishly, Kai had expected there to be some clever deception.

  Alicia using the room each day but otherwise sleeping in the domain with Syl as they had done within the dungeon, thereby avoiding any awkwardness altogether.

  Though he would have waited for the invitation, if he was honest, he was at the point where he was prepared to try being the middle spoon the two ladies had discussed so often in the dungeon.

  But for reasons that seemed beyond his grasp, Syl had found a way to force the two of them to share a bed without her, as the house within the domain suddenly needed moving, the comfortable bedroom Syl and Alicia had been sharing in the dungeon becoming unavailable for an indeterminate time.

  Regardless, the bed in the empress suite was more than large enough for the two of them to sleep comfortably apart.

  However, they found that didn't mean much, as day after day, he woke up with Alicia cuddled into his side, his arms wrapped around her as her cool body helped to draw away his excess heat.

  It turned out Alicia ran cold at night while he ran hot; their slumbering bodies attracted, seeking each other out as they slumbered.

  Alicia soon relished crawling into bed with him after a long day working on tasks the sage had assigned her. The opportunity to place her cold hands and feet against him to warm up before she drifted off was a highlight of her day, according to an amused Syl.

  The sharp initial chill of her delicate fingers and toes didn’t bother him much, as it meant he didn’t have to manage his own temperature by uncovering a leg or kicking off the sheets altogether.

  He, of course, asked Syl one night when the domain's bedroom would be accessible. She just chuckled and told him Alicia knew.

  That confused him.

  And when he had asked Alicia what Syl meant, she just buried her head into his shoulder and pulled the sheets over her head. Knowing he wasn’t going to get an answer, he just kissed the spot her forehead would be through the sheets and wished her a good night. She just groaned and pressed herself tighter against him as she tried to steal his warmth.

  Her beating heart calmed as her grip on him relaxed, the sound of light breathing coming what felt like only moments later as she somehow always drifted off to sleep before him.

  He was actually enjoying his nights together with Alicia; while he wouldn’t say he felt guilty, he missed Syl, despite her always being present in one way or another.

  Why she chastised Alicia for not attacking him each morning, he never knew. The fact that they were sharing a bed like this was the situation she created in the first place.

  The three of them had developed a routine at this point.

  They would wake up and use their respective cleansing stones. The girls' distinct, almost perfumed scents invigorated his senses each morning, despite the lack of any scented soaps being used by either of them.

  Syl would help him pick out a sensible outfit while Alicia redid his two braids with practiced ease.

  Then Alicia and Kai would head out to meet with Arnella before heading down to the mess for breakfast.

  Syl, retreating to work on his physical manifestation in the domain.

  Down In the mess, the so-called boys table had become their usual spot to dine in relative peace.

  The message made clear to the crew that he was in no way interested in anyone else, with Alicia at his side each day, as Kai did his morning practice with the system action known as examine as he ate his breakfast.

  His practice meant he had to interact with the crew to a limited degree. But he had always been terrible with people's names.

  He was what he termed a face person.

  The problem with being a face person was that in social situations, telling someone you recognised them but could not for the life of you remember their name was nearly always awkward.

  He had fortunately discovered a workaround using his personal system, that being he could mark a person with their own name once he had successfully examined them.

  Sure, at first, seeing a load of names floating around was a visual nightmare and, to his mind, a massive breach of privacy, as allowing himself to see where everyone onboard was, whether they wanted to or not, felt a lot like playing a multiplayer game with wall hacks on.

  He already knew too much about who was hooking up with who. He really didn’t need to see two rutting names hiding off in a cupboard on B deck to confirm it.

  Fortunately, with a bit of help from an amused Alicia, he eventually managed to get his personal system to only show someone's name when he both looked at them and intended to know it.

  Furthermore, if he wanted to ever locate anyone with what he was calling a name tag, he just had to recall the name, and if the tag was still active, he could tell where they were so long as they were in range of any of his senses, mana sense included. The problem, of course, was that he had to remember the name for this to work.

  Upon figuring all this out, he had actually raised that this might be some kind of security issue with Arnella, but she dismissed it, stating that it was a fact of life with magical senses and the system.

  You either got used to it or found a way to block it.

  Apparently the crew knew they could be tracked at any time by the officers who had explicit training for just such a thing.

  It was interesting to learn that thus far he had actually proven impossible to track, the sage reporting that it was a non-issue as he could always be easily contacted through a communication skill he had with Alicia, who, much to her dismay, could very much be tracked.

  So, with the adjustment made to his personal system and what he thought was some clever use of mana mark, he practised his examination each morning at breakfast, then again at lunch and dinner.

  The crew had quickly adapted to his rough use of examine, some even going so far as to parade past his table each day, grading his improvement with a hand gesture once they had felt his admittedly juvenile use of the action.

  And each day he got positive feedback, until finally someone stood there a little too long. Waiting for her regular exam after she had made her own attempt to expertly examine him.

  The only thing was that he had examined her; she just hadn’t felt it.

  Kai had a breakthrough, or at least he thought he had.

  He had examined this crew member multiple times. The young dwarf woman was a cadet that put a bit of coin down, thinking Kai was level fifteen, and made a point to come by at every opportunity to try her own exam. Each time so far, she had noticed his examination, grading it with a wiggle of her hand.

  But this time she had missed it.

  He thought that was it; he had learnt how to use the action with subtlety.

  But the next member of the crew to pass by the table gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up to indicate she had felt it, but it was better than the last time.

  That was when he learnt everyone's ability to detect these things varied greatly.

  Still, day by day, meal by meal, it seemed fewer and fewer people noticed.

  He was making some progress.

  Unfortunately, he could not say the same about making progress up on the deck in the training with the adventurers.

  He always felt behind Cillian and that the gap between them was only growing wider.

  Alicia always moved off on her own to work on her archery, shooting across the gap in the ship's frame at magical targets that dipped and dodged her shots while another archer on the far side tried to take out targets Alicia was supposed to protect on her side.

  Even without Gift to aid her, she made it look effortless.

  While he, on the other hand, was always turned into a heaving puddle, never quite mastering the training kata.

  The common report he received was that he wasn’t clearing his mind, which was preventing him from entering something akin to a natural state of flow with the sword where they could take him into the next step and beyond.

  Cillian, despite his lower level and lack of system skill books that supposedly gave Kai sword skills that should suit him perfectly, on the other hand mesmerised Kai with his grace and fluency.

  The would-be adventurer was eager to enter his first dungeon and told Kai eagerly about the skill points he was gaining because of their training.

  Kai, of course, had gained six skill points himself, three in dexterity, one in strength and another two in endurance.

  It was a boon and proved the value of pushing himself outside of levelling up with essence.

  But it felt like nothing compared to the eleven Cillian said he had gained.

  He had to wonder if there was some kind of limit on the amount of skill points you could gain outside of using essence… He had asked only to be told that there was, but it varied.

  Kai wasn't bitter, at least he didn't think he was; he just didn't know what he was missing, besides the obvious years of training Cillian had.

  And eventually he worked up the sense and courage just to ask for some pointers.

  The kids only advice, meditate.

  Adapt the skill, train and practice until everything becomes instinctual.

  Instinctual… time and time again, it came down to practising until things became instinctual.

  Kai saw the logic, but the system said his meditation was sloppy for a reason.

  He struggled to clear his mind for any length of time, which made meditation difficult.

  But there were those times he just slipped into it, losing all track of time… But were you supposed to lose track of time or be in the moment?

  He really didn't know.

  Naturally, he had the lame excuse that he was in a magical world surrounded by new and interesting things whilst caught in a situation he feared fucking up.

  Besides, did he still need to improve his meditation? He had already gained all the benefits of meditation through his time in the trials dungeon.

  Seeing Cillian move through the kata with a heavier sword and considerably less effort now that he had a few days of practice, Kai knew the truth; he couldn’t give up on the skill because he had a frustratingly active mind.

  He just needed to find time to sit down and meditate…

  And not for the first time, he wondered if it might be possible to make some kind of hyperbolic time chamber in the domain so he could find some much-needed time to practise everything he had to practise.

  He certainly needed more time with what the sage was trying to teach him.

  The results of the man's efforts to teach Kai how to convert his mana into any distinct aspect had been met with dismal results.

  Thanric eventually abandoned the conventional methods of conversion when it became clear Kai lacked any real comprehension of standard spell construction.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  His solution: teach Kai the basic spell forms that were the building blocks of magic as it was known on Alea.

  And so Kai had spent hours thumbing through the pages of a book titled Spell Construction for Infants, interspersed with the sage presenting him with one spell construct after another that he should recognise, given his existing repertoire of skills.

  Sure, occasionally words and concepts would jump out at Kai thanks to his language skill.

  A skill that had the sage salivating at this point.

  But at some point, after all the repeated failures, Kai felt like he was humouring the man in return for everything he was doing on his behalf.

  He knew it was ultimately short-sighted, but from Kai's perspective, it all seemed redundant. An unnecessary extra step when he could simply apply his intent and cast spells like barrier or mana bolt.

  But he carried on, hoping something would click and the knowledge might propel his understanding of magic forward.

  He thought the sage would be drowning in frustration at this point. But somehow, whenever Kai did something unexpected or often, as the sage kept insisting, wholly impossible, it would stoke the fire that was the man's interest.

  Eventually, Kai actually managed to do something to his mana, converting it into some kind of electrical aspect that zapped things by imitating the feel of Thanric’s own mana after he tried to show him another example of mana conversion under Kai's careful observation with both mana sight and mana sense.

  But this only confused Thanric more, as it had been an accident, and they could in no way bring what Kai had done back to any of what the sage was trying to teach him.

  Alicia tried to help from time to time after the sage had started giving him homework, but their time together was surprisingly limited, and whenever they had free time in the evening, she was often caught up reading some obscure text.

  As it turned out, while Kai was receiving private tutoring from the sage himself, Alicia was cloistered away, translating a never-ending pile of ancient texts for her master.

  At first she had resisted in the form of rushing through the translations.

  But the act of rediscovering a dreadful recipe for fermented fish from a long-forgotten ancient society, which had likely perished due to their unpalatable food, somehow validated her omniglot skill.

  As a result, the sage had given her the run of his library if she would just translate some key texts for him.

  It turns out there were some quite interesting books in that room that had not been read for thousands of years.

  Many interesting historical accounts; others, the sordid diaries of figures once thought to be quite reputable mythical figures of long-forgotten history.

  No guessing which Alicia chose for light reading.

  Why the sage had not asked for the omniglot skill yet was up for debate between Kai and his team.

  Thanric knew how his apprentice had received the skill from her journals. But the man, for whatever reason, never asked.

  Syl had agreed to give the skill to him at the first possible convenience, the idea of using it as some bargaining chip long forgotten with all the aid he had given them and the secret revelation that he was in fact Alicia’s biological father.

  But somehow there was never a convenient moment, as when he wasn't working with Kai, he was off working on something else.

  Kai had suggested offering it to him when he brought the man into the domain.

  But Syl had torn the place apart, her estimate for when she would be done still indefinite.

  Kai, as an experiment during a spare moment over some of that mint and liquorice tea the sage was fond of, attempted to loot the sage; however, unlike with Alicia, he was met with considerable resistance for reasons they set aside for later investigation.

  That led Kai to practise his other method with the aid of the sage whenever either of them needed a break between Kai's introductory lessons on magical concepts and spell construction.

  Kai's first attempt to connect the space within his domain to the space in front of him had actually been surprisingly easy.

  The issue, however, was the rapidly moving portal nearly tore a hole through the sage's lab as it was fixed in the location it was created relative to the planet but not in any way linked to the momentum of the ship.

  This resulted in a very fast-moving hole in space that could have done a lot of damage had he not closed it down in time.

  The sage's solution, of course, was to have Kai attach his portal to a focus, effectively anchoring it in place once the focus itself was somehow secured to the ship, thereby preventing the portal from dragging it along on its path of destruction.

  They tried a few things that the sage had lying about; stones seemed to have a lot of magical uses on Alea, and they tried one after another.

  While it worked, and the portals were no longer drifting off from where they were made. The portals took an obscene amount of mana to open and were visibly unstable as they tried to break away from their fixed location.

  In the end, the thing that actually held a stable portal the longest was using one of the hilts that Inego had commissioned for him in the dungeon.

  The sage's conclusion was that the materials used in the hilt's construction were simply superior to anything the sage had; the metal and wood used were both completely alien to him.

  The result was a portal that took a high yet reasonable amount of mana to open but was otherwise visibly stable.

  Kai was ecstatic; they had successfully created a working portal, which actually frustrated the sage to no end, as all he had to work with were merely pictures and Kai's account of how it felt to create it. No workable spell construct in sight.

  They just needed to test it to make sure it was safe before they would risk using it to enter Kai's domain when they received the invitation from Syl.

  So today, on Kai's sixth day aboard the T.S.S. Spirit of Exploration, Kai and Thanric were actually taking the time to test those portals with the help of Arnella and Alicia.

  The morning training had been cancelled, and the ship's complement of adventurers had been placed on alert while the ship had stopped to refill its water tanks.

  Apparently fresh water in the lake below them was crucial to the long-term operation of airships, and ships would come from far and wide to refill their tanks.

  This made the location a favourite spot for pirates to ambush ships.

  It took a considerable amount of time to lower the hoses and pump mechanism, collect the necessary water, and then retract everything again.

  Time inevitably meant the ship was stationary and vulnerable.

  But this also meant the ship was stationary and the top deck was relatively empty. Giving Kai and the sage the perfect testing environment as they opened a portal on one side of the ship to the other and tossed random arcane stuff through to then have Arnella and Alicia confirm nothing weird had happened to the items on the other side.

  The portals seamlessly connect one spot to another with a barely discernible purple shimmer to their edges.

  It oddly reminded Kai of the archways in the dungeon; only he could clearly see what was on the other side, even converse with whoever might be over there.

  They were on the third portal test in two hours, Kai and the sage discussing how they would proceed with testing how the portal might affect living matter when Arnella, on the other side, rolled her eyes and stepped through to inform them it would take too long to find anything like a rat or mouse on the ship.

  A few more tests later, and everyone, even some of the silver-ranked adventurers on watch, had taken a trip through the portal, confirming the safety of Kai's portals.

  That left Kai with some free time to recover his mana as the sage drew up further plans to test the possible limitations of Kai's new ability. Things like distance, location and open time. Things Kai was otherwise disinterested in right now.

  Opening the portals took a surprising amount of concentration, as he had to focus both on where he was and where he wanted the other end of the portal to be connected, which was easier said than done.

  And after so many repeat tests, he was feeling quite a bit of mental fatigue.

  Still, portals were cool and a slight amount of secret dread made him check his system notification to make sure something from the void couldn't slip through.

  New skill discovered.

  Basic Spatial Portal

  Through practice and experimentation you have discovered the fundamentals for a safe traversal portal from one point in space to another.

  Seeing no mention of monsters with too many eyes and stuff in all the wrong places, he relaxed.

  Kai dismissed the notification and leaned against the railing next to Alicia and Arnella as he looked out over the verdant valley stretching out far beyond the ship with steep mountains enclosing it on either side.

  He was surprised no one had settled here; it looked perfect to him, a freshwater source in a valley chock-full of resources and ample space for farming.

  He had yet to see any sign of civilisation on Alea, just the occasional airship in the distance and a lot of free and wild nature.

  No roads, no farms, no villages, no towns and no cities.

  It was weird.

  He was watching the far mouth of the valley where one mountain had broken free to float, scraping a long scar in the terrain of the adjacent mountainside as it tried to escape the valley.

  A flash of light catching his eye, he asked, “What’s that?”

  Arnella and Alicia both looked in the same direction, squinting slightly as they tried to see what he was asking about.

  “Oh, that? We call those sky stacks. They’re full of a mineral called liffurite. Once the stuff absorbs enough mana, it can flip mountains as they are torn from their mother, Alea. Liffurite’s pretty common, and it’s the core material in airship drives, among other things.… That one's been ground-bound in this valley for centuries now. The company registered to mine it went into litigation or something, and it's still in the courts as to who now owns the rights.” Arnella said.

  She pulled out a pendant of clear crystal. "We call these naval charms. If they float high, you are good; there's lots of eather and mana to power the ship. If they sink low… let's just say it's a bad omen. They're made of impure chips of liffurite."

  He had, of course, been treated to viewing one of the ship's four experimental drives. It was a giant mass of spinning crystal that reminded Kai of a magical gyroscope that both stabilised, lifted and propelled the ship. The pendant made sense if it was made from the same material.

  Kai saw another flash, reminding him that the sky stack wasn’t what he was talking about.

  Alicia bounced on her toes as she shielded her eyes to get a better look. “There are not many sky stacks around here. But you find a lot of them drifting along lazily in the ley lines. High Trion, the capital city of the Twilight Empire, is actually built upon a series of interconnected sky stacks that have been fixed in a conjunction of the lines… The main industry mining the stacks that drift by and building ships.”

  As interesting as a city built upon floating islands was, it still wasn’t what he was talking about.

  Another flash.

  Looking at the two of them as they waited for his input, he flooded his eyes with mana and looked back out, past the sky stack, to the place he now believed the sky stack had originally broken free from to see if he could get a better look and give the two of them a better explanation.

  And there it was, clear as day in his now arcanely enhanced vision.

  “I was talking about the large ship flying in low through the mouth of the valley; it's being attacked.” Kai said calmly as he turned back and drew back the mana from his eyes once more.

  Arnella was already peering through a spyglass she had pulled from somewhere; her uniform was too tight for it to be a pocket, so he guessed she had retrieved it from some hidden spatial storage.

  “Pirates, true bearing, east-northeast, cargo vessel under attack, two skimmers and one small frigate, shattered kingdom patterns. All arms to ready stations!” Arnella barked without taking her eyes off the distant mouth of the valley.

  There was a sudden flash as a light burst from the ship, shooting high up into the clear blue sky above it.

  “Distress call confirmed! I repeat, pirates…

  Kai didn't know what was happening as everyone around him started moving as a short, sharp horn started calling out across the ship at regular intervals.

  He was wondering if he should be doing anything as the sage joined their group.

  Arnella passed him the spyglass and saluted.

  The sage tsked the moment he had eyes on the distant ships.

  “Sage, your orders?” Arnella asked, her prior relaxed demeanour completely gone.

  Thanric sighed, “Despite the recent change in convention I was not informed about, this is not my ship.”

  Kai felt the deck below him shudder as the ship started to spin on the central axis of its drives.

  “As this is a military matter, this is ultimately up to the captain.”

  Arnella didn’t look pleased with that answer.

  “You already know what her decision will be, don’t you?” He sighed, “You two always butt heads in situations like these.”

  The ship shuddered to a stop, and Kai was surprised at how quickly the ship had reorientated to face the threat.

  But nothing happened; the ship remained stationary as the sage led the way to the front of the ship and down onto a foredeck just above the reinforced glass structure that was the ship's main bridge.

  All of a sudden the repeating horn call changed, and the clear, soft command of a wizened old woman spoke out across the ship. “Belay orders, resume tasks, maintain stations at high alert… We will not make it in time, and we cannot afford a chase… May the spirits protect them. Prepare a rescue party for any survivors…”

  To Kai, that sounded a lot like they weren't going to do anything but watch.

  “What's happening? We're not going to help?” Kai asked as he felt his stomach tie itself into knots.

  Arnella turned to him, her hands balled at her sides. “That was the captain; she has a voice projection skill… We're too far; we would only make it halfway there, and the pirates will have already sacked the ships spatial storage and taken what they need or want of the crew as prisoners.”

  “But if we go full ahead, draining the batteries, we could make it then.” Alicia spoke up.

  Arnella shook her head, her fist turning white.

  “We would need to wait to retract the pumps. It would still end up in a chase; we would have to push above full ahead just to catch them, damaging the ship… Then we would have to wait for the mana charge to return to minimal running conditions before we could resume course... You would not make it to the meeting.“ The sage explained.

  Kai felt his heart thump in his chest; there had to be something they could do other than watch.

  “Can’t we shoot at them from here?” Kai said, thinking it was the obvious solution, “Scare the pirates off.”

  “How would we do that?” Arnella asked.

  “Wait, you’re telling me this ship doesn't have any magical cannons!”

  “No, they would interfere too much with the ship's systems. They’re typically reserved for static defences. It's why we have a complement of adventurers instead.”

  Well, he thought that was shit design; what was the point of military ships without guns?

  Kai turned to Alicia, “Is Gift still coupled with the polymorph egg?”

  She nodded.

  That left it up to him; he summoned his main hilt.

  He didn’t need to hit; he just needed to deliver a message.

  He lined up the hilt and attached the pocket of warped space to the far end and began preparations to fire.

  “Kai, what are you doing?” Arnella asked him, her confusion evident.

  “Are you at least familiar with a warning shot?”

  His three onlookers all nodded as he let his iridescent black dragon scales grow into position.

  The distance was so great it called for everything at his disposal as he started to form a mana bolt larger than any he had made before.

  His old gauntlets somehow aided his control, so his new one should do the same, only better.

  “Kai I don’t think this-" Arnella started, but the sage held up a hand to forestall her.

  Syl appeared at the moment he started cramming as much mana as he could into a giant mana bolt that was about six times the normal size.

  She looked at him and nodded, her silent approval telling him he was doing the right thing.

  After what was just a moment that felt much, much longer, he felt he could input no more.

  Not wanting to tarry and lose his control, he moved on to the next step and started to squeeze, shrinking the bolt down to the size he could feed through his hilt into the distorted space at just the right orientation.

  Surprisingly, he only struggled with the last little bit of compression as the mana bolt suddenly started to crackle with purple sparks.

  Seeing his sign to move it or lose it, he pointed the hilt directly at the largest pirate ship in the distance and mentally pushed the mana bolt down through the hollow tube.

  It streaked off with a silent flash; it flew to its target in the blink of an eye, leaving nothing behind but a purple afterimage.

  There was no chance he would hit his target at this distance, but the purple streak looked like it would just cut across the ship's side…

  There was a flash, and then, a second later, an almighty crack echoed down the valley.

  Kai blinked; he didn't believe it.

  The shot had curved in the last second.

  “Damn Kai, you were supposed to shoot across her nose, not up it.” Syl chided playfully in a soft, awe-filled voice.

  The notification came first, then the flood of essence that carried him up another two levels.

  The ship was eerily quiet as everyone on deck stared towards the distant valley mouth, waiting for something or stunned into silence; Kai couldn't tell.

  The sage levelled the spyglass as Kai sank into a shallow squat, Alicia taking up position beside him with her hands on his shoulders to steady him, his head bowed as he whispered, "Pirate killed. Pirate killed. Pirate killed…" The list felt endless, but upon reaching the bottom, he chuckled quietly to himself…

  Unable to hide his relief, he looked up to Alicia, then to Syl at her side. “Thirty-two dead, all of them pirates… and an achievement.”

  Shipbreaker.

  Your singular attack broke through the limited defences of a ship engaged in piracy. The attack impacted the ship's unstable drive, the ship imploded and broke apart, and all souls lost.

  Would you like to set ship breaker as your active title?

  Yes / No

  “Frigate sunk, skimmers fleeing… Ah! signals confirmed, light damage to the cargo ship, no souls lost!” The sage called out to the waiting crew.

  Arnella immediately echoed the call, and thunderous cheering broke out throughout the ship.

  “Who the fuck did that!” came the voice of a rather perturbed captain. “I want a report on all arcane systems; that better not have disrupted any critical systems of my baby boy!”