Caster got up from the floor and looked at tracker for a moment. Confirming that she was still asleep, Caster walked a bit further from her and stood still for a moment.
He took a deep breath.
'Let's test you out, shall we?'
He went into his soul sea.
It was still as mysterious as always.
The bright, crackling suns. Seven of them. His soul cores.
Small, and bright sphere's that revolved around them, his memories.
Another sphere, brighter than the others also revolving among them. His echo, Evermelt.
The floor beneath his feet wet as usual.
A wall encompassed the entire soul sea, protecting it.
He felt another wall separate his soul sea into two halves.
On the left half, a library.
On the right half, which used to be empty, now had a little something in it. It was an illusory, wraith like being, floating around, almost mindlessly.
'The graze.'
It was the graze obviously.
It felt like a ghost or a spirit or a wraith.
Point was, that it was illusory and didn't seem to have physical significance.
Caster let out a quiet humm as he observed the wraith-like being in his soul sea.
A bit later Caster concluded something.
"These are beings that exist without physical bodies. They aren't shadows or souls, they are just... body-less existences."
One of the reasons Caster thought of that was because the graze seemed to have a mind of its own, just like the echoes, just to a lesser extent.
But the main reason was that it had attributes and abilities. Which means, the aspect is preserved.
Stopping his mind from overthinking, Caster left the soul sea.
Now standing near the entrance of the cave, Caster felt his graze in his soul. It felt strange to have that. It was like he had a foreign soul trapped in him.
Which was exactly what had happened. He had trapped a soul using his sacrificed soul core.
He activated his hourglass charm and then his graze.
And then, the water that was falling down the waterfall stopped.
Caster was using the first ability of the graze, telekinesis.
It was likely the dormant ability, so it barely took Caster any enough.
After thatm he focused on using the awakened ability, telekinetic perception, at the same time as using telekinesis.
He succeeded at that too.
Immediately, his senses got sharper, he could begin to sense every little movement around him, and the movement that was about to happen.
It was almost like a weaker precognition.
Well, that's a stretch to say, it is too vague to be called precognition, it was just that he could sense movement around him.
The ability wasn't anything revolutionary, but it complimented the telekinesis ability fairly well.
'Using these grazes is surprisingly simple.'
But when he tried to use the third ability, Telekinetic Field, he couldn't get it to work at the same time as the others.
To be exact, not at the same time as his dormant ability.
'Weird.'
He experimented with it a bit and soon figured it out. The name was really straight forward, so that helped.
The third ability was sort of a 'domain' type of ability. Everything in a certain radius would experience the force of the telekinesis.
But the first ability was focused.
So, it was like one was made for a single adversary. But the field ability was meant for an area of effect.
The two abilities don't compliment each other directly, but they do so in a sense that both are meant for different situations.
'Laylah didn't use this against me... likely because her cohort would also get affected by it, but this is possibly very, very useful against hordes, no?'
He stopped using the abilities and looked around, the cave was getting slightly shook over by it. Luckily, tracker didn't wake up.
'There's immense potential.'
As for the graze's attributes, he couldn't get them to work on him.
'There's a lot that I don't know. It would have been useful if I could utilize the attributes as well, but no matter. The abilities are the main boon anyways.'
There was one more thing Caster noticed though. It was that despite using his charm, his fake time never disappeared.
This means that using grazes was not counted as his aspect ability.
Caster clenched his fists in satisfaction and uttered a quiet: "Yes!"
It seems his aspect was providing him a method to fight against his flaw. He had suspected things like this could happen in the past but never expected it to happen to him.
An example of this was Cassie, who had gotten a harsh flaw, but as she progressed up the path, her aspect provided her with ways to slowly overcome her flaw. Of course, it still exists, it's just that she can work with it.
Something similar has happened to Caster now.
Though, he didn't really continue thinking about that and simply looked at the runes again.
Name: Unnamed
[Would you like to name the graze? Y/N]
'Yeah, I'll rename you.'
He paused for a moment to think, then he uttered:
"Arcless."
He decided on this name because Laylah's arrows didn't have an arc, it could go through any path, due to her abilities.
He didn't wish to use the name "Laylah" in his mind everytime, as it would remind him of this scene, so he chose to distinguish between the two.
It was sort of a coping mechanism. He didn't wish to get reminded of this time, everytime he uses the graze.
Despite him having a 'wall' between this world and himself, he still killed a human. Not the first time, but it still made him feel unsettling.
After that Caster decided to see what would happen if he sacrifices a core.
Cores: [1/7]
[Would you like to sacrifice a core? Y/N]
'I'll do it.'
Caster wasn't very keen on getting weaker physically, but he knew these kind of things wouldn't be a waste, he's seen the spell play things out a lot.
He was ready to take the gamble.
Suddenly, he felt the searing pain of loosing a core again. But it wasn't very hard to endure now. He had been getting used to it pretty often.
Surprisingly, forming a core hurts more than loosing it.
After a while, the core left Caster's soul and entered the graze, or that's what it felt like to him anyways.
Just when it stopped, he saw the the runes for the graze become gray.
'Oh...'
He tried to use it, but it was of no use.
'It is likely in the evolution stage... but how does this work? I have an awakened core, and the graze is ascended... so how can my core evolve it? I mean I can make some guesses but... ah whatever.'
The graze was basically hibernating, so he was back to square one for now.
He'll need to move around without the graze.
'Just when I thought I would have an easier time... Hopefully, it finishes evolving soon.'
Caster sat back down on the floor to rest.
He looked at his runes again.
Soul Fragments: [4950/5000].
'Wow, so it needs a fully saturated core for this? It can't make do with an unsaturated core it seems. I feel so weak physically compared to before...'
It was obvious that any sort of evolution would take a bit of time, but it just slipped Caster's mind, catching him offguard.
'I should check it.'
He went back into his soul sea, and looked over at the graze again.
'I got a little of your memory, Laylah. Can I have more of it?'
He tried a lot of things, but none of them worked. After that, he took the graze to the library, hoping to find something in it.
The library used to be largely empty. Only a part of it had books that were filled with everything that Caster had in his mind. They included both his lives.
'Everything is recorded here.'
But now, there was another section with books now. It had all the memories of Laylah.
'Jackpot.'
Of course, Caster didn't wish to read all of her memories, that would be too much. But Caster wished to find out about a few things.
He went over to this new section, it had hundreds of books, less than what Caster's sections had, since he had two lives.
He opened a random book and started flipping its pages, taking in a bit of the information it shared.
'It looks like everybook spans about a month of her memories. Different from mine, I take about three books per two months. Perhaps my memories are recorded in more detail, or perhaps reading the memories of grazes is less efficient? Whatever the case is, this is still in exceptional detail.'
He put that book back from the shelf he took it out from and started counting the number of books it had.
'Three hundred twenty eight books... she was a little over twenty seven years old, huh?'
He took out the most recent one, it's later pages were mostly empty.
He flipped past them, but he could barely seem to make sense of it. He could read the general notion behind the memory, but it just didn't make sense to him.
'Weird.'
He focused further and continued to read but it felt like the more he focused, the harder it got for him to read.
'Damn it.'
The memories were resisting from being read.
Annoyed, Caster injected some essence into the book, and tried to resist the resistance, and it worked to an extent, but it became too hard for him to focus on the contents properly.
In the end, he couldn't get enough information out of it.
He wanted to find out the exact purpose behind attempting to kill him. He also wished to find out about the internal workings of the Clan Valor better.
There were more things as well, of course, but these were the two main questions he wanted to get answer.
'Unfortunate...'
"Gah! Whatever! Let's look back onto the fight."
This was a habit Caster had forced himself to create, analysing the fights after he settles down.
First, when he was attacked by the five masters, they only covered the side from where he could have escaped Reckoning. The other side, which led to deeper into Reckoning, was only covered by the metal giant master, Ludwell. Which meant that they were extremely wary of Caster's speed.
They also seemed to have a secret code of sorts.
When the leader, Eleanor, was talking with Caster at the absolute start of the fight, Tracker seemed to have sent a secret message to Ludwell to launch an attack.
If Caster hadn't noticed that, he might have taken the hit straight up, and it would have been a very nasty situation for him.
He would have likely noticed the movement thanks to his fast reflexes due to the nature of his aspect, but reacting and avoiding the attack in the same time frame would be a little challenging, but nothing he was incapable of. The problem with that, though, was that he couldn't avoid the attacks of all the other master's at the same time.
Avoiding the attack of one wouldn't be enough.
Which was why it was good that he didn't let that happen.
During the entire fight, Caster utilized his speed advantage on them, being on the move during the entirety of the fight, to separate the masters.
He wouldn't have been able to fight the masters at the same time. After singling out Ludwig, he killed him.
Then he used evermelt to trap two masters, Eleanor and Tracker, which singled out Ludwell.
Laylah made a mistake of trying to get the two masters to escape from that. Had she attacked Caster, it would have been a much harder fight for him.
Unforunately for them, during the time Laylah saved Eleanor and Tracker and then reached the fight scene, Caster had already killed Ludwell.
This made things much easier for him.
Because now there were only three masters of their cohort left alive, they decided to use Laylah's flaw against Caster, but it was only unfortunate that it was not something that would work out.
It just allowed Caster to graze Laylah, weakening their battle power further.
It was a good plan, as long as they didn't face someone like Caster.
It was fairly easy to take out Eleanor and Tracker after Laylah was grazed by him.
He fought exceptionally well this time, barely making mistakes unlike the previous fights.
'I'm getting used to this... wait, thinking back, I've not been getting any echoes! What is this? My kills have been in the thousands! This is ridiculous. Not a single echo out of thousands of kills? The only echo I have isn't even something I got on my own...'
Sigh.
'Perhaps it's because I already have an echo too strong for me...'