Ranvir settled back against the cavern wall, his stomach feeling full to splitting. They’d used the last of the firestones for the meal, which meant no more hot meals, but for now he was too busy enjoying the afterglow of a meal of fresh food.

Amalia had killed some sort of crab-like serpent creature, together with a few of the heartier underwater plants, had come together for a surprisingly pleasant meal. With his stomach groaning under the pressure, he put it under, his body warm and cozy, and the worst of his pain blanketed by the thólos mushroom.

“I hope you’ve been doing some thinking,” Amalia said. “Because I’m honestly not sure what we can do.”

“Could we distract them?” Alexis asked. “Draw them company away from the entrance, then slip out while the brunt of their forces are elsewhere?”

“I was thinking something along the same lines,” Amalia confessed. “Though I don’t know how we would convince them we aren’t the ones behind the distraction.”

Alexis sucked in air through her teeth. “Yeah, I guess that would be the tough part.”

“We need some sort of increase in power,” Ranvir said. “Amalia, I don’t presume you’re sitting on some hidden Ability or a stockpile of stats?”

She shook her head, not bothering with an answer.

Ranvir nodded. “And Alexis? What is your mana-type and Level?”

Alexis sighed, looking like she might protest. “Counting mana and I’m Level 73.”

Ranvir’s fingers itched to reach for his notebooks. Counting mana was not an esoteric type he was familiar with. “And its potential for combat?”

Alexis winced. “Unless advanced calculations become necessary, then I doubt its going to help. Besides, I have no training, experience, or desire for violent situations.”

“And you, Ranvir?” Amalia asked. “You must have a few options.”

He nodded. “Like I said, I have a few theories about advancing my tether to the next stage. That should increase my control over space, which might allow us to escape the fold without breaking it. Amanaris is the obvious option, of course,” Ranvir continued, folding his hands in his lap.

His forearm started twitching. A moment later, one of Loce’s copies crawled out. The manifestation was more noticeable to his physical-senses than his spiritual ones.

“I don’t know that Amanaris is going to help, however,” he said. “Adding more Mana: Draw or Perception won’t do much. I could add Mana: Control to assist, but that’s going to be a relative drop in the bucket. Ten or twenty points that may or may not improve my situation.”

“So we’re just fucking doomed?” Alexis asked, her voice cracking. Ranvir couldn’t see her clearly enough to tell, but he thought she might be crying. He heard Amalia shuffle over to her.

“Hey, hey,” the scout wrapped an arm around her, pulling the girl into a slightly awkward embrace. “It’s going to be okay. We’re going to figure something out, yeah? I have no plans of leaving my fiancée, and you can bet Ranvir’s never going to allow Frija to become an orphan. This isn’t over, is it Ranvir?”

The foreigner shook his head. “It’s not. The clear advancement paths aren’t the only roads forward to us. I’ve spent quite a while assessing most of the mercenaries on the fold, and it’s clear who’s the strongest. But during my distraction in their camp, it was not Sabas that gave me the most trouble. Despite the gulf between the captain and the old man in raw stats, it was Stelios who was the most dangerous. His control and high Ability Scores made him the worst enemy.”

Ranvir looked down at his lap again, scrutinizing the smallest details. “It’s going to be difficult to suddenly get a grasp of my Abilities on a level similar to the old man,” he raised his hand into the light of his eyes, revealing the purple-lit form of Loce. “This little guy might help close the gap. Loce’s powers are limited, not by my control, but by the amount of power I can feed into it. Ability Score makes the process more efficient, but has little impact on what the swarm can do. I think perhaps it’s time I lean into that.

“More than that, however, is something else that has been bugging me for a little while now,” he confessed. He was hesitant pursuing this line of thinking since most fold were a terrible place for experimenting and testing theories, let alone this situation. “Amalia, when you use an Ability, especially one that interacts outside of your body, does it create its own material or affect what’s around it?”

Amalia turned her full attention to him then. She stared at him for a long time, Ranvir feeling not entirely certain what she was thinking. “I don’t know. It kind of depends, doesn’t it? My regeneration requires me to be in darkness, but otherwise, they just work. I have an Ability that increases my speed underwater, but it’s passive so…”

“It depends on the situation,” Ranvir said. “Except with your regeneration Ability, which appears to be restoring your form using outside material?”

“Sure, let’s go with that.”

“Alexis, how about your Abilities?”

Sniffing once, Alexis cleared her throat before answering. “Most of my Abilities are internal, but Running Count displays in the air and I think that kind of is a bit of both.”

“There’s counting mana in the air?” Ranvir couldn’t help but ask, the words slipping from his lips before registering.

“Wherever there’s enough people, all the esoteric mana-types gather.”

“Ranvir?” Amalia asked, a little impatience slipping into her voice. “What’s this about?”

He nodded once, clearing his throat. “Amanaris allows braced to both summon their own material or control what’s around them. It even does so with such ease that most of the time, the braced in question doesn’t even seem to register it. So why is it I, as a tethered and a braced, can create sand on command but not space?”

“Huh, I hadn’t really thought about that,” Amalia said.

“Of course not,” Ranvir replied. “Amanaris takes care of those kinds of details for you. So why is it that a tethered is limited like that, when Amanaris isn’t? At first, I thought ‘different powers, different worlds, different rules.’ But I’ve been to three different worlds now and mana feels the same wherever I go. I’d have to try really hard to differentiate between some regular light-tethered’s mana and a light-braced’s mana. Even then, I’d bet most of the difference comes down to their individuality rather than where their powers came from.”

“Where are you going with this?” Amalia asked, her tone clearly suggesting she wasn’t as entertained following his train of thought as he was explaining it.

Ranvir diligently ignored it. “So I’ve been thinking about the differences between braced and tethered for a while now. I looked at power comparisons, trying to determine strength, but that’s too variable. You can barely compare to braced to each other, let alone with another system.

“It was more fundamental than that. It came down to something so much simpler. Amanaris is rigidly structured. Braced have Abilities which let them perform very specific tasks. To counteract this, there is the Absolute. Absolute is weak and most braced see it as a poor tool best left for shaping their more important Abilities.

“Tethered, however, only have a single structured technique, or Ability if you will. Our attuned technique allows us an ease and almost instinctive skill with a single function of our mana, but otherwise it’s entirely free form. If a tethered needs to make a spear of light to throw at their opponent, they don’t need to spend a hundred hours perfecting it, they’ve got the raw control to simply throw it.”

“That’s the difference!” Alexis said, straightening. “Tethered have constraints in return for much higher control!”

“No,” Ranvir replied with an excited gesture. “That was my thinking at first as well, but after seeing Kyriake and Stelios use their Abilities, I don’t think any tethered I’ve met can match the heights of Amanaris. I believe I could insert the tethered’s limited manipulation or generation into Amanaris, which should increase my control over my Abilities more than adding dumping a few stat points.”

“But you would need to carry sand around with you everywhere for that,” Amalia reminded him. “Though, there is sand in the fold that might do in a pinch, though you’d probably want real second-order sand at if you wanted to do it for real.”

Ranvir nodded.

“That is a sound theory,” Latresekt replied as it rolled over onto its back, watching his tether spin lazily. The spiritual draft tugging on the creature’s fur. “I mean, it’s elementary, basic, and shows a lack of greater understanding. Though, I’d still rank it high enough to put you above most people on Korfyi. Almost impressive, really.”