It had been around eight days since the fight with the arachnid monster.

  Lio had decided to name it Torachnea Paralex, seeing as there was no Court presence and she doubted that the natives had named it. So she took the opportunity and came up with a name she liked.

  She debated including her name there somehow, but decided against it.

  The nest of the Torachnea Paralex was still their base, and everyone had their own theories about it: Why it had built the nest like this, why they weren’t being attacked by anything, or why it had left the shuttle intact.

  It was a nice way for them to bide their time.

  A lot of the technology from what had once been the launch pad had been destroyed, but the shuttle was almost in a pristine condition- if one ignored the webs covering it.

  Vaetra and Oris swapped between assisting Lio in her scavenging and hunting or training. While they weren’t fighting to survive, Lio spent her time examining every inch of the Xendarii shuttle. She had gotten a bit further with her exploration, but it was still just enough for her to start the repair.

  Wear and tear was one hell of a thing to repair. Hundreds of small things were broken, or didn’t look like what Lio thought they’d look like. During the third day, she managed to get the systems to run, but they just flashed red and spewed out a long list of alarms.

  Since then, she had been going through alarm after alarm and trying to fix each. Tears in cables, little rips, a lot of other little things she couldn’t properly fix. But she did have a scroll of tape in her bag that she used liberally to keep everything from falling apart during their travels. There was nothing she could do about the material breaking down, except for patching it up temporarily. It would have to be enough.

  On the morning of the ninth day, Lio called Vaetra and Oris over and into the shuttle. They all sat down in the cockpit, surrounded by countless buttons and levers.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said, holding two corroded halves of a metal rod. “this is rather important- well, it was. I need something like this: metal, long, and narrow. It needs to be conductive and I am uncertain where I could get another. The hull is not made out of metal and I am not really comfortable ripping a part out of another system.”

  “Long stick of metal? Zavari probably has something that could work. I’d go and ask him, but we’re not welcome,” Oris said, sitting down on the pilot’s chair. “At least Vaetra and I aren’t.”

  “Yeah... There might be some around here left over from the launchpad,” Lio replied, tapping one of the corroded rods onto the ground, “but we’d have to search for it and dig...”

  Vaetra leaned against the doorframe, scowling as she thought it over. “I could work...”

  “No,” Oris immediately shot her idea down, grabbing one of the rods from Lio. “We’ll find a replacement somewhere here or go to Zavari. If neither of that works, Lio will need to get it from somewhere on the ship. Having you electrocuted will always be the very last possibility.”

  Vaetra crossed her arms under her bust, but didn’t argue with him. She knew that he was correct, but didn’t feel comfortable not having presented a valid option.

  “We’re never gonna find a piece of metal big enough if we just dig around aimlessly,” Lio said, her incessant tapping of the metal rod continuing. “Any ideas?”

  The shuttle fell silent as the two thought of ways to find something like that.

  Vaetras mind quickly went to the spatial sense she had been exploring just a few days prior. She drew a slow breath, eyes drifting to the dull floor panels beneath her boots. Really, she thought, there was only one way to find a piece of metal that size without gutting half the shuttle- or asking Zavari for scraps.

  “Wait,” she said, stepping into the cockpit’s center. Lio and Oris looked up. “What if Oris senses it?”

  “I can’t sense metal...” Oris said, his brow creased in thought, “unless you mean to tell me that you expect me to sense the minute differences in how metal affects the space I can sense?”

  Vaetra nodded. “That is what I am implying, darling. I know I am better with finesse than you, but this would be the perfect opportunity for you to train. If you managed to get to my level of finesse while keeping your power level, who knows what else we could figure out? That’s how I approximated the size of the ship earlier.”

  “That’s something I’ve never tried,” Oris said, tossing the rod aside. “It’s gonna take a while for me to find one, especially one that would be big enough for us to reuse for that.”

  Lio continued to tap the rod against the floor in thought. “That’d probably be ore then... we’d need to look for it in the launchpad area.”

  He closed his eyes and tried to get it over with quickly. He strained his senses to the maximum, only to come up empty.

  Lio poked Vaetra with the metal rod before tossing it aside to the one Oris had thrown away. “Let’s go, Vaetra. We can gather food for today and talk a bit while he trains. You’ll be fine, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Oris waved them off.

  Lio and Vaetra made their way outside, grabbing one of the backpacks they had emptied for scavenging and leaving Oris behind.

  Vaetra jumped down first and helped Lio down, starting her way down the path of cleared webs towards the jungle. They had cleared the path during their first scavenging trip where they all went.

  “So...” Lio started the moment they were outside of the webland, sucking in air through her teeth. “What is it between you and Oris?”

  “Nothing,” Vaetra immediately replied, turning away from Lio and starting their march into the jungle.

  Lio followed with a sigh, trying to match Vaetras speed. “Seriously, I don’t want to taunt you or anything. You two seriously do act like a couple, but it’s mostly from you. You’re into him, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t even know what being into him means,” Vaetra said, slowing down to accommodate Lio. “I literally came to be in his lap, while he was naked and covered in blood. Since then, he has always been the person who treated me like an actual person.”

  “Okay. Is that all? He’s nice to you?” Lio asked, taking a cursory glance around to see if they had missed any berries or anything so close to the webland. She found nothing.

  Vaetra shoved aside a low-hanging vine and tried to keep her voice steady. “He’s… complicated.” She paused, stepping over a moss?slick root. “I enjoy spending time with him and he looks... good. I think. I like how he looks.”

  “Mhhh... I guess,” Lio hummed thoughtfully, continuing to search around. She grabbed a berry off of a log she recognised and snacked on it. “He does have a... rugged sort of charm, I guess.”

  She kicked a root before continuing. Grabbing onto a branch and swinging forward. “There’s something more there. He’s nice. Sure. But you… you light up when he looks at you.”

  Vaetra’s ears tingled- were they red? “I’m not… I don’t know how to explain it,” she blurted. “When he’s near, everything I feel gets louder. My magic hums differently, my insides feel… fuller.” She let the words tumble out, raw and awkward. “I’ve only existed a few months. I know how to bend space, but I’ve never bent my own thoughts around something like this.”

  Lio grinned, sharp and gentle all at once. “Sounds like you’ve got a crush. You think it has something to do with your bond as wielder and Incarnate?”

  She stopped as soon as the words left her mouth, freezing up and quickly checking on Vaetra to see if she had pushed too far in her curiosity. It was an innocent question for her, but Vaetra might see that differently.

  Vaetra’s cheeks flamed, and she stumbled over a tangle of roots, nearly pitching forward. “I-” she began, throat suddenly tight. She clenched and unclenched her fingers, the spatial hum in her veins warping into something uncomfortably warm.

  Her thoughts raced.

  Did it? This bond was something completely natural for her. She was born with it and it had shaped her perception of Oris, probably just as much as any interaction with him. It caused her to see him differently from anyone else- she had a certain insight into him.

  Lio paused mid?step, concern flickering in her eyes. “Hey, sorry-I didn’t mean to…” She reached out, gentle. “You’re allowed to say you like him.”

  Vaetra didn’t exactly listen to Lio, her thoughts twisting and turning in her head.

  She definitely liked him. He was the most important person in her life. But was it because they’re bonded and thus was just her instinct, or because she actually liked liked him? She didn’t know anyone as well as him, having spent the majority of her life at his side. She was his Incarnate, but she didn’t even know what exactly that meant. Her heart fluttered whenever she got him to smile. He was the one she wanted to go to after a battle, after encountering something funny or beautiful. She wanted to share that with him.

  Thinking about all of it, something twisted in her gut. She didn’t know what it meant, or where it came from, but maybe that was what this all meant.

  Vaetra drew a shaky breath. She let the words tumble out this time, slower, more deliberate. “I do like him. A lot. It’s just… I don’t know what that means. I was made to be his power, his tool. Now I feel like there’s something else, something I’m not built for.” She kicked at the leaf?litter, sending a brown butterfly fluttering up. “Does that make sense?”

  Lio pocketed the berry she’d been holding. “Perfect sense,” she said with a small smile. “You’re discovering emotions. Everyone does at some point, in their own way. I got into a few relationships, but none of them lasted.”

  “Why not?” Vaetra asked, trying to find something to relate. Even the simple reassurance of Lio knowing how she felt made her relax a bit.

  Lio grimaced, slipping behind a tree to break line-of-sight with Vaetra for a moment. “I am... not conductive to relationships. I like to drink a lot- but not that frequent- I have no impulse control, and... something you do not need to worry about. I’ll tell you if Oris and you ever get so far.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s... personal,” Lio said, running her hand over her face as she tried to control her blush. This was something Vaetra did not need to know. Lio’s blush deepened, and she ducked her head, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear.

  “Forget I said anything,” she muttered, forcing a grin.

  Vaetra watched her for a moment- saw the way Lio’s shoulders twitched, the rapid flutter of her eyelashes. She wanted to press, to reassure her friend, but something in Lio’s posture said, not now. With a gentle nod, Vaetra let it go. “Right, relationships are usually personal.”

  Vaetra and Lio fell into an easy rhythm as they picked their way down the jungle path, backpacks growing heavy with berries and edible shoots. Every few steps, a distant bird’s call echoed through the canopy, and the humid air clung to their skin like a second uniform.

  Lio chatted about the odd fungal blooms she’d spotted on the shuttle’s old vents. “Looks like the thing’s practically fermenting its own insulation,” she joked, trying to cheer up Vaetra.

  Vaetra paused at the base of a moss?clad root, crouching to examine a cluster of luminescent mushrooms spilling soft blue light. She plucked one gently and turned it over in her fingers. “Quartermaster would pay a month’s rations for these back home,” she whispered, voice hushed as though afraid to disturb their quiet sanctuary.

  Lio watched Vaetras careful inspection, then knelt beside her. “They’re not poisonous,” she murmured, guiding Vaetras hand toward a delicate roll of pale fungus. “You can eat them raw, but they taste like wet stone.” Lio popped a small piece into her mouth, grimacing at its chalky texture and offering Vaetra one. “Let’s save the rest as bait- for birds or something. We should test Oris’s patience when he skips on his training.”

  “I don’t think he’d skip out on his training. He was always the one who helped me to actually get to work.”

  Lio stood back up, dusting her hands on her pants. “What is it like- using magic, I mean?”

  Vaetra paused, tucking the pale mushroom into her pack, and let out a slow breath. The filtered shafts of sunlight danced around her, illuminating motes of dust like drifting stars. She glanced up at Lio, considered for a moment. “I think I am the wrong person to ask for that,” Vaetra said. “I was born with magic. My first memory includes twisting the space surrounding me to make sure I wasn’t causing him discomfort... I was using magic to make myself lighter.”

  “That must be convenient...” Lio sighed. She cut off a piece of bark and turned it over in her hands, investigating it. “You can really just casually twist space around using Oris’s magic?”

  “Our magic,” Vaetra corrected, stepping over to look at the bark. “It strains him more than me when I use or alter the magic, but it also strains me when he uses it. It’s... difficult to explain something so innately... me with words. It’s just a part of who I am and I couldn’t think of a life without it.”

  “So, just like emotions,” Lio concluded.

  Vaetra sighed. “I guess so. But emotions aren’t magic.”

  The bark was smooth and moist, like nothing she had seen before. The outside was smooth with small flecks of a lighter colour. It smelled good, spicy.

  “This smells good, but not like something I’d like to eat just like that... It smells like spice, but you can’t use bark as a spice, right?” Lio said, rolling up the bark and stuffing it into her backpack. She continued walking, looking for anything else she could add to her collection of ingredients.

  While they had decided to scavenge mostly for stuff, they could eat here and now. Lio always wanted to grab more stuff that might not rot until they were back on Caldrith’s shard. She might be able to dry the bark and keep it. It’d be worth a lot.

  “Do you think we should try to get seeds of different plants to get back and try to plant on Caldrith’s shard? They might not be able to grow in such a different environment, but my notes on the ecosystem here are pretty extensive. Maybe I could give the plants everything they need with the correct fertilizers and enough water,” Lio thought aloud, stopping in front of a large tree and looking up. There were fruit way out of her reach, but she could climb up.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Probably,” Vaetra said, unable to say much more about that particular topic. “Do you want some of those fruits?”

  “Yeah.”

  Vaetra bent the space around her, lightening the burden of gravity and jumping up. She grabbed onto one of the sturdier looking branches and climbed over to a bundle of fruits. She picked a few and tossed them down to Lio one after another.

  “Watch out,” Vaetra called out as she grabbed the last of the fruit and jumped back down. She bent the space again to slow her descent and handed the last fruits to Lio. “If you do manage to get anything farmed up in Caldrith’s shard, please let it be these fruits.”

  “Just because they’re so sweet?” Lio asked, putting the fruits into the bag and carefully closing it to not squish anything.

  Vaetra tucked her hands into her pack’s straps and watched Lio examine the fruits, their golden skin dappled with russet freckles. “Because they remind me of home,” Vaetra said softly. “Sweet but hardy, defending themselves with thick skins. And… because I like sharing things that remind me of comfort.” Her voice trailed off as Lio looked up, a small, knowing smile on her face.

  Lio paused, a fruit cradled in her palm. “Comfort’s important,” she agreed, then turned toward Vaetra. “You’ve kept going, even though you were made for something you didn’t choose.” She tapped the fruit thoughtfully. “Maybe these plants will survive on Caldrith’s shard because they carry more than seeds- they carry memory.” She rolled the fruit between her fingers, as if testing its weight.

  “That sounds like it’s from some sappy romance novel,” Vaetra said.

  Lio pouted, but couldn’t help her lips quirking into a smile. “That’s because it is.”

  Both of them burst out laughing at that confession, the mood shifting as they settled down for a break. Lio sat down on the nearest root, brushing off the dirt from it.

  Vaetra copied her and sat down on another nearby root, looking around and checking her spatial sense for any potential threats. “Do you mind me asking something personal?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I know you said you grew up as an orphan, but what was it like? Growing up, I mean,” Vaetra asked, grabbing a stick to fiddle with.

  Lio sighed. “Like you said, I grew up an orphan. There were about a dozen other kids in the orphanage, but only two adults, so it might not be the most normal childhood. We were all around the same age, which meant all of us had to suffer through puberty at once- oh wait, you don’t have to go through puberty, do you?”

  “...I don’t think so,” Vaetra said, stepping aside.

  “I dunno either,” Lio confessed, brushing a lock of hair behind her ear. “I figured you just popped into the world full-grown, all magical and invulnerable.” She chuckled, then shook her head. “Being an orphan… it wasn’t exactly as bad as the Calamity. Mostly there were rules- get out of bed before dawn to fetch water, scrub the floors, sort rags for the seamstress who couldn’t spare a stitch of fabric from the donations. We were twelve children and two caregivers, but even they wanted us to fend for ourselves as much as possible.”

  Vaetra nodded, pulling her robe tighter around her robe. “Sounds… lonely. Almost like what I had heard about bootcamp.”

  Lio smiled ruefully. “It was. But in a way it made us close-knit: Thalia taught me how to read when she slipped me newspapers she had stolen during one of her runs. Jorin showed me how to use a knife- ” she mimicked a quick, careful slice in the air with the stick “-without slicing my fingers off. We formed little alliances, like colonies or groups in a village. If you wanted something done properly, you’d find someone your size with the steadiest hand, and you partnered up.” She paused, turning her gaze toward the forest canopy. “But when someone left- got adopted, or worse, shipped off- it hurt like losing a limb.”

  “Do you ever miss them?” Vaetra asked softly.

  “All the time,” Lio admitted, tracing a swirling pattern in the dirt with her fingertip. “Most of them are still alive, somewhere on Caldrith’s shard or other islands, some died... I try to keep in contact with all of them, but that’s kind of difficult at the moment. I just hope that all of them are okay. Thalia is still a thief and a gambler.”

  “Should you just admit to that?” Vaetra asked, experimenting with her magic.

  She created a ball out of a spatial boundary and cut a plane through the middle of it, leaving her with two half-spheres created around a small rock.

  Lio shrugged, tapping her fingers against her thigh. “You aren’t going to arrest her, can’t actually. You’re an Incarnate, a Hunter, not a guard.”

  “I could still tell someone that you know of a thief,” Vaetra said, but didn’t mean it. She focused on the two half-spheres and started to apply opposite forces on them, trying to tear the rock apart without creating a spatial tear.

  She focused her attention on the boundaries, trying to strengthen them and pull the two halves opposite without tearing the boundary. She didn’t manage to make the two opposing forces exactly equal, so the rock started wiggling.

  Lio looked down at the shaking rock, confusion evident on her face. It took her a moment to realise that it was Vaetra working on her magic, leaning back. “What are you trying to do there?“

  “I just want to see how complex of an effect I can make. Currently, I am trying to tear this rock apart without damaging the space by just creating two opposite gravity effects,” Vaetra explained, pumping more magic into the construct to strengthen the boundary and bend space as much as possible. The moment she felt the boundary crack, she stopped bending the space and strengthened the boundary.

  Lio leaned in closer to the rock, peering down at it. “Can you make it spin?”

  Vaetra just nodded, twisting the space and angling one effect upwards while angling the other one downwards. The rock immediately starting to spin and skitter over the ground. The moment it moved out of the boundary, it stopped accelerating but kept rolling across the floor from the velocity.

  “Heh, that’s cool,” Lio said, giggling slightly. “Can you make it float midair and spin?”

  Vaetra grinned and moved the ball of boundaries over another rock and immediately attaching it to it. She grabbed the entire ball with her magic and pushed it through the space, the enclosed boundary dragging the rock with it. Once up in the air, she adjusted the bends in space so that it could hold itself without her dragging it back up.

  “Ohhh, that’s very cool! You could probably make someone vomit like that- is it still speeding up?” Lio said.

  Vaetra looked at the rock and let the boundary dissolve.

  The bent space snapped back into place, bouncing like rubber as it settled back into its regular place with the rock plummeting down. It plummeted down and hit the ground, its rapid spin shooting it out into the forest and away from the two.

  “I’d say that was a successful experiment,” Lio joked, grabbing a root and cutting off a small slice before rubbing it onto her wrist. She’d have to wait for any sort of reaction before continuing her tests. “Actually... I think I might know of a better way for you to test it without sending rocks hurtling through areas. Like a little tablet with something like webs stretched out that can somewhat accurately map out the effect your manipulation has on objects here.”

  “My spatial sense is very accurate already, but it could be nice to have something to compare it to,” Vaetra conceded, lifting the stick up with a regular bend in space, no boundary.

  It wasn’t as efficient as enclosing the effect in a boundary, but there was something she was missing in how that bend spread out in the surrounding space, causing her to feel lighter as the warp in space reached her. It wasn’t just a waste of her magic; it spread the effect around evenly. The further away one went from the center of the effect, the weaker it got. This was probably something she could use, like the bouncing of space when she dissolved the boundary earlier.

  Lio sighed and grabbed the stick out of the air, grinning as she felt the change in gravity affect her arm. “But Oris’s spatial sense is not very accurate, is it? It could be useful for him.”

  “That’s true. He has always struggled with accuracy and the more complex effects,” Vaetra said, dropping her manipulation of the surrounding space again.

  Lio nodded along, grinning. “Sure, sure. I know he’s not that great with finesse. He’s kind of a brute- but not in a bad way!” she blurted out, trying to reassure Vaetra that she meant no insult before quickly moving onto back to the test object, “We could probably make a prototype with some of the web and a bunch of sticks. It wouldn’t help with strong effects, but Oris would need to get really careful with how he trains with it. It’d be very fragile, and he’d probably break it more than once.”

  “It’d force him to make tiny effects to not break it, learn finesse,” Vaetra agreed.

  Lio stood up and tossed the stick away. “Then it’s decided. I’ll make a prototype once we’re back. The training might help him find a suitable piece of metal in the time I manage to get the rest done and we won’t have to wait for long,” she said, waving Vaetra up.

  “Yeah, let’s keep going. My backpack is almost full,” Vaetra agreed, standing up.

  Lio leaned back against the tree, sighing melancholically. Letting her head roll, she looked up at Vaetra. “There is no chance you’ll carry me, right? It’s good to train your strength...”

  “Okay,” Vaetra said, holding out a hand to Lio.

  The moment Lio reached out her hand, Vaetra spun a spatial boundary around her and reversed gravity to lift her up. She dangled and twisted for a moment before Vaetra grabbed her hand and kept her steady. The field itself warped around Lio, twisting and turning her as she clung to Vaetras hand steadily dragging her forward.

  “H-HHey!” Lio squeaked, reaching a hand behind herself to keep her backpack closed and all her scavenged foods inside. Her feet kicked midair, trying to find purchase as her body insisted that up was down due to the gravity. “That’s cheating!”

  “You never said what strength I needed to train. I am strengthening my magical muscles, so to speak,” Vaetra countered, twisting on herself and spinning Lio around. A grin spread on her face.

  Lio grabbed onto Vaetras arm with her other hand, shrieking in joy. “Stop! Stop!“

  Vaetra let Lio spin for another heartbeat before gently twisting the boundary so her heels skimmed the forest floor. With a soft thump, Lio landed upright- albeit a little woozy- her hair splaying around her like a ragged halo.

  “Alright, gravity tricks are off the menu,” Lio gasped, pressing both feet into the mossy earth. Her grin never wavered as she bounced twice, trying to get herself used to being on the floor again. “That was kind of fun... but please just. Just let me walk the rest.”

  “I thought you wanted me to carry you?” Vaetra teased.

  Lio quickly stepped away, leading the way back to the webland. She stopped a few metres further, leaning against a tree as the nausea hit her. “Oh damn... No. I regret my laziness.”

  Vaetra rolled her eyes and stepped past Lio. Checking on their magical reserves, she found them still halfway full so she decided to spend some more and collect another fruit for her to eat on the way back.

  The way back was uneventful but nice, filled with idle chatter. Lio continued her test on the roots, rubbing it on her tongue and waiting fifteen more minutes before eating a small piece after that didn’t cause a rash. It was tart, but not very complex in flavour. Still, it would probably be rather nutritious so she collected a few more on the way back.

  Once in the weblands, Vaetra gestured for Lio to follow her. “I’d like to check on the spatial tear Oris and I left in our fight with the spider.”

  “Torachnea Paralex,” Lio corrected but kept following Vaetra. She looked around the webland, surprised at how quickly it had gotten mundane to her. She remembered the intense excitement she had felt when they first stumbled upon it but after spending a few days living in it and with the excitement of the shuttle overshadowing it, she almost forgot about it.

  It was still such an intricate structure, way too complex for a beast to make unless it was an instilled instinct. Yet it was also so primitive in its own right. It was just a large torus set around the ruin, curving up into the jungle and over the ground, but it was so perfect in its execution that it proved its intelligence.

  Lio’s thoughts drifted as Vaetra approached the spatial tear. She had nothing to do here, no way to help.

  But how she wished to help. To be able to perceive the space around her like Vaetra does.

  Vaetra couldn’t quite reach the entirety of the spatial tear, but it intrigued her all the same. It was the sort of taboo knowledge people would normally scare away from due to it being dangerous.

  She ran her finger carefully across the length of it, yet nothing happened.

  It was too small, already healing after the past days. Space mended itself. She knew that. It longed to be one, to encompass everything and leave nothing untouched. It affected every single speck of the universe, except for those they had broken prior.

  This wasn’t a tear anymore. It was something healed over, but not at the height of its health: a scar.

  A scar in space. How peculiar.

  Arguably, this was the largest tear they had ever made from the size of it, yet it healed much faster than a spherical tear. Was it really so simple?

  Space bent to her will, yet the scar did not.

  She twisted and bent the space surrounding it, focusing her efforts on the planar scar in front of her. Her power rose in time with her curiosity, space bending and twisting as she tried to get the stubborn patch to follow her orders.

  Leaves and dust flew wildly, freely changing directions as she tried to use the self-correcting properties of space against itself to turn one ripple into a wave.

  The scar stayed stubbornly static.

  She stopped shortly after, not wanting to actually break it or deplete her limited magic.

  The tear in space had probably healed within hours, if not even minutes. They were the biggest offensive tool they had. Nothing she knew could resist its middle simply vanishing from space after all. But if they permanently scarred the space and disabled them from using their powers again, how much should they use them in a prolonged fight?

  It was a finisher, but every use of it weakened their powers- or at least their area.

  She focused on a point next to the scar and bent it to heighten gravity as much as possible.

  It took a considerable amount of power for the effect to travel to the other side of the scar, a lot more than it should have. It wasn’t a dead-end, just an obstacle they could still overcome. If they fought and used a spatial tear, they’d need to move away from it to keep their full arsenal at their disposal.

  She dropped the effect again. If they could break space, could they heal it?

  It would probably require an insane amount of power and finesse- and it wouldn’t be viable in combat- but it might be possible. They’d have to clean up in civilian areas at some point, or be unable to do anything where it most mattered.

  It was intriguing to her. It felt no different from the surrounding space upon closer inspection if she didn’t affect it. The moment she did, the rigidity of that space was all too clear, like a blindfold had been lifted off of her eyes.

  If she could only delve deeper and lose herself in the details, she could figure it out!

  She tried her best to delve deeper, to get an understanding higher than what she had been working with so far, but she made no progress until a hand on her shoulder jolted her back to reality.

  “You alright? You’ve just kinda been staring at space,” Lio asked, concern bleeding into her voice as she put her hand on Vaetras shoulder.

  Vaetra turned to look at Lio, tilting her head quizzically. “I was staring at space. I focused on my spatial sense to investigate how the spatial tear was healing.” It took her a moment to realise that the sun had already moved overhead, leaving them in the shadows. “How long have I been standing here?”

  “Like an hour,” Lio said, checking the time on her tablet.

  Vaetra looked around, trying to find something other than the sun to gauge the time by that had passed. Alas, it seemed Lio was telling the truth.

  Vaetra cleared her throat, trying to restore at least a hint of her dignity. “I see. It appears like I lost track of time while investigating the remnants of our last battle.”

  “There you go sounding all emotionless again,” Lio said with a defeated sigh, starting the rest of the walk back to the shuttle. “Come on, we wouldn’t want Oris to worry about us.”

  Vaetra followed her, a sudden pang of guilt jolting her fully out of her spatial discoveries. She didn’t want to worry anyone, least of all Oris.

  They found Oris laying atop the shuttle, spread out with all of his limbs spread out around him.

  “I hope that’s you, Lio,” Oris called out as he felt them approach him. He immediately recognised Vaetra due to their bond, but Lio wasn’t as recognisable to him just from his spatial sense.

  Vaetra bent the space around her and jumped up onto the shuttle in one large leap. She knelt down next to Oris, leaning over him and letting her hair fall down to frame her face. It reduced his view to only her. “Hey, Oris. We need-“

  He was sweaty, panting from exhaustion as he looked up at her. It made her heart pound in her chest. That damn half-smile on his face. She knew he had made some progress in his sensitivity just from that.

  “I think I got it,” he said, completely missing Vaetras words as he laid there. “I think I understand space better now.”

  It stopped her dead in her tracks. He had done it? He was supposed to train his spatial senses, yet he just declared that he apparently reached an entirely new level of understanding. And she had done barely anything the entire day. She just managed to make a rock spin and investigate a scar in space.

  What was she meant to do?

  Yes, she wanted to confess to him that she had a crush on him. But she wasn’t sure of it yet. She’d need to do some more tests to be sure of it. If she wanted to confess go him, she’d need to be sure.

  Otherwise, it could be very embarrassing.

  “That’s very nice,” Vaetra said, sitting back on her haunches. “Did you find any metal yet?”

  “No, I haven’t actually looked into that. I’ve just been trying to refine my spatial sense, which kind of worked,” he explained, a thin smile spreading on his face as she moved his head onto her lap.

  Lio climbed into the shuttle, stopping just long enough to greet Oris before returning to her tinkering and snacking on the gathered foods.

  Oris and Vaetra stayed on the roof for a little more before joining Lio inside the shuttle.

  And just like that, two more weeks passed in service of their goal to return.

  Oris dedicated himself to training his spatial senses and hunting with Vaetra. He didn’t manage any other big epiphanies, but his skill rose considerably, with nothing to do except train and explore.

  Lio kept tinkering with the ship. She kept extensive logs of everything she did, ever grateful for the practically endless storage on her tablet.

  Vaetra tried to help both of them as much as possible, forcing downtime onto both of them whenever they forgot.