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  Chapter 2

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  Nokron, Eternal City.

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  “This is harder than I expected.” Elyra murmured as she morphed her left hand into a grapple, and propelled it at a windowsill two floors above the one she pressed herself against. Her initial plan to just harpoon herself into the wall and crawl up was stymied by the fact that the material said wall was made of was still resistant to damage despite her upgrades. Which… made sense, yeah, since these structures had lasted for centuries, if not millennia without any noticeable issue.

  She tried doing the same with the rock face, but that had the opposite issue of being too unstable to support her weight - and as much as it pained her to admit it, she weighed quite a bit owing to the fact that she was a literal concentrated mass of liquid metal. She would have tried spreading herself across the cliff in a thin film and crawl up like a starfish or something, but the issue with that was visibility. Crawling up the walls as a literal tide of metal wasn’t exactly subtle, and she did not want the Nox to catch her red handed with their prized artifact. She would revisit the idea when she was able to upgrade herself to the point she could change colors and textures for better camouflage.

  The solution to this accomplishment of Nox engineering, was ironically the ventilation; their need for windows, and their need for elaborate detailing liberally lining the entire surface. Grappling hooks was the way, it seemed.

  She fired the hook, and it caught. She then allowed it to relax and flow into the gaps between the windows and around the protrusions and decorations before solidifying. Elyra gave it a tug, checking to see if it would hold.

  Success.

  She then proceeded to slowly send her mass along the line, collecting at the top. After she managed to collect herself, she reoriented and repeated the process, until she reached the narrow ‘alley’ between the two buildings she remembered leading to the Ancestral Woods.

  She finally found herself at the edges of the splintered Nox settlement, and stared up at the narrow valley between the rock face she knew led to freedom.

  She remembered the sheer lengths she had gone through to scale those heights before - she had made her way through and explored most of Nokron, sometimes literally making away with everything not nailed down or held by anyone with any particular power or skill.

  Each and every one of those times felt like a personal expedition in of itself, requiring months of travel time for her to get to anywhere of note. But now? Elyra smiled as she fired dozens of harpoons of liquid metal into the cliff face, and practically slingshot her entire mass over the edge, even as the rock crumbled under her not-so tender grip.

  She plopped down, and relaxed, letting out a deliberate breath from her artificial lungs. She then laughed, in exhilaration, in relief, in sheer unadulterated triumph.

  She stared at the spot on the ground where she knew for certain existed a site of grace. She waved her newly articulate hand through the space and felt a brief flicker of warmth and otherworldly peace and purpose. But she did not yet see it. It was an improvement from her last attempt, but it seemed neither the giant angry space amoeba, nor its vessel-god has yet to see it fit to grant her grace. Elyra sighed, but she was still optimistic.

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  The fact that she felt something was indicative that she was indeed on the right track. Perhaps if she tried again after she fully morphed into the ‘human’ figure that seemed to be the current Elden Beast approved meta, she would find success. She was certain she could eventually trick it into granting her grace… eventually. She had no intention to stay in human form once she attained her goal - transhumanism for the win - but she was fairly certain she had the drive to hold onto grace after she was granted it.

  In the distance, she heard a haunting yet beautiful melody drifting through the wind. She approached it sedately, enjoying the music as she approached the rather large grey skinned woman in tribal fur clothing and a pair of glowing antlers atop her head singing as she was surrounded by deer and various forest critters swaying in harmony.

  The woman noticed Elyra as she approached, and smiled. The Ancestral Followers were a relatively peaceful bunch if they didn’t consider you a threat, and while she didn’t exactly fit into their society, their familiarity with the Mimic Tears and the fact that Elyra stayed for their music and rituals had them acclimating to her occasional presence over the months. She was fairly certain they saw her the same way one would see a particularly adorable stray cat or something.

  She stayed there for about half an hour, before she finally moved on.

  Her exit into the lands between proper lay south, but before that she had one last stop. Elyra slowly made her way North, past the mystical forest full of spectral jellyfish, dropped down the cliff onto a rocky ledge, walked through a small cave that led to an opening that overlooked the inverted towers that hung from the sky-ceiling.

  She dropped down onto one of the buttresses bracing the closest inverted tower against the gargantuan cavern’s wall, and waited for the heavy metal boots of the patrolling Crucible knight, a massive armored figure clad in red-gold armor bearing an equally massive set of sword and shield. He had an axe-themed helmet. Not the one she was looking for then.

  She moved further into the winding structures and the floating bridges that connected them, before eventually finding her target standing at attention overlooking the perpetual waterfall that flowed down the Siofra Aqueduct.

  Elyra slowly approached the knight, who turned as he heard her heavy footsteps splashing through the flowing water. He too was a Crucible Knight, clad in ornate red-gold armor and clad in spiraling crucible-tree iconography and a small fur cape. Notable, his helmet bore tree-like horns that curled above his head like a crown, and in his hand was a massive spear with a multilayered cone of curling branches, or horns. You could never tell with the crucible, and she wasn’t close enough to say for certain what it was made of.

  Whatever the case, the knight initially tensed at her appearance - an simulacrum of what she remembered her old human body looked like wearing an imitation of a nox sworstresses robes. But tellingly, composed entirely of a deep, dark silver. It was the only set of clothing she had managed to get her hands on and replicate, but it was sufficient for its purpose; to show him a deliberate sign of intelligence. First impressions mattered, after all and it was crucial that hers hit the target as intended. After all, he held the next piece of the puzzle to her ascension. And as much as she was confident she would eventually prevail if a fight broke out - most likely by shoving liquid metal down his throat, there was a significant enough gap in skill between them that even her advantage in sheer power and durability wouldn’t matter. This was one the Lands Between’s best, after all.

  “Before you strike me down, knight of Lord Godfrey, I ask of you to listen for but a moment.”

  The knight halted, just as he raised his spear off the ground.

  “I have come to bargain.”

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