Alex scowled at Cedric. He didn’t even feel like hearing the man’s voice anymore. Things would make much more sense if he was some kind of evil traitor instead of a pathetic loser who conned his way into their trust.
So instead of worrying about him, he brought his mind back to the problem at hand. The Kruwal attacking the town. A sorcerer powerful enough to play with him and Valerian like a cat does with its food working with them. More than that, they’d gone through with his plan for nothing. Alex and Valerian almost died, three guards did, and now Daven was missing.
What a mess, he thought, putting his head down on the bar.
There was a stretch of silence between them as if they’d all gone internal, and it lasted until Valerian asked them to follow him to another table. Rising from his stool, Alex let the paladin and Diana lead the way to a quieter corner of the common room, and more importantly, away from Cedric.
Traitor or not, the man had lost the right to be in their confidence. The former crew leader seemed saddened at his exclusion, but didn’t pursue them. He turned to his ale instead.
Valerian waited for them to settle before he spoke again. “What about the coins,” he asked quietly. “I do not recall what happened with mine, but last we know Daven still had his, no?”
Sitting beside him, Diana nodded, but it wasn’t a hopeful thing. “Probably, yes, as the two of you still had your coins when you were brought back. The healer handed them over.”
“Then what’s the issue?” Alex asked. “You can just do that thing where you can focus on only a single coin and we’ll follow it to Daven.”
“I told you.” She sighed. “It’s not that simple. The arcane signal can only travel so far. The receiver has to be close enough to the anchor for it to work. I’ve tried, believe me. Almost gave myself another week of mana exhaustion by pouring so much arcane power into the anchor, but it didn’t heat up for a single second. We’re too far away from wherever he is.”
Ah, right, he chastened himself. He'd forgotten about that. Despite him thinking about it as a sort of GPS system, the way power worked in this world wasn’t quite so straightforward.
It brought to mind what the Reaper had said back in Riverbend. It takes an infinite amount of power to make a trace last infinitely. Did that mean that if they had infinite power, the anchor’s signal could reach anywhere in the world?
Quickly glancing at his status page, Alex saw the remaining skill point still available. He could put it in Arcane Proficiency and try it himself, but his concept of his own power had already been humbled recently. He doubted he could produce enough power when Diana herself couldn’t. Her performance at the bridge was proof enough, as even his most powerful traces couldn’t match that.
But that didn’t mean he couldn’t try adding his own power to hers.
“What about if you had enough power to make it work?” he asked.
She looked at him strangely, as if not understanding where he was going with the hypothetical. Without hesitating, he put his remaining skill point into Arcane Proficiency, lifted a hand up, and pulled on the heat inside him to make one of his fingers glow a faint blue.
Diana’s eyes widened at that. “What?! You can use arcane power now? How? Since when?”
“Very recent,” he said, then waved the barrage of questions he knew were coming his way. “Look, let’s focus here. Maybe it’ll work with both of us powering the anchor, right?”
She swallowed her next words and gave him a tight nod. “Right.” Reaching into her pant’s pocket, she took out the anchor halo and put it on the table with the runes side up. She put one of her fingers on top of it, and a second later, the runic clusters carved into the coin lit up the same shade of blue.
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“Do I just use my mana to pour power into it?” he asked, looking down wearily at it. “I haven’t really used arcane power before, so I’m kind of clueless here.” That, at least, was true.
She nodded. “Just make sure to control the flow of it,” she said. “Start slowly and ramp up until I tell you to stop. Too much power and we’re more likely to destroy it.”
“I didn’t know that,” he admitted. Following her advice, he placed his glowing finger beside hers on the silver halo and carefully began to pour power into it. Nothing happened for a few seconds, until finally he saw his mana tick down by one point on the edges of his vision.
MP: 179/180
“A bit more,” Diana said, frowning in focus. In response, Alex let go of the tight control he’d taken and felt the energy flowing from him expand from a trickle to a stream.
Arcane power felt different than using his fire powers, or even the lightning, though his memory was quite foggy around that. He didn’t think there was an external manifestation for it, unlike all the other elements he’d come across so far. And despite being produced from the same heat that was the power coursing through the arteries in his body, the arcane energy left a cool, soothing feeling as it flowed from his finger into the halo.
Mana trickled down faster now, yet the coin on the table kept glowing a softblue despite the increasing input of power. He narrowed his eyes at it.
Diana noticed his confusion. “It’s using all the extra power to send the signal as far as it can,” she explained. A bead of sweat rolled down the side of her face as she used more and more mana on the coin.
Alex did the same, letting the floodgates open as the stream of power became a torrent. The cool sensation that had been restricted to his finger now spread like a wave throughout his whole body, and a sense of calm washed over him.
On his status screen, his mana shrank in chunks now.
MP: 130/180
MP: 122/180
MP: 115/180
MP: 106/180
After another minute of that, the halo remained unchanged. It didn’t vibrate, it didn't heat up. Diana sighed across from him. “We can stop,” she said, taking her finger away from the coin. “If nothing’s showing by now, then we just don’t have enough power for how far away the receiver is.”
Nodding, he let the power run free for another heartbeat before he reined it in. That was something else. He took a deep breath as the ambiguous feeling of cool arcane energy and warm power retreated from his body. His idea hadn’t worked, but if nothing else, it would be an amazing meditation aid.
“Wouldn’t more power just destroy it like you said?” he asked, curious about his new proficiency.
“Eventually, yes,” she explained. “There’s an optimal amount somewhere in the middle, but an artifact like this has a hard limit. Silver coins serve as good enough anchors for these kinds of runes, but they weren’t made to handle too much power. They grow unstable with time and use.”
“Wait.” He raised a hand. “Are you saying they have some kind of expiration date on them?”
She frowned at his choice of words, but nodded nonetheless. “You could say that,” she allowed. “Back before we first went to the Riverbend dungeon, I made that Siren in a rush using simple wood. I just wanted something to leave by the wagon while we went out into the forest after we heard your explosion. The pieces of bark were from the same tree, so they already had a strong connection with each other. Even then, if I had moved with the anchor too far away, or if we’d taken longer than a few minutes, the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. That’s how little it takes for the runes on a random piece of wood to become unstable.”
“That… makes sense,” he said, then pointed at the halo on the table. “But you said it yourself, these coins’ connections work ‘on many different planes’. And silver should work way better than pieces of bark.”
“Relatively, yes. But the mage who taught me the little I know said that the best runesmiths use all kinds of rare metals, gems, and even loot from dungeons to make longer-lasting relics and amplifiers. Silver coins are better than wood, of course, but eventually…”
This time, it was Valerian that understood her first. “The coins will not work for much longer, will they?” he said, and judging by Diana’s face, he already knew the answer. “How long?”
Her lips pursed. “I don’t know when it will happen, but they weren’t made to last more than a few days, and two have already gone.”
Her words settled like pall over them. Valerian sat back in his seat, grim and contemplative. Tall and wide as he was, he looked like a father sitting on his children’s play chair. The weight of the last few days seemed to catch up with Diana as they sat there in silence. Her fists clenched over the table, teardrops falling onto the wood as she looked down at it.
She’s blaming herself for the coins not working, he realized. In that case, shouldn’t he be the one to blame? It was because of his plan that her brother was missing, after all, but he knew he couldn’t think like that. Even if that was true, regretting it wouldn’t change their situation.
Forward, he thought back to his sister’s advice. The only one he still followed. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it?
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