The ground beneath his left foot frosted first and then the frost spread outward, moving across the rocky terrain in a widening ring, and in the distance, far beyond where he could see clearly, the same process was propagating at scale, the extreme cold radiating outward from him in a direction and a distance that told him something about what was actually being released.

His right side went hot.

The opposite extreme, equally total, the right half of his body burning at a temperature that turned the rock beneath his right foot soft almost immediately and then liquid, a pool of melted stone forming and spreading outward.

And in the far distance on the right side of the field the ground was shifting and cracking and in places opening as the heat propagated through the substrata and expressed itself in the way that extreme heat expressed itself in geological material.

Both extremes simultaneously, both total, both spreading outward across dozens of kilometres in their respective directions from the single point where he stood.

Freya observed this from wherever she observed things, which was inside him and everywhere at once, and she was quiet during it in a way that was not the quiet of someone with nothing to think about but the quiet of someone thinking about several significant things simultaneously.

She watched him hold the method through the full duration of what it required, which was long, which was the kind of long that had hours inside it rather than minutes, the absorption process consuming the entirety of what it needed to consume before it reached completion.

She thought about the competition between their fathers, about Jackal and her father and the children they had sent into impossible situations across years and distance, the ones who had not survived and the ones who had survived and then been broken by what survival had cost them.

She had survived and been trapped in a realm that was its own kind of death, and she had survived that too, and now she was here, inside a phantom who had come up from nothing on a mid-tier planet and was currently standing in the centre of a geological event of his own making without stopping.

She thought about what they could do together.

Once she had her body back, once Neil had reached the fifth Origin with all of what he currently had and all of what he would develop between here and there, the two of them with her sealing ability and his range and the compounding of what they each were, those two phantom fathers and their competition and everything it had cost everyone who had been caught inside it, it was not an untouchable thing anymore.

It was a problem with a solution that was still some distance away but was visible.

Her mother was already gone and that was a grief she had been carrying for long enough that it had found its place in her, but Neil’s mother was not gone, was currently held rather than lost, and that was a different situation with different implications.

She did not examine the feeling this produced too closely. She had not been in the habit of examining her feelings closely for a long time, because the conditions she had been living in had not rewarded that kind of examination.

But she registered it, the warmth that was not temperature but was something adjacent to care, the specific quality of finding someone whose situation mirrors yours closely enough that resentment becomes impossible and something else takes its place instead.

Magnar sat on the volcanic ground on the right side of the field, fifty metres from the nearest lava flow, entirely unbothered by the temperature and in fact visibly comfortable, his body settled low with his chin on his forelegs and his amber eyes on his master’s distant figure with the patient and undemanding attention of a familiar who was going to be there when it ended regardless of how long ending took.

The lava was Magnar’s element in the literal sense and he was not merely tolerating it but enjoying it, his scales absorbing the heat with a satisfaction that was evident in the looseness of his body and the occasional very slow movement of his tail.

Twelve hours.

Neil stood through twelve hours of it, the absorption ongoing, the dual extremes propagating and sustaining, the cracks in his cores held open and active while they processed the vast incoming volume of transformed energy, his healing working constantly against the structural damage to keep the cracks from becoming fractures and the fractures from becoming the thing they would become if he had been anyone other than what he was.

He did not stop.

He did not pause.

He did not hesitate once in the entire twelve hours, which Freya noted with the quiet and internal version of the acknowledgment that something has been done that could not have been done by most of the people she had encountered in her existence.

The absorption completed.

The energy conversion reached one hundred percent.

The ruptures in his cores, no longer needed for their structural purpose, began to close.

Neil lowered his hands, which he had raised at some point during the process without having made a conscious decision to raise them, and the darkish blue-red flame that burst from his palm when he did was not a controlled manifestation but a natural one, the pressure of what was now inside him expressing itself through the path of least resistance, the crackling of the air around it not a dramatic effect but the actual sound of energy density interacting with atmosphere.

He looked at the flame for a moment.

Then he closed his hand and it went out.

The left side of the field was still frosted kilometres out, the frost patterns intricate and total, covering every surface and catching the overcast light in ways that made the landscape look entirely different from what it had been that morning.

The right side of the field was volcanic, lava flows cooling at their edges while the central section remained active, steam rising where the extreme temperatures of the two sides met in the space around him.

He was standing in the precise centre of it, on the only patch of ground that was neither frozen nor melted, and he was so exhausted that the exhaustion was its own kind of experience, the total depletion of something that had given everything it had for twelve consecutive hours and had nothing remaining to give.

He was not going to be functional for several days.

He knew this with the certainty of direct physical knowledge rather than estimation, the cores still in the process of healing despite the speed of his recovery, the structural repair ongoing and requiring resources that his body would need rest to generate.

He sat down on the unmodified ground beneath him, which seemed like the appropriate response to his current state.

Magnar was there within thirty seconds, covering the distance from the volcanic field at a run and arriving with the particular energy of a familiar who has been waiting for a very long time and is expressing relief through proximity rather than sound.

He pressed against Neil’s side with his full weight, which was considerable, and stayed there.

Neil put his hand on Magnar’s head.

"Saturated cores." He said. "Energy fully converted. Peak of the third Origin." He paused. "Just need one more second Order Diamond class domain core and we can evolve."

Magnar made a sound that was agreement and warmth and tiredness all at once.

Freya spoke quietly.

"Before you sleep." She said. "The fruit."

Neil looked up.

"Your condition will take days to recover without it." She continued. "The cores are healing but slowly even for you. The fruit Shadow gave you has no impurities, I confirmed it thoroughly. There is nothing in it that poses a threat and everything in it that resolves exactly the problem you are currently experiencing." A pause.

"Eat it now, while your body is in this state and the integration will be maximally effective."

Neil reached into his coat and produced the golden fruit that Shadow had thrown to him on the path home, the one he had carried since then with the appropriate scepticism of someone who had not yet had enough independent confirmation to act on.

He had Nemo’s confirmation.

He had Freya’s confirmation.

He had Shadow’s own explanation, and the clarity of the gift’s intent, and the fact that everything else Shadow had told him had been accurate in ways he could verify.

He looked at the fruit.

Freya, who had been inside him long enough to read his decision-making the way you learned to read a language through immersion, simply waited without pushing.

Neil ate the fruit.

The effect was immediate and it was not subtle and it was not comparable to anything else he had experienced in the category of treatments and treasures and recovery methods, because those things were all, in various ways, fixing something broken by filling a gap or repairing a function.

This was not that.

The heat that moved through him was not the external heat of the right-side field or the absorbed energy of the cores, it was something intrinsic, coming from the fruit itself, moving through his body with the specific intelligence of something that had been made for exactly this purpose and knew precisely where to apply itself.

The cracks in the cores that had been healing slowly closed completely in moments, it was so rapid.

They were now back to their peak, no might be even better, enhancing further and even increasing the amount of energy

❖❖❖

Thanks for reading...