Kornos stood in the middle of the chapel of the Returned. His arms were crossed, and his eyes closed, though he was far from defenseless or inattentive.

Evelyn lurked around him, moving from cover to cover in a constant approach to her target.

The dragon-lion man awaited patiently, his scaly tail —now long enough to actually touch the floor under him— swung from right to left, betraying his excitement behind his calm demeanor.

Evelyn smirked at her battle mentor's cute animal quirk. He was actually really happy they were doing this, but of course, he had to be the adult about it.

The black-haired woman ran from her hiding spot and leaped into a round kick to the chimera's face, which he easily blocked with a big scaly and hairy paw, not even looking in her direction.

Without losing momentum, Evelyn twisted her body to switch to a hammer kick with the other leg, but Kornos just grabbed the leg already in his paw and threw her across the room like a sack of potatoes.

Hitting the floor hard and recovering just as quickly was one of the first things he had ever taught her to do. Her stamina and resilience were above those of any normal person, thanks to having a boost to her Endurance, so getting hit and thrown around a lot was most of what she did at the start of her training years ago.

Evelyn fell into her shoulder, dislocating it in the process, rolled over, and crashed into a column. Cleaning the dribble of blood falling from her nose with the sleeve of Mama Anima's black leather jacket, she stood up and fixed her shoulder hititng it against the column with a hard crack.

She scuffed at the lion man, nodding to herself before going into the offensive again. She tried another tactic, this time going from run down into a slide at a lower point, using their height difference to hit directly at his groin with a kick. As he went to move his hand to grab her leg again, she proved the underhanded attack a feint by receding her leg just in time to fully slide under and behind him.

With a cloud of mana dust, she summoned her metal staff and struck at his ankles, then the back of his knees in rapid succession, just as she was getting up. Without letting him any time, she used the staff as a jumping pole to propel herself over him and gave him a good whack in the face as she fell back in front of him.

Now armed with her signature weapon, the one she had fought and killed monsters and raiders the most with, she was feeling confident in her abilities.

She knew it would have little effect on him, of course. That's why she could afford to go for the kill with every consecutive strike.

Larynx, eyes, skull, ribs, kidneys, heart, lungs... Evelyn entered a trance of deadly, precise blows, one after the other, using the metal staff as an extension of herself, combining it with kicks, punches, and a final headbutt directly to Kornos' face at the end.

After almost half an hour of pummeling away, Evelyn was finally starting to feel a little tired, while Kornos showed no sign of injury at all. In fact, he had not moved from his starting position. Not even one step.

"Your Rising Oak has gotten acceptable, good use of my increased height and mass there, but your Crossing River and Mountain Fall need improvement. You need to keep up with your nemas every day, don't get cocky because you got Skills now. I've fought plenty of powerful Classers and still won because they were overconfident in raw power over technique, and kept relying on Skills and Stats too much. And yet, while technique and creativity can get you pretty far, it's just as important to always know when you are just outclassed. The superior Tier always wins among fighters, no matter what type of opponent you are facing, person or monster. Always remember that, little pup."

He had always said the same kind of thing at the end of a sparring session, criticizing and correcting her mastery of the nemas—the name Kornos had discovered of the movements of an ancient martial art he had learned and mastered himself in his research into the lost culture of the past thad had left hidden temples like the Last Glade behind— every single time for years, but Evelyn nodded in serious understanding anyway, as always.

She wasn't the type to ignore the wisdom of those who taught her out of cockyness or misguided youthful defiance. Those who fell into either died early or lost their way. Evelyn had made solemn vows to do neither.

And even so, with her newfound emotions, there was a tinge of hurt pride at not being able to make him budge at all. The feeling was new to her, uncomfortable and undesirable, clashing against her natural pragmatism, but just as curious to observe, like a new ugly toy from an exclusive collection.

Evelyn had studied others enough to be able to rationalize what it was exactly that she was feeling, but being on the receiving end of spontaneous emotions was exhilarating, even when they were the more upsetting kind.

"Now, let's get to the main event. Get back in position and try to fight me like a Classer." He announced, excitement in his voice.

Evelyn smiled back at him and went into hiding behind a column, changing positions around the covers in the chapel chamber as she would in a battle scenario.

She took a piece of metal from her Inventory and threw it at him as she activated one of her new Skills.

"[Hylosynthesis]" She whispered, focusing her mana into the projectile. There was a seed of doubt in her, unsure if it would really work. Years of being subject to a total lack of control over her own powers, of suffering the consequences of their unwilling activation, had left her with fear of this not being actually real.

The moment it flew from her hand, amber colored mana enveloped it, causing an all too familiar reaction. Metal vines grew rapidly from the piece of metal, along with the expected jagged blade leaves. Evelyn punched the air with a huge grin on her face and some wetness in her left amber eye.

She really could control it now. She actually had a functioning Skill.

That rush of happiness —one of the positive emotions that now came as easily to her as the use of her mana— lasted for just a couple of seconds, before Kornos stepped to the side to avoid the coming flying blades.

"Sloppy." He said nonchalantly with a slight chuckle. "Actually, try to hit me this time, will you? Otherwise, this is gonna get boring very fast."

Oh, so now you are in cheeky-trainer mode? Alright. Let's turn up the heat then.

Evelyn pulled out a bunch of small pieces of metal from her Inventory in a series of puffs of dust clouds and threw them as she activated her Skill once more, this time from behind one of the remaining columns.

"[Hylosynthesis]! Let's see what this does now!" She dared him, with the confidence of knowing that even if he was hit, he would hardly get hurt, if at all. Evelyn wasn't confident to the point of foolishness to believe a newly made Tier 1 Skill would be even an inconvenience to a late Tier 4 like Kornos. She may be considerably more emotional now —which she was beginning to admit, would take as much time as her Skills to get used to— but that hadn't suddenly eliminated her analytical mind or her general prudence.

She was still hoping to cause at least a bit of an itch with that attack.

Several of the pieces of metal illuminated with the same amber mana, before more bladed vines erupted from them, the metal having taken a slight orange change in hue due to the extra mana.

This time, Kornos stood still and took the front of the attack without moving a muscle. The blade leaves uselessly hit against his hard dragon scales, either bouncing off or breaking apart.

They are more fragile if I make too many of them with a single activation. Good to know. It may get solved at higher levels of expertise. It's just Apprentice level after.

"That was interesting, but still not even worth reacting to. It may do some damage to unarmored Tier 1 enemies, but you need to focus your mana better if you really want to do some damage to it." Pointed Kornos with a frown. "Come on, little pup, even the ones you made yesterday in your sleep were better than these. With control comes the necessity for focus if you want to exert the right amount of power."

He opened his arms and got into a receiving position."Give it your all this time. Either you show me you can do this, or we are going home. No excuses, that was our deal. Now stop messing around and HIT ME."

Evelyn pouted, annoyed by not being able to retort to that. He was absolutely right. If she couldn't even use her Action Skill to attack properly, she would be about the same as before she got it.

Weak.

She got out of her cover and walked in front of Kornos with a determined expression.

The mana channelled into the pieces of metal had felt weaker as they left her hand. The more she had tried to create at once, the structural integrity had diminished to the point of becoming brittle. But it wasn't just that.

It felt like the Skill quickly lost stability as soon as she was no longer touching the metal affected by it.

So, she decided it was time to bet on Alice's work once more.

Evelyn ran towards Kornos, focusing her mana, shaping it in a very specific part of her person.

"[Hylosynthesis]!" She screamed, punching forward with her crimson runitronic arm.

From the moment she spoke the word, Evellyn felt the immediate difference. In the metal limb attached to her body, the mana concentrated much more intensely. Power was flowing from her Core in a stream rather than a trickle. A solid and constant connection, not like the ephemeral activation when she had thrown the pieces of metal just before.

This time it felt right.

A single metal vine exploded out of her arm, growing in the direction her will had wished it to go. It was the way it looked that surprised Evelyn the most. It was nothing like any of the other times, not even when they manifested during her nightmares.

The technorganic plant wasn't just plain shaped metal, not even the same crimson color that her arm was, but a deep jet black more similar to her own hair, with patterns of bright amber circuits through it. The blade leaves weren't inanimate either, but actually full of life, with glowing veins of similar amber circuitry in which she noticed her mana was pulsing like blood, pushing them to grow farther and stronger with each pulsation.

Her arm was now like a portal to a forest of living metal, creating more mass than what the implant itself contained.

The blade vine reached Kornos all the way from almost ten meters away. Like serpentine cables, they coiled around one of his arms, cutting into his scales as Evelyn felt them move and thirstily drink in Kornos own blood, like they were an actual extension of her body.

Not only was it physically protruding from her runitronic limb, but her senses were actually connected to it as an extension of the implant. Evelyn sent even more mana and pulled on the blade vine, cutting Kornos arm like the inside of a blender.

He grimaced, visibly uncomfortable with the experience, but not even a groan escaped his lips.

Before the living cable of jagged knives had finished retracting into her arm, the open wounds in Kornos' bloody arm had already stopped bleeding.

But she had done it. For the first time, after years of training under him and receiving the greatest of one-sided pummelings at his hands, Evelyn had finally managed to hurt the invincible King Chimera.

"Yes! I did it! I can actually control it! I can fight with my own Skill!" She celebrated, hopping in the air.

"Evelyn," Kornos called her attention. "Look."

She watched as Kornos cleaned up some of the blood on his arm, showing a scaly forearm. Only in the parts that had come into direct contact with the blade leaves, there was just bare bloody skin, its wounds closing very slowly.

"What am I looking at? Did they fall off?"

He shook his head, a strange expression on his face. "No, Evelyn. I didn't feel them break; they are just gone. Your attack erased them, somehow."

Evelyn considered what her battle instructor was actually saying carefully. There is nothing about such an effect in the description of the Skill.

"I don't think it was the blades themselves that did that. My [Hylosynthesis] is supposed to create different plants depending of what material I use, there's no other effect in the Overseer's description that could have done something like that."

They both watched as orange-red hair started to grow where the wounds had already closed. The hair then solidified into thicker and thicker strands, fusing into new scales, like weaving fabric into armor.

"Good to know it's not forever. Oh! Sorry, Kornos." She apologized, understanding what must have gone through his head: that if she did that to his whole body, it could have made him look human again.

"Don't worry about it, little pup." He reassured her, hiding a slight disappointment as he saw the scales and dense hair appear once more. "Still, that's a very useful secondary effect. You should test if it happens consistently with different Skills and direct applications of mana. You are gonna do some serious damage once you start going up in Mastery levels with that Skill, so get used to practicing at every moment you can. And about that additional effect... if it's not part of that one Class Skill, then... it may be one of your hidden Aspect Skills."

She nodded, having come to a similar conclusion herself. "The Overseer tried really hard to block me from accessing this mysterious Aspect, but it couldn't do it. Which means it's still available to me, whatever it may be or do." Evelyn looked at her own human hand, thoughtful. "If it gives me some sort of Skill nullifying effect, that's gonna be very useful, but I don't know. I feel like it's something else entirely. It's a gut feeling of sorts."

Kornos rubbed his chin, curious. "What do you think it is? If you didn't activate it yourself, seems good to assume it's the passive Skill of that Aspect."

Evelyn played around with the blade vines growing out of her crimson arm, ordering them to move in specific ways to test her control. Precision was hard, and the response time was still too slow for her liking. It was like moving a numb toe after sitting for too long on your legs. She would need to practice constantly to get used to the feeling of having her senses stretched into additional matter like that.

"I think..." she paused, unsure, before following that particular feeling in her chest. "... I think it's not Skill nullifying. I'm not sure how I know that or what it actually is yet, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to discard that."

"Okay. It's your Aspect, so discovering what its Aspect Skills are is up to you. What worries me is what comes with having an Aspect."

"You mean the ghost in the flesh." She acknowledged, to his affirmation with a slight nod.

"Every Aspect carries the remnant will of the creature it comes from. A Chimera must fight it, conquer it, and assimilate it as part of themselves rather than a separate one. It's a dance, an inner war, and a negotiation all at once. But you don't even know what type of entity gave you that Aspect. You know nothing about it, and that's extremely dangerous. You are fighting a hidden enemy with no weapons on you, trying to convince it to give up the fight before you even saw it once."

He growled softly, shaking his head. "I worry this will become a problem very soon. We need to know what kind of mafu they put inside you in that damned underground lab. You having consumed one already before also explains why you would not take another those times we tried in the past: you haven't even finished assimilating this one, so you are technically still a Tier 1 Chimera. You won't be able to get any new Aspects until you make your peace with this one."

Evelyn switched her weight from one leg to another, crossing her arms in a very similar way to her master. "Speaking of that, are we gonna ignore the dragon in the room then?"

"Don't change the subject, little pup." He warned, annoyed, but Evelyn was relentless.

What was happening to him could not be left unaddressed.

"I've never seen you lose control that way before. That dragon Aspect was pretty much driving your body around like it was theirs."

Kornos turned around, scoffing. "No mincing of words with you, as usual." He grabbed a big piece of sharp glass from one of the broken display cases between two of his thick scaly fingers. His reflection on it showed a pair of dragon eyes brimming with something more than just power. "I got it under control. We are coming to an understanding, learning about each other." His voice changed slightly, just enough for Evelyn to tense up. "We would appreciate your trust."

"Can you promise that?" She asked, deeply alarmed about his switch back to using we when referring to himself. That was definitely not a good sign. "You are the one who taught me how easy it is for a mutant to lose themselves to their Aspect. To slowly see their sense of self degrade as the human they were gets overwritten until they aren't the same anymore. Even more for Chimeras, who must keep multiple Aspects under control and working in tandem. I just..."

"We will not argue this matter any further!" He roared, snapping back, teeth bare. "Our treasure was stolen, and we will get it back! We will not be denied that which is ours!"

There was a tense silence for a moment before Kornos realized what he had just said, looking down apologetically in shame. "There is an adjustment period. I'm sorry that you must see me this way. You are used to the stable Kornos. But it hasn't always been so. I earn my inner peace with hard work, training, and meditation. I fight every single day to keep it that way. To stay me." He closed his fist, crushing the glass inside with a crunch.

"But you are right. There's something different about this Aspect. I don't know if it's because it's a dragon type or because it's my fourth Aspect. It has not yet revealed enough details about itself to know what specific creature it really is, besides just being categorized as a dragon, so I go with what I know from that family. None of the others ever gave me this much trouble, though. Not the sphinx, the manticore, or the griffon."

He chuckled darkly, shaking his head as if remembering a bad joke.

"I dreamed of growing wings my whole life, you know?. That I could just take off and go over the walls, where no authority would be able to stop me anymore. That I could see the wild and untamed outside world, away from the constraints of Neo Vorath, without having to go through another Frontier War. That was always my dream as a young man. That's why I kept choosing mafus from winged monsters. I abandoned it for a while, admittedly, but now it has taken the form of taking you and Alice with me instead, away from this voracious city and its damned nobles, may the All-Mother damn them all."

Recovered from the shock of seeing the usually reliable and self-controlled man lose not only his composure but his entire persona, albeit momentarily, Evelyn gave him a kind smile, seeking to ease the floating tension.

I can read people like a book most of the time, yet I can't help saying things in the worst way possible just as often. What a good job I do being utter social puffdust.

"And all those monsters you chose just so happened to be part lion, too, huh?. So much monster pride put together into such a humble man." She pointed sarcastically, yet lovingly, in an attempt to move her mind away from his concerning outburst. "You are allowed to not be perfect, you know? But I need you to be honest with me if you are not okay. Also, I'm gonna put that whole possessive spiel just now on the dragon and not you, but if I ever hear you speak of Alice like she's a thing you own again, I'm gonna punch you in the face so hard you may be able to feel it. Deal?"

Kornos chuckled in amusement, recognizing her usual clumsy way of smoothing an awkward situation. Good thing they knew each other enough for him to be ready to accept her threat as the peace offering it actually was.

"Deal. I would expect nothing less, little pup. I would punch myself too." He admitted before remembering something. "I have something to give you. I'll be back in a moment. I left it on a nearby roof on the way in; it was too heavy to bring all the way back while also carrying you both. In the meantime, try using your Utility Skill. And keep up with practicing your artes. You need to learn how to adjust your fighting style to your Skills and growing Stats by yourself, so you are not getting out of your daily practice just because you have almost a proper Class."

He opened his fist, letting the glass, now reduced to dust, fall to the floor. "Maybe try using your Action Skill with other materials as well. There is plenty in this museum for that."

"What are you going to get?"

"Something you left behind. It will be fast." He assured her. "Do take good care of yourself, okay? Remember that you are now living for two."

Evelyn's crimson hand touched her chest, feeling a warmth inside her Core, where not only Alice's Core was now plugging its hole, but now her runicron body was stored after Evelyn used Inventory on it.

"I promise. There are some things I want to test myself on. Besides, in how much trouble could I get into in the time it takes you to return? Give me some dusting credit, big guy."

He nodded, then went to the balcony where they had watched the first rise of the sun in many years and took off into the sky.

"Now then," she said to herself, "I believe it's time to try my full skill set without any parental supervision. Let's see what [Verdant Toolset] can do with a museum's worth of materials."