"Are you keeping an eye on me?" A pool of tar-like substance had formed below Phloria. Its stench was so terrible that it almost made the girls faint.
"Always. Don't worry, I'm the only one that can see in there due to my bond with Solus."
"I'm sorry." Friya sighed. "I shouldn't have taken it out on you. I know that even though you two are no longer together you care for Phloria. It's just that I feel so helpless and scared that my mouth ran wild."
"There's no need to apologize. I would feel the same if I didn't have years to prepare for this moment. Also, I didn't let Phloria hear your earlier outburst, so we can pretend it never happened." Lith held her hand and Friya finally let the emotions from that horrible day overwhelm her.
She had almost been killed by the Ghouls, met Baba Yaga, been betrayed by the army, half of her guildmates were dead, and now she risked losing one of the most important people of her life.
The events transpired in the last few hours were a burden too great for anyone to bear.
Friya forced Lith to stand up and hugged him as tight as she could, losing herself in his apparently endless strength as she had done during the academy's second exam.
"Thanks. Kamila is a lucky woman." Friya suddenly felt so weak that she had to sit down. "By the way, does she know about all this and what is your relationship with Solus exactly?"
"Since I don't know how long will it take to end phase one, I might as well tell you everything. Phloria could use a distraction to endure her pain." Lith said.
"Much appreciated, thanks." Phloria said. Hearing the voices of her sisters, Solus, and Lith helped her to not think too much about the passing of time.
Lith couldn't tell them about his rebirth so he moved his self-Awakening at four years of age and started from there. He told them how he had used his powers to hunt, to treat Tista's symptoms, and how he had met Solus and Protector in the same day.
"I still remember that awful sound stinging my poor ears and the obnoxious runt trying to kill me." Protector said with nostalgia. "I'm the one who gave him the name Scourge, you know?"
Lith then told them all that had happened until Solus had assumed her tower form for the first time.
"Wait, so she is the tower?" Phloria was flabbergasted.
"She's much more than that. Solus is always by my side in her ring form and until a while ago, we shared one mind and one body. I'm not going to lie, a good chunk of my academic success is thanks to her." Lith said.
"We studied everything together." Solus nodded. "Also, I'm not a tower, I'm a hybrid as well. Yet unlike anyone else, I'm a human-artifact hybrid. Without my human half, I would be just another cursed object, like Dawn or the Black Star."
The implications of such words were hard for everyone, but they were much worse for Phloria. She remembered how Lith never took off the stone ring, not even while in his sickbed after saving Protector's life.
'Just how much has Lith shared with Solus and how big of a role did she play in our relationship, break up included?' Phloria thought as a searing wave of pain ravaged her body.
Her agony had become so intense that she couldn't hold back the screams anymore.
"What's going on?" Friya asked.
"We've entered phase two. Due to the changes, Phloria's body has expelled most of the impurities and without their interference, the Awakening process is going too fast." Lith said.
He took a deep scan of Phloria's condition, allowing Solus to adjust the mana output of the magic circle that surrounded their friend until they found a new balance. Solus called upon both the world energy coming from the mana geyser and that from the tower's crystal mine.
They worked relentlessly until the counter pressure the circle generated not only stemmed the mana flow from Phloria's core, but also kept more impurities from leaving her body.
With their natural mana inhibiting factor, the impurities stopped Phloria's body from breaking down faster than it could recover. Her hair and nails had fallen off just to regrow so quickly that both processes hurt the same.
Her skin would dry and crack, revealing the muscles underneath that twisted as if they were living snakes trying to escape.
'That came awfully close.' Solus thought as soon as Phloria was stable again.
'Well, yeah. It's our first time doing this. We have no idea how things can develop for a core that strong. We can't afford a single moment of distraction.' Lith replied.
Once Phloria stopped screaming and her body kept evolving at a controlled pace, Lith resumed his story until it reached the present day. The Ernas sisters already knew most of it, he only had to fill them about Solus's involvement and the truth about some of his achievements.
"Do you really want me as your partner during your apprenticeship?" Phloria soldiered up the pain, focusing on her future rather than on her dangerous present.
"Yeah, what about me?" Tista already felt neglected by Lith in her studies about true magic. It was the reason why she had started to travel the Kingdom on her own, to gain as much experience as she could.
Tista was sick and tired of waiting for him to spend the crumbs of his time with her. Discovering that he had reserved a seat with Faluel for Phloria who had just Awakened and nor for her, irked Tista to no end.
"Yes, Phloria. You are my responsibility for the next one hundred years, your magical skills have hit the wall all fake mages meet, and you need to live among Awakened to get used to your condition before doing whatever you want to do with your life." Lith said.
"As for you, Tista, you didn't practice magic until late in your life. I know it wasn't your fault, but that plus your lack of fighting skills gives you a lot of things that you can learn on your own.
"I think you can learn Spirit Magic with us, once Faluel decides we are ready, but your knowledge about Healing Magic and Forgemastering isn't that advanced."
"That's unfair! What about me?" Quylla suddenly looked at her sister in envy. "I've reached Forgemastering skills good enough that Dad taught me Royal Forgemastering as well and I'm considered one of the best healers in the Kingdom.
"I know so much about light magic that I'm trying to expand its boundaries. Why do you think I'm focusing so hard on Body Sculpting? It's because there's nothing left for me to learn, whereas Phloria doesn't even know tier five!"
"Hey, that's unfair. I worked my ass off to learn a third specialization with a full-time job!" Phloria didn't like to pass for a slacker.
To prove her point, Quylla made a small hologram of a hand giving the finger appear above her palm.
"Remarkable. Did you learn it on your own?" Lith said.
"Well, duh. Manohar didn't help me for sure and neither did you. I had to spend a lot of time studying the holograms projected by the communication amulets and light magic even to perform this parlor trick."
