My mind was a mess of swirling thoughts after the little friendly talk with Ted. Fortunately, there was a pile of random construction waiting to be transmuted into hopefully valuable materials to distract me.
I placed my hands on it, and activated [Matter Reclamation]. Immediately, a torrent of mana was whisked away from my body, quickly emptying me of all I could give. My hands began to glow, the light growing stronger and brighter until it enveloped all the materials on the ground.
Then, with a snap, I felt the pull on my mana ease and cut, leaving not even a drop.
General Skill level up!
[Matter Reclamation] 1 → 2
"Damn!"
Ted's exclamation shook me out of the mana fatigue, and I dismissed the level up window. Blinking the afterimages from my eyes, I could see what had him so excited. The rubble had transformed into several neat stacks of pristine-looking construction materials, some of them taller than even the original pile had been. Looking around, I quickly figured out why: the skill had consumed part of the junk pile as well!
It looked like some giant had taken a bite out of it, probably because the skill ran out of mana before it could convert it all. Still, the results were impressive, and Ted seemed to agree. He was jumping around the rows of materials, muttering to himself.
He touched the beams of compressed, almost metallic wood. "Iron-Heart wood! Look at how tight the grain is…"
Moving over to several dark blocks, he took out a strange sort of lens and began to examine them. "Vitrified stone? But the joints… it's like they are fused together."
And then, finally, he approached several clay jars filled with a grey liquid. "Nuts and bolts, Slag-Glass sealant?"
The examination lasted for several more minutes, after which he simply looked at me, eyes unfocused as if he was having a fierce internal debate with himself. His head kept going from side to side and he kept glancing at the reclaimed materials, almost worried that they were going to disappear the moment he stopped looking at them.
When his eyes fell on me, they were filled with hunger, narrowed into slits. "Lad," he said, a rumble of powerful rock. "What level is your skill?"
The thought of lying didn't even cross my mind. "It was level one, now level two."
With a flash of motion almost too quick to see, Ted fished out a sheet of paper and scribbled something on it. "I'm buying these materials myself. Fuck the market, I need this stuff. Here, three silvers for the wood, two for the stone and five for the sealant. How about that?"
I didn't know what to say. Most importantly, I had no idea what these things were worth. However, the emotions that I got from the bond with the girls told me that they were beyond excited at the prospect of gaining so much money and, truth be told, so was I. Was I worried that Ted was potentially ripping me off? A little, even though after our little talk I was more than willing to trust him. But it didn't matter much. I was in no position to refuse what basically amounted to free money.
"We have a deal," I said.
Ted beamed. "Good lad. Now, I'm assuming you are low on mana?"
I nodded.
"When do you think you can cast again?" he asked. "Don't worry about taking the other garbage to the dump, don't worry about making more piles, don't worry about nothing. I'll let the grunts do the dirty work. I'm not having you rummage through trash when you could be meditating. In fact, there's a garden in the back. Nice crystal-lights and flowers. Sit on the grass, meditate, and let me know when you can cast again yes? You and I lad, we are going to make so much money."
With that, he basically shooed me away and into a small walled garden behind what was left of the house. It was tiny, but it was well-lit and rather cozy.
"Well, so that happened," Vespera said, plopping on a wooden bench near a bush of roses. "Nice place they got here. Think the owner was loaded?"
"The neighborhood is the best we've seen so far," I replied, pacing around.
"Still sucks, compared to…"
The demon frowned. "Right, compared to what? I get this feeling that I was used to much better places, but I can't recall any of them. Heavens, I hate feeling like this."
Elyra took a seat near her, debating whether to give her a rub on the shoulder to make her feel better or not. She was stiff as a board, sitting on the edge of the bench. "That is true…" she began, trailing off because of how deep in thought she was. In the end, she did start massaging the demon's arm, and began to relax herself in the process. "I believe we should talk about what just happened."
We did, and there was simultaneously a lot to say and nothing at all. If things went well, then we got ourselves our first decent ally in this gods-forsaken world. Buck didn't count.
"And, most importantly, we have something Ted wants," I said.
Elyra nodded. "Your skill."
"Technically, it's our skill. We agreed to share everything."
She smiled at that.
"For a moment I really thought we'd have to kill him," Vespera said menacingly. "But did you see his eyes after he saw what your skill could do? We got ten silver, Sol. Ten! And that's just ten percent of the market rate?"
"No," I said before she could get too excited. "I checked the contract. He amended it to give us, and only us, a higher than normal rate."
"How much?" Elyra asked.
"Half."
Vespera grinned. "He wants to keep us. No need to kill him any longer."
The angel sitting beside her finally relaxed, sitting back and stretching her wings. Vespera gave her a nasty side eye and demanded that the shoulder massage not stop.
Elyra complied. "Not that we could have killed him," she said.
The demon scoffed. "He's just a tiny person!"
I clapped my hands before they could descend into banter again. "Anyway, what he said is true. We need to be more careful."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Vespera said.
"Do not whine, demon." Elyra shot back. "It was your fault."
She recoiled as if struck, her eyes going wide with indignation. "Mine? Listen who's—"
"It was all three of us, come on!" I said. "Need I remind you that we are still in public? These walls are thin!"
"Right…"
"Right…" they both said at the same time.
"Again," I said. "We were lucky Ted seems to be a good guy. And now that we have something he wants, we can maybe trust him. Fuck, I have no idea why I let my guard down so much. My old instincts should have—"
"Sol," Elyra said softly. She took my hand, stopping my frantic pacing. "I am glad you do not have instincts that make it easy for you to be mean to people you care about. Even if they might land us into danger."
"Well said, angel cat," Vespera said with a wide, toothy grin. "Sol's just too nice. Anyway," she said, deciding to shift topics before our little angel went all red in the face. "The way Ted mentioned meditation makes me think it might speed up mana recovery? Why don't you try it, Sol?"
I could do that. Beginning by sitting on the ground in a lotus position, I assumed.
"Good idea, Vespera," I heard Elyra say while I tried to focus on my breathing. "We should join him too."
"Whyy?" the demon in question whined. "I wanted to take a nap!"
"No naps," admonished the angel. "This is a prime occasion to figure out if our bond can be extended to mana. Did you focus on it when Sol used the skill earlier, like I asked you to?"
"I… tried…"
"Good. Not let us join him with our eyes closed, and see if we can feel something."
They sat beside me, making a little circle in the middle of the small garden. The soft grass was slightly wet beneath us, and the sounds of the beast tide were almost hypnotic with how far away they felt.
"I… feel something!" Vespera exclaimed after a while.
I was counting my breaths, reaching a hundred and then starting over again. In my old life, meditation had always been beyond me, boring and bothersome. Now, I had not even realized I was in a trance until I heard Vespera speak.
"Me too," Elyra added.
And, if I focused, I could feel a twin presence that went beyond the simple existence of the empathic bond. It was far away, faint, but it was unmistakably there.
Vespera shifted, her face contorting in effort. "I can't reach through it. Cat-angel, are you sure this is the right way?"
Elyra too was focused to the point of straining her facial muscles. Closing my eyes again, I tried to do what they were doing just to see if it was more effective. It wasn't.
"Girls," I said softly. "Don't try to force it. Here, listen to my voice."
I began to talk, softly, recalling what I could about the guided meditations I tried in my old life before I threw in the towel and quit. There used to be entire programs on the sphere that you could download for free.
What I didn't recall, I made up. Soon I realized that it didn't matter much what I said, what mattered was the tone of voice and the state of mind it induced. The empathic bond we shared helped us immensely, letting me know when they were struggling, and letting them touch my mind in turn.
After a while, I felt two hands reaching for mine. I took them, feeling like a physical link was forming, but something was missing. I didn't let it distract me, instead letting it wash over me as the trance state deepened.
"You two as well," I said, my words floating in the air without effort.
Vespera and Elyra's hands touched. It was a shy, little touch at first. Then, a flood of memories from this morning, and we all blushed. When it passed, they weren't shy any longer. How could they be, after what we did together? Surprisingly, it was Elyra who took the initiative, gripping the demon girl's hand tightly.
The incomplete link finally became a closed circle. Our minds became one single tranquil lake, a shared state of consciousness. It didn't last long.
Our deepest desires, fears and repressed insecurities came to the surface, threatening to turn the lake into a stormy sea. There we stood, a small boat buffeted by the waves.
The mana began to flow.
The boat toppled, and we were thrown out of the trance. We released our hands, opening our eyes to the fake daylight of the garden, the sounds of outside battle assaulting our ears. I thought we had failed, but…
"My mana is full!" I exclaimed.
Elyra gasped. "And I am at two thirds capacity," she said.
"Me too," Vespera added. "It worked!"