Planar transit spat the two of them directly onto the thick rug of the Acacias living room.
The landing was curt. Maria hit the ground on her feet, the soles of her sneakers cushioning her two hundred pounds of muscle with scarcely a sound against the hardwood floor. Dante touched down right behind her, but his altered center of gravity jerked his torso backward.
He tried to compensate by planting a foot to the side, but the tip of his left wing struck the corner of the iron bookshelf dead-on.
The racket of hardcover tomes crashing to the floor echoed through the quiet apartment. Three empty glass vials rolled across the rug, settling by the baseboard.
"Ow," Dante grumbled, nursing the back of his neck.
Maria set her carbon steel bar into its wall mount on the right side of the room and turned around with folded arms, leaning her hip against the frame of the bench press.
"First rule of having wings, bighead: your profile just expanded five feet on either side. Keep stumbling around like a newborn calf and you'll put that TV on the floor before midnight."
Dante tried folding the new limbs against his back.
The motion was clumsy. Fresh muscle fibers rooted along his shoulder blades fired with involuntary twitches. The right wing complied, tucking its ivory feathers downward, but the left locked horizontally, its iron-stiff tip nearly grazing the balcony glass.
He strained his focus, forcing motor intent into his vertebrae. The wing whipped through the air, kicking up a sudden gust that scattered the parchment drafts across the coffee table.
"Dammit..." he cursed through gritted teeth, cold sweat beading on his brow from the mental exertion. "The system didn't give me a user manual on how to stow this junk."
"Try treating it like an extra arm," Maria suggested, unable to stifle a smirk as she pulled a bottle of ice water from the fridge. "Or you'll need the tailor to cut two massive holes in all your coats. The lady in 402 already looks at you funny for hauling sacks of black loam up the service elevator. If she catches you with giant chicken wings, she'll call the parish priest."
"They aren't chicken wings," Dante shot back, closing his eyes and drawing a long breath through his nose.
He stopped trying to wrangle physical muscles and shifted his focus to his Mana pool.
With thirty Intelligence and twenty-three Wisdom, his internal perception of energy currents was sharp. The wings were not merely biological bone and sinew. They were bound to that primordial soul stratum the system had flagged during his level transition. They existed as condensed matter drawn directly from his ether core.
Dante reeled the energy back in.
Instead of tucking them away with muscle tension, he commanded the plumage to dissolve into the Mana channels tracing his spinal column.
The burning between his shoulder blades flared again, but in reverse.
The tips of the ivory feathers softened, unspooling into threads of golden light siphoned back through his skin. The newly formed skeletal structure retracted, folding under the muscles of his back with subtle pops of cartilage until vanishing entirely.
The skin sealed shut without a trace of scarring, leaving only two slender lines with a pale, pearlescent sheen traced above his shoulder blades.
Dante exhaled slowly, bracing both hands against his trembling knees.
[Winged Vestige successfully retracted.]
[Maintenance Cost: 0 Mana/second in latent state.]
[Estimated deployment time: 1.2 seconds.]
"Nailed it," Maria said, walking over and handing him the bottle of cold water. "At least you won't have to rip up your new shirts."
Dante downed half the bottle in one long pull, feeling his throat cool off after the sweltering heat of the Plain of Iron Souls.
"Retracting them costs zero Mana," he explained, wiping his lips. "The strain on the nervous system is real, though. I'll need half an hour to reset my coordination whenever they deploy."
Maria settled onto the hardwood floor in the clearing between Dante's chalk circle and her weight plates. She stretched out her long legs, kicked off her worn sneakers with her toes, and studied her calloused palms.
"Hey, Dante."
"What?" He began picking up the fallen alchemy books from the floor.
"That trick you pulled back at the scrapyard," she said, pointing to the concentric white chalk rings marked with triangular sigils on the floor. "That fine dart that punched through the monster's piston. Teach me something like that."
Dante froze, heavy volume in hand, glancing down at her.
"You have ten Intelligence, Maria."
"So what?" She arched an eyebrow, her tone hardening slightly. "Ten isn't zero. I've got thirty Mana sitting around on that screen doing nothing except powering that Sentinel sprint. I want to channel that energy into my steel bar, or my bare hands."
Dante slid the book onto the bottom shelf, pulled up a low wooden stool, and sat facing her, arms resting on his knees.
"It doesn't work like that," he began, settling into the lecture tone he used when drawing up raid maps. "System magic runs on three axes: fuel, calculation, and anchoring."
He tapped his own chest.
"Fuel is Mana. Anyone bound to the system has a pool, however small. Calculation is Intelligence. To shape an Aether Dart, my mind has to process atmospheric density, launch velocity, compression rates, and ambient temperature in a fraction of a second. If you attempt an arcane calculation with ten Intelligence, the spell either detonates on your fingertip or fizzles before clearing your palm."
Maria scowled, thumping the back of her head against the baseboard. "So my ten-point brain is useless for throwing lightning."
"For ranged lightning? Yes, completely useless." Dante retrieved a piece of white chalk from the wooden box beside his feet. "But there's the third axis: anchoring. That's where chalk comes in."
He twirled the chalk between his fingers.
"You always ask why I spend hours drawing on the floor before meditating, or why I haul this powder into rifts." He gestured with the chalk toward the floor glyphs. "This isn't classroom chalk. It's calcium carbonate compressed with conductive ore powder we sourced from the Fourth Continent market. It acts like a printed circuit board."
Maria leaned forward, studying the white traces on the timber floor.
"My physical frame has nine Constitution," Dante continued. "If I dump three hundred Mana from my core straight through my own flesh, my tendons boil and the backlash shatters my forearm bones. The chalk absorbs the strain. I draft the circuit on the ground, discharge the load into the mineral trace, and the chalk vents the force without roasting my body."
He held out the chalk toward her.
"You don't need complex calculations because you aren't flinging magic through open air. You have twenty-six Strength and twenty-eight Constitution. Your circuit doesn't need to be drawn on the floor. Your circuit is your own skeleton."
Maria took the chalk. Her large fingers handled the thin cylinder with care so as not to snap it.
"Explain it clearly."
"Your class is Rearguard Sentinel," Dante said, rising from the stool and taking a step back. "Your power stems from physical retaliation. You don't need to bother with equations for wind or heat. You just take the thirty Mana idling in your soul and shove it straight into the bones of your hands."
"No geometry?"
"No geometry," he confirmed. "Geometry is for shaping energy outside the body. Inside your flesh, your raw intent dictates terms. Clench your fists."
Maria obeyed. She sat cross-legged on the floor, resting her clenched fists on her knees, and shut her eyes.
"Now find the reserve," Dante directed, keeping his voice steady and low. "Don't look for floating text. Feel the weight in the center of your chest, right where air pools when you hold your breath before swinging a sledgehammer."
Maria drew a deep breath, locking her lungs.
In her mind's eye, the blue bar displaying thirty out of thirty flickered.
"Now push it," Dante said. "Don't imagine fire or sparks. Imagine mass. Imagine forty pounds of that steel bar packed tight into the knuckles of your fingers."
Maria clenched her jaw until her temples throbbed.
She ran no formulas. She simply threw the same physical will she used to bench four hundred pounds straight into that reservoir of blue energy sitting in her chest.
The reaction hit with a sudden jolt.
Heavy pressure rolled over her broad shoulders, surged down her biceps, and flooded into her closed fists. The skin across her knuckles shed its bronzed tan for a moment, shifting to a matte, dark gray as dense as cast iron. The air surrounding her fists began humming with a low vibration, spitting faint static sparks that made the loose sheets of paper on the table flutter.
[Unregistered skill channeling.]
[Sustained Drain: 5 Mana points every 10 seconds.]
[Current Reserve: 25/30.]
Maria opened her eyes. She stared at her gray-coated knuckles, surprise lighting up her brown eyes.
"I feel the weight," she said, her voice dropping an octave under the strain of sustaining the surge. "Feels like each hand just gained twenty pounds."
"Don't hit the floor!" Dante shouted the second he saw her arm coil back to test the punch against the wood. "That's solid timber planking. Put a dent in that and you'll drop straight into apartment 1301 below us!"
Maria checked her swing mid-motion, chuckling through her nose. She glanced aside toward a forty-five-pound cast-iron plate leaning against the base of the bench press.
With a sharp, compact jab from her right arm, she drove her fist straight down onto the rim of the weight.
BAM.
The strike yielded no crack of bone on iron. It landed with a dull, concussive boom, like a hydraulic press dropping onto heavy steel plate.
The iron plate didn't fracture, but its rounded rim buckled nearly an inch inward, warped under the pure compression of the blow. Maria pulled her hand back completely unharmed. The iron-gray sheen took the brunt of the collision without yielding a drop of blood or a red bruise.
She released her focus. The darkened film dissolved into a faint wisp of heat, and her Mana stabilized at twenty points.
Her silver screen chimed with a clear notification.
[Custom Skill Consolidated.]
[Registered Name: [Lead Impact - Tier 1].]
[Effect: Converts 5 MP into temporary kinetic reinforcement for the upper limbs. Increases concussive damage by 20% and applies light armor fracture.]
Maria flexed her fingers open and shut, popping her knuckles as her hands returned to normal.
"It worked." She flashed Dante a wide grin that brought out the dimple on her left cheek. "Five Mana for a strike like that is a steal. Now I don't have to scramble for scrap metal just to crack hard plating."
Dante stared at the caved-in rim of the cast-iron plate, a subtle shiver creeping up his neck.
This girl is a public hazard.
"Congratulations," he said, nudging the chalk box under the bookshelf with the toe of his sneaker. "You now have brute magic. Hit harder without doing the math."
"Brute magic that's going to save your ivory hide in the next rift," she shot back, pushing off the floor with the effortless balance of her twenty-one Dexterity. "Now hurry up and pick up those papers in the living room. We need some real food before we map out the run into the Second Great Continent."
Dante checked his back in the dark reflection of the balcony glass, where the two faint lines remained invisible under his fresh shirt.
Their partnership was drifting further and further from anything resembling normal suburban teens, and he knew all too well that the world on the other side of the rift would not wait long before demanding every scrap of their new strength.