Emily leaves Mensacus in charge of Elisime and teleports herself back to Chroni, heading to The Dome and using a transportation circle to get as close as possible to the array far beneath it. She latches onto the mark she left in Gaius' home and slices a hole in space, stepping through into the small pocket of peace.

"You're back soon," the old man calls down from his study as she steps through the front door to his cottage.

"I put the knowledge I gained from you to good use and want a second opinion," she replies, making her way up the stairs and finding Gaius sitting cross-legged in the centre of the space, surrounded by dense mana.

"Oh?" he hums, looking over at her and opening his eyes wide in surprise when he spots the shimmering tattoo curling up the side of her neck, peeking over the edge of her scarf. "Oh! Now that is interesting."

He pushes himself up in an instant and approaches, watching Emily pull off her scarf before wrapping it around her chest and recalling her Second Skin into her belt, exposing more of the patterns tracing her skin.

"Is that…"

"A pocket dimension bound to my being." Emily nods.

"That doesn't seem safe," Gaius chuckles, leaning in to inspect the runes tracing her stomach.

"It isn't. Damn thing would've killed me if my son hadn't fed me the lifeforce of half an army and two fourth circle mages. I would call it a waste of resources, but I'm quite happy with the result."

"I can imagine. How big is it?"

"Just enough for two people to stand in for now, but it'll grow."

Gaius nods, frowning as he spots several familiar wind runes among the constantly shifting patterns fading in and out across her body.

"That's an odd combination of runes to be running off what appears to be metal and lightning mana," he says, pausing for a moment as a flicker of purple draws an arc from Emily's waist to her shoulder before fading back to silver. "Sorry, metal, lightning, and space mana."

"Well, I don't have a mana vein inside me to stabilise a dimension formed with space alone. I needed all six common elements to balance the dimension, but lightning and metal are my main elements, and I've started preparing my body for an innate defensive spell, so I had to make sure the enchantment didn't interfere with that. This was the result."

"Fascinating," Gaius hums. "So, what did you want me for then? This doesn't look like something you can change now that it's active, and I'm not sure I could help even if you could."

"I want you to help me work out how I'm returning to the same point when I enter and exit the dimension, along with whether it's possible to follow me in against my will," Emily explains, breathing in the dense spatial mana surrounding them and pouring it into her Factory. "I assume I'm leaving a spatial mark of some form, but my son was still able to feel my presence, so I may actually be opening a small spatial channel he couldn't detect."

"I see. Go ahead then."

Emily nods and activates her tattoos, pulling herself into her Dimensional Factory. She waits for a minute before returning to Gaius' study, giving him time to run any detection spells he needs to.

"It's a wonder your son could detect you," the old mage says the moment she reappears, his eyes lighting up with excitement. "It's definitely just a mark, and it's a faint one at that. Try again and stay in there for a few more minutes, I'll see if I can break in on my own before trying to mark you first."

***

After completing her tests with Gaius, who was unable to enter her Factory on his own a single time, Emily leaves The Dome and makes her way to the royal palace. She finds the front doors sealed shut and knocks, waiting patiently for one of the mana signatures inside to let her in.

A second circle, blank-faced woman wearing robes dyed in the royal family's black, white, and red greets her with a light bow and a hand across her chest.

"Greetings, Miss Coldstone," the servant says as she rises. "The King is currently occupied, but I can inform him of your presence if you wish for an audience."

"Sure." Emily nods, not bothering to correct her address. "I don't mind waiting."

The servant bows again and turns, silently leading Emily through the entrance hall that, unlike before, is now occupied by servants in matching robes moving about their duties, entering and exiting hallways covered by portraits and cleaning surfaces despite the enchantments in place to do the same. Emily notices the throne room doors are standing ajar, and she can feel the dense mana of a gathering of mages beyond it, but she ignores it and follows her guide to the same portrait of the king she entered last time, stepping into the cosy waiting room beyond and waving away an offer of refreshments.

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She settles down in one of the plush chairs and shuts her eyes, falling into a meditative trance. She drinks in the dense ambient mana filling the palace, cycling it through her circles and cortex before pushing it into her Factory, continuing the slow process of growing the space.

After a few hours, the portrait entrance opens again, and Arthur the Second steps in, breaking her focus.

"I take it from the reports I'm still getting about your ship flying north that you aren't here to report contract completion?" the king asks as he walks over and takes a seat opposite Emily.

"Not in its entirety, no," Emily replies, pulling out her tea set and making them both a drink. "Although we've captured, and in two cases eliminated, all the fourth circle family heads, so it's just cleanup left now. I've left my son in charge of that, given he's the one who's able to free their slaves, and come to you to see if there's a better way to spend my time."

"Really?" Arthur says, with a small smile curling his lips at the news of his dissenters' capture and a raised, knowing brow. "I would have thought you'd want to take the excuse to visit Madonna territory."

"Have you decided what territory you're willing to give me to set up base in yet?" Emily asks, ignoring his poorly veiled attempt to probe for information and fixing him with an unamused, cold stare.

"Yes, I have a few options actually," he answers, moving on as if he never asked and pulling a large parchment map from his robes, forming a small table from his earthen mana to unroll it over. "First, is your home city, Eimdon."

"No thanks," Emily cuts him off before he can continue. "I said I want to be left alone, and I meant it. I'd rather not establish my factory in a city."

"Right, I thought you might say that." The king nods, not batting an eye at her quick refusal, as he points on the map to the thin sliver of flat grassland between the desert and the forest to the west of Chroni. "The Hawthorne family is willing to give up some of their territory on the border. They've built a small defensive fort over the mana vein there, but it can easily be vacated, and the next closest city is a couple of kilometres away."

He moves his finger up the border with Morzea to the centre of the large desert dominating most of the continent.

"Or, there's a mana vein junction here at the edge of what is currently Lonicera territory. There's no infrastructure in place, and you'd have a lot of space to expand, but as I'm sure you're aware, the constant sandstorms make it barely habitable."

"That's perfect. I couldn't care less about the extreme weather."

"In that case, the territory is yours to do with as you please. The vein itself should be pretty hard to miss. Just head northwest of Reindon, and anything from the city until the border is fair game."

"Thank you," Emily says, tossing him a communicator and finishing her drink before rising from her seat. "I'll be back again once I've finished the contract."

"Leaving so soon?" Arthur questions, looking at the small tablet with interest and rising to see her out. "Also, how did you get back here so quickly? I haven't received any reports of fast-moving ships from the north."

"I teleported," she replies, watching the king's brows rise in surprise. "My exchange with Gaius was very fruitful."

***

After leaving the royal palace and riding a bolt of lightning out of the city's limits, Emily warps herself back to Elisime before boarding a Cutter and taking off towards Reindon.

She reaches the city by nightfall and continues past, climbing in altitude to avoid a raging sandstorm. She extends her senses into the storm as she flies over, searching for the flow of mana within it and using it to guide her towards the border. It only takes twenty minutes for her to find a hotspot, where the sandy winds meet in a swirling vortex that's reminiscent of a whirlpool from above.

Emily slows her ship to a crawl and opens the cockpit, forming a platform of solid wind to stand on as she turns the aircraft's engines off. She takes a large, worm-like excavator out of her belt to create room before stowing the Cutter and slowly lowering herself into the storm. The sand clatters against the metal shell of the worm as she has it wrap around her for protection, and she reaches what should be ground level within a few seconds. However, she keeps dropping through the low visibility for several more seconds before she actually touches the floor, finding herself in the centre of a sunken basin, with steep slopes stretching out into the unknown around her.

Hard to miss indeed.

Emily floods her excavator with machina, and the grinding teeth within its mouth activate as she directs the robot to burrow down into the sand. The brown runes coating its shell glow, hardening the sand around it as the worm slowly sinks, and, after the first few metres of metal have disappeared into the ground, it begins spitting out compacted blocks of material from its tail end.

While her drone does its job, Emily shuts her eyes and reaches out to the pulsing channels of energy running through the air itself, calling upon the mana veins' power to form a large barrier, extending it out to find the edges of the pit she's standing in. She finds them a little over two hundred metres out and carves a matrix of runes to hold the barrier in place, letting them flow with the pulsing mana and form into a rotating shield that spins with the storm.

In an instant, the sounds of rushing wind and shifting sand fall quiet, and when Emily opens her eyes again, she's able to see the slopes rising up tens of metres on all sides of her. Looking around, she quickly begins weaving runes together in her mind, putting together the framework of a spell combining wind and earth. It takes her a few minutes and only reaches the complexity of a second circle spell, but when she's finished and begins casting, two sharp blades of wind shoot out, driving into the sand and stretching to the edges of the barrier.

The blades slowly expand into triangular wedges, sucking in sand to create space for themselves and funnelling it towards Emily, compacting the loose particulate into dense balls and fusing them together, making it easy for her to stow them in her belt and Factory. As she pours more and more mana into them, the blades begin rotating, eating through the slopes around her.

She casts another spell at the same time, suffusing the forming sheer walls with her mana and reinforcing them to keep the sand from collapsing in and ruining her work. The worm below her hits rock long before she finishes, sending up a signal but not stopping, only slowing a little as the medium around it changes and its grinding teeth speed up, burning more power and machina. Her spatial storages reach their maximum capacities quickly, so Emily unloads several metal soldiers to free up space and weaves another spell into the mix, reforming the orbs of material into bricks for her troops to stack in the space she's creating.

The excavator hits its intended depth at the same time as Emily finishes clearing the sand in her way, so she sends down a signal and directs the robot to return to the surface in a twisting spiral around the channel it's created. As it rumbles away beneath her, Emily stands in the centre of the deep cylindrical chamber she's created and begins carving an alchemical array into the ground, preparing to convert the gathered sand blocks into useful materials.

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