Elizabeth took a deep breath, then cringed just thinking about the task presented to her. She had known that it was theoretically possible to enhance her thoughts with just Void as a Concept, but had planned to only do so several mergers and carvings later with Perfected Temzdaflesh, which was… 3 mergers and 4 separate carvings further down her planned path. She had just Temzda, Void, and Flame.

The trial was forcing her to improvise, become her own trailblazer. For all its storied history, the Duchy of Black had limited records of those wielding Temzdaflame - or Voidflame as most called it. The stifling weight of tradition and well-trod paths meant that most with the potential had chosen to focus solely on the Void half of their talents. That compounded with the very real rarity of prismatic elements, then further with Flame specifically - the Duchy of Red was on the opposite end of the Federation, which made the elemental pairing much rare due to limited bloodline mixing.

And, the most important point, the records they did have were left behind by those with too little talent to be of much use. The few doses of Ambrosia had been sourced mostly through trade purely to sate Pride - because the nobility of Black wanted to have all the part-Void doses in the Duke's vault if it could be arranged over countless centuries.

The last Truth bearing mage who had wielded Temzaflame and had actually lived in the Duchy of Black had died 'ages ago' - which probably meant at least a millennium when put together with Johnson's revelation about her nation's actual age - and had left no instructive records of their magical achievements.

The only other place to look was the Duchy of Red, but that would raise too many eyebrows given the long term downplaying of her talents. The plan had been to manufacture an excuse for a prolonged visit when she was at the cusp of Conception, given the Archduke's established penchant for nurturing talent. That plan had been sidetracked by both the Lichwar and Irwyn entering her life.

So she was forced to tread half-blindly and rely on mostly intuition and incomplete knowledge to create something that would give her a chance at passing the obnoxious puzzle. The anticipated achievement and progress of it were the only things that dulled the sheer frustration at her existing plans being ruined. But it had to be possible. She would find a way.

The solution she eventually arrived at was to burn away the relative distance the thoughts in her head had to travel. That was well within what Temzda as a Concept should be capable off. Erasure of distance between things by leaning on Void's disregard for precise lengths, then dip into incineration to make the effect much more controllable. She had even grown practiced in the technique in her months waiting by the monolith for her Soul to recover - it was very useful for fast movement. The hard part was actually doing it without collapsing her brain on itself. Or scorching the gray matter until it sizzled.

And Void geometry. A lot of damn Void geometry. A 'science' that most waited until their first Domain to even engage with. Because while Void did not obey the regular rules of space, it still moved and shifted in ways that were technically predictable. One might as well try predicting in real time a feather in a hurricane down to the movement of individual atoms to achieve similar complexity, but it was not completely impossible to get close if she cheated.

What she had going for her were affinity and resistance to bridge the gap. Not immunity. Unlike Irwyn she felt very much threatened by her own magic. Serious brain damage was a significant risk if she made a single mistake or miscalculation. Had she any other choice, she would not have attempted it. That abominable little maze forced her hand.

So Elizabeth carefully, painstakingly, prepared the spell. Burning away the distance between her neurons was not about clumping them closer. That would achieve very little in actual effect and probably make the brain malfunction. What she intended to achieve was to make them all simultaneously adjacent. An impossibility in a three-dimensional space, hence Void geometry.

That was at least the initial plan. After about ten minutes of it and the start of a headache before any magic was even activated, Elizabeth realized that it was too lofty of an ambition. Instead of trying to connect every individual neuron, she compromised and portioned her brain into segments. Orders of magnitude less difficult and dangerous. Though, it presented new issues as well.

How was she to decided how to group her neurons? She could barely perceive them on the individual level, even with all the improvement the maze had pushed her towards, but couldn't quite tell what they did. Her prior theoretical knowledge did not extend much beyond 'they exist' either. She had to somehow decide which would work best together and how.

Eventually she settled on a simple methodology. A hundred such groups for where the brain connected to the spine, then two hundred for each of the distinct hemispheres, spread mostly evenly. As far as she envisioned the magic, it would not make her thoughts quite rapid to the point that would be expected of a dedicated spell with a Concept. Instead, it would funnel that potency into her reflexes. With all the 500 parts of her brain simultaneously connected to all the others, she would be able to process and react several times faster than those with more generic spells, a massive advantage in battle, especially up close as she intended to fight. Eventually she could likely upscale the spell to the whole nervous system as to let her body better keep up, but that wasn't needed for the damn puzzle.

She just had to actually implement it and pray it didn't kill her instantly. With the grouping eventually delimitated, she began the slow and careful process of turning the inside of her head into a localized pseudo Void. That was what it would take for her idea to work. Again, something she had been planning to put off for a lot longer. Still, she at least knew the outlines of the plan for that, refusing to use just Void as a crutch and instead creating the effect purely with Temzda as foundation.

Then came the Void geometry she had been dreading. How does one connect all the sides of 500 separate objects in one singular point? With extreme difficulty and headaches, at least at her level of power. Each of the groups needed to be individually aligned with precise configuration of the spell across the whole surface to actually work. Practically an impossible task. Her only saving grace was that she could intuit how the result would turn out thanks to her sheer affinity. That meant Elizabeth could experiment with various alignments rather than spend five hours on complex abstract mathematics for each section and pray she got the variables right every time.

She was still very quickly forced to give up on perfection, as much as it hurt her Pride to do so. It would simply take too long to find the exact combination when the Void geometry 100% aligned with what she wanted for every group. The first ten minutes in which she tried thousands of possiblities and never saw anything better than 30% showed her that much. Instead, Elizabeth decided to settle for anything in the range of 90 to 95 that she stumbled upon first.

The process and subsequent laying of the magic still took her at least two hours of time. The spells were in place, but yet dormant, so that they could all be activated at once. She double-checked them one last time, smiling in satisfaction. Once the spell was active, most of her brain matter would technically only exist a tiny distance away from a single point, without - hopefully - interfering with the function.

Besides the obvious benefit of reduced distance, it also meant that her thinking would be mostly concentrated within said point, which would be empowered by her Concept and the increased density of mana that allowed compared to nine intentions. She had also nudged the localized Void needed to sustain that state so that it would be disrupting time towards a favorable dilation, improving the effects further. All that was left was to see if her confidence was warranted. So she spoke before she could hesitate about the very real chance of instant death:

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" In nothingness, clarity A mind; Singularity "

A wave of dizziness hit her instantly. Not pain, just… confusion. Overwhelming, almost debilitating strangeness as she felt the inside of the head rearrange and try to puzzle out how it should work. It was all the same pieces, all the same thoughts and memories, they just needed to suddenly travel down a different pathway. A much more efficient one, yes, but switching from a dirt road to a highway still took getting used to.

But slowly she made that progress, the already notable acceleration of thoughts assisting with the process. Bit by bit, Elizabeth regained full control of her faculties - as bound by the trial as most of them were - then basked in the glory of success for a few moment. When she would eventually need to disable and recast the spell it would be… unpleasant. But at least not damaging, most likely. A problem for a later day either way.

The maze's final challenge that had seemed downright impossible before became trivial. With wonderful ease, Elizabeth passed the obstacle, then felt herself be released towards the ground. But with the fall, so did her binding slips. The moment she landed, she could move.

As soon as she was able to, Elizabeth surged to her feet. Then she had to suppress the groan while looking around. Great, more puzzles. Enough to consume hours upon hours, not to mention the possible time crunch she was probably under. She hoped that Irwyn was having a better time than her at least.

Wait, did one of them just vanish?

If the first chamber had tested his mettle for scale, this one challenged the very limits of fine control and out of the box thinking. Puzzles stacked upon puzzles, ranging from those almost purely logical to others that needed him to use his magic in the strangest of ways.

For example, one of them required Irwyn to produce a beam of light so concentrated it did not let off even the slightest hint of a glow, then aim it down a path of complex mirrors that would lock up and reset the whole contraption if he failed that absurd requirement for control. That, as well as needing to eyeball where to actually aim with extreme precision as to not deviate off course even after reflecting dozens of times. Both things he had scarcely ever practiced before.

Despite the difficulty, Irwyn was honestly having fun. He had only enjoyed a proper puzzle a few times when some had passed through the Tears' stock, and none of those had this level of complexity - and therefore not a fraction of the satisfaction that came with actually cracking them. Most of them, at least. Some were boring, and several ended up not being frustrating. There were a few that tried sapping Irwyn's mana instead of resetting to punish imperfection, which meant he could basically brute force them. The drain would perhaps increase with each mistake, but never got to the point where Irwyn actually felt his absurd reserves dipping even slightly.

Irwyn lost the track of time for a bit. If it was constrained for the trial, there was no visible sign of it. Nor for what would happen if it were to hypothetically run out. Which might have been the point, adding to the pressure. Irwyn was mostly distracted from that by enjoying the puzzles.

He first noticed something was off when finishing the roughly 15th - he hadn't exactly been keeping count, but that number seemed about right. It had involved counting individual grains of dust in a falling stream just as they passed through a thin film of sunlight from out of sight. Without using any mana. He had needed to perceive how many were in each separate falling layer and then enter the count as a 40 digit code for the ten consequtive clusters, which had taken him a while to get right. When he looked away from it towards the next challenge he had been eyeing, he realized that it was gone, missing from the wall.

That gave him pause for obvious reasons. Even when he had solved them, the puzzles stayed in place. They just kind of… turned off. It was quite recognizable since they would visually dim down and drain of magic, but they remained unmoved. So the vanishing of one was quite strange. Irwyn tried looking around to see if any more had perhaps disappeared. Instead, he found a different anomaly - one puzzle clearly appearing solved despite him definitely not doing such.

After seeing one, he knew what to look out for and quickly found five more. It didn't take him long to put things together. He had originally assumed that this portion of the trial was individual because he had been separated from Elizabeth, but that no longer seemed to be the case. They just needed to solve all the puzzles between the two of them instead of alone.

Irwyn briefly wondered how that worked given that some of them didn't seem like they would work without the properties of Light or Starfire, but perhaps those were just switched out for different obstacles using Temzdaflame and Void instead. The one which had vanished was likely being worked on in the mirrored room Elizabeth would be stuck in, wherever that might be. He could confirm his hypothesis later when it re-appeared. Instead, he got back to solving. He was well ahead by his count, but if he wanted to maintain or even increase that lead, it would not do to dally. After all, he was already theory crafting all the mocking jokes about slowness with a smile on his lips.

With that knowledge, his approach changed a little. For both competitiveness as well as faster overall completion, Irwyn began to actively seek out the puzzles that seemed to fit him. Those that required overwhelming power - or were easier with it - as well as precision and sensing through the elements, as those were the things he felt like he was excelling at. In the meantime, he left those with extreme demand on reflexes and combating opposing magic to Elizabeth, since that much seemed to be more suited for her… probably. He presumed she had to have figured out a way to enhance her cognition with Concepts like he had, though the how or the exact effects he couldn't possibly guess at with any certainty.

Either way, he had puzzles to solve. And there were a lot. Irwyn began actually keeping count just so he could needle about it more easily when he saw Elizabeth again. Because there were many left. Possibly around a hundred. Irwyn got to work with a wide smile and competitive zest.

From handlessly juggling several hundred miniature suns, through decoding complex and shifting spell patterns, to outright just counting. One such actually stumped him for a while: A completely non-magical panel with just symbols on it next to a number lock. After a while he realized that the symbols correlated to how a good chunk of the other puzzles looked outwardly, needing just a bit of counting. He wasn't sure exactly what it was supposed to teach him, but it was at least refreshing compared to the constant strain on his magic.

His favorite was likely the one where Irwyn had to identify objects that annihilated any attempt at directly observing it with magic. Even the slightest trace of light would be vanquished upon touch. That was solved by observing the absence of Light in its shadow, gradually gathering the shape by repeatedly illuminating it from every side. The puzzle stretched the imagination as to how he could use opponent's obstructions to his benefit.

It took them hours, but eventually Irwyn finished the last one. At least on his side. He was confused for a few moments before he noticed a prominent empty spot. The very final puzzle was up to Elizabeth, which she spent several more minutes on. Enough time for Irwyn to anxiously check that he had not missed another one at least eight times. Once it reappeared, there was only a moment of silence before they were again standing elsewhere.

The room was larger than the one he had just been in, but not nearly as gargantuan as the first chamber had been. It was similarly empty, with seemingly only a single pedestal in the middle - a glimmering white gem on top of it. A similar set-up to the soul nourishing monolith they had earned for their success the first time around. Elizabeth was also standing next to him again. For a moment she seemed mildly annoyed, but her expression was already shifting when Irwyn turned towards her, changing into a wide smile. Before anything else, she took a stride to his side, locking an arm around his as it hung down Irwyn's side.

"79," was the first thing he said, not commenting on the gesture.

"I wasn't keeping count," she averted her gaze, the smile briefly slipping.

"I am sure," Irwyn laughed.

"At least you were clearly having fun," she sighed, seeming genuinely embarrassed. Almost a pout.

"You weren't?" Irwyn paused analyzing her expressions.

"I have been dealing with a worsening migraine because I was forced to update my cognitive magic dangerously ahead of schedule. That has made the whole experience a lot more annoying. But I don't want to disable it without some healing on hand, just in case," she said, then frowned. "Actually, the golem has not come back."

"It's not over," Irwyn realized, earning an immediate groan of agreement from his side. And there was only one thing in the room with them. They shared a glance, then stepped towards the next part of the challenge.

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