The party spent the next few weeks in the forbidden land. Though few celestials took interest at first—most hoped to minimize contact with visitors and other residents alike—they started to warm up as the days passed. As the Vel'khanese soon learned, the celestials' work was constant. It took only a week for their crops to produce a season's yield. And as such, they were always busy. Every day, they ran up and down the length of the fields, either tending to their plants or packing them away. The few rare breaks they had were invested in processing their goods. Sorting, milling, and preserving stole almost every waking moment from the immortal farmers.

The rapid nature of their cycles was a clear blessing, but not in the way that a starving mortal might have otherwise imagined, for it was the excess of work and not the fruits of their labour that they were grateful to experience. Elysium existed for celestials to run from their troubles, and they managed precisely that by being too busy to think about anything but the next task inbound. And though far from accepted and still kept at arm's length, the forbidden land's invaders provided a similar distraction. Their optimization became the talk of the town by the time of their departure, with everyone pitching in their ideals to better facilitate their growth. The more excitable among them went as far as to spar with the mortals. And a few had even emerged from the experience invigorated by the taste of defeat, prompting even more of their number to shed their shackles and join the ring.

It was a shame then that they were bound by time.

The party vacated the northernmost land with the coming of spring and set their sights on Valencia again. They battled their way through the mountains, putting their freshly refined skills to the test as they crossed peak after peak after peak.

With the season changed, the Langgbjerns were practically unrecognizable. The area around Aurora's domain was the only still frozen over. There wasn't a lick of ice or snow anywhere else to be seen. Even the mountaintops, which sat far above the clouds, were returned to their natural stone colours. Swaths of green decorated the forests as deciduous sprouts grew from the otherwise evergreen branches—an adaptation that the trees had long developed to maximize the energy they gathered from the sun before the world was iced again. They wasted no time spreading their seeds; flowers and fruits popped up overnight and filled the northernmost land with a rainbow of colour.

Of all the changed elements, the monsters were by far the least recognizable. Gone were the statues, the fungi, and the myriad flying fish. The most common prey species in spring took on a camel-like shape. With sixteen unpaired legs and nearly as many humps, the giant grazers bounced through the mountains in packs and gorged themselves on the abundant greenery. Monsters with bodies made of paper and skeletons woven from wire dominated the skies where the griffons once hunted for eels. There was no explicit theming to their shapes or sizes; they took the forms of birds, blades, books and many, many more. The only constant was their method of locomotion. Those that had limbs would flap them, while those that didn't would fold and flap their bodies instead. Like the vegetation, their colouring was haphazard. With the patterns just as inconsistent, it was almost like they had random paints splotched all over their skin.

The metamorphosis stemmed, again, from the change in the seasons. With the frost gone from the mountains, the dungeons that were frozen over in the winter finally allowed their monsters back into the world. Far more powerful than their winter counterparts, they took only a few days to hunt them to near extinction.

Aurora's weakened influence played yet another part in the ecosystem's collapse. While the mountains still fixed themselves each morning, the blizzards and accompanying moments of peace had gone the way of the coldest season. No longer did the monsters report to their assigned posts. They scattered to the winds and wreaked havoc at their own discretion.

It was the perfect training.

While Claire and Sylvia wandered off and did whatever they so damned pleased, the rest of the party fought tooth and nail for their survival. Even with two aspects fighting amidst their ranks, and their members armed with divine instruments, they found that they often had no choice but to turn tail and run. Too many of the monsters lay beyond their ability to conquer. The crowned were certainly at fault—three of them were rampaging throughout the mountains with their armies in tow—but they were hardly the only major threats.

The brigade was no match for any of the sentient rivers that had finally been freed from their winter hibernation, just as how the bodies of water could never even dream of facing the parasitic feet and their zombified hosts. And yet even they lost to the quantum hippos, who in turn fell victim to the brain-eating squirrels. So on and so forth, the food chain continued, resulting in monsters of unfathomable strength, new crowned beings to take the places of those that had fallen in winter.

It couldn't be helped.

When awoken from its slumber, the Langgbjern Range was one of the few places on Mara where celestials could go to seek experience. There were only five others. The Infinite Abyss, ruled by the god of darkness and filled with all the horrific creatures to have ventured below the sea; the Steelestone Caves, where the planet was hotter than the sun it circled year round; Schdolen Plain, where the concept of death itself was blurred and ostensibly defied; Yornmorr's Fortress, the lost land where the first relics had been turned to artifacts; and the Heart of Azzrott, which whizzed past the planet every few thousand years and carried upon its jagged beak the inevitability of Mara's destruction.

And yet, Claire was far from satisfied.

"It's dead." She yanked Boris out of a towering beast and flicked the blood off his blade as she checked her experience gauge. The creature in question was more or less a strange-looking bear. It had a six pack instead of a head and a half dozen faces sticking out of its stomach, in its abdominal muscles' place. Despite looking absolutely ridiculous, the monster had proven itself to be a decent fighter. It had warded off Claire's ambush and survived the following assault for a full minute—more than five times longer than any other of its species.

"Finally!" said Sylvia. "How many is that now?"

"One thousand, three hundred, and ninety."

"And you still haven't leveled!?"

"I'm going to need another three thousand or so."

"What the heck!?" cried the vixen. "Why the heck do you need that much experience!?"

Claire shrugged. "They're not threatening enough, I guess."

"Mmmnnn… I mean, it does look like you're having a pretty easy time of it. These things would probably fall apart the moment you used any magic."

"Probably."

With her circuits back at full power and Collarsaur's divinity in her grasp, her enemies were incapable of resisting. It took only a lazy thought to overpower both the systemic and cellular bonds that held their bodies together and reduce them to bits of flesh.

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The deconstruction was so efficient that one might have thought her ultimate to be in play, but she had long disabled it. Relying too heavily on the ability would only superficially aid her progression. Even if she became truly divine, following such a route, she would exist as but a one trick pony, a weakling that Vella could remove with a flick of the wrist. Granted, realistically, she employed such excessive brute force that it didn't make a difference either way. It was more of a matter of principle.

"I need something better to fight," said Claire.

"Oh, I know!" Sylvia raised a paw. "You could always go back to Llystletein."

Claire tilted her head.

"The equitaurs give loads of experience. They're pretty much guaranteed to match you, no matter how strong you get."

"Oh. Right. Them," said Claire. She paused for a moment to consider the suggestion. It would likely prove a decent choice if Alfred's creations could truly grow powerful enough to offer a challenge. She had only given up on the idea the last time she tried because their scaling algorithms had ignored her damaged circuits. "Are there any conditions for fighting them?"

"Nope! You can kinda just waltz in. It'll respawn as soon as you leave the room if you already killed it, so you can kinda just go back as many times as you want."

"Is that what Ciel did when she tried?"

"Ciel had to take a bunch of breaks 'cause the trials are kinda rough. Oh! And I think we're probably supposed to be visiting Al soon anyway for that one monthly thing. Wait, are you even still gonna do that? You don't really need his thingymajigs anymore, do you?"

"I don't," she said. Her last two stabilizers were held in Sylvia's tail, though she didn't have the slightest clue as to how she was meant to use them. "But I don't mind freezing his door. I might as well, if I'm going to be using his facilities."

"Wait, really? I thought for sure you were gonna say that you weren't gonna 'cause you hated him way too much."

"I know how close he is." She could sense it from the impatient glint in his eyes. He almost seemed to grow hungrier every time she visited, his existence ever drawing closer to that of a rabid wolf. He was likely operating on a timescale of months. Whether that was to be celebrated was a whole different question, but Claire suspected that it was probably fine. Neither Flitzegarde nor Flux had voiced any complaints, and she didn't doubt for a second that both were well aware.

"Yeah, even I can tell," said Sylvia. "Oh, don't tell him I told you this, but last time we visited, some of the other foxes told me that he's working so hard he even stopped jerking off!"

"Did you really need to tell me that?"

"I figured I'd suffer less if we shared the burden!" said Sylvia.

"Of course you did. Stupid fox." Claire took a second to pinch and stretch the critter's cheeks as she opened a portal to their destination.

She stepped through it after squeezing Sylvia's face one more time and found herself on the usual beach, right next to the statue of Flux that she had crafted on her previous visit.

Claire took a second to stare at her handiwork before snapping her fingers and forging it anew. And with that, the once painful process was readily completed. Claire walked away without even looking in its direction, her outfit transforming into a summer blouse as she stepped past the beach and across the ocean.

She looked up at the citadel as she casually crossed the sea. She knew for a fact that she had doomed its residents—her actions had directly sealed their fates. She certainly pitied the poor fools sure to fall to Alfred's creations, but at the same time, she wasn't particularly concerned. Most of them had ventured to Llystletein for power, fame, or freedom. It was, by and large, their own greed that had dragged them down to hell.

She stared for a few seconds before shaking her head and moving on.

The snake-moose ventured through the familiar domains, crossing both the archipelago and the nebulous multi-zone that lay directly beneath it before finally finding herself in a system of caves.

Navigating it was much easier than it had been during her first encounter. She needed only to raise her ears to trace their surroundings in detail. She could have easily avoided the various monsters that roamed the halls, but she marched straight through them, obliterating anything that wasn't smart enough to get out of her way.

"You don't have to stick around," said Claire. "Go catch up with your parents."

"I know, but I want to. Just in case."

"I'll be fine."

"I know, but still."

Claire smiled, softly. "Alright."

She shelved the urge to squeeze the stupid furball and continued to advance. She didn't quite recall the path, but it didn't take long for her to find it with her ears raised overhead. She stepped through the room where she first spoke with Alfred and paced down the spiraling corridor beneath it. The ugly beaver-like creatures didn't even have the chance to flee. She grabbed every single one with her vectors and, tightening her grip as hard as she could, compressed them into a series of tiny flesh balls no more than a millimeter across. Something about them still irked her; she didn't even want to see them with her ears.

The mana she expended had returned well before she finally arrived at the bottom of the vertical hall. The shape of its ceiling was as odd as she recalled. It was made up of a series of layers, each slightly higher than the one before it. Its overall shape was circular, almost like that of a colosseum's arena, if colosseums were lined with giant pillars to hold up their lopsided ceilings.

Sitting on the far end was a pair of giant double doors. And standing in front of them was the so-called equitaur. The creature in question wasn't quite as intimidating as she recalled. He had worn its bloody armour during all their previous encounters, but upon entering the arena, they found him instead with a frilly pink apron around his waist, a half-eaten cake on the plate in front of him, and a fresh cup of coffee against his lips.

His underwear—his boxers—were not around his waist, but hanging from one of his giant ivory horns. His other hand held a stack of parchments, which he examined with a pair of rounded glasses too comically small for his face. Without his mask, his face was completely devoid of equine features. But of course it was. The equi in equitaur stemmed not from equine but equalization. His helmet had certainly made him look like a reverse-centaur, but the taur was technically for minotaur, though he wasn't quite that either. Like the foxes and the borroks, he was an experiment, something that combined a non-human species with Alfred's very human genetics. The intentionally woven sequences were reflected in the equitaur's face, which delivered a simple, rustic charm, like an old wooden house amidst a golden field.

He took a solid second to process that he had been caught with his pants down.

Gasping, he scrambled through the double doors, only to return, grab all his things, and scamper away again. Even without Claire's sharpened hearing, one could easily discern his panic from the clattering.

When he emerged, a few minutes later, it was in the usual horse-faced armour. The mask was almost disturbingly realistic. It huffed and puffed in time with his breaths and poured hot air from its metal nostrils.

His new look was far more intimidating, but Claire couldn't unsee his apron. Every time she gazed upon his figure, she found herself thinking back—a fact that left the fake horse-man fidgeting uncomfortably beneath her gaze.

The perfect moment of weakness.

Claire closed the distance in the blink of an eye and drove her lizard towards his throat.

And yet, her blade was deflected by his gauntlet.

It was not a desperate block, but a calculated perfect parry that not even her ultimate would have bypassed.

Claire opened her eyes wide—at least at a glance, it looked like Alfred had delivered—but there was no time to be impressed.

The equitaur had already launched into a heavy counter.

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