Unholy Player

"So this is what happens after consuming the Synergy Crystal?" Adyr wondered aloud, gliding through the void as his cloudy wings carried him with ease.

After locating the clash through the tandem of his Gaze and Presence, he had set out without delay. He wanted to witness everything up close and test his new strength against the Rank 4 Spark.

When he arrived, he chose not to reveal himself at once. It was a good show unfolding before him, and as a refined man who enjoys a well-staged play, he decided to watch first.

He was surprised to see Maruun and the mixed-race contingent present, helping the two. Thinking it through with a political mind, he understood their choice and felt satisfied with it.

Adyr already knew Maruun's character well. The man was a natural strategist and a leader. Even his approach to Adyr had been a strategy from the start, an effort to build alliances with trustworthy people for the Legacy Domain and to strengthen his stance against the Umbraens.

Now, with his decision to aid the Lunari and the Gorathim, his intention was clear.

"A man with a rational mind, rational enough to set aside deep disputes. Scary." A low laugh slipped from him.

Even though Thalira had killed 5 of their most promising Practitioners, Maruun did not let that cloud his strategic judgment. By moving now, when Thalira and Brakhtar were at their most vulnerable, he was earning their recognition and creating a debt.

It was a debt Adyr had no doubt Maruun would spend later for the good of his own kingdom and race.

Another scene that surprised him was Thalira's decision to stay.

While Brakhtar used his bloodline talent to pin the Serpent, she had the option to take the Book, the core of the Sanctuary, and leave without disturbance.

Adyr even caught the small motion of her eyes shifting between the Serpent and the Book, as if she were weighing her next move.

In the end, she chose to stay and help, consuming her Synergy Crystal in a dangerous situation like this. That made Adyr reevaluate her character.

''She has principles. That makes her trustworthy'' He filed the note in his mind palace under Thalira's character profile.

But later, when he saw her finish her power-up and the obvious change in her character, he had to reassess again.

''She just loves fighting more than anything.''

He understood she was someone who could be manipulated by using fighting as the lever.

Above all, another realization rose from everything he had watched, the most important of all. "Haven't I been talking to myself a lot lately?"

The words left a faint echo in the helmet of silence around him, and the echo made him aware of his own mouth moving, of breath touching his teeth. A slow frown gathered between his brows.

Recognizing a change in one's own character was never simple. People often had to pause for a long while just to remember what they were like as children; memory fogged like glass breathed on.

Catching a habit that shifts quickly in a short span was harder still, like trying to see hair grow; unless someone else pointed to it, the change slid by unseen.

Adyr was not oblivious to himself. He knew that with every evolution, not only did his body change, but something within shifted as well.

The signs were small and vague, the kind that lived in the pauses between heartbeats: a new reflex, a faint tilt in judgment, an impulse that had not been there yesterday. Hard to detect, yet present all the same, and the presence was unmistakable.

Seeing Thalira's sudden shift in demeanor sharpened that awareness. If she could turn so quickly, then something was moving in him, too.

Living in a fantasy world was a factor in anyone's change, of course; new rules reshape a life. But the cause did not end there.

The source ran deeper. With every evolution, he took the Spark's genetic information into himself; each time, threads of alien code unspooled and sank, settling into his depths. They did not float on the surface. They seated themselves like roots in soil, and once seated, they became part of him.

This is a problem. He thought.

That same mechanism explained why Thalira had grown more impulsive in her fixation on fighting after taking the Synergy Crystal.

The crystal worked like a key turning inside a locked room; it awakened the Spark genes sleeping in her, and when they woke, her emotions woke with them and fused into a single drive. The edge in her smile, the hunger in her stance, the way she leaned toward the clash rather than away from it—each told the same story.

For someone like Adyr who wanted control over his surroundings, and especially over himself, that was unacceptable.

But the gains are too good.

His gaze settled on Thalira and Brakhtar, weighing cost against power like coins on a scale.

Especially Brakhtar. Under the pressure of his bloodline talent, the second head had almost fully solidified before Adyr's eyes.

Sutures in the bone tightened and locked; tiny vessels filled and colored; skin drew taut and took on texture. The twin face ceased to be a blur and became a feature-bearing thing, not an echo but a partner, turning the Gorathim into something new as a whole.

When he saw Brakhtar finally finish his changes, Adyr chose to stay and keep watching, intent on gathering more data about the character shifts that followed such transformations. He wanted patterns he could trust, not impressions that faded with the next clash.

He was not collecting information blindly. He had already delivered one of the Synergy Crystals to the researchers at Player Headquarters, letting trained minds test, catalog, and compare results across baselines.

Letting professionals work on it was the best way to learn what the crystal truly was, especially since Adyr held not one but 3 more, each waiting to be consumed.

He also wanted to see what the two of them could really do against the Rank 4 Spark on their own, pressed to their limits.

"I can reveal myself at the right moment and let them think I turned the tide," he thought aloud, a brief laugh slipping out.