No Need For A Core?

Creating the invested version of Mordecai's avatar was going to take significantly more mana than it had when Kazue had created hers, so he spent a few days finalizing his design now that they had finished their metal zone.

It also gave him some time to deal with a feeling of irritation. It was irrational and selfish, but it was there.

Mordecai had intended to travel with Kazue and Moriko once he had his awakened avatar. They could have traveled through the Elven Kingdom and the Allied Nations, visited the dungeon there, traveled back to traverse the passage through the mountains, and seen the great trading city that sat at the edge of the mountains and the great plains to the south of them.

That city had been old when Mordecai had first awakened, but it was not the sort of place that became the center of a nation. It existed as a sort of commune, a place where traders from all the nomadic peoples of the plains gathered to trade goods throughout the year, and where large populations surged briefly when the nomadic groups met there before continuing their yearly travels.

Of course, there were permanent residents: people who came from the north to escape a previous life, couples from tribes that didn't get along and their descendants, people too elderly or frail to easily continue traveling with their tribes but who had some form of support in the city itself, and others who found themselves dissatisfied with the nomadic lifestyle.

To wander that city again and see what had changed and what had remained the same, that was an experience Mordecai wanted to share with his wives.

Instead, it was going to be a very brief stop during a more focused and fast-paced trip. One that was being done to accomplish a specific goal rather than a trip to experience the world. Mordecai had been intending to take his time to deal with this sect of the blood purists, but once he knew about Deidre, taking his time wasn't an option anymore.

He knew better than to rush in, and with Deidre's avatar here the worst of the abuse could no longer happen, but Mordecai also couldn't accept making her wait longer than he had to.

This led back to one of the side benefits of the tournament, which he thought of as 'refinement and remembrance'. In addition to giving him data and inspiration for refining his invested avatar, the tournament had helped Mordecai remember more of the things he could do. It wasn't that he'd truly forgotten so much as he was finding it difficult to recall information without some sort of relevance or context to a more current situation.

There was just too much information for him to readily process, and he was fairly certain there were other things he was missing still. Skills and abilities built entirely from training and experience were harder to evaluate and measure than abilities that were inherent to the flesh and could not simply be learned.

Then there were abilities where potential was born in the flesh but required great work to bring to their full potential, or to enhance with personal skills beyond the norm for that inborn ability.

Hajime was a good example of that. The wing scales of a prism dragon always had their light-altering and illusion-enhancing effects but Hajime's ability to alter them so greatly and control them so precisely, even after they'd been ground into a compound, was something that he'd personally developed.

Along with that reality-shattering breath weapon. That was a very new and rather unpleasant experience. Intense radiance and searing light were normal, along with different magical effects riding on each color, but he'd never seen a prism dragon enhance the effects that far.

Mordecai had seen Hajime use the light spears before, but those too were now enhanced. Previously, Hajime couldn't use so many of them and they had been much more ephemeral rather than becoming somehow solidified shafts of light. Also, Mordecai's core hadn't been able to fully analyze the effect that hindered healing and regeneration. But he'd work on that data later.

Right now, he had more urgent things to work on.

Previously, Mordecai had been removing only abilities and forms inherent to the flesh. The tournament had let him see where he had duplicated skill knowledge and data. The rarest form of duplication was nearly identical duplication; this had happened where the circumstances under which he'd learned the same technique had been different enough that cursory examination during his hasty assembly hadn't revealed that they were really the same technique.

More commonly, he found skills with enough overlapping information to effectively reduce multiple related techniques to a single technique that had variants in application. Also, some skills had been learned in an incomplete form during one avatar's life that Mordecai had a more complete version of from a different avatar's life, and those former version could be safely discarded.

Well, 'safely', in that there was no value in the duplicated data.

The process of modifying the template was not safe, though it was not a likely risk so long as he took his time. If Mordecai screwed this avatar template up, he'd have to discard the whole thing and design a more normal avatar, which would be extremely limiting. As things stood, this template was 'oversized' for an invested avatar template, given the space and processing power available to a core of their size, and every time he removed something, that space was reclaimed by his normal memory allocation.

That did not make it completely impossible to add something, it was just extremely tricky and a little risky. Mordecai needed to replace data rather than remove it, and the data he was removing needed to be significantly larger than what he was replacing it with to create a buffer.

Fortunately, what Mordecai wanted to add was relatively small, given that it was going to be exclusively potential, without any of the skills, abilities, or techniques that would have to be built on top of that potential.

Mordecai wanted to be able to resonate with the elements the way Derek and now some of the inhabitants did. Sure, he had a lot of other elemental powers, but the potential power and fluidity of Derek's inherent ability were astounding. Examining Derek's usage of his power along with studying the effects of implementing more limited versions in some of the inhabitants had left Mordecai confident in how to integrate that potential into his invested avatar.

Of course, developing that potential would have to wait. Mordecai wasn't going to even attempt to do so until sometime after Deidre was safe, he needed to focus on remastering his old abilities which would be much faster than trying to bring new abilities up to the same level of power and skill.

After that was safely taken care of, there were two more modification to be made; the first was to leave a set of his abilities as potentials instead of realized yet, and the second was something of a present for his wives.

The abilities that Mordecai set back to potentials were his shadow familiar and his eidolon summoning. His eidolon, Shenlong, was a creation of potential combined with the concept of dragons, and molded by his will and power. It had been easy enough to attach this creation to his avatar when combining everything, but that connection would not be there for his invested avatar, only the potential to make that sort of connection.

While a familiar bond was easier to break and reform, Mordecai chose to not forge a shadow familiar either. Both of these choices were made with a specific hope for the future; Mordecai intended to find out if he would be accepted to rescue one of the eggs from the clutch that Moriko's and Kazue's dragons had come from. If he was accepted, then he planned to try using his eidolon bonding ability to enhance the connection to the unborn dragon. He didn't know if it would work, but if it did, it would let him supply his own vitality directly to the hatchling.

There was a hypothetical downside to this plan; he wouldn't be able to readily unmake that bond. But Mordecai was willing to deal with any consequences of that, should it be needed. Of course, this was not an immediate concern either. Mordecai had no intention of pursuing this idea until after Deidre was safe. There was no need to bring yet another creature into harms way during this venture.

Now to turn his attention to more positive thoughts. Mordecai had made his avatar resilient against pain and other sensations that could overwhelm conscious control of his body. In any purely practical sense, he'd tuned his sensitivity perfectly; he'd be aware of the sensation, but it wouldn't be taxing on his endurance or mental stamina and couldn't make his body react in a way he didn't want.

This was not, however, always ideal for less 'practical' purposes, such as certain forms of play in the bedroom. At least, not from Moriko's and Kazue's perspectives, and Mordecai was always happy to work towards their happiness.

Within reason at least.

So he didn't make himself a lot more sensitive and there was still a hard cap on how much pain his avatar could experience, but he did make himself more vulnerable by a small amount. Mordecai could still force himself to not react or respond, but depending on what he was ignoring it took some amount of concentration and focus.

There was one thing about his invested avatar that Mordecai could not change, not that he would want to. His wedding ring.

When he'd manifested a temporary avatar through Moriko's contact with Kazue's core, Mordecai had simply been making a simulated copy of Moriko's 'cursed' ring for his avatar. When he had moved into Kazue's core, he had of course copied the ring's information, but that process had combined with Kazue's accidental modification of the ritual to bind Mordecai's soul to her core. This had created 'real' versions of the ring that attached to Mordecai and Kazue.

The full effects hadn't been noticeable until Kazue had started working on investing her awakened avatar. Fortunately, it also didn't take up the normal space for avatar data. Instead, the 'curse' he'd made for the original ring manifested itself on each avatar and drew upon the dungeon's mana to recreate a copy of the ring, meaning that he and Kazue were technically wearing cursed rings too.

Mordecai wasn't exactly certain how the curse was spreading or duplicating itself, but it was no doubt due in part to the spiritual links made between their souls and the copying of the ring's data into their core. That was the problem with trying to make practical use of what was technically a broken enchantment, it was hard to predict what it was going to do.

Once Mordecai had run a final triple-check of his invested avatar design, he demanifested his internal avatar and began channeling mana into creating his awakened avatar.

Condensing energy into a fully real, living, and self-sustaining body was always much more difficult than creating a simple mana construct that simulated such a body. Unlike with their inhabitants, this was also not recreating a state of being that had been stored. This was forging something completely new.

But Mordecai was not new to this process and he was only a little bit nervous about his design changes. So he simply took his time to make sure he was getting it right.

When his new avatar opened his eyes, he was lying on their bed. Kazue and Moriko were waiting patiently nearby, though they had also turned their chairs away from the bed while they talked. Oh, right, he'd been going a lot slower than Kazue had during the actual manifestation of her avatar. The way he'd been doing it, they'd have been able to watch him assembling the avatar as he made sure everything worked and interacted properly.

That would not be something they'd find pleasant to watch.

He cleared his throat and said, "I've finished; sorry if that wasn't quite what you were expecting of the process."

They got up and turned around to look his body over with an exaggerated air of critique. "Hmm, not bad," Moriko said dubiously, "though I can't help but to think that there is something missing. I wonder what it could be."

Kazue nodded thoughtfully and said, "You're right. Let's see, oh! I know!" With a wicked smirk, she brought forward the small satchel she'd been hiding behind her back. "He needs a tattoo!"

Mordecai eyed his wives suspiciously, given their planning and obvious enthusiasm. "I am very certain that I did not tell either of you about one of the adjustments I was making to my avatar."

"Oh, I know Love," Kazue said as her smile widened, "but my core was watching what you were doing very carefully. I didn't catch everything of course, but that little design change was something I could puzzle out. Naturally, I told Moriko about it, and we had enough time to get this ready."

"Now," Moriko said, "you should lie back and let your wives take care of this missing detail for you. Or will you need some help staying still?"

He noticed that some of the shadows nearby were moving under her control. Well, turnabout was fair play after all.

And it was a rather fun way to test how well some aspects of his avatar were working.

The next morning, Mordecai went down to the arena in one of the modified gi that had been made for him. He couldn't use his core to just move his avatar anymore; he had to walk and use the shortcuts, which was far less convenient. Well, with a range that short, he could have teleported to a location that he knew that well, but that felt both lazy and like overkill.

The gi worked rather well, and overall he was pleased with the results of his spars. Which didn't mean that he won most of them, but his current power and skill were about where he was expecting. It was only his previous experience and knowledge that let him make an awakened avatar that started this strong, which was about two-thirds as strong as his internal avatar had been after their latest zone.

Sadly, manifesting both an awakened avatar and an internal avatar at the same time was a technique that would take a long time for their cores to have the power to do.

At least he could expect his new avatar's power growth to be rapid; this was going to simply be relearning and retraining what he already knew how to do.