The exterior of Aurora’s soul was melded like putty, the very fibers of her being bent to the whims of various elements. Despite the sense of wrongness that gripped her, the agony of having an aspect of herself far deeper than her body begin to tear itself to shreds, she frantically scanned the surface of her soul as some attunements, some possibilities vanished before her eyes. Some were locked in a stalemate, neither section of her soul changing much, while other attunements rapidly lost ground to others, and vanished.

Her soul was colored by the varying attunements, but their presence was more than just a shade. Each attunement brought sensations, emotions, textures, and sounds, all culminating in a distinctive presence; there was no way to mistake one for another.

Aurora saw celestial—her twenty-second choice—wink out of existence the moment she laid her mind's eye upon it, subsumed by miasma. It was a shame, especially with how high it was on her list; Aurora had heard horror stories about kitsunes who didn’t even see one of their top hundred during their attuning, so having celestial as a backup would've been great. Rapidly looking onwards, she didn’t mourn for the lost possibility. Aurora only had a brief window of time to pick out her attunements, and if she didn’t begin bolstering one within roughly a minute, the odds of her dying would skyrocket.

She spotted a large patch of illusion thriving as it gradually spread across her soul thanks to her harmonization. It slowly pushed back on all sides against a number of attunements, including her twenty-seventh choice, storm. Gleefully, she diverted a portion of her attention to strengthening the hold illusion had on her soul, while also exerting a small amount of focus to preserve storm within the rapidly growing swath of illusion; it would be an amazing fallback if she couldn’t find anything better. She saw a couple attunements in the lower fifties of her list, which she stoked illusion to absorb as it rapidly spread across her soul with a few violent bursts of energy.

Despite the fact that Aurora was so focused on her soul that she couldn’t feel the floor she was laying on, or even move her fingers without a fatal break in concentration, her tail was wagging. The manipulation of the mana gripping her soul was surprisingly intuitive, as well. She had no method of manipulating mana without the proper system-granted skills, yet bolstering the attunements attached to her soul was like moving a long-lost limb, with all the muscle memory already present.

Around forty seconds had passed since she began her attuning, and her illusion attunement had spread to encompass nearly a twentieth of her soul already, a patch of storm carefully preserved in its center. Aurora frantically looked through the attunements clashing, with no order to be had on the lawless battleground as every aspect of the world pitted themselves against each other.

She didn’t blink at the sight of some attunements lower on her list, such as magma, only keeping an eye out for anything in her top twenty-six. The total pool of attunements was rapidly narrowing, and she was beginning to lose hope for finding space. There were only about ten seconds before Aurora should commit to an attunement in order to be safe, but she hurriedly searched as illusion grew to cover a tenth of her soul, bolstered by her harmonization and will as time dwindled away. Quite literally, in fact, as she watched a patch of time-attuned mana give way to illusion, purging it from her soul. Good riddance. It was certainly a powerful attunement, but attuning to time often doesn't end well, sometimes doing anything from rapidly aging the body to slowing the speed someone processes information at to such an extent that they can't even see themselves die as their attuning instantly spirals out of control. 

The first minute had passed and attunements were beginning to entrench themselves, making it significantly harder to expunge them in favor of others. Yet Aurora kept looking, frantically scanning the surface of her soul. As good as storm was, she wanted something better. She wanted to attune to space.

She was endangering her life by continuing to look, yet Aurora forged onward; the eighth of her soul attuned to illusion was beginning to take more and more of her focus to expand, the clashes of energy increasingly violent. Hairline fractures began forming on the surface of her soul, the pain negligible compared to what already wracked her being.

Attuning to space was extremely unlikely by that point; it was notoriously elusive, and often occupied so little space on a soul it was immediately subsumed by something else. Seventy seconds had passed since she began, and Aurora would only keep looking for another ten before she called it. It wouldn’t be worth the risk to continue beyond that, as unfortunate as it may be. She was looking over almost a hundred different attunements every second, yet nothing showed itself.

A blot of emptiness caught her mind’s eye; a blot of nothing, with abyssal tendrils rapidly spreading out from its center into wherever other attunements clashed, immediately seizing the gap where there was nothing for a brief moment. Void. 

Aurora immediately stopped attempting to expand her illusion attunement, which started to be battered back on all sides. She stopped searching, and only spared an iota of attention to preserve some of the storm mana in the center of her illusion. The patch of void had already doubled in size since the moment she initially saw it, like a malignant tumor. 

The ink-black stain on her soul would rapidly overwhelm any resistance against it once past a certain size. Void attuned were executed on sight due to the ease with which even a low-level one could rip apart the fabric of reality, not to mention how even just having one in the vicinity could ruin someone’s attuning by introducing the attunement. All it took was a mote of mana drifting through the air for the disease to spread. Even after the death of the Voidfather, there were far too many running around unhindered.

Aurora hurriedly bolstered all the attunements surrounding void that had a grasp on her soul, devoting almost every drop of her focus and energy into having them overwhelm the void as soon as possible, not giving it any room to grow as it slowly shrank. Void could worm its way in even after an attunement had begun, and it was impossible to find equilibrium between it and another attunement.

Aurora diverted a fraction of her attention to desperately search the surrounding area for anything at all that was higher on her list than storm as the patch of void diminished. She was significantly behind schedule, and it had been over ninety seconds since her attuning began; there wasn’t time for her to continue searching for space, despite how her heart ached at the thought of settling for a storm and illusion combination. Yet as the patch of void slowly broke apart, Aurora saw a glimmer of iridescence partially fill its place. Her fifth choice, and her mother’s attunement, on top of that.

There must’ve only been a pinprick of it left before Aurora focused on staving off the void, but now it was a brilliant, incandescent patch as the last remnants of void gave way under the combined assault from all sides.

Aurora immediately let go of her hold on storm and resumed attempting to expand her illusion, which had shrunk to cover only a tenth of her soul again in the time it took her to eliminate the smudge of void. She couldn’t spare a moment for glee as the outer core of her soul, keeping everything that was her as a person in place, was threatening to fall apart if she delayed too long. Focused on the vibrant, beautiful spot of iridescence, Aurora began delicately melding it to slip through the cracks in other attunements as they clashed, the fractures in her outer soul slowly growing with each collision. The pain from the core of her being was only growing as the splotches of illusion and iridescence continued to grow, rapidly. She unknowingly grinned, her physical body spasming from the pain.

As the multitude of colors marring her soul slowly diminished, it was taking longer and longer to purge each individual attunement as they sank further, deeper. Three minutes had passed since Aurora’s attunement began, and almost a third of her soul was covered by two glimmering, beautiful sections of iridescence and illusion—while she was only slightly behind schedule—and the two attunements' hold was only growing as Aurora had them worm through the middle of others and seize ground, bit by bit.

She even noticed a second blob of void forming on the edge of her ocean of illusion, but rapidly snuffed it out as she immediately surrounded and smothered it. Seeing void twice was quite rare; there was likely someone attuned to it in the vicinity, perhaps even near the attuning rooms. Horrible luck, but the void hadn’t been given the chance to snowball, blessedly. It was growing harder and harder to remain focused, and Aurora was also trying to keep an eye out for any blobs of void that might pop up before it was too late.

As her attuning continued, the fields of illusion and iridescence covered almost half her soul combined. But another splotch of void appeared. And another. 

=====

Ignis and Iris Dreamfire both stood just beyond the intricately engraved stone door, their tails hanging low. 

“I hope Aura can at least get one of her top twenty,” Iris whispered, her crystalline staff constantly shifting and warping between forms in her hand.

“We’ll wait for her to wake up grinning,” Ignis murmured, squeezing his wife’s hand gently. The two of them stood, still as statues, the minutes passing one after another in silence, the world seeming to wait with the century-old kitsunes, neither looking a day over twenty.

Then reality tore. A grotesque cacophony reverberated through the halls as a gaping hole in the world lanced through the walls and space ceased to be, shifting between void and the disjoined shards of the underlining space. Air rushed into the gap in reality, the gargantuan rift flashing between a myriad of colors, mana pouring into and out of it in torrents. The kitsunes remained glued to the floor in shock for the first fraction of a second since it appeared.

The tear flashed red for a moment, and an amalgamation of solid flames crept out where the tear met the walls, its body covered in burning, pupil-less eyes. Half the creature fell to the ground, sliced cleanly through the middle as the red vanished to reveal inky blackness once more. The corpse of the thing was pulled down into the abyss, rapidly broken apart until it was no more, the tear shifting between colors in rapid succession. 

Ignis had already ignited his body in a blinding burst of golden flames, a blazing shortsword materializing in his hand as he vanished, an ear-shattering clap resounding down the hallways. A hole pierced through the stone walls beside the tear, dripping globs of molten rock. The tear, almost three meters in height, pulsed.

Iris stared at the intricately engraved stone door, which had been damaged by an errant burst of amalgamous mana, over half the carvings no longer visible. The door Aurora was behind.

Before the first droplet of melted stone from the hole Ignis made hit the ground, Iris phased through the wall in a flash of light with her [Everlasting Radiance] skill. Inside the featureless stone room there was only Iris, the gaping fracture in reality that was slowly beginning to close, and nothing else, besides a second molten gap torn through the ceiling.

The right side of the room was a gnawing void, and the center, where Aurora had laid, was empty. The only thing that wasn’t pulled into the tear was one of the attuned objects, a crystalline eyeball anchored in space without a scratch on it.

Iris barely noticed the wet thunk as the void attuned’s severed head fell onto the ground behind her, fallen from Ignis’s hand. It was swiftly dragged into the gaping abyss, a bloody trail left on the stone as it was consumed by the void they’d wrought in a fraction of a second.

She stood still—looking at the spot where her daughter should be—as Ignis choked out a gut-wrenching sob.