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It had been a while since he'd felt the sky all around him. Wind on his face and in his hair. The world sprawling out around him. Nothing but clouds below and the faintest glint of stars above as evening approached. He'd been stuck in one rock form or another for too long, as of late.

It was important to appreciate these moments while they lasted, he told himself. Live presently. Not just obsess over the future--or the past, occasionally.

The clouds below were rearing up quickly--but not quickly enough. Much as he wanted to enjoy the open air a bit more, time was wasting.

A suit of armor crackled into existence around him. Crystalline and clear but for the way it shimmered, it covered his whole body and increased his descending velocity in an instant, leaving a snapping boom in its wake.

It certainly wasn't necessary. Not in pan-rozum. He could just turn his body completely to crystal and be a literal flying brick. He'd done it plenty of times before.

But this was an older technique. One he'd developed early on, then later refined thanks to his old mentors. Many of them had grown up in some manner of knightly tradition--just as he himself had done--and so they always had a preference for it, even when other techniques began gaining more popularity among newer generations of warriors.

And it still had its uses, of course. In some ways, it even felt superior. Plus, an overreliance on pan-rozum was a genuine threat to older servants, Sermung had found. Over the centuries, he'd seen so many great warriors come and go, and he couldn't help noticing how they often seemed to suddenly "forget" much of what had made them great in the first place once they were finally able to use pan-rozum regularly.

It was like watching a lifelong swordsman give up the blade completely, just because he'd gotten his hands on a gun. There was something tragic in that, even if it was in some ways understandable.

He rocketed down through the clouds, letting his senses guide him toward his destination on the horizon.

Teleporting would of course be faster, too, but he wanted to address this trail of misery before his eyes.

And there were always wrinkles with that power, too. Invitations to onlooking threats. He didn't want to alert them to his presence just yet.