by Jace Kang
On unevenness. He’d need to ask about scissors, since he’d already gone a week without trimming his hair as all good Fourth-Rank Water Path Cultivators should. He’d also need to find comfort in the warm embrace of a woman if he was to replenish his Yin energies…
Though…considering how gorgeous all the women were, he’d probably spill his seed for the first time in seven hundred years and weaken his Essence. And even if he could control it, if modern women were anything like these warriors, their fragile Yin might not even fill his Core.
Around them, the onlookers held up open hands with black circles in the middle of their palms.
It was all coming back to him. In his youth, everyone carried around mobile phones, and recorded everything from their children’s first steps to idiots trying to launch themselves on bicycles over flaming cars.
“Drop the sutafu,” the man yelled.
What was a sutafu? Ryu cocked his head.
With a shout, the warrior charged in. Jab, cross, hook, cross, lead uppercut, rear uppercut, hook…it was a decent combination, which Ryu avoided with Six Harmony bobbing, lest the man hurt his fists on Ryu’s Iron Shirt. On one foot like a crane, trying to balance his staff on the other foot, it was almost like his Second-Rank Earth Path training seven centuries ago! Only that had also included avoiding No-Shadow Kicks and Water Whips.
The warrior disengaged. His expression was as lost as an unranked initiate trying to gather his Qi in his Core for the first time, only to piss over himself. “How are you doing this?”
“May I?” Ryu lifted his hands from his head, slowly, lest his opponent panic and release another barrage of futile attacks. He then pointed at the man’s feet. Sadly, the next concepts were hard to explain in English. “Foot. Must root. Like tree.”
His opponent froze, perhaps trying to absorb the valuable, if rudimentary lesson. “What are you talking about?”
“No root, no balance, no power. Remember you fall?”
The man’s expression twisted, and he was again bouncing on his tiptoes.
Some lessons just had to be taught the hard way.
Ryu kicked his staff into the air, and then, as his opponent tracked it with his eyes, ducked down and used his leg to sweep his feet out from under him, yet again. Ryu whirled back up, and before the man hit the ground, slammed his palm down with a Splashing Hand technique. Unlike the first time, he transferred his force to the surface only, shattering the composite breastplate but not fracturing any bones or damaging any organs.
He reached out and caught the staff.
The onlookers all gasped and pointed.
Smiling, he dipped his chin in a perfunctory bow. He searched his memory for the words in English. “Temple. I go. Temple. You know? Honnoji.”
They exchanged glances and whispered among themselves, fingers pointing in every direction.
Of course. He let out a sigh. Last time he’d been in Kyoto, hundreds of years before the Cataclysm, there’d been hundreds, if not close to a thousand temples, and an equal number of shrines. As soulless as these people seemed to be, they probably didn’t know the difference between the two.
“Ishihara Ryusuke!” a female voice called.
His heart soared.
Someone knew his name. How was that even possible? A descendant of a relative? He turned.
Six men, led by an exquisite woman, marched through the bystanders as they made way. Unlike the first three, who’d worn composite plating, these seven were all dressed in what looked to be grey yoga pants and wicking compression shirts. Holstered pistols hung from their belts, along with several other devices. Three of the men knelt by the fallen warriors.
Ryu closed his eyes and curled his toes through his boots into the pavement. There was enough moisture in the air connecting them all for him to sense their Cores.
All fragile.
In fact, none of the people he’d sensed so far—save for the middle-aged street sweeper— would even rate with the unranked initiates back home.
The pretty leader held up a fist. Her companions halted, drew their weapons, and aimed at him. She opened one hand and raised the other, in a gesture of surrender.
When she spoke, it was in halting, heavily accented Japanese. “I have a translator. May I?” She brushed her hand from her ample bosom toward his feet.
The six others didn’t look as if they planned on doing any translating, and sadly, she probably wasn’t offering what her sign language had suggested. Still, Ryu bowed his head and beckoned her forward. Though her gait remained confident, she extended a tentative hand toward his head. A black dot was attached to her index finger.
It could be just about anything, and considering how weak all the electromagnetic waves permeating the city made him feel, maybe it was a weapon.
He caught her wrist. “What is it?”
There was nothing but sincerity in her tone and expression. “Translator.”
Oh, so it was a technology. AI translations had progressed during his youth, but had not yet made the leap to capture the nuance of human expressions. Ask a computer for basic information, sure; but at least back then, it wouldn’t be able to parse the difference between hardware and what he’d like to do with this woman. But who knew, a lot could change in eight hundred years. Releasing her wrist, he nodded.
She pressed her finger to his ear, then spoke. “Do you understand what I am saying?”
The sounds of her voice didn’t match the movement of her lips, a little like the vintage Hong Kong movies he’d watched as a child on analog VCR technology. It had been those videos that sent him on his journey to the World of Rivers and Lakes, in fact.
“Do you understand what I am saying?” she repeated.
He nodded. “Yes, do you understand me?”
“Yes.” Her tight expression softened, making her look even more beautiful. “I am Captain Oyama Keiko.”
So she had a Japanese name, despite not looking Japanese. He bowed. “I am…”
“Ishihara Ryusuke.”
“Please, call me Ryu.” Grinning in spite of himself, he bowed.
“I need you to come with me.”
He gestured at the six men surrounding him. “I have a feeling that isn’t a request?”
“No. But it will be easier on everyone if you come peacefully.”
The air crackled, and a shadow blotted out the sun. Ryu looked up.
Two large figures plummeted from the skyscrapers. They landed to either side of him.
The impact shook the ground and sent webs of cracks rippling through the concrete. They stood head and shoulders taller than him, and were twice as broad. Their polymer-plated armor made them appear even larger. A six-barreled minigun sprouted from a compartment in one’s forearm, though without any feeding belts of ammunition.
The onlookers who had the presence of mind to flee did, though most screamed and cowered as fear rooted them in place.
“On your knees, hands on your head!” one of the new behemoths ordered.
A machine? No, behind the visored helm glared a pair of brown eyes. When Ryu gripped the ground with his toes and reached out through the moisture, he sensed the Core, albeit a weak one, of a living being.
“No!” Captain Oyama grabbed at the one man’s gun, pulling it down.
With a snarl, the giant shoved her away, his brute strength sending her out of the circle of her soldiers and careening into the crowds. He raised his weapon again. “On your knees. Hands on your head.”
Ryu smiled. “Sir, if you shoot and miss, you will hit these bystanders. Or your friend.” He dropped through the beefy arms of the soldier behind him, who’d tried to wrap him up. Ryu back-rolled between his would-be captor’s legs, popped up to his feet, and slapped both palms into the man’s back with Splashing Hands.
The armor shattered, and the man staggered forward, crashing into his comrade. The first extended his arm, and the minigun’s six barrels whined as they started to spin.
Did this man not care for t
he onlookers? Like all Cultivators on the Water Path, Ryu had trained in the fundamentals of the Metal Path. Metal generated Water, after all, and even untrained initiates started the rudiments of Iron Palm. He dashed in and rooted to the ground. Guiding Qi to his fingers, he knifed his hand into the whirling barrels. The weapon locked up and jolted free of the warrior’s arm mount.
And mangled Ryu’s digits.
Pain blossomed in four fingers. He took a deep breath and calmed his mind with the Water Path’s Placid Pool to block it out. He directed Qi up and down the six Hand meridians and collaterals, sensing the pathways. No broken bones, just a few partially torn ligaments. Gritting his teeth, he yanked his hand back, minigun barrels still entangled in his fingers.
The two huge men stared at him, looked at each other, and after exchanging nods, turned to him. In unison they clenched their fists, and red blades of energy sprouted a meter and a half from their wrists. They closed with admirable speed, attacks coordinated in a flash of lights akin to an old sci-fi movie.
Ryu lifted the minigun into the path of the blades, which severed the metal barrels like a newly sharpened sword through exposed flesh. With the cut so close to his fingers, the weapon’s heavy stock unbalanced his hand. Before the barrels hit the ground, Ryu flipped the minigun remains over. The next hack of the energy blade sliced through the gun’s body.
A flick of his wrist sent pain jolting through his fingers, but dislodged the mangled metal. He executed a back-hand spring and landed out of range. One second was all he needed to focus. With his good hand, he used a Watershaping movement to draw water vapor out of the air. Bending it to his will, it coalesced into a molecule-thin whip and snapped it across the men’s blade emitters. The light blinked out.
In their moment of shock, Ryu used a Crashing Wave shoulder-butt on the closest, shattering his armor and launching him into the second. Both landed in a heap six meters away.
The remaining onlookers gasped.
One of Captain Oyama’s men was first to regain his wits. “Take aim!”
His comrades came out of their stupor and levelled their weapons at him. If they were so foolish as to fire, and he jumped over or ducked under the barrage, six innocent bystanders would be injured.
“No!” Captain Oyama’s voice came out weak from among the crowd.
“Fire!”
The Code of Rivers and Lakes necessitated Ryu protecting the innocents, even if it meant getting hit. He reached into the fold of his robes and plucked a green Core Fortifying Pill from the interdimensional space in his internal pocket. He flicked the glowing green pearl into his mouth and swallowed. Warmth filled him, energizing his meridians and strengthening his Core.
Six beams of blue light shot out. As a Cultivator of the Path of Water, channeling the Path of Wood came easily. He rooted to the ground and sank his stance. The energy surged through him, like the time when he was a stupid child and stuck a fork into an electrical outlet. He buckled to his knees. The edges of his vision blurred as all faded to black.
Chapter 3:
The Hacker
E ighteen-year-old Aya was Earth’s greatest criminal, and nobody even knew.
Not her parents, who tried to pretend she didn’t exist, while lavishing affection on her sister.
Not the Sentinels, Repairers, Filers, and Operators which mistook her for one of them inside the EtherCloud.
After all, they never saw her real body, the one which had the dubious distinction of belonging to the only XHuman who ever hacked up phlegm.
Turned out, she was quite good at a very different kind of hacking, as well.
So much that she was one of only three or four civilians who’d seen all seventy-three videos of Ishihara Ryusuke defeating two shocktroopers.
The raw footage.
Not the edited story which the government had released. Witnesses knew to stick to that fiction. To do otherwise would mean their social score would sink so low they couldn’t even get a Purebred’s job.
While even the simplest AI could use one camera angle and extrapolate details into a 92.7% accurate 3D rendering, Aya had taken all available views and merged them into a 99.99997% accurate replay of the fight. Now, she rewound it back to Ishihara’s confrontation with the shocktroopers, and walked among them in the simulation.
Her EtherCloud Avatar flickered, tethered as it was to her real body. “Freeze,” she commanded.
Gasping for air, she jacked out of the EtherCloud and returned to reality. Dizzy, feeling sluggish and slow in real time, she fought the rising nausea. Mucous was flooding her lungs. Coughs racked her body as phlegm scoured up her throat and filled her mouth. She spat it out into a glass, leaving a salty aftertaste on her tongue.
Aya heaved a few breaths as she looked around her lavishly furnished bedroom. She snorted. The decorations were a waste, but her parents figured that making her living space as luxurious as possible would keep her from leaving the house.
Because in a world where all humans but the Purebreds had reached genetic perfection, Aya was a one-in-six-billion accident.
She was supposed to have been just a bundle of engineered stem cells, a base from which to create designer hair color for the one who’d become her elder sister. When her parents were ready to have a second child, a B8 AI mistake in the embryo lab management system had led to her being implanted in her mother’s uterus instead of a younger sister. By the time anyone realized what had happened, she’d been born the genetic identical twin of her older sister, save for six genes that gave her gold hair and an incurable disease that had been eradicated six centuries before.
Back then, during the Age of Greed, people still used pharmaceuticals to manage the symptoms; now, nanobots did the work, and the sole sufferer of an ancient ailment wouldn’t live long enough for a nanotech company to recoup its investment costs to program a treatment.
At last, fresh air filled her lungs. The ten minutes of open airways in real time translated to what felt like a day in the EtherCloud. She jacked back in even before acclimating to real time, leaving behind the limitations of her flawed body.
Her Avatar, a black-haired beauty with honey-toned skin from her homeland’s brutal past, reappeared in her firewalled EtherSpace, back in the simulation she’d paused.
Ishihara’s stunningly handsome figure stood to one side, the two shocktroopers on the other. At full speed, he’d moved like a blur, faster than the Peacekeepers in their reflex-enhancing armor and tactical suits, and just as fast as the shocktroopers in their power armor.
“Ai,” she said, fusing the letters for her Artificial Intelligence assistant to sound like the ancient Japanese word for love. “Play at one-quarter speed.”
Appearing as a nine-tailed fox in the corner of her vision, her assistant bobbed its head. As the scene repeated itself, she froze it in certain places. Ishihara didn’t appear to be wearing any technology to enhance his speed or strength, but perhaps he was one of the Ministry of Defense assassins with internal wiring and a tenuous grip on sanity.
His fingers had been injured in the minigun, and yet with the wave of his other hand, the shocktroopers’ blade emitters had just broken off.
Which should’ve been impossible.
If only she dared to hack into the Ministry of Defense’s EtherSpace, she could acquire the shocktroopers’ feeds from their state-of-the-art sensors. But only another hacker, Slash, could do that. Maybe she could talk him into trading some code…
But for now, she’d have to make do with her own resources. She leaned in to examine the sheer cut in the tube.
“Reverse to timestamp 11:04:03:91.”
The scene jumped back in time to where the first emitter failed. The slice was just appearing in the conduit.
“Magnify.”
The image zoomed in closer and closer, with still no sign of what had disabled the shocktrooper weapons. The resolution surpassed the several civilian videos that she’d knitted into the replay, and was limited to the feeds from the Peacekeepe
rs.
“Stop.”
The image, caught by that bitch Keiko’s camera, froze at the atomic level, where water molecules interlocked into a line, slicing through the emitter.
No, that couldn’t be.
Because if what she was seeing was true, Ishihara could control water at the molecular level.
That was supposed to be only theoretical, the technology in the experimental stage. And it didn’t explain how Ishihara could move so fast.
“Ai, zoom back to standard size and resume play.” She watched another second of the fight, to where he jammed his fingers into the revolving minigun barrels. “Pause. Zoom in.”
Unlike the revelation of the water molecules, nothing on the surface showed just how he’d been able to stop a durastrium alloy rotating at 8000rpm. Thankfully, government cameras included wide spectrum electromagnetic scans as well.
“Shift to X-ray CT and magnify.”
Filaments of some kind webbed through the layers of his skin and muscle fascia. The protein structure of his ligaments and muscles looked strengthened by coiled proteins. Foreign minerals reinforced his bones, and his blood vessels…
“Cross-reference.”
Organic polypeptides in the subject’s connective tissue, Ai’s voice spoke in her mind. Images of the long-extinct orb spider flashed, along with the chemical structure of its silk. Several different iron alloys make up the network in the subject’s skin.
How was this even possible? If Aya’s Avatar could gasp, she would’ve.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at his eyes.
The nine-tailed fox gestured to the cellular structures. Cone and rod density is six times greater than average.
“What does that mean?”
Subject is able to see clearly in the dark, and distinguish more colors and details than normal.
Better vision. “What about his sense of smell.”
The CT scan shifted to Ishihara’s nose.
Subject has over twenty-five million olfactory receptors.
Not nearly as good as a dog, but still four times more than anyone else. Might as well ask— “And his hearing?”