Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

Faith- psionic teleportation

  Maja- probability shifts

  Simone- psionic divination

  Oma- mind hunter, mental schism

  Sheila- pacifism

  Natalie- mental stimulation, mental decrease

  Ryleigh- enhanced speed, joint manipulation

  Daphne- power amplification

  Eden- power leech

  Zoe- laser vision

  Aisha- daydreaming

  Niamh- augmented form

  Naomi- mass absorption, enhanced strength

  Alexandra- mercury form

  Samantha- judgment/truth detection

  Trinity- power linking

  Aliyah- enhanced pliability, enhanced strength

  Gigi- mental math

  Ellie- mechanical intuition

  Rebecca- medicokinesis

  Lauren- shape manipulation

  Fuses: 18 so far, 24 willing, 19 unwilling, 50 undecided

  The list was broken down as it was by pods in the order that he had fused the girls, although he noted that Trina was put at the end of the wives, whatever that was between them. Since he had agreed to let the girls nominate who he should fuse with next in that same order, he decided that it would be good to know who he was going to be joining with for life over the next week.

  But for now, he put the list out of his mind and began working on his physical skills. He increased his mass until it required him to use a great deal of his strength to move. Unfortunately, it made the floor creak and while he assumed the A’snkarnt metal could hold up to it, he didn’t want to test fate.

  In the end he stopped after increasing his eight-hundred-pound body till it weighed just over four tons. With the ten times gravity in effect that was the equivalent of moving forty tons with each step. It was a good compromise because it required him to ramp up his Evolved Strength Forged Body but wasn’t causing the floor to groan in protest.

  Before he knew it, he was adapted to the weight and was zipping around the room, performing various forms that Bong-Cha had taught him and some of the more brutal combat moves that Hanna had drilled into him. Hopefully, they would both be proud. He practiced both with and without his PSI sword.

  When he wasn’t using the sword, he would create PSI constructs around him so that he had powerful obstacles to run into and bounce off of. It simulated hitting a powerful opponent and forced his body to adapt to the beating that caused and helped him work on multiple skills at the same time.

  To mix it up he would also throw in Phase Burst, Primal Power, which allowed him to summon some instinct or skill of an animal without changing forms like Jessie did, and his Evolved Fire Form. As often as possible he juggled the largest number of skills that he could handle at once but wasn’t yet working on combining them as much as simply getting in more practice with each of them.

  For hours he kept at it, exerting himself to the max. His body regenerated so quickly that lactic acid never had a chance to build up in his body, if it even would now. He probably needed to learn a bit more about human anatomy and work on looking deeper into those systems. From what he could tell his body was currently being powered by PSI energy rather than any chemical process derived from breaking down food.

  That however, made it a challenge for himself to see if he could push himself to the point of true fatigue. He moved, jumping off the walls and bouncing around the room faster than a normal human could have followed, all while essentially moving a body that weighed forty tons. Yet every time he started to sweat or began to breathe heavily, he would pause for a moment. Within two or three seconds the fatigue felt washed away and his body was entirely renewed.

  On the one hand this was exciting. He had never been old on Earth but had heard more than one professor complain about old bodies. Now he was perpetually operating in a state of being fully rested and feeling fresh. The value of that couldn’t be overstated. It was a dream that so many on Earth would have killed for.

  But that didn’t mean that he was gonna stop trying to push himself to the point of exhaustion. He might not be able to increase the weight anymore, but he could still work on pushing himself harder. He had the time. The first training session was only half an hour but at 1750:1 time distortion that worked out to just over thirty-six days.

  He was finally getting some alone time. It was ironic that less than three hours into it he was already wondering if he shouldn’t have invited one of the girls to come train with him. But no, it might be nice to have extended times with just one of his wives, but he needed to train. His skills were lacking, and he refused to fail because even after begging for alone time he found himself missing his harem.

  So he pushed harder. He maximized his speed and strength till he was streaking around the room at over fifty thousand miles per hour while making rapid turns. The entire length of the room was only the size of two football fields. Thus, every second he was covering the room from one end to the other one hundred and thirty-one times, all while hauling his forty tons.

  Beads of sweat were breaking out on his body. He kept pushing. His PSI regen rate was keeping up even with both skills maxed at level five. What was more was that he had not moved this fast in this constrained of an area before. So, his precognition and hyper accuracy were both having to be ramped up to keep him from smashing through one of the walls. The ship was sturdy but there was no way the internal walls would survive such a crash.

  Without even trying his primal power further served to heighten his reflexes and his extreme structural reformation was working to heal and enhance his body even as he tore it down. All of these skills were being guided by his evolved adaptive speed which was maxed to give him this crazy acceleration but was also serving to help his body adapt faster.

  That was gonna be the key. Training his body to adapt more quickly. He needed to gain tens of thousands of skill levels spread across some twenty-six skills and he needed to do it all as quickly as possible. Strength and speed were gonna be easy if somewhat monotonous. He just needed to find better ways to use them. The other skills were gonna be hard. His mind raced while his body responded instinctively to the extreme struggle that he pushed on it.

  Then he had an idea. He came to a stop, well he did but it required him to use a kinetic burst in front of himself pushed against a PSI construct in the shape of a wall. Once all that momentum was gone, he set to work building a series of PSI construct walls in a floating circle around him. The constructs were created by his energy and weren’t required to be supported by the walls or floors.

  That was the breakthrough that he had. He could now assert a greater amount of strain on himself so long as he was just bouncing between walls that were hanging in the air. No kinetic force should be transferred into the ship so that was a good thing. He had already worn the floor of his designated training area out. There were indentations from his feet and his most frequent paths were clearly worn down an inch lower than the rest of the room.

  Now though there were six floating walls hanging in the middle of the room. Each time he impacted one of them he bounced immediately across to another wall. It was virtually like flying since he was moving at a staggering speed. Perhaps not as fast as when he was running but each landing no matter that it only lasted a fraction of a second required his legs to absorb all of the impact of stopping and redirecting forty tons moving faster than any human rocket ship.

  With each impact he felt not only the physical strain in the form of a jarring sensation that ran up his body and micro tears in numerous muscles but all the strain on his PSI construct. The drain to his PSI energy was palpable and he was quickly exhausting his massive energy supply faster than it was refilling. It still took him seven minutes to do it but at that point he actually had to stop as his abilities failed him.

  It would only take five minutes for him to be fully recharged now but for a few minutes he could operate with only the ability of his base stats. So once again he took up running and leaping in as wild a ma
nner as possible, trying to push his body to its limits. For the first time in hours, he had managed to drench his shirt with sweat.

  Lying there on his back upon the hard metal floor, he looked out one of the view portals and saw the stars around them. The fact that he could see them at all indicated the ship was between spatial jumps, otherwise nothing would have been visible outside. The spatial jump drive didn’t move them through space. There were no Star Wars-esque lights that suddenly streaked to indicate that the ship was moving faster than light. No, the jump drive simply caused the ship to be in a different location, although there did seem to be a minute passage of time from one end of the jump to the other.

  Jay found that within a couple of minutes all of his exhaustion was so completely gone as to make him question if he had even felt it in the first place. Pushing himself was going to be a challenge. The next idea that he had was to make the walls that he was jumping off of progressively smaller. This would force him to hit a target, while draining less PSI and allowing him to push harder physically.

  In the end Jay pushed himself harder than he had ever pushed. He realized that he needed to do the entire five hours of training on his own. Not because he didn’t miss his wives, children, and the rest, but because he did. If they were worth missing, then they were worth training for. For all of them only five hours would have passed even if essentially an entire year had passed for him.

  When it was done the results were impressive. He had been right. Pushing his Evolved Adaptive Speed had been critical to improvement. But on the negative side his skill increases had started coming much slower towards the end. He took one last glance at his skill sheet. He was content with the progress. He still had six days of this training which meant six years and six days of training with the others.

  All of his skills were now over one thousand and even if the skill increases were coming slower, he was still making progress. Well at least all the skills that didn’t require someone else to be there. Even his Iron Will had leapt, which was probably the only reason that he had managed a year of solitary confinement. He even managed to gain two levels, or maybe he should say that he only managed to gain two levels in an entire year. If that didn’t confirm that fusion was the true way for him to move forward now, then he didn’t know what would.

  Either way, it was time to go rest now. Rest and enjoy the company of his wives, children, and just eat a casual meal. Maybe act like a normal person for a bit, someone whose shoulders didn’t bear the fate of his entire race.

  Chapter 6- Refining

  Jay had an evening in regular time, eating at a huge table, with all of his fuses and even the non-fuses who had his children all invited. The kids were there, and the room was loud and chaotic. But it felt alive. It felt real, not like some sci-fi adventure.

  There was one extra girl at the table that Mia introduced as her guest, Cecelia. The pretty redhead was bubbly and maybe trying too hard to make a good impression. He could understand how she would be nervous with a room full of women around him. But she was still pleasant to talk to.

  When he had first seen her, he had asked Mia telepathically why she was here. The response was, “She is my guest and remember I get to pick who your next fuse is. So, you might want to make nice with her.”

  “What about Emma?” Jay asked back.

  “What about her?”

  “She is also in your pod and according to the list I was given she wants to be fused. Certainly, she has priority. She has been with us since the beginning. She even played a part in containing Jasmine when we fled into the dungeon,” Jay answered.

  “Yes, and she will be my next pick, but she and I had a nice long talk earlier and she understood that it is important that some of the newcomers be picked, especially their leaders so that they can feel like they are truly equal parts of Team Jay,” Mia said.

  “Ah,” Jay said. He laughed at himself. He excelled at stating the obvious, but he couldn’t argue with Mia’s logic. Even better that Emma was okay with it.

  That of course led him to engaging in more conversation with Cecelia who was soon insisting that he call her CeeCee. Madison burst into the discussion and said, “Oh no. Jay can’t use any nicknames until he’s been in you.”

  Charlotte burst out laughing remembering Maddy’s statements after their first time. But Cecelia didn’t miss a beat as she said, “Oh, okay. Right now?”

  Half the room burst into laughter, a couple of the girls said something about there being children present, and most predictably Huong shouted out, “Orgy.”

  Jay just shook his head. Eventually things calmed down and the strangest thing he heard was Ava asking Huong, “Why shouldn’t she please the master right now? I can tell he is aroused.”

  Things naturally calmed down from that point and Jay eventually announced that he would begin the agreed-upon schedule tomorrow but for tonight he was just going to spend a quiet evening with his wives. Ultimately while a great deal of passion was involved, he still ended up getting several hours of much-needed sleep.

  When he woke, he was draped in legs and arms and he sighed deeply, realizing that it wasn’t fair that it had cost billions of human lives, but this was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. That morning he had to go check in on the science lab and see what was going on with the implant replacements.

  Everyone was nervous when he arrived but confident that it was going to work. It was the first time any of them were going to be practicing brain surgery. He set up the tempus fugit fields for the lab. The ease with which the skill functioned now was miraculous. He had so much more precision and the skill level for it had only hit just a bit over one thousand. He couldn’t imagine how amazing it would be if he could get to triple that.

  From there he followed Trina until they reached a room where there was a line of newcomers. All the ones who weren’t working in the labs or nursery this morning were waiting for a turn at refinement. It was daunting to think about. He had four hours dedicated to this and they had agreed on a 125:1 time dilation.

  A quick headcount showed that there were thirty-seven of the newcomers in here. He was surprised sometimes now by how quickly his head did the math for these simple tasks. It was hardly rocket science but not the sort of thing that he would have been able to naturally do before.

  He would have approximately six and a half real-world minutes with each of the thirty-seven but that would translate into thirteen and a half hours per girl. That would definitely be enough to lay a good foundation for their refinement. Especially if, as he hoped, his new higher-level skill would allow him to be more efficient.

  Thankfully, they already had an order set aside. Trudi, one of the two leaders, was going first. She was another cute blonde. Was it possible to have too many of those? He didn’t think so. He loved all the flavors of beauty around him from blonde to brunette, Caucasian to African or Asian and every variant possible. They were more American than anything else, but Team Jay had representatives from over thirty countries now and he couldn’t help but think that was a good thing.

  He also needed to remember that Trudi wasn’t just a pretty face. She had managed to successfully lead a cluster after numerous deaths and saved the rest long enough for them to survive for a merger with his cluster. That was no small feat given how hard the experiment had been. Jay knew that his success was in large part due to his cheating help from the future.

  Rather than looking at the pod list to find out what her abilities were, Jay erected a tempus fugit field around them and then asked, “So what skills do you have? Knowing will help me with refining your body.”

  She grinned and said back, “Skills hmm. I’ve always been told I’m good with my hands. And body refining? That sounds kinda naughty. Not sure anyone has ever done that to me before.”

  Jay smiled, he could play along. “Oh baby, no one has ever done to you the things that I’m about to do.” Once upon a time Jay would have been too bashful to tease like that but now, he cou
ld give as good as he got, except maybe with some of his wives. They just seemed to know how to push his buttons.

  “Oh, now this sounds like more fun than what they told me. Here I was warned that it hurts a bit at first and any time you have to make major changes,” Trudi cooed.

  “Well that is true if we are talking about body refining. The first time is I think the roughest, but it is also pretty hard when you reach some of the later stages.” He paused for a second before adding, “I can’t help but notice that you and for that matter everyone was in a rather good mood for having to stand around all morning waiting for me to do some unknown process to them. Why’s that?”

  “Nothing bad. It was just that Mia and another couple of your fuses set up broadcast stations last night,” Trudi said with a grin.

  “Broadcast stations?”

  “Yeah, they were broadcasting your sensual projections. I think that is what they called it. But pretty much everyone got to experience what you were doing last night.” For a moment Trudi’s face actually turned a pretty rose color as she got flush and seemed to be breathing shallower and more quickly. “I have to admit I wasn’t prepared for how intense it felt.”