by Sean Oswald
It was Jay’s turn to chuckle. “Oh, they never tell me when they are gonna do that. But I guess it was only fair. Share and share alike, right.”
“Huong told us all that as the unspoken motto of Team Jay. I just didn’t know that it would be so literal, but yeah, none of us are complaining. It's been a long while since there were any guys around us.” Trudi reached out and put her hand on his knee where he sat cross legged in front of her. “Although, I have it on good authority that the real thing with you is much better.”
“Well, maybe if you work really hard and we make enough progress on your refining there will be time for you to find out before our bubble ends,” Jay said.
“Then what are you waiting for? Do it to me,” Trudi said.
He didn’t even need to touch that one but instead just sent his mind into her. His Evolved Assessment had improved dramatically during his training yesterday as he had been running it as much as he could to parse out details in all the maneuvers he was attempting.
Now he found just what an improvement it made. He saw the details of her body, from skin to circulatory system, down to bone marrow in exquisite detail. It wasn’t even a strain and yet he remembered that the expression “no pain no gain” had real application here. If he didn’t push hard enough then his skills would not grow past a certain point.
He pushed harder and began to break down her body’s functioning at a cellular level. He saw her PSI and Stamina cores and channels. He watched the way that they fed her body and realized just how different she was from the other girls he had already refined. She might be past the 4th threshold, but she didn’t hold a candle to any of his girls and that wasn’t even trying to compare her to any of the fuses.
Then again, technically she was one of his girls now. He owed it to her to make her better, stronger, more durable than she was before. He reached out to her telepathically. Afterall, he needed to practice that skill too and hadn’t been able to do so during his private practice. He had an idea on a whim and wanted to test it out.
“I would like to bond with you if you don’t mind. It isn’t the same thing as a fusion, but it will make us have a connection. You will be able to sense many things from me. My emotional state for example will be pretty open to you. It will connect us emotionally and even to an extent on a physical level.
“This is not necessary for the refinement process, but it just occurred to me that the more connected we are the easier I think it will be to effect changes in your body. So, what do you think? Would that be okay with you?” Jay asked.
“I’m sure you must have looked at the pod list they created. I am on the list of girls who have already decided I want fusion. So, why would I say no to this?”
“Fair enough, but it seemed like the sort of thing that I should get your consent for first. With your permission, I’d like to forge a permanent bond between us. Are you okay with that?”
“Go for it,” Trudi replied.
This was another skill that he had obviously been unable to work on while doing solo training. He also realized that he only would get a limited number of opportunities to practice improving it, so he meant to make the most of it. Jay reached out and felt her body again through his awareness. He delved into her systems and then began to pace his heart to match hers.
He extended tendrils of PSI from himself, that he could now see with his PSI sight and began attaching them to her. Before bonding had always been an instinctual thing. It was more a function of desire, wanting to be connected had been enough. As always intention controlled so much of what they were now.
Now though, Jay wanted to be more precise. He wanted to do it with open eyes to gain a greater understanding so to speak. So, he searched for just the right spots in her to attach the tendrils of energy that flowed out of him. In some ways it was like when he would merge channels and resonate energy, but this was more about emotion and thought.
As he progressed, he saw just how to connect tendrils to parts of her brain and how they flowed back to his brain. He was still very leery of making any changes to the brain, so he stopped short of that but still anchored the threads of power between them. The pleasure centers of their brains had a thread connecting them, just as did the cognitive processing sections and on down the line through the different parts of the body.
It wasn’t a fusion, but it was a much more complete connection than the prior bonds and maybe it was a step in the right direction of understanding how the fusion worked. He didn’t stop with the brain either. He forged bonds connecting their PSI channels, their autonomic systems, down to hearts, lungs, nerves, and bones.
When he finally felt like he was done, he mentally pulled back and saw the intricate weave of PSI threads that were connecting them. It was like he only needed to infuse it with an extra burst of power and then it would sink in.
He went over each connection again. He tried to check how the different connections would interact with each other. Then he triple checked everything till he was content that this was just a more detailed version of the bonding without any appreciable risk that he could detect. Once he was sure, Jay flooded it with PSI power and suddenly she screamed.
Trudi’s back arched like she was spasming and she fell backwards. Jay instinctively cushioned her with a PSI construct and sent his senses running into her. Her heart was racing. Her muscles were contracting wildly, almost like they were trying to tear themselves free of her bones.
He flooded her with healing regenerative power using the skill he had obtained from Huong and that eased her pain, but she was still experiencing some type of convulsion. Jay was worried that he had caused permanent damage to her, so he scanned further.
It then dawned upon him what his mistake had been. It was twofold. First, he was so far beyond what he had ever been before. She was also less in the sense that she had no refining and was only 4th threshold. He had never bonded with anyone that was so far removed from what he was.
Then to make matters worse he had of course decided to push the bond to a whole new level. Now her body was trying to adapt to all the input that it was getting from his vastly more powerful and efficient body. It was almost like he had uploaded an incompatible operating system into her body.
With the problem diagnosed, Jay realized that he needed to react quickly to fix it. The first idea that he had was to fuse with her. That might fix her as it would push her body up by a great amount of power. The thing was again though that he had never fused with anyone who had absolutely no refinement. Even the first fusion with Mia was when she had some minimal refining done to her. Also, he had been much less then, so the shock of trying to merge with him had been more about equals.
If he bonded with her, it would be like trying to graft a piece of Superman into a normal human. It would tear her apart. She simply couldn’t make that much of a change. So, if that wouldn’t work, he was left with the simple need to refine her. But he would need to do it more quickly and more thoroughly than he had ever contemplated before.
It wasn’t like this was a new process though. He had done hundreds of refining sessions with the members of Team Jay and even done some minimal refining with Team Miguel. Now he just had to be better. Fortunately, his Body Modification skill was up to one thousand fifty-seven so he expected he would be able to make the changes quickly enough.
He dove in and started changing her body. She quickly passed out from the pain, but he could see her body continue to try to rip itself apart. Jay raced to make the necessary changes. He began with her nerves and tried to soothe them. If he started with hardening the bones the muscles would still take damage as they over contracted. If he started with the muscles, they would have snapped her bones.
Of course working with the nerves was the most complicated but his skill had gone up dramatically, so he made it through her entire nervous system in less than an hour. That still meant that the spasming didn’t entirely stop for that hour and she remained unconscious.
A closer exam
ination showed that there was some swelling inside her skull, but he had to hope that he could heal that quickly enough to stay ahead of it. He began pouring PSI into Evolved Genesis which was his healing skill while at the same time beginning to strengthen her bones.
It was a draining process and he ended up making four passes through her body repairing and then improving each part of her. She woke up about halfway through the process and was still in considerable pain. He could feel the agony that still lingered in her as a faint echo through their bond.
That told him that the current pain had decreased significantly but her body still was trembling from the sensory overload that it had received. Little by little she began to relax and by the time he had made his fourth pass through her system over the period of eight hours, she was basking in the glow of how good it felt to be this much stronger.
Prior to this she had been level sixty-six. Now she was level seventy-five and right on the cusp of breaking through another threshold. Not only had she gained the nine stat points from those levels, but she had also gained six more points in Awareness which reflected her body’s greater sensitivity, and twelve points each in Durability and Metabolism.
Jay couldn’t complain either though because he had made significant gains in Evolved Assessment, Evolved Projected Bond, Hyper Accuracy, Evolved Genesis, and Body Modification with smaller increases in Evolved Telepathy and Evolved Adaptive Speed. He was definitely becoming better at using multiple skills together. Ironically, Hyper Accuracy which he had not thought much of was becoming one of his go-to skills for comboing with everything else he did. It simply improved his accuracy so significantly.
She still was nowhere near as strong as a fuse and not even quite up to par with one of the original Team Jay members at a similar level, but she had closed 85% of the gap all in one day’s worth of misery. The bond they now shared helped him to realize she was sorting through a bunch of emotions.
He could tell that she was angry with him for how much that had hurt but she also understood through his bond that he hadn’t meant it to hurt. She was also clearly digging the improvements in her strength. In one day, she had gained a thirty-three percent increase in her overall stats and more than that in her physical stats specifically.
Still an unspoken apology was no apology at all even if she could sense his feelings. “I’m sorry about the bonding. I tried to make it stronger, and I overdid it. I didn’t realize how it would affect you given the extreme difference in our power levels. That doesn’t excuse my decision and I should have been more careful.”
Trudi seemed to have recovered her smile as she listened to his apology. “Silly boy, I can already feel how upset you were about this. I’m not saying that I want to go through it again, but this connection with you is amazing. I feel like we are almost one person.”
“Be that as it may, as the leader I have to be judged by the consequences of my actions as much as by my intentions. My dad may not have had much to teach me, but he used to say that if wishes were wings, then every pig would fly. And if you think this is close then you will just freak out about a fusion. That is if you still want to fuse with me,” Jay replied.
“Yes, please. Right now,” Trudi said as she leaned forward, placing her hands on his thighs. Maybe it was the lack of aphrodisiac, maybe he was finally getting used to being surrounded by beautiful women all the time, or maybe it was just his love for his wives, but he didn’t react to her like he would have.
“One thing you will learn about me is that I am faithful. I may be a bonehead at times as Amelia will say but I am a loyal bonehead. I promised my fuses that they could pick the next fuses in the order that I fused with them. So, that means that you will have to wait until you are nominated by one of them,” Jay said.
“Oh, they told us that you take this stuff seriously. I guess that is a good thing, especially if I’m gonna be on the inside someday. I would like to think that if I’m make a lifetime commitment to you that it won’t be one sided,” Trudi said.
Jay smiled. “It will very much be a two-way street. Now though we should work on refining your channels a bit more before our time is up.”
“I think I’ve had enough of that for today,” Trudi replied.
“Okay, I can end the tempus fugit field early.”
“No, silly boy, I may not be fused to you but I was told quite clearly that there were some other perks to being on Team Jay,” Trudi said as she climbed up onto his lap. “Now do you need the bond to know what I’m thinking about.”
Jay shrugged. It was her time, he wasn’t gonna fight how she wanted to spend it. So, he just smiled, and they took her refined body for a test drive.
Chapter 7- New Ways To Do It Wrong
From there he went from one girl to the next. He didn’t make the mistake of bonding with any of them before starting the refining process. It did slow things down a bit but not having to repair the damage more than made up for it. Jay did end up bonding any of the girls that were certain they were going to end up going forward with fusion, which was only a handful of them. Unsurprisingly most of the sessions ended up with extra-curricular activity.
The last session was scheduled for Cecelia. She was extra handsy and confident in how she dealt with him just like Trudi had been. Maybe part of it was that she knew she was going to be the next fusion.
“So, how does this work? Like I jump your bones and then you do your presto power stuff and we end up joined at the hip or something?” Cecelia asked.
Jay just stared at her for a second and then shook his head. “First off, I’m not sure that you would survive fusing with me now. I had a bit of a bad experience earlier with Trudi…”
“What? You fused with her? Mia told me that I was gonna be next,” Cecelia said as she interrupted him.
“No, I agreed to abide by the choices of my fuses. You will soon learn; I take that sort of thing very seriously. But you need to let me finish explaining if you don’t want to waste our time,” Jay snapped back.
She nodded, and Jay continued. “Bonding is a lesser connection but when I tried to do it with Trudi the results nearly killed her. I want to make sure that we get you refined before we try a fusion. Because of that I am going to push harder with you than I did the others. It will hurt but it is necessary. If it works though then I am willing to fuse with you today.”
“I saw how much stronger and tougher the rest of my cluster are now. If you can do that for me then I am more than happy to bear a little pain. I know I act silly sometimes, but I don’t want to give you the wrong idea. I can be tough when I need to. We wouldn’t have survived otherwise,” she responded.
“Good. I know what leading a cluster takes and you have my respect for that. I just want us to start out on the right foot here,” Jay said.
“Fair enough, so how does this work?” she asked.
“You know out of all of the new members of Team Jay, you are the first person to ask. Quick version is that I used an evolved assessment skill that allows me to scan into your body combo’d with a skill that allows me to be exceptionally precise. Then I used a skill called Body Modification to make changes to your body. I make the muscles stronger, with enough time the fibers become more resilient, more flexible, and able to bear more weight. I do the same with bones, ligaments and tendons, your organs, and eventually your channels that control the flow of PSI and Stamina in your body.
“Something you may not know is that as you are leveling up these changes are already happening. The entire process is one of evolving you into something more than simply human. That is why each time you pass a threshold it becomes more painful. For example, you now have tiny duplicate copies of your organs attached to each of your organs. As you evolve, they will grow and ultimately you will have backups to everything inside your body from hearts to kidneys. All of them will be smaller and more efficient but you will have duplicates. What I am doing just greatly accelerates the process.”
“That sounds sorta creepy.
Does it affect our brains?” Cecelia asked.
“Another good question. No, I have avoided trying to modify brains. I worry about making changes that I can’t undo, and to be blunt, I won’t do anything to any of you that I haven’t already practiced on myself,” Jay answered.
“That makes me feel better. I don’t want you to think that I don’t trust you. Just consider this a trust but verify moment,” Cecelia said.
Jay chuckled. “Okay, well time is burning, we need to get you ready. Actually, now that I think about it, I do have a question for you. Would you be agreeable to me modifying the time distortion we are in. I’ve never tried to change the rate of time distortion in an active field, but I worry that I won’t be able to refine you far enough in just one session, for fusion to be safe. And it would allow me to work on another skill.”
Cecelia didn’t answer him immediately. She clearly was thinking over her answer and Jay could respect that. Eventually she said, “So I would get more time with you and get stronger than the others. I like the sound of that. But how long would we be stuck in this little area? I do admit that I get bored easily.”