by Mills, H. C.
And yet, they can’t be as illusory as they’re claimed to be if I managed to bring something back.
What about the memory loss, is that normal, or is it induced for some reason?
I glance at Dave, who’s lightly snoring nearby. More than anything, I want to pick his brain about this, but... even though he’s so close, I can’t. I can’t think of any method of communication that can’t be listened in on, as our AIs collectively are able to see and hear everything we can!
Telepathy is definitely out. Since flows of energy are what the eye-crystals pick up best, trying to send secret messages along tethers made of Lavi is just asking to be wire-tapped.
A secret code? We’d have to decide on one first, and they’d witness it. Also, objective friggin’ meaning. A puzzle or cryptic message? Same problem, and even if that weren’t an issue, it’d have to be something that advanced Artificial Intelligences aren’t able to crack, for some reason.
Pretend that we want to get intimate, and ask our AIs to tune out?
Again, I don’t trust them to not secretly keep tabs on us. God, we’d basically have to have actual sex just to keep up the ruse, and they still might listen in.
Clearly not an option. Also, not worth it, even if it was. Guess I’m on my own for now.
Survival will still have to come first, but maybe I can try a little experiment tomorrow.
After a lot of mulling and planning, I finally drift off to a restless slumber, full of confusing dreams.
The next morning, I once again seclude myself to take a Skilldream.
I have to decide which one first, though. The subject matter shouldn’t really matter for the experiment I plan to run, after all.
Now that my friends know about Charm, and I may be able to actually start learning how to use it, taking a Skilldream for the Dreamcloud Purpose for Infuse starts to seem like a pretty good idea. I can just imagine myself in the future, leading a host of froggos through a Trial, having them kill everything for me...
And even by itself, the Dreamcloud Purpose could be very useful. If I could Infuse some darts—or better yet, my breath—with Dreamcloud Energy, that could prove a powerful tool.
“All right,” I say, my mind made up. “Half a Skilldream for the Dreamcloud Purpose of Infuse, please.”
I should be able to manage with just half, since I already have the basic Skill, and still have some dregs of ground Dreamcloud pollen saved to use as a reference.
[Coming right up!] Suri chimes pleasantly, and the world fades to black.
When I wake after my Skilldream, my memories are, as always, vague.
I heard you can train yourself to remember your dreams, by keeping a journal of them. Could that possibly work to improve my retention of Skilldreams as well, or would that be wasted effort?
Not like I even have a journal anyway. Or a working pen.
I shake my head.
Focus, Emma! Did you succeed in what you set out to do?
A blurry memory of a pitch-black beach comes to mind. That must’ve been where Suri took me. The question is, did I manage to stick something in my hair again? I can’t even remember if I tried...
I yawn, keeping my eyes closed as I stretch out my arms and legs, and secretly check my hair for sand, or anything else that’s beachy.
I quickly go through all of it, front to back, but don’t feel anything out of place.
Damnit.
Did I perhaps imagine that feather after all? I guess all I can do is keep trying, though it’ll have to wait until after the next Trial, probably. I don’t really have time for another Skilldream.
[Good, you’re up. Better get started right away,] Suri suggests.
I sigh but take out my Focus Crystal and the pouch that holds my last bit of ground Dreamcloud pollen.
I carefully take out a pinch of the fine powder.
Since the Toxic Energy in this stuff has Purpose, I can’t just inhale it up to my Tolerance Limit. Toxic Energy Tolerance does mitigate its effects, but it doesn’t block it completely. Maybe only if I reached 100% someday, would I be completely immune.
I stare at the pinch, using the energy vision of the eye-crystal, and try to get a feeling for what this Purpose is all about.
The first thing I notice is a difference in the colour. Regular Toxic Energy has an almost aggressive colour, magenta with flashes of something a little pinker, maybe fuchsia. The Toxic Energy in Dreamcloud powder is much calmer, and coloured much softer, more like lilac.
The energy still consists of tendrils, but like the colour, they’re much calmer. The tendrils undulate in a soothing... almost hypnotic... rhythm...
Woah. I shake my head. Staring at it too intensely might not be the brightest idea. The more intense the contact, the easier it can get its hooks in me.
Hooks... a blurry memory pops up from the Skilldream. A kind of jellyfish that Suri showed me, washed up on the pitch-black shore, that had hooks on its tentacles.
My eyes widen. I take out a fresh pinch, as the energy in the previous had started to fade with the exposure to Aether.
I take another close look at it. Closer than the last even, as I’m trying to see if—yes! There are tiny hooks on the lavender-coloured tendrils of energy!
Satisfied, I back off. Some half-forgotten sensations from the Skilldream rise in the back of my head. Dreamcloud is... insidious. It’s kinda like the wolf in sheep’s clothing, pretending very hard to be harmless. It sucks its victims in by getting its hooks in their mind and pulls them in the direction it wants them to go.
I’m definitely starting to get a feeling for this Purpose, so this shouldn’t take too long.
It doesn’t take long. After using up about half my Qi, trying to impose this Purpose on the Toxic Energy as it forms, I get the following message.
Sweet!
Now that that’s done, it’s time to get serious about my training for the big showdown with Jacob.
And the next Trial, of course.
First, I use up the remainder of my Qi trying out some sick moves with Decrease Inertia.
Once my Qi is spent, it’s time for the main part: figuring out how I can best use Breath Control level 2 in combat.
The first thing I want to try is something I’ve previously tried under-Hydrum, but never with Aether before: forming my breath into ropes to restrain someone with.
Since I don’t have any other test subjects, I use them on myself.
Of course, even though I can pack the Aether much more densely than I used to, and have much finer control over it thanks to the nuclei, it’s still not as suitable for binding things as the viscous Hydrum is. Still, I control five breaths now, and using all of them in tandem, I find they can offer a nice bit of resistance.
My control is much stronger when the Aether touches my skin though, so this might work a little less well when I use it on someone else from a distance. But still, definitely useful.
My next idea is to try and use my breaths as a kind of cushioning, to defend against blunt force impacts, but possibly also to break my fall someday.
This turns out to be a little harder than I first imagined.
The distinction between my breath and the surrounding Aether is getting clearer and clearer as I advance in this Skill, and it’s now possible for me to see a kind of membrane outlining the outer edge, with thin connections to the nucleus.
Basically, each of my breaths is kinda like an inflated balloon. Using them as ropes to tie someone up is kinda like making balloon animals. Trying to land on them to have them break your fall is therefore kinda like, well, jumping on a pile of balloons.
I’m stupid enough to try anyway.
Some of my breaths scatter away under the force of my landing, and one of them bursts under my ass. All in all, it’s not pleasant or practical.
As I sit on the ground rubbing my sore lower back, I belatedly wonder if I might be able to fuse them together, for better effect.
I never tried it under-Hydrum, because it
wasn’t necessary. I did combine them into a single tail, but they were still separate breaths then. The Hydrum I exhaled wasn’t more pressurised than the surrounding Hydrum, so it didn’t behave like a balloon and shaped much more easily. It was also viscous, so the different exhales easily stuck to each other.
I start to experiment. Truly combining my breaths into one requires the outer membranes to break open, which most often leads to sudden deflation of my breath balloons. Eventually, however, I manage to fuse two breaths into a single, larger one.
During another attempt a little later, I manage to add a third before the structure destabilises. Soon enough, I add a fourth, then a fifth, and, to my surprise, a sixth. Apparently, having the nuclei close to each other helps stabilise them, and allows for them to last longer.
Either way, it’s like this that I manage to create a kind of mega-balloon, taut with condensed Aether.
I put it on the floor, and once again attempt to land on it on my back.
To my surprise, it bounces me back up.
Well... that can actually also be pretty useful, but not if I want to cushion my fall. Landing on that thing from up high would just result in me bouncing off into something hard, probably breaking my neck or giving me whiplash in the process.
I need something a little more like an airbag. That means it needs holes to vent the pressure. But I can’t actually make holes in it, that would just deflate it immediately!
Can I make holes in the split second before my landing? Unlikely.
Hmm. How do I make holes that appear the moment I land...
My eyes widen. That’s it! I don’t have to actually make holes, I just have to make weak spots in the membrane, so the pressure will rip holes there when I land on it, but the overall structure remains intact!
Boom, instant airbag!
Excited, I get to work.
Obviously, this idea requires considerably more complex manipulations of the Lavi in my exhales than anything I’ve done before. But, after a lot of practice, I manage to pull it off.
I only take breaks when my Qi refills, to pull off some aerial stunts with Decrease Inertia. Now that I’m getting a feeling for how the Skill affects my accelerability, it’s almost child’s play to perform increasingly complex manoeuvres, especially considering how high my Agility is.
I keep working on Breath Control in the meantime. After some more practice, I can even easily switch back and forth between airbag and balloon mode. And it works like a charm. I now keep my breaths on my back as a kind of cape, fused into a whole. I can jump on my back and have it bounce me back up, or quickly switch to airbag mode and have it deflate underneath me to catch my fall.
It even works better as a binding tool, fused into a whole. I can’t just insert someone inside of it, as that would require me to break open the membrane, but I can easily twist it around someone’s limbs to immobilise them like a kind of straitjacket.
At dinner, I hear about the exploits of the rest.
Kaitlynn finally gained Telepathy. She hopes we may be able to stay connected a bit after exiting the Trial.
Perhaps inspired by her idea, Alec pestered Dave to teach him about the second level of Telepathy—which indeed turns out to be connecting to multiple people—and managed to gain it.
In return, Dave had him explain about the third level of Meditation, and worked on that, but didn’t manage to break through yet.
Well, it’s a hard Skill to master. I know all too well.
Jacob claims he spent his time honing his swordplay and his Yang Qi momentum Skills.
Kaitlynn pesters me about the Skilldreams I took, so I decide to tell them about my new Infuse Purpose, figuring it’ll be a nice way to throw Jacob off the scent of how I plan to deal with him. Judging by his grimace, he takes the bait.
We’re holding the match an hour and a half before the Trial, so we’ll have at least an hour to replenish our Qi and do our final preparations afterwards. But first, we’re getting one last good night’s sleep.
As I curl up on my side on the couch next to Kaitlynn, something pricks my hip.
There’s something small yet hard in my pocket.
At first, I’m confused. Then a thought strikes me like a bolt from the blue.
I carefully rub the eyelid covering my eye-crystal, pretending like I’m just rubbing an itch, while I surreptitiously draw the item out of my pocket to glance at it with my actual eye.
It’s a tiny, pitch-black conch shell.
Son of a beach.
CHAPTER 29
Mortal Kombat
I DON’T SLEEP WELL. My dreams are plagued by a certain black conch shell that keeps popping up.
I awake restlessly and my fingers quickly seek out the dangerous secret on my body.
Except, it’s gone.
That innocuous little shell, the proof of a lie, that is supposed to be burning a figurative hole in my pocket right now, is gone.
Was it really there last night? Did I just dream the whole thing?
As soon as the doubts rear up, I push them back down. The memory of last night is too vivid, too real. There’s no way I dreamed that.
Which means there must be another explanation for why it’s gone.
Did someone take it? Seems unlikely.
Perhaps, since it came from a dreamscape, it behaves like one of those objects conjured within there and just disappears after a while.
Or... the black conch shell that plagued my dreams last night was literally the same conch shell, which I brought into my dreams and lost somewhere in there.
This is what I dislike about doing research. You run a successful experiment, and all you end up with is more questions.
I also hate that I can’t tell anyone about it.
But there’s no time to seek further answers or to lament my solitude in this matter. In fact, there’s hardly time for a proper breakfast before the showdown.
Jacob and I face each other in the living room.
There are dark circles beneath his eyes. He looks agitated, but his grip on his weapons is steady and his pose relaxed. If he’s still sore in any way from the surgery performed on him to install the Piezoelectric Crystal while he was unconscious, he doesn’t show it.
Still creepy. Did someone come into his room to perform the surgery? They must have. I wonder if it’s performed by the same person—or being—that replaced our eyes with eye-crystals...
I twirl my spear lightly as I stare him down, the corners of my mouth curling up as I banish my thoughts and focus on the upcoming fight.
I can’t help it, I’m excited. My heart pounds from the adrenaline singing through my veins. If that even exists in this Realm.
Part of me hopes this’ll be a friendly competition, that we’ll come out smiling, better friends than when we went in.
Another part of me feels challenged in my capacity as alpha, so to speak, and holds a kind of primal urge to put this little upstart in his place.
It’s very confusing. Human nature is weird.
Anyway, I’ll play it by ear. One thing is for sure: I’m winning this little competition.
We agreed on Dave as our arbiter, and of course, he’s taking the job very seriously.
“If the two of you are to duel, we’re going to need some rules,” he intones from where he stands by the sidelines. Kaitlynn and Alec watch from the couch behind him. “Since we’re all friends here, we’re obviously going to try to avoid injury. Therefore, to win a duel, all you need to do is assume a clearly advantageous position, from which you could strike the other down at a moment’s notice. Having the tip of your blade at the other’s throat or chest will suffice.”
Jacob and I share a glance and nod.
“For Emma,” Dave goes on, “placing her Focus Crystal on a patch of uncovered skin of Jacob would also count, as she could easily incapacitate him by Infusing him with Toxic Energy.”
Dave pauses for a moment, raising a brow at Jacob, to see if he’ll protest.
; Jacob grimaces but nods his agreement.
“Finally,” Dave continues, “since this is a competition to determine superior skill, not luck, we’re going to make it a best of five. That means whoever is the first to win three duels is the winner. Do you both agree to these rules?”
I blink. Huh. Well, that suits me just fine, really. It’d be boring if it were over too quickly.
We both nod one last time. At the same time, I activate the second mode of Boost Physical. With this, my Strength should be 1 point higher than his. A small edge, but a useful one. After all, Strength doesn’t scale linearly. Of course, the difference in our Agility is far greater, and Jacob’s about to find out what that means.
Dave nods back, raises his hand, and solemnly proclaims, “Then, may the best fighter win.” His hand moves down in a cutting motion. “First duel, begin!”
Jacob doesn’t waste a second. Yellow light flashes from his sword hand and his Skill flings him forward shield-first. He’s probably hoping to catch me off guard and bash me to the ground for an early win.
Unfortunately for him, I was expecting as much. The Focus Crystal tied to my right hand is already filled with about 5 Onkh worth of Qi, which I immediately convert to Inertial Energy.
In the split second that he flies towards me, a pink vortex forms around my Focus Crystal that drains everything around it from its inertial mass. Most notably, me.
I jump up and forward, leaving behind the hardly visible mass of breaths I was hiding behind my back, and perform a Barani—a somersault with a 180-degree twist—over Jacob’s head as he charges into my trap.
He crashes into the balloon of Lavi that contains my six combined breaths, and I will it to twist around his limbs, immobilizing them as he takes a few more staggering steps forward.
My spear appears next to his throat in a flash of steel.
Silence reigns for a second or two, before Dave softly declares, “Emma wins.”