AN: A preemptive Bonus chapter release for 500 power stones. If we get to 700 I will release another extra chapter.
More importantly, I have a question for all of you. This WILL change the direction of the story. Patreon members voted, and so did some of you already. One member brought it up, and he was right; most people probably would not like it. So here I am asking all of you. Your vote might influence my decision fi it overwhellmingly one sided.
So the situation is:
The MC for his second L4 world will get into a difficult world. We are talking pure HAX world, corruptions, Eldric stuff, insane powers. Here, I wanted to use this as a chance to alter the story. As you know, it is not realistic for an MC to always have plot armor. I don't like too much of it, but we still do it more or less. I wanted to show the horror of this world by making the MC pay with his powers. This means that he will lose a lot, but he will gain a lot. Temporarily, he will be downgraded, maybe 3 - 6 chapters long at most, after which he will have a different kit. I will leave Great Sage because you all like it, but everything else is gone.
Cast your votes by liking the comments I leave.
He woke at six.
The kitchen was the same kitchen. The coffee maker had been broken for two months and he had not gotten around to replacing it.
He thought about it for a count.
Sage was on. Sage had been on since he opened his eyes. He felt the runtime in the quiet way he had begun to feel it overnight, like a person sharing the room.
Coffee.
" The Explorer has Telekinesis. The Explorer has water in the tap. The Explorer has ground beans in the pantry. The Explorer has a pot. "
" Recommendation. Operate the kitchen. "
He almost laughed.
He had used TK in combat for two years. He had not, as a matter of habit, used it on his own counter. The kettle filled without him reaching for it, the water laying itself in a controlled column from the tap. The burner clicked on by intent. He set the heat at the line he wanted. The kettle came up. Grounds settled into the filter from across the room. A knife, butter, the heel of yesterday's bread crossed the kitchen in sequence and landed on the cutting board.
The whole production took ninety seconds and used a fraction of a fraction of his pool. He sat at the counter with the cup of coffee in his hand a moment later and noticed, as a matter of mechanical surprise, that he had never thought to do this before.
" Observation. The Explorer's Telekinesis output ceiling is presently around ten tons of directional force. The Explorer has been operating at perhaps three percent of that ceiling for the duration of his career. "
He set the cup down.
Ten tons.
" Confirmed. The mental capacity required to manage that load has been a limiting factor throughout. The runtime now manages the load. The Explorer's body remains the binding constraint. Force application above the body's structural envelope produces internal shear injuries before the TK fails. "
He turned that over. He had taken a three-hundred-kilo strike on the shoulder in Range 3 and called it the upper limit of the test. The actual ceiling was more than thirty times that. He had not, in the field, deployed his TK at anything close to its actual reach, because his head had not been able to hold more than the loads he had been working with.
The head was no longer the constraint.
The body was.
He drank his coffee. He showered. He packed an overnight bag he was probably not going to need.
He went to the station.
The Kerenth platform was nearly empty at seven. He had bought the ticket on the platform's screen by reflex. The 7:15 to Greyhill was the train he had taken every time he had gone home in the last five years, on the route he had memorized at fourteen. He stood at the edge with his pack at his feet and watched the rail.
He had ten minutes.
Sage. Run a flight test.
" Query interpreted. Ten tons of directional thrust applied to a seventy-eight-kilogram body produces theoretical acceleration of approximately one hundred and thirty meters per second squared. The body cannot sustain this. Body tolerance with Haki reinforcement and the Suit-Hatsu in Armor mode at full activation is approximately 8g, or seventy-eight meters per second squared. Sustained acceleration at 8g produces a velocity of eight hundred meters per second after ten seconds. "
" Atmospheric resistance above approximately two hundred and fifty meters per second produces ablative load on unprotected surfaces. The Suit-Hatsu handles ablative load. Air pressure on the front of the body remains an issue. "
" Solution available. The Explorer deploys a directional Telekinetic field forward of the body to part the air. The field functions as an aura-reinforced wedge. The body travels through a corridor of reduced pressure. The corridor closes behind the body and produces a sonic shockwave at velocities above the local speed of sound. "
" Practical ceiling, conservative estimate: seven hundred meters per second. Approximately Mach two. One thousand five hundred and sixty miles per hour. The constraint above this velocity is the Explorer's reaction time at the speed, not the body or the TK. "
" The 7:15 train arrives Greyhill at 9:08. Henrik expects an arrival corresponding to that docking. The Explorer can land at Greyhill station's east platform at 9:06 and emerge from the front entrance at 9:08 walking at normal pace. Henrik will not see anything other than what he expects to see. "
He thought about it.
Confirm.
He stepped back from the platform edge.
He thought deploy. The suit moved. The fighting form took shape under his clothes the way it had in Range 3, except this time it kept going. The plate climbed his neck and closed at the base of his skull. A helmet drew over the back of his head and forward across the temples and sealed at the chin. The visor came on last. The world dimmed by a fraction and resolved cleaner, the way a windshield cleared when the wipers caught up.
He stepped off the platform.
He did not fall.
The TK held him at the platform's height the way a hand held a thing that did not weigh much. He angled west. He fed Nen into the suit. He called the corridor.
The wedge formed in front of him as a faint compression wave the visor rendered in violet. The air bent around it and around him. Inside the corridor, the pressure dropped.
He pushed.
The acceleration came on as a clean push at the small of his back. The first second was 8g. The body took it. The armor distributed the force across his frame the way it had distributed the three-hundred-kilo strike in Range 3. Sage held the reigns.
He hit two hundred meters per second in the third second.
He hit four hundred in the fifth.
He capped at six hundred and fifty on Sage's recommendation. The corridor was holding. The visor was holding. His pulse, by the numbers Sage rendered at the periphery of vision, sat at one hundred and ten.
Mach one point nine. The world below was a green and gray blur he could nominally still parse. The Velden flashed under him.
He flew.
He felt the way a person felt when an instrument finally fit the work he had been doing with the wrong tools. The runtime in the back of his head had moved a year of intuition into a recipe, and the recipe was working under him while he flew.
He had time.
Greyhill, at conservative cruise, was six minutes. The 9:06 landing window was an hour and forty-eight minutes off. Sage said the Velden coast and the open sea east of it were empty airspace at this hour, and offered him a test corridor.
Run the envelope.
He pushed.
He hit seven hundred meters per second over the river. The corridor stretched. The body took it. The visor did the work his eyes could no longer do at the speed. The Velden was a silver thread now and the city behind him was a memory.
He hit seven-fifty.
The body started to talk. The horizon stayed steady on the visor, but his sense of which way was up lagged the picture by a fraction of a second. Sage flagged it before he registered it himself.
" Vestibular drift detected. The inner-ear apparatus has not been designed for this rate of change. Recommend cap at seven hundred and twenty until the apparatus adapts. Adaptation requires repeated exposure over weeks. "
" Note. At sustained velocity above three hundred and forty meters per second, the Explorer's signature becomes detectable on advanced regional radar. Newest-generation phased-array installations in the Velden basin will produce a partial profile. The flight will be identified post hoc through camera coverage at the launch point and added to the Explorer's IEC file. The state will know by the end of the morning. "
He thought about it for a count. He had not been hiding. The file would catch up.
He pulled to seven-twenty. The drift settled. He held it for thirty seconds and crossed sixty kilometers in that span. The coast came up under him and went past him. He decelerated to four hundred and let the body relax.
He climbed.
At nine thousand meters the air outside the corridor went thin. At twelve, the suit ran a partial pressure envelope around his head and chest at a small additional drag on his pool, and the breath he took at that altitude became the suit's breath for him. He held there for forty seconds. The visor put his pulse at one hundred and twenty. He came back through the layers to four thousand and let the body settle.
He turned hard at three hundred meters per second.
The world rotated. He came around at what Sage flagged as nine point four g of lateral load and the armor distributed it across his ribcage instead of letting it sit on the kidneys. He held the turn for two seconds and came out of it on a heading ninety degrees off where he had started. He ran the turn three more times in different directions until the body had some sense of what nine g felt like and what twelve probably would feel like.
He came up to five hundred and cut the thrust. He applied a reverse TK push at the chest. The world stopped. He hung at the apex of the deceleration with his pulse at one-thirty and the visor reading zero forward velocity. Then he held the hover for a count and tipped forward into cruise again.
" Baseline logged. Practical ceiling at present conditioning: seven hundred and twenty meters per second cruise. Ten g lateral pulses. Twelve thousand meter altitude with partial pressure envelope. The ceiling rises with body conditioning. "
" Time remaining: twenty-three minutes. Greyhill east platform: one hundred and seventy kilometers. Cruise at four hundred clears the leg in seven minutes. The remainder is yours. "
He cruised.
The Velden ran south of him at four hundred meters per second. The corridor was a constant low pressure ahead of him. The pool held.
In the regional air defence centre that served the Velden basin, a tracking technician named Calla Brenner watched a return she had no folder for.
It was small, moving at a velocity her instrument refused to render in tens of meters per second. The instrument switched to Mach. The reading settled at two point one.
She tagged it. She called her supervisor.
The supervisor was at her console in seven seconds. The two of them opened the secondary system the centre had stood up after the second wave, the experimental high-frequency phased array that the older long-range plot had been blind to. The array got a partial profile. Small. At the resolution the new system could give, human-shaped.
"Get me a visual."
The visual feed cycled through every camera with line-of-sight on the corridor the object was traveling. None of them could lock. Two cameras caught a frame each, a streak of dark composite against sky.
The supervisor moved up the chain.
By the time the chain reached the IEC liaison desk eight minutes later, the centre had walked the timeline backward through ground-camera coverage to the eastern platform of Kerenth Central at 0710 local. The footage showed a man in travel clothes step off the platform, hold for half a second, and accelerate west out of the frame.
The IEC liaison watched the clip three times.
"That's an Explorer," she said.
The match took her four minutes. The Explorer was on the regional roster. The file already had a note at the top of it, dated the previous afternoon, indicating the subject had been offered a guild license and that the IEC's posture toward him was supportive.
She opened the file. She added a line.
Confirmed atmospheric flight envelope: Mach two point one, sustained. Notify the principal.
She closed the file.
The working group's vote on the guild extension had been close. The room had not been certain. She had gone with the supportive position because the alternative was a future in which the Explorers above the envelope worked outside the institution rather than within it.
The morning's footage had clarified the choice for her.
She moved to the next item on her queue.
The body had conditioned itself in ninety minutes to a load it had not been asked to carry before, and Adam understood, by the time the thirteen-minute padding ran down, that he was going to need to put hours into this in the weeks ahead.
He decelerated over the Velden on Sage's profile, dropping through nine hundred meters and holding there at standard cruise, then through three hundred, then a hundred. He banked east. The Greyhill station roof appeared.
He landed on the east platform at 9:06. Nobody was on it. He thought recede, and the helmet drew back into the collar of his shirt and the plate flowed down into the fabric, and he was a man in ordinary travel clothes standing at the edge of an empty platform.
He picked up his pack from spatial storage.
The 7:15 from Kerenth pulled in at 9:08.
He walked through the station in the small flow of arriving passengers, like he had come in on it. Greyhill station was unchanged. The same vending machines on the same wall, the same man at the ticket counter. He stepped out of the front entrance at 9:08 and twenty seconds, the way a man who had been on the train would step out.
Henrik was waiting outside in the car he had driven Adam to the academy in three years ago, a year and a half older now and wearing a coat against the wind.
Adam got in.
Henrik did not say anything for the first three blocks. He drove with both hands on the wheel and his jaw set the way Henrik's jaw set when he had been crying in the kitchen and did not want it brought up. Adam did not bring it up.
When they got home, Lena was in the doorway. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she opened her arms and Adam went into them and stayed there for as long as it took. Henrik came up behind them and put a hand on Adam's shoulder and stayed there. The hallway smelled like rosemary bread, the way it always had. He let himself feel it.
"You're skinnier," Lena said into his shoulder.
"I am not."
"You are. I can feel your shoulder blades."
"I'll eat. I promise."
"You'll eat now."
She fed him. She sat across from him at the kitchen table and watched him eat. Henrik sat at the head of the table and looked at his hands. They asked him three questions about the deployment. Adam answered each one in the size and shape he could answer it without breaking the seal. They did not ask a fourth.
He finished the bread. He set the fork down.
"There's something the IEC put on the table yesterday."
Henrik looked up. Lena set her cup down without drinking from it.
"What did they put on the table."
"A license to form a private guild. I'd run it. Independent operation, internal build privacy, monthly performance quota the IEC sets. They don't tell me how to deploy. I don't tell them what's in the build. They get the work done. I keep the company."
Lena did not move for a count.
"At nineteen," Henrik said.
"At nineteen."
"How many people."
"Whatever roster I recruit. I'd start with the people I trust. Sigma-4 would probably come with me. Ren would. After that I'd build it out the way I build it out."
Henrik turned that over. He had a way of holding new information that Adam had grown up watching: he held the thing still and walked around it once before saying anything about it. He walked around it now. The kitchen clock did the work for the count.
"Why," Lena said.
"Because the wave killed the old policy. The IEC used to want people like me leashed inside the institution. They've decided people like me are more useful running their own operations and feeding the work back to them. The guilds are how the response system is going to scale through the next decade."
"That's why they're offering it. That's not why you would say yes."
He thought about it. He had spent the train ride thinking about it.
"Because I would rather build something than work inside something somebody else built. Because I came back from the deployment with tools that don't fit on a standard team's load sheet. Because the people I want next to me when this gets worse are the people I want to choose, not the people the IEC assigns."
"It's going to get worse," Henrik said.
"Yes."
Henrik nodded, slow. He knew, from the first incursion that the world would never go back to the old days.
"When."
"I'm not deciding this week. The Commander said today is not the day for that conversation. I'm telling you because it's a thing that's coming."
Lena had not picked her cup back up. Her hands were folded around it. The cup had stopped giving off steam.
"You'd be in Kerenth still," she said.
"For a while. Eventually I'd probably move to the Hub. The work is going to be there."
"The Hub."
"Yes."
She let that sit. She had grown up in Greyhill. She had been to Kerenth maybe twelve times in her life. The Hub was a word she had heard on the news.
"You'd come home."
"I'd come home."
"Promise."
"I promise."
Henrik leaned forward. He put his elbows on the table.
"What do you need from us."
It was the question Henrik had asked the day Adam had brought home the IEC acceptance letter at sixteen. It was the question he had asked the morning Adam had left for Marineford. He had a small set of questions he kept across his life, and he asked the same ones at the moments the answers mattered.
"Nothing yet," Adam said. "I'll tell you when I know. I wanted you to hear it from me before it showed up in any paper that crosses your desk."
"It's going to show up in a paper that crosses my desk."
"Eventually, yes."
Henrik nodded. Lena finally drank from her cup. The kitchen settled in the way the kitchen always settled when one of them had said the thing they came to say and the others had taken it in.
After a while, Lena said, "If you do start this thing, don't give it some dramatic, self-important name."
Adam almost smiled. "I'll avoid anything with 'eternal' in it."
"Or 'shadow.'"
"Noted."
"Or 'blood.'"
"Lena."
"I'm serious."
"I can tell."
Sophie came in through the back door at one in the afternoon.
She was in her academy uniform, the Year 3 patch on her shoulder. Her hair was longer than he had last seen it. Her face was the same face, except it had been somewhere it had not been the last time he saw her. He stood up.
She stopped in the doorway.
"You're back."
"I'm back."
She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around him. She held on harder than she would have a year ago. She let go and stepped back. Lena was already moving. The kettle, more bread, the small plates, the cinnamon-clove tea Lena had taught Ren how to make and which was always going to live in this kitchen.
After lunch he and Sophie walked.
The walk went from the house up the hill to the overlook where Adam had connected to the Bazaar three years ago, on his sixteenth birthday. He had not planned the route. They ended up there because their feet always did. Sophie sat on the rock at the edge of the overlook. Adam sat on the grass.
"Tell me about the L1," he said.
She did not answer for a long minute. Adam waited her out. He had learned, with Sera once and with Ren a few times since, that when a person had been trying to hold a thing in for three weeks the worst thing you could do was reach for it before they put it down themselves.
"It was a hospital," she said. Then, "Sorry. I keep starting from the wrong place."
"Start from the wrong place. It's fine."
"It was a hospital. Evacuation scenario, hundred and twenty civilians, something hostile in the basement I wasn't allowed to engage. So I did the evacuation with the locals. That part was..." She stopped. She started again. "That part was the part I knew how to do."
"How many got out."
"A hundred and seven."
He didn't ask about the thirteen. He didn't have to.
"I saw nine of them," she said, before he had to. Her eyes stayed on the river. "The other four happened in places I wasn't covering."
A long pause.
"You don't have to tell me," he said. "Any of it. I'm here if you want."
"No, I — " She wiped her nose on the back of her wrist, the kid-gesture she had used at eight and ten and twelve and apparently still used. "No. I want to tell you. The four I didn't see, those are someone else's. The nine I saw aren't the part. The part is, there was a man in a wheelchair."
She stopped.
She started again at a different speed, slower.
"On the third floor. Older. Sixty maybe. The corridor was sealing behind us. They had compartmentalisation locks that came down every two minutes to slow whatever was in the basement. The chair had a broken wheel. I don't know if it broke when I started pushing or if it had been broken before. It would roll for a meter and then go sideways. I tried three times. I would have had to carry him, and he was a full-grown man and I was — " She stopped. "I'm a hundred and ten pounds. I had two minutes left on the lock. I tried to do the math twice because I didn't want it to come out the way it was coming out."
Could be Raccoon City. The compartmentalisation, the basement quarantine, the don't-engage order, all of it. He turned the thought once. Or could be something else. The catalog had a lot of survival-horror worlds with the same shape.
He wasn't sure. He kept the not-sure to himself. Sophie didn't need it.
"It came out the same," he said.
The wind moved across the overlook. She put her palms flat against the stone she was sitting on and pressed.
"I told him," she said. "I told him the door was going to close in a minute and forty seconds and the wheelchair wasn't going to roll and I couldn't carry him. I made myself say it. I don't even know why."
"Because he was a person."
"He, yeah. He told me to go. He said thank you for telling me. He, um. He held my hand for three seconds. Then I went."
She finally looked up at him. Her face was wet.
"I don't know what to do with it," she said.
He did not have a clean answer. He had not had a clean answer for Sera and he did not have one for a man in a wheelchair on the third floor of a hospital he had never been in. He sat with her. He let the wind go through both of them.
"You don't put it down," he said, eventually. "Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. You carry that memory. That's the right thing to do."
"Carrying it is going to crush me."
"It's not."
"Adam, I'm —"
"It's not. Listen." He put his hand on the rock between them, palm up, an offer. She looked at it but did not take it. "You did the work. The hundred and seven walked out because you did your job. The thirteen weren't yours to win. You were sixteen years old and three months out of orientation and there was something in a basement that nobody let you fight. The man in the wheelchair gave you the answer you needed and he gave it to you because you treated him like a person. You will carry that. You won't be crushed. Those are not the same thing."
She did not respond. He let the count run. Then he said the rest.
"You carry it forward. That's what carrying it is for. Not as a weight you owe him. As work you owe him. Every door that closes from now on, you stand at it with him in your hand. You keep going. You don't quit on the next person who needs to hear what you told him. That is how the memory stops crushing you and starts holding you up. It's how you become the Explorer he need, and wanted you to become."
She looked at his hand for another beat. She did not take it. She did not need to. Her breathing slowed.
"Promise."
"I'm not going to lie to you about whether anything is going to crush you. I'm telling you what I see."
"That's not a promise."
"No."
"Okay."
She wiped her face again. She let it stay wet this time. He took his hand back.
They sat.
After a while he said, "There's a thing I've been writing. I haven't told anyone about it. I'm telling you first."
She looked over.
"Tell me."
"It's a framework. About how to put a build together so the parts of it talk to each other instead of just sitting next to each other on a sheet. I've been working on it since before I deployed. Nobody else has seen it yet. Ren knows it exists. Nobody knows what's in it."
"Why me first."
"Because you came back from your L1 with the right question. You were going to ask me what I would have done with the man in the wheelchair. The framework is part of my answer."
"And you want me on it."
"I want you on the early version. Before anyone else. Tonight, if you'll let me."
"Why."
"Because you're family. Because the world you're coming up into is going to be harder than the one I came up into. Because the deployment is never anybody's call. The Bazaar puts you on L1 and you go. What is your call is what you walk in with, and the standard track teaches doctrine where it should be teaching integration. The framework is integration."
She thought about it. She actually thought, for a long count, the way she had as a kid when somebody offered her something she was suspicious of being too good.
"Show me tonight."
"Tonight."
"Don't wait until tomorrow. I don't want to wait."
"Tonight."
They walked back down the hill. Lena had dinner on the table. Henrik did not ask what they had talked about. Adam sat at the kitchen table, pulled out his tablet, and walked Sophie through the framework's first three principles before the soup got cold. She read each line carefully. She asked two questions on each one. She wrote nothing down. She did not need to.
When he caught the last train back to Kerenth that night, she walked him to the station. They stood on the platform and did not say much. The train came. He got on.
She waved.
He waved back.
The train pulled out of Greyhill.
In the back of his head, the voice that wasn't his had been quiet for most of the day, the way a tool was quiet when it was not being used. It spoke once on the ride home.
" Notice. The En recommendation has been queued. Suggested begin date: tomorrow. "
He acknowledged.
" The Explorer has approximately 358 days until the voucher window closes. Mandatory deployment for L4 tier remains a 10-year window per IEC schedule and is not the limiting clock. The Explorer's body has cleared all post-Marineford constraints; deployment is available at the Explorer's discretion. The Explorer has approximately 2 hours of train remaining. "
" Sleep is recommended. "
He almost smiled.
The train ran on. The Velden ran beside it. He closed his eyes.
In the corner of his mind, the En drew its first sphere.