Hugo winced, wrists twisting sideways as his face contorted with marks of concentration. Veins bulged on his body - and one near his forehead looked ready to pop.

He let out a small grunt, and Reid felt his attempt falter and fade in an instant. Reid breathed a bit deeper with the slight pressure around his body gone. Hugo had improved again, and lasted an additional hour pushing against Reid's soul before he ran out of steam.

Nyx sounded satisfied. "Excellent work, little prince."

Hugo was smiling before Reid had a chance to parrot her words out loud. The man was now even better at interpreting what Nyx was thinking by her 'flow and currents'. His intuition, coupled with Soulsight and Reid's ongoing confirmations, made for an effective combination.

Even with his energy depleted, Nyx continued the lesson. She had taken to Hugo the same way she'd taken to teaching Lycra and Win. She enjoyed his progress, and pushed him hard in her own way to see him succeed.

She did not do the same for Reid's trio, nor for Vidita.

Reid could understand her preferential treatment, to an extent. Hugo was someone who was now part of his inner circle, and so was someone Nyx could teach openly. He also had interesting and seemingly powerful magic available to him, which made him friend and ally against the larger forces in the cosmos. Maybe most importantly, teaching still drained her. Of course she didn't want to sap herself away in order to give a minor boost to people who would willingly stagnate in growth when left to their own devices.

The first time he had that thought, Reid chided himself for being callous. Then he realized he wasn't wrong. Maybe he could argue that Nyx should help Vidita grow, because she had the makings of someone who would continue to strive forward and take opportunities - but Vidita still wasn't part of his inner circle, and Hugo hadn't pushed Reid to include her. For all his pressing to get Reid to share his secrets, he hadn't said a word about them to the woman he was so close with.

"Now - I told you before that people can make it more difficult to manipulate their souls. It's something you haven't seen yet, and probably won't see for a little while longer. Think of it as shapes, and proper structure. Reid and I are the closest you'll come to shapes and structure in the tutorial, and that's one of the reasons why you have so much strain, even when trying to subtly interact with our souls."

Reid handed Hugo a snack as Nyx took a long pause.

"Right now, Hugo, you are a child swatting things with simple strikes. That's effective against the pests you've fought, but you can't use a stick to beat a tiger. So what can you do, and what should you be able to do? Assuming you've been honest, you can tear a soul apart, or twist it like a dishrag. But you haven't said a word about fine applications. There are ways to unwind a person's defenses and get through their shape and structure, if you have the patience and ability. You've built up endurance, now it's time to test your resolve."

What followed were hours and days of grueling practice. Mostly grueling for Hugo - Reid just kept a hand pressed against his friend's back while the man turned colors and shook with effort.

Nyx was having Hugo manipulate his own soul in new and difficult ways. Nyx could clearly sense the changes and spoke as much during each session, but Reid soon found himself aware that things were changing as well. It wasn't as apparent as he initially expected. Win had done similar work in fine control with the mana tree she made while they were trapped in the Warrens - but her improvement was like a blasting siren compared to the subtlety of Hugo's improvements. There was something there that felt kind of like energy, and Reid could kind-of sense it becoming more condensed and rigid, but lacked the true sensation to feel any deeper.

When he was finally 'finished' with the first stage, Nyx called his upgrades to his soul a 'defensive fortification', meant to both help prevent exhaustion from overuse, and to ensure that some backlash was mitigated if he did end up pitting his soul against one of similar strength. She also claimed his 'detail work' would make fighting easier in general.

In Hugo's words, he'd changed from having a soul that was like moving liquid around, to solid pieces. He had a ball of sorts that never left his body, and he could then form cables to interact with the environment and other souls around himself. He lost a bit of range in exchange for the structure, but called that a good trade.

Nyx smiled at the confirmation that her lesson had taken hold, and had Hugo take a break from training for two days - which meant Reid finally got some extended time for himself. She had already answered a number of small things, but Reid was still holding onto a few that required greater time alone.

He started with the one that had truly been eating at him.

"Nyx, at the end of the fight, when I was on the ground. I felt something... intense. It gave me this second wind and let me move again, even though my body and my metaphysical self were useless. Was... was that something you did, or...?"

He let the end of the question linger in the air. Or is there something deep and powerful and incredible within me that you've chosen to avoid because my understanding or my stats aren't ready for it yet. She answered in seconds that hung like hours.

"If I don't tell you, you're going to spend too damn long trying to figure it out. So here goes - you touched on a lesson I wouldn't even consider teaching you in F grade. I probably won't want to do it in E grade either. It's something you've seen once before, though the power didn't accompany it at the time. Think of it like this - that intense feeling is more dangerous to you right now than it is helpful. If you go searching for it, it'll be like looking for a solitary lightswitch in a room where the walls are covered in the triggers of guns pointed at your head. Yes, the analogy sucks, but I'm not giving you another one. The point stands, you need to continue doing what you have been, and eventually we'll get there. But don't try for it. Don't reach for it. We'll do that when you're ready, or it will come to you without you needing to pursue it."

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

The wave of questions her statement had spawned culminated in a long sigh. "Fine. Or not, I don't know. It just felt-"

"Stop. I'm serious about this, Reid."

The strain in her voice caught him off guard. She sounded truly worried. Reid made a promise to himself that he'd try to drop the subject. "Okay. Change of subject, but I was... less resilient to magma than I would've hoped to be."

Her laugh broke any lingering tension around her warning. "Oh, Reid. That's funny. There's a difference between magic and elemental force, you know."

"... I didn't know."

"What do you mean you didn't know? I taught you this when... when- leviathan's eggs, did I really skip that? Okay, alright. Magic and Elements. Simple distinctions. Magic is something someone does, right? It's either an attack that happens at a point in time, or a physical thing that's semi-permanent or permanent. Like crafted weapons, or the earth walls when you fought those Belar mages. You've seen things like fire, and wind, and grass. Normally, magic is fueled and sustained by a person. So your bone weapons get crafted as strong as your mana allows. Enemy magics hit as hard as their mana lets them. So fire, if it's coming from a weaker person, is weaker."

"That makes sense"

"Right - but things that aren't magic, still aren't magic. A natural hurricane or a tornado are as strong as they are, not dependent on a person. Same thing with ocean waves, or magma, or an avalanche, or natural lightning. It isn't limited to the power of a person - but it's based on the power of the underlying elements that make the elemental force possible."

"Underlying elements - like how the rocks in this tutorial were weaker than the ones from the Warrens?"

"Quite right. Planets - and the things on them - are made up of stuff, and that stuff exists at a certain grade. Technically, it can be in early, middle, or late grade, but it's all going to change with changes in grade. You've seen it in the stones you looked at, and in the king's fang. You've felt it, with the water you drink and with the food you consume. When something increases in grade, it is simply... more. There's no better way to put that at the moment. Back to elemental forces. Fire, from F grade trees, will be weaker than a fire made with E grade wood. Lightning on a G grade planet will be weaker than on an E grade planet."

Reid nodded.

"So, Reid, when you were unawakened, could you jump into a pool of lava?"

The words were out of his mouth before his brain activated. "No, that's ridiculous."

"Isn't it just? Now, even if Lava were, say, relatively weaker compared to your personal ability, it would still be lava, wouldn't it?"

Reid cleared his throat. "So I'm not going to take a bath in a volcano anytime soon."

"And you shouldn't go too deep down into an ocean, or get struck by lightning, yeah. Final part of the lesson, is what happens when someone's magic doesn't make the element, but lets them control natural elements. It's a high-waste and restrictive style of magic, but the results can be pretty compelling. Your crab friend wasn't making magma, it was using it. Manipulating it. If it hadn't been on that volcano, it would've lost that fight and looked weak while it did."

He internalized her words. There were going to be more elemental manipulators, probably, whose advantage would come from the environment they fought in, and the natural elements that surrounded them. And if Reid wasn't careful, those kinds of enemies could put him in serious danger.

"Good. Hold that feeling, and use it. It's time to start make some progress on your conduits again - and your stats."

#

#

Two days wasn't enough to realize any significant gains - especially because he didn't really know what to connect next. Setting the precedent of spending long hours up on the mountainside alone did give him more time in the days to make things happen, instead of just sneaking away at night once he was done resting. He made a few points worth of progress in his self-affixation, but otherwise felt like he'd wasted the days.

Now, he was in parrot-teacher mode again, with Vidita and Hugo together on the mountainside as morning mists clung to the land below. Hugo had started to learn a bit about non-violent soul interactions by his prior training with Reid, and had learned about structure within himself. The true test, now, was to make semi-permanent, or potentially permanent, changes in another person.

When Reid started to volunteer, Nyx shot him down immediately. Her argument was that Hugo and Vidita were quite close, and he wanted to keep her safe, which would improve the results of the process. Reid knew there was more to her refusal. He could feel her trepidation and fear about the subject. Reid's interest in Hugo's magic was nothing compared to the thought of making her relive any amount of that trauma - he was already happy that she had chosen to go as far with Hugo's training as she did. Her knowledge and her strength could sometimes make Reid lose sight of the fact that she was herself a person - with all the emotion and desire and trauma that entailed. She had her own wounds to heal.

The morning passed slowly, with frequent failure. There was a difference, Nyx said, between pushing someone else's soul, and touching it. Hugo slowly shifted from using his power more forcefully to softly trying to interact with someone else. But interaction went both ways. To touch and manipulate required more than force and power - it required trust. On both sides. Vidita seemed receptive, but Hugo had trouble exposing his own soul to outside influence.

Near midday, when the sun had burned away the mist and heat up the mountainside enough that the air was slightly uncomfortable, Vidita asked Reid for a break, and privacy.

He wasn't certain what happened in the hour they spent with each other, but it worked. They all sat down, Hugo with his hands on Vidita's back, and Reid with one hand on Hugo's shoulder so Nyx could get a sense of what was happening. In the moment, even Reid could sense it. Energy fluctuated wild around Hugo and Vidita as the air rippled and shook. Hugo's shoulder warmed, and tears fell from his face. He felt a pulse of strong emotion from Nyx.

"This is it. The first sensation you get is flakes of you and him interacting - really interacting for the first time." Nyx's voice was soft, almost longing. "There's this... perfect moment where you realize you're closer than touch, and deeper than understanding. If you want to, you can take that farther, with love or with fondness, and you can truly intertwine - feel each other like your soul and his are the only two things in the cosmos, and the way they hold each other and bend against one another and mix and sway. All of your secrets open, and so do his. You feel his essence and his ferromancy like the power was your own, and you understand the effort and the care he puts into the masks and the prosthetics he makes in a new way. You breathe the same air but everything seems new, rejuvenated with possibility and different because you've intertwined and you have each other and it feels permanent, like you're connected at your -"

Her voice stopped, suppressed. Reid removed his hand from Hugo's shoulder and pushed sympathetic emotions towards her as she recovered. Hugo and Vidita were both streaming tears, and the pulses continued. Nyx returned with shuddering breaths of intangible air.

"Nyx, I - I'm here. Whatever you want. Share more, or don't - venting, or quiet. Whatever you need, I've got you."

She let off a swirl of complicated emotion.

"I'd like some time alone, please. Really alone."

Reid nodded, and excused himself from Hugo and Vidita. He wasn't sure if the two of them heard his words. Reid's feet carried him into the wilderness, away from the mountain and Gerald's shelter where the trio were relaxing.

A name resurfaced in his mind.

The Collective had done this to Nyx. His teacher. His friend. His family.

Every step hardened his conviction, and a quiet promise etched itself deep.

Someday, he would be strong enough to challenge the Collective - and when that day came he would break them into pieces so small, they'd blow away with the wind.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.