In a mental simulation, surrounded by an alien field of wide blades of blue grass, Jack practiced circulating his qi in different intricate patterns. Each pattern, or weave, would produce a different technique.
There were techniques that could manipulate the weather to turn against his opponent and rain lightning from the sky. Other techniques were designed to move the wielder great distances with a single step. Another weave would produce an explosion of power.
Not all techniques were combat related, however. Zachias had informed him that the list of possible effects was endless. Jack was actually worried about accidentally creating the self-destruct weave or the turn yourself into a slime technique. If everything was possible, then he would need to take care.
Still, he had been learning basic weaves from Zachias. These circulations would become the foundation for his future techniques. Jack still had to master the basics before he could begin to experiment and discover what would work best for him.
Every pattern was merely a template. He would have to tailor any of them to himself.
Also, Zachias had emphasized the need for specialization. Jack could not focus on learning everything or he would inevitably fail. He needed to narrow down his own style and create techniques that supported it.
He looked down at his hands and watched the lines of blue lightning circulate around his arms in an interesting shape. The bright blue qi traversed his body in a pattern of intersecting spirals.
This weave was designed to empower and reinforce his body. Enhancement techniques, Zachias had taught, were among the easiest to produce and the most commonly used. They were efficient in that qi was simply circulated through the body and not expelled into the world.
Jack looked up and took in his opponent. Zachias stood tall and gazed down on him condescendingly with his massive arms crossed over his gleaming white armor. Jack took a fighting stance sliding his right leg back and bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.
The body enhancement technique made Jack feel invincible. He could barely sense his own weight, as if he could jump over mountains. His fingers felt as if they could bend steel as he balled his hands into fists. His body hair stood on end as the lightning flowed through his veins. Jack wouldn’t admit it, but the power felt good.
As a final measure, he reached for his chakra and attempted to wrap his fists in kinetic energy. He had been trying and failing to use kinesis since Zachias had told him about it, but Jack would continue to practice as if he could use it. This would make it easier to incorporate it into his style when he did advance to the Spirit Realm.
With his technique prepared, Jack launched himself towards Zachias with intentions of utmost violence. In one bound, Jack flew towards the heavenly warrior’s head like a bullet his right fist aiming to knock off that big blue chin.
The next thing Jack knew, his fist was in the middle of the alien’s large hand. He hadn’t even seen Zachias move to block. Jack kicked off the warrior’s leg and launched himself back down to the ground.
As soon as he touched down, Jack launched himself back at the giant warrior’s head. Over and again he attacked, and every time, the big pro-wrestling looking mother fucker swatted his fists and feet away contemptuously.
The enhancement technique gave him great speed and power, but Jack was unsatisfied with his own use of that speed. His movements were too jerky and uncontrolled. He was striking too fast for his own good, and was thus unable to throw a single combo.
“Pathetic” Zachias rumbled. “What is the point of enhancing your body if your mind cannot keep up?”
As soon as Zachias started talking, Jack’s single-minded focus on maintaining the proper qi circulation wavered. He fumbled the weave and the technique sputtered and failed. He lost the enhancement to his body and stumbled backwards away from the hulking warrior.
Frustrated, Jack manifested his qi on the tip of his index finger and drew a simple fractal in the air in front of him. He aimed it at Zachias and poured qi into the pattern.
A sustained lightning bolt six inches in diameter burst from the fractal and slammed into Zachias, who held it back with one outstretched hand.
Jack knew it was a terribly inefficient use of energy. It wasn’t even a proper technique, just a simple fractal directing the lightning into a beam. If this had been the real world, Jack would have drained his entire qi reserve in less than half a second.
Fortunately, in this particular exercise, Zachias had bestowed on Jack an unlimited supply of qi. The purpose of this training was to give him a chance to practice using techniques while he was still in the Mortal Realm.
With an annoyed look, Zachias closed his hand and smothered the beam of lightning with his chakra like he was blowing out a candle.
The ease with which the warrior could defeat him had been a constant source of frustration for Jack.
“Can’t you limit yourself to my level every now and then?” he voiced his irritation.
Zachias raised one eyebrow in response. “Do you really think I have been using my full power all this time?” he asked skeptically.
“Of course not” Jack responded honestly. He couldn’t guess the scope of Zachias’ former power, but he knew the heavenly soldier was a breaker of worlds. “I’m just tired of getting my ass kicked every time.”
The alien looked at Jack blankly. “Do you know how many beings there are in the Universe that would literally kill for the off chance of my instruction?”
“Yeah, how charitable of you” Jack said sarcastically, knowing that Zachias would be wearing him like a meat puppet right now if he had things his way. “I’m not your damn sub.”
Zachias ignored the jibe and persisted with his lesson. “My point stands. Why are you only enhancing your body and not your mind?”
Jack’s expression betrayed his confusion. “All I’m doing is using the weave you showed me. Is there another technique I should use to enhance my reflexes?”
“Of course there are” the warrior responded. “But you do not need them. You already have a much more effective means to accomplish that.”
Jack thought about the tattoo on the back of his neck. He still didn’t even know what the damn thing looked like. All he could do was pray that it wasn’t shaped like a dick. “I can’t use it” he claimed. “It’s too much. Every time I activate it, no matter how little qi I use, my senses get overwhelmed.”
Zachias nodded contemplatively and stroked his smooth blue chin. “It may be too powerful for your mortal body to handle.” He studied Jack closely for a moment. “That seems to be a theme with you.”
Jack mat Zachias’ eyes with an inquisitive stare of his own. “Alright man. Out with it. You’ve been looking at me like this since the day we met. What’s the deal?”
An awkward silence stretched out between them as Zachias considered his response for too long. “You have a strange number of inherent advantages” he finally stated. “Especially for a human from a qi deprived world.”
“You mean like my healing physique?” Jack asked. He had often wondered about where the mysterious power came from. “I thought you said those were relatively common.”
“It is more than that” the warrior revealed. “When first we met, your body and energy were completely out of alignment.”
“I’m sure that’s just because of my Zodiac sign” Jack joked.
“You misunderstand” Zachias continued seriously. “It felt as if someone had intentionally manipulated your qi to keep your natural ability hidden. And then, we found out about your healing physique.”
Jack chewed on the inside of his lip as he thought. He was finally beginning to understand Zachias’ point. Up till now, he had never questioned the normality of his pedigree. “You’ve been through my memories” Jack argued. “My mom is a schoolteacher and my dad a businessperson. I’m just a normal guy. At least I was until I met your bitch ass.”
“And I have explained to you” Zachias reminded him. “Memories can be altered by those with mental prowess. They are not always to be trusted.”
Jack absolutely hated the idea that his memories had been manipulated by an external force. He met the light blue-skinned alien’s silver eyes and took a deep breath. “You think I’m related to Zeus don’t you?” Jack asked seriously, putting the pieces together.
He looked down on Jack pensively for a moment before sighing and looking away. “I cannot say for certain. What I do know, is that to heal like you do as a mortal, your physique had to have been passed down from someone who reached divinity.”
Jack began to accuse Zachias of dodging the question when he was jarred awake by the sound of rumbling and the feeling of the ground shaking. His eyes snapped open and he rolled up to one knee, looking around for the source of the disturbance.
There was nothing in the immediate vicinity that would explain the quake, but Jack didn’t drop his guard. He glanced up to where Emrys had been working on repairing the trees and saw the young druid drop nimbly from one of the higher branches and swing his way down to the forest floor.
The bark skinned man landed beside Jack and gazed casually into the distance. Jack glanced back toward the mountain range expecting to see a volcanic eruption, but Emrys stared in the other direction as if he knew the cause.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
Just as quickly as the shaking started, it settled. Jack braced for aftershocks, but none would come.
“That was a hell of a quake” he projected to Emrys. “Does that happen often here?”
The tall druid looked down at Jack and shrugged. “Sometimes it happens repeatedly, and other times rarely. It depends on the migrations and moods of the leviathan.”
Jack’s eyebrows drew together in confusion. He had been sure that Emrys was about to say something about tectonic plates. He was about to ask the druid to clarify, but when he looked up, he saw that the trees had been almost completely healed. Only the twigs at the very end of the branches were still bare.
Emrys noticed Jack’s impressed gaze and confirmed. “We are finished healing the forest. I believe you are ready to leave correct?”
Jack snorted and jumped to his feet. He had not been able to hide his desire to get a move on. He came to this world to do one thing, and it felt like he had made no progress toward saving his friend.
Quickly forgetting about Emrys’ offhand comment about leviathan, Jack prepared to leave. It had been a stressful couple of days.
Not only had their journey been completely stalled, but he hadn’t been able to rest properly since he was attacked by the giant beastkin. Jack knew that he was likely still being hunted, and although Emrys had promised that the trees would warn them, he was still wary of ambushes. No one was perfect after all.
Soon, the two druids and the shorter human walked side by side through the forest. Jack was happy to be moving again, but he still found his head swiveling and searching for the next surprise attack.
He was starting to look at life like he was just waiting for the next bad thing to happen to him. He wondered whether that was from all the traumatic experiences, or just a part of growing up. Maybe it was both.
Jack asked Emrys more questions about the ogre village that they were escorting him to, but the antler-headed druid only offered truncated responses. It seemed like something was bothering him, or perhaps he was just deep in thought. His demeanor was certainly different from the easygoing, carefree attitude that Jack was used to seeing.
At first, he worried that it meant they were expecting another attack, but Emrys assured him that was not the case. Eventually, Jack decided that no one could be chilled out all the time and shrugged it off.
A few hours travel later, he would find out what was on the druid’s mind.
As they walked through the forest, the landscape began to change. The massive oak-like trees shrank until they were only slightly larger than the ones on Earth. The relatively flat land began to break into rolling hills.
Suddenly, the two druids stopped walking in front of him and Jack followed suit. He walked around them to find a beautiful vista.
They stood at the edge of the forest and looked out over a seemingly endless field of shin-high, green grass. The bright grass covered the rolling hills as far as his eyes could see.
Jack walked out of the forest that he had been trapped in for months and smiled as he basked in the afternoon sunlight. He stayed that way for a long moment until he felt a slight tension in the air.
He turned around to find his two druid companions still standing shoulder to shoulder in the exact place that they had stopped at the edge of the forest. Neither one of them looked Jack in his eyes.
In the case of the older looking druid with the spiky head, this was completely normal. Jack couldn’t recal a single moment of eye contact from the craggy old tree. Even after he had saved Jack’s life, there had been absolutely no communication verbal or otherwise between them.
On the other hand, it was strange that Emrys seemed unable to meet his gaze. They had struck up a friendship on their journey. He had even used his plant affinity to make the shirt on Jack’s back.
Jack looked over his shoulder to the fields behind him and quickly turned back to the wooden men.
“Is something wrong?” he projected to Emrys’ mind.
For the first time in his life, Jack watched a tree fidget. Finally, Emrys met his eyes with a slightly pained look and answered.
“This is as far as we go. Our tribe is forbidden from leaving the forest.”
Jack’s face fell as he absorbed this news. He had known that something was up by the way Emrys had been acting. They hadn’t known each other for long, but Jack would surely miss the young druid's company. His fearless calm had been a source of comfort for Jack in trying times.
Still, he could not allow this to slow him down. He would rescue his friend Arthur at any cost, be it his own blood or anybody else’s.
After staring at the ground for a moment, he looked back up to Emrys and smiled. Jack walked back to the edge of the forest and reached his hand out towards his new friend.
At some point after the battle with the massive beast, they had stopped hiding their conversations from the other druid. Although he still refused to converse with Jack, he did not try to interfere with their discourse.
Emrys seemed surprised at first, then he smiled down on Jack and grabbed his forearm. Although he had expected a handshake, Jack accepted the gesture gracefully.
“I know this all started with you guys choking me unconscious and taking me prisoner, but I’m actually glad we met Emrys. And tell your friend I said thanks for saving my life if he ever takes that stick out his ass.”
Despite Emrys returning Jack’s smile, it was obvious that he was struggling with this decision judging by his strained expression. “I wish I could help you more. Good luck finding and saving your friend.”
Not wanting to draw out a painful goodbye, Jack turned and took his first step into the bright green field. He thought it unlikely, but he still hoped he would see Emrys again one day.
Without looking back, he made his way over and around several hills. The sounds of the grass crunching under his feet and the gentle breeze we’re all Jack could hear as he walked alone through the fields.
As alone as he could be anyways with a ghost living in his head. Jack could feel Zachias’ attention, but the ancient warrior remained quiet for the moment.
Deciding he should probably use the time to train, Jack began to spin his qi to absorb and convert the ambient energy. Lately, the speed with which he could draw in qi had drastically slowed.
Zachias had told him that this was due to his nearing the peak of his current realm. Apparently, there was a limit to how much power a mortal’s body could contain.
Jack felt stronger physically than he ever had before. He hadn’t gone all out in the real world in some time, but according to Zachias’ simulation, he could move faster and hit harder by a considerable margin than he could before he left Earth.
Thinking back to the fight between the druid and the beastkin, Jack knew he still had a long way to go. He hadn’t even been able to follow their basic movements, and neither one of them seemed to have been built for speed.
After several minutes of drawing in ambient energy painfully slowly, Jack gave up. He was still able to pull in just as much qi by rotating his own in a vortex around his shoulders. However, when it reached the point of the funnel at the center of his body just below the navel, the vast majority of the neutral energy was simply expelled back into the environment. Only a small trickle took on his aspect and became his to wield.
Jack decided to try and improve himself in another way. One that would be just as useful, or perhaps even more so, than having more raw power.
He turned his attention to the fractal tattoo on the back of his neck at the very top of his spine. Zachias was right. If he could master the sensory enhancement ability that the extraordinarily powerful wolf beastkin had given him, then Jack’s combat ability would get a huge boost.
He thought back to the moment he had accidentally channeled qi through the tattoo when the giant furry monster had ambushed them. Time had seemed to slow to a crawl as his nervous system was kicked into overdrive and his senses were pushed beyond the limits of what his brain could handle.
In the instant before he had experienced extreme sensory overload, Jack’s perception of himself and his surroundings had become seamless. He had felt every shift in the air currents on his skin and instinctively knew which were natural and which were caused by moving objects.
His hearing had become so acute that he could get a sense of exactly what was behind him without looking. This cognitive picture had been confirmed by his sense of smell, which was able to separate individual scents and discern the direction of their origin.
Humans were naturally visual beings, and his sight had been boosted more than the other senses combined. His eyes had taken in every detail of the monster as well as every detail of the forest behind it. Even his peripheral vision had become primary. He could have counted the leaves on the tree branches out of the corners of his eyes.
It had been completely overwhelming, but also amazing in that moment before clarity became chaos. Jack moved the sensory tattoo up towards the top of the ever-growing list of things that he needed to learn to use.
As he walked through the rolling hills, Jack attempted to get a handle on the tattoo’s effect. He started by running the tiniest trickle of qi that he possibly could to the top of his spine.
This worked in that it didn’t overload his senses, but only because it didn’t enhance them very much. Jack ever so slowly increased the flow until he lost control and was forced to stop and wait for his senses to return.
Jack repeated this process until he found the maximum amount of qi that he could supply the tattoo without going overboard. Unfortunately, though his perception was amplified, it was nothing like the state of pure awareness that he had experienced before.
Apparently, to reach that state, Jack would have to feed the tattoo enough qi to leave him temporarily senseless afterwards. Despite this drawback, he was still determined to find a way to use it.
He continued to practice as he traveled through the beautiful countryside. With his enhanced vision, he spotted what he assumed was the village wall in the distance.
It was a dark structure that formed a snaking line across the hilly terrain. Jack didn’t realize the scope of what he was seeing at first glance. It was only when he drew nearer to the wall that he understood what he was seeing.
It was a massive slab of marble that stood around three hundred feet high. The wall was not perfectly flat as he had assumed it would be. There was a sharp but noticeable incline as if it were leaning slightly away from him.
At the bottom of the incline, the wall plunged down into a fast moving river. The water ran white around the many rocks that jutted up out of its depths.
By far the most fascinating thing about the structure, was the outward design. The face of the massive wall was absolutely covered in carvings of every description. There were beasts and humans that appeared to be battling with each other. Some of the carvings were abstract in design, with random shapes appearing here and there.
Most prevalent were the busts of a people who were similar to humans, but also distinctly different. They had slightly longer arms and legs than most humans for one thing, and it seemed like their fingers and toes were webbed. Also, they all had hair that only grew from the tops of their heads, not the sides or backs.
Their faces were all hairless and angular with mouths and lips that protruded slightly like they were constantly making the duck face. Jack assumed that he was getting his first look at the fomorians.
Given that the humans had named them ogres, he was expecting them to be uglier. Then again, maybe they had made their depictions to be a little more flattering than reality.
Jack came close to the edge of the river and gazed up at the wall in amazement. From the faces and shapes carved into the structure, water poured forth and ran down into the river like a gigantic decorative fountain.
Now that he was closer, he observed that it was also covered in a complex fractal script that had been etched into the entire face of the majestic structure. With a shock, he realized that the seemingly artistic carvings actually seemed to be organized to support the fractal pattern seamlessly.
Jack could scarcely imagine the mind, or minds, that had designed and crafted this marvel. He could feel the incredible power flowing through and radiating from the script. The air was so thick with the energy of the script, it felt like a physical burden weighing him down.
It was breathtaking. This was more like what Jack had expected to see when he came to a world where people could bend nature to their will. The druids had been a bit of a disappointment in that regard, but it seemed that the other peoples of Olympus would not be. He could not wait to see the so called village of the people who could make something like this.
Jack studied the fractal pattern for a time trying to understand its purpose. He could feel Zachias also taking note of the pattern. However, unlike Jack, Zachias was less than impressed by the fantastic wall.
“Do you know what the script does?” Jack asked the big blue warrior. He had gotten more used to telepathic communication during his time with Emrys.
Zachias’ response was casual almost to the point of boredom. “I would need to see more of it to be sure, but if I had to guess, I would wager it to be a reinforcement pattern.”
Jack was about to inquire about whether the script would prevent him from scaling the wall, when he was interrupted by a high-pitched, sinister voice in his head that belonged neither to him nor Zachias.
“So you are the famous outworlder human.”