We spent the following weeks training relentlessly; we continued our sparring and power training and we added a lot of work out.
Swordjuice was pushing herself the hardest, every night ending up shaky and unable to stay up on her noodle limbs. It was only thanks to the serum, as we started calling it, that she could get up every morning and be ready for more.
All the others were also going all out every day, LED pushing them with constant reminders to not waste the opportunity.
Victor had joined us in our training fights, proving to be a real menace on the battlefield dishing out all types of artillery at long range and having a versatile attack and defense at close quarters.
The fights between him and Swordjuice were the most interesting as their powers worked similarly, giving them both attack and defense simultaneously, and when Swordjuice put on a shroud that wasn’t as stacked as the extreme ones she used against me they could fight on very close levels of powers.
Swordjuice was still stronger overall, being able to outlast Victor in the time she could stay in battle, she makes her jellies outside of combat which makes her able to stack up on a lot of them, meanwhile if Victor’s energy ran out, that was it.
Even then he didn’t go down easily, getting more and more used to fighting with the almost relentless training.
He always chose the best type of ammunition against Swordjuice’s shrouds, made shields that absorbed the kinetic energy of her blunt attacks while using the solid metal to defend against the slashing attacks.
He could wrap it around himself like a second skin, which made for a great cosplay of Argenturion. The similarity with the heroic icon made everyone crack up the first time he pulled it off, even more when he willed the metal to assume the late hero’s ripped physique.
His fights with me were just like my fights with anyone else, I could adapt to protect myself from the diverse types of bullets and attacks that he could pull off, and after that first fight I could just turn into the optimal transformation for fighting him and start ahead from the beginning.
One interesting thing was trying to fight on the same strength level where I focused on using Victor’s power trying to up him in his own game, he would enhance, invert or delay properties of his attacks trying to get over my transformations, which as the fight went on made me adapt towards encompassing all the possibilities.
Sometimes that was simply my protections becoming more and more robust, but on one of our fights I tried to use invert in it but instead of inverting its own properties, my goal was to make my skin apply the effect in what struck it.
At first it didn’t work, my armored skin only refusing to make itself softer. It was notoriously hard to force a transformation that would hinder me, which probably was what also prevented me from making any catastrophic mistakes in my dozens of tests at manipulating my matrix.
The fight had dragged on with Victor trying out making the most liquid and soft bullets he could and then inverting their softness; it resulted in some very hard hits that splashed like water but impacted with the same force as a normal bullet. Not having any of the flexibility it would otherwise have, each droplet was like a shard of metal.
Then my matrix eventually caught on, it made a combination of matrices more complex than I had ever seen, combining giving off effects from LED’s power and using it to create an on-touch buff over my skin, being based on LED’s power it only worked on things that had a matrix.
It was fickle and broke apart after making a couple of Victor’s attacks ineffective, all that for an enormous amount of energy.
It really wasn’t worth the extra effort, but it showed the infinity possibilities that combining powers granted me.
He sparred with Spotlight a couple of times, always being considered a loss when Spotlight tapped a vital area. Victor didn’t have any protection against Spotlight’s power, so the matches against him weren’t very useful for his training.
There was the possibility that his power could improve to cover that weakness if his metal could gain sentience or maybe a surveillance ability or even a passive defensive mode if he could encounter other powers that created weapons with those abilities.
His power had turned out with great adaptability and potential, and it wasn’t the only one. The first night of the training regime, me and LED had gone to old Dan’s house as planned, to give the old man a power or try to.
His diminished core was a curious happenstance and was another mystery that I was going to discover more about along the way as I interacted with more people and tried to give them powers.
We made the same dance as before; LED putting his buffs on first and then me coming along and giving the person a connection.
This time we explained from the beginning what Dan had to do, something Victor had to figure out by himself. So now it should be easier.
But maybe because his core was so much smaller it was more difficult for him to actually grasp into the connection and try to expand it, the second time we tried he definitely felt something, the inkling of a way but it took another three times before it actually worked, and the awakening of his core send the buffs and my tether scattering away into nothing.
I first saw his reaction in the real world, marveling at his own hands and with a giddiness that looked as foreign in his face as a downpour in a desert.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
He was mostly the same, only the lobes of his ears extending while transitioning to a green tone at the end, finishing in what seemed like a seed pod on each of his lobes, like a long green pearl earring.
“You know,” he finally said after taking a breath, “powers always seemed like some fantastic thing, even after hearing about them for most of my life, it really is something different to actually have one yourself.”
“I know,” I said, nodding. “It’s like finding a part of yourself that had been missing your whole life”
“Yeah...”
“Can you tell what it is?” LED asked
“Yeah..” He said almost in a daze, raising his hand for us to see.
In the palm of his hand there was a bump, like another one of his seed pods. “They’re growing in here,” he said, and touched one of his lobes with his other hand, “and here too.”
“What’s growing?” LED asked.
“Seeds,” Dan said simply as LED stared at him in confusion.
“Oh, plant-based mutation then.” I said, “that’s pretty cool.”
“I guess so,” he said, shrugging.
“Can you tell what it does? Or anything at all?” Led asked.
“Calm down, boy, I can.” Dan huffed. “When they’re ready, I can plant them and they’ll produce different plants. I have four. It seems, one for each seedpod.”
“Interesting…” I leaned forward to have a better look at the seedpod in the palm of his hand.
“And do these plants have any additional abilities?” LED questioned further.
“Yeah, they feel like part of me, man.” Dan explained, slightly rambling and moving his other arm around, the other centered between us, the seedpod in his palm the focus of everyone. “Even now, as little seeds, I can tell they’re Extensions of, of my mind or something.”
“And there’s more. They each give off this, this different feeling.” he bobbed his opened hand in the air, indicating it to us. “This one has a feeling like, like when you finally give someone a jump after waiting around a corner.”
“An ambush?” LED asked.
“Yeah, exactly that.” He touched his right lobe. “Then this one feels like when you notice someone at a distance, you know, or from out of a crowd.”
He turned his left hand, showing the pod in there too. "And this one. It feels like the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had. Those that with a drink make you feel more alert.”
And lastly he gestured towards the left lobe, his palm staying there in the gesture as the silence stretched.
“Nothing?”
“Yeah, nothing,” he laughed. “It’s like...” he cupped his chin deep in thought, “holding a Christmas present, that you have no idea what it could be.”
“And how do you use them?”
“Well, they’re seeds. I guess I need to plant them.”
“Let’s go then,” I said, moving to the door. “I wanna see it.”
“No, I don’t think they’re ready yet.” Dan said, halting my steps.
“Can’t you speed them up?” I asked hopefully.
“Hmm, I think I might with the ones in my hands.” He extended his hand in the space between us again, the right one, and frowned, staring at the pod.
He visibly got slimmer, stumbling in place. LED held him up quickly, alarmed.
“It’s done,” he said, showing us the brilliant seed, like a gem made of the purest green.
“Jesus, man, are you okay?” I asked, moving back.
LED guided Old Dan to a chair while he nodded feebly, looking dizzy.
“You just lost at least 5 kilos,” LED commented drily.
“I feel fine.” He coughed, a manic grin on his slightly sunken face. “Look at this he said,” showing the seed.
“Yeah, I saw your seed.”
“How much time you figure it will take to grow?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, but I’ll find out right now.”
Dan got up slowly, waving off LED’s offered arm and set to his courtyard. I shrugged when I caught LED’s eyes and followed the man as he went out.
LED joined us outside as I overlooked Dan, seriously judging the dirt. He seemed to find a good spot and shoved the emerald seed on the ground.
It sprouted immediately, but only growing to a sapling, not much higher than 10 centimeters.
LED, and I stared in slight disappointment.
“Should we come back next month, green thumb?”
“Humph, this will take time, yes, but look at this place.” He gestured to the multitude of plants around his house; the plantations extending on the horizon.
“Don’t you get it? This little plant here isn’t the only one. It’ll produce seeds herself.”
My eyes widened at the implications. This really was a long-term power, but shit, he could then probably breed them together to make stronger variations, and the one who came with random properties was to make an even bigger bucket of possibilities.
“That little detail makes your power deceptively powerful.”
Dan chuckled evilly crouched in front of the little plant, and after a while of letting him admire it, we managed to bring him to inside his house. I intended to look closely over his powers, even though I didn’t think that the power itself would be of much help to me, given how long term it was, the mechanisms interested me.
And I’ll certainly visit if he ended up making some interesting plants. I think they’d have matrices themselves, could a copy a plant’s matrix? Probably.
I connected with Dan’s newly formed matrix while he rested on the couch with a cup of water talking with led.
It stayed small, surprisingly. With a power that complex, I really thought it might haven grown, but it used his own body as fuel and seemed to grow slowly otherwise, using his body’s nutrients slowly most likely.
I dived deeper, not finding much of anything until I encountered the part that dictated what would be in his physical body
The same part where my mutations started, the matrix changed there and made my body change as well. I concentrated in the area fully, seeing that there was a strong connection with his body.
Was this how mutation powers worked then? It made sense. Interesting, but there were no more matrices here, only how he could direct his body energy to the seed pods and the creation of the seed pods. Where was the rest of it?
Wait, would it be in his actual body, separated just like Victor's metal is, but not exactly in here? But maybe I just didn’t see it because his matrix is so small? I moved my consciousness from the tether back to my matrix, and extended my tentacles from it in the tether's direction, putting everything in it so that I could ‘see’ with them.
Looking here from outside, I could see another four clusters of matrices floating equidistant from Dan’s matrix. So there they were.
I opened my eyes briefly, seeing that the matrixes overlaid with his body where the pods were, with his core being around his chest.
This time I went to study the pods directly, putting my sensors all over them and focusing completely, the implications of this new way of building matrices had been floating around in the back of my mind and it could be the missing piece to making more leaps and bounds in manipulating my matrix and giving myself even more powers.
It was something that I had been planning on doing, mutating myself, manipulating the part of me that dictated the way my body should be and therefore creating something new, before I had no frame of reference for it though and I was sure that going at it blindly would only result in terrible outcomes.
I thought this was how different mutation powers arose, matrices fused to the body’s biology, creating a variety of powers like an organ that produces a type of superpowered hormone or an arm that can destroy anything it touches.
And it showed me a way ahead, instead of only copying new powers for me to adapt into or searching for even more powerful base lines like Rebeca’s powers provided me.
I could implement a new power through mutating it into my body, more or less forcing something that I could use at my leisure instead of waiting to stumble on the perfect transformation power.
That technique could pave my way into reaching a whole new realm of power.