Booooom!

Boooom! Boooom!

Three of the fleeing targets erupted into large fireballs, spraying their remains over grassy prairies.

The fourth and final target was a different beast altogether, however. It had dodged every attack thrown at it for the past ten minutes, but each new attack was closer than the last.

Still, it bobbed and weaved through the air to buy more time. So much was riding on this; if only it could hold out but a little longer.

Booom!

It dodged another blast by a hair, only for the shockwave to send it spinning.

Boooom!

It recovered just in time to dodge a second attack shortly after. The enemy was becoming quicker; if it didn’t — .

Boom! Boom! Boom!

Several consecutive blasts blocked its escape path and forced it to change directions. It only took a split second to realize it had been tricked, but even that wasn’t enough time to save it.

====

A fourth blast hit the final stone target dead on, shattering it into a rain of shards and dust.

The Captain fell to his knees, tears in his eyes.

His vacation funds!!!

The surrounding crowd, on the other hand, cheered as various bets passed hands. The Captain turned and glared at one group in particular. A large metal beast waved its arms in victory as a group of young children danced around him, several proudly wearing the patrol helmets they’d “won” off of his Guardians.

Damn these Slatewalker kids! They only got worse and worse with every generation! He sure as hell hadn’t been this bad… Ok, so he had accidentally burned down a third of the village when he mistook an Emberdrake whelp for Ash Salamander, but that had been an accident!

This was calculated maliciousness!

The Captain had only stepped away after receiving his new orders from the village council, mostly to finish the paperwork that would be needed later. A few hours later, he had gotten reports of explosions on the village perimeter.

. He’d rushed to the scene, only to see the spirit beast, along with his ever-growing gang of children, had challenged his guards to a game of skeet.

Guards who should have been watching their “guest.”

No one knew the origin of “skeet,” but it had become a popular training exercise for Guardians throughout the Radiant Sea. One or more soldiers would control a group of stone disks, while another group would attempt to shoot them out of the air with various Spirit techniques. It was a great exercise for polishing control and accuracy, as well as encouraging teamwork and quick thinking.

Many would even place bets on the outcome of matches, even if it was technically against regulation. The Captain himself was an expert “evader,” and he was proud to say he’d never once lost a match since entering the [Golden Spirit] step, even against his more powerful and well-trained seniors among the Jadewalkers.

So when he’d seen the defeated looks on his men’s faces, the Captain couldn’t let that stand, of course.

Almost 30 minutes later, however, the results spoke for themselves. Even some of his own men had bet against him! The traitors!

As the Captain knelt in the grass, a figure approached. The Captain looked up to see a young girl smiling gently down at him. She wasn’t quite old enough to have started her own apprenticeship yet, but she was still one of the three oldest of the group, making her one of their leaders by default.

The young girl’s smile widened as he met her eyes, and she held out a hand to him. The clouds of the Captain’s defeat seemed to part as his heart warmed at the girl’s gesture. He smiled back at her and stretched his hand out to meet hers. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe there really was some hope for this generation of children, after all.

As he did, the girl’s hand passed by his and latched onto his helmet. Then, with one swift motion, she yanked it from his head.

The Captain could only stare, frozen, hand outstretched, as the girl ran away, raising her “prize” high about her head to the cheers of all the children.

The Captain’s face sank, and he ground his teeth in frustration.

Seeming to feel his stare, the Captain’s daughter turned around and stuck her tongue out at him before turning back to her friends. That was it! No way was she getting dessert after dinner tonight!

===

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Alpha watched the children march in formation, each wearing a metal helmet several sizes too large for them. At the front, an older girl led them along, a slightly more ornate helm bobbing on her shoulders. When the children proposed their “game,” Alpha wasn’t sure what to expect.

Of course, the guards never asked who they would compete against, so they had no one to blame but themselves.

He had to admit that the sly munchkins had pulled the rug out from under the guards. It was amusing to watch. Alpha was often accused of “corrupting the children” and “being a bad influence” or “teaching bad habits.” But for once, he could honestly say no one here needed much “corrupting” at all.

It helped the game was the perfect opportunity to both test his newest toy and observe more of the strange abilities the people of this world seemed to have. He still wasn’t fully convinced this wasn’t some kind of shared Esper ability, but Humans weren’t a species with such a thing, and that wouldn’t explain the various animals he’d observed doing similar things. More data was necessary to fully understand it.

As for his new toy, he wasn’t sure if it could be called useful or just that, nothing more than a novelty.

His experiments with the heart crystals had hit a dead end, and he couldn’t figure out why. He’d tried several combinations of lines and connection methods, but none had proven very stable or even useable so far. Instead, he’d turned his attention to the more stable but drained shard formed by the fracturing process.

What little testing he could do with the limited equipment had shown they were just some kind of organic quartz, as he suspected. Mostly.

Rather than just silicon dioxide arranged in a crystalline pattern, the crystals appeared to use the quartz crystal to provide structure to several unknown inclusions he couldn’t identify. Alpha theorized that it was these inclusions that actually stored the energy inside the crystal, with the quartz acting as a kind of insulation, but he had no proper way of testing this yet.

What he had discovered, though, was that these crystal shards could be “recharged,” in a manner of speaking. By linking the shards to his test array, he’d siphoned off the energy into the shards, temporarily recharging them. This had the added benefit of keeping the test array stable for longer. His arrays likely exploded because of the constant flow of energy being pumped into them with nowhere to go, like a balloon filling with far more water than it could hold.

Charging the shards drained some of the energy, releasing some of the “pressure.” They’d still fail, eventually, but Alpha could study the energy flow for far longer now.

However, these recharged shards were far more explosive than even the cut gems and would quickly destabilize. Instead of letting the shards self-destruct and waste their energy, Alpha decided to do something more… fun with them. Some quick simulations later and Alpha’s prototype [Crystal Rail] system was finished.

The idea was simple; attach a small piece of shaped crystal shard to a modified rail round and then use one of the test arrays to recharge the crystal. That had been the trickiest part, but after some tweaking, he’d settled on a design that would slot the cut gem into the array on demand, then decouple it before the system could overload.

The result was interesting, if nothing less.

He could extract dozens of raindrop-sized crystal shards from a single heart crystal, and once charged, each would explode into a small fireball a few inches across. That was almost as effective as some of the Federation’s low-grade explosives!

Alpha was excited about the concept. If he could refine it further, it might be a respectable alternative to the more resource-expensive rail rounds and free up that material for other projects.

The prototype system had some major downsides, however. Less metal meant less mass. This translated into far lower kinetic power and velocity. That meant the crystal rounds would have a harder time piercing harder armor, making them rely more on their explosive damage than sheer impact or penetration. If he was just going up against biologicals, especially things like the penguins, that might not matter much, but even some tougher mundane megafauna could shrug off lower-caliber rail rounds.

Now give those creatures magic powers on top of that?

The [Crystal Rail] would likely not have much effect at all. At least in its present state.

There was also his current limited supply of actual heart crystals. Sure, he had a few hundred at this point, but it wasn’t like he could turn all of them into ammunition. He still needed a lot of them to experiment and study. It’s possible the entire system was a complete waste of resources as well, and he just didn’t know it yet.

Nonetheless, it was a good start.

===

Three days…

Kallik had been stuck in various meetings and talks for three entire days.

One could argue that for a Cultivator of her level, that wasn’t too long. After all, some Cultivators could spend weeks or even months in meditation and seclusion. But those times were filled with peaceful meditation and reflection, not constant bickering and political maneuvering by this Elder or that.

There was a reason she’d chosen to take a more hands-on approach with the young apprentices when she rose to Elder herself. She’d rather deal with that insanity than be stuck in a room with these geezers daily.

But sometimes, you had to do what you had to do; that was simply the way of things. Not that this particular discussion should have taken more than a few hours, but someone always had more to say. The hottest topic of debate was, of course, the “Lord Protector.” Even with all of their eyewitness accounts, no one could decide if he was truly a Progenitor or not.

Some elders flat-out denied it, thinking such a thing was preposterous, that the creature was a danger and should be killed or chased away. Others assumed the spirit beast was simply an extraordinarily powerful being, and even if it wasn’t a Progenitor, it could still be swayed to their side as an ally. After all, many larger villages had powerful “Guardian Beasts” of their own. Why shouldn’t the Slatewalkers?

More still were fully invested in Kallik’s Progenitor theory, but even then, there was division. Few could agree whether they should report events in their entirety to the Jadewalkers or hide the Maybe-Progenitor for themselves.

Both sides had their fair points. If they reported everything to the Jadewalkers, the status of the Slatewalker village would instantly skyrocket, regardless of the truth. That meant more support, more supplies, and better access to services they couldn’t provide themselves. But that also risked the Lord Protector being “stolen” by the much more powerful and wealthy Jadewalkers.

While the Slatewalkers were technically subordinate to the city itself, none in the village had a particular fondness for the overly pompous high clan, especially after some of the trouble they had been causing the past few years.

Not reporting everything would let them keep their secrets and possibly buy them time to both win over the Lord Protector’s favor and gather the strength to push back against anyone who might try to poke their nose in further. But it would also leave some glaring holes in their story. Holes that might attract the wrong kind of attention.

And so the arguments when back and forth, over and over and over.

It took three days for them to finally come to a decision, and frankly, Kallik wasn’t too excited about it.

But then, what could she do?