Atop the highest mountain peak, Aiden sat alone with his eyes closed. The thin, frigid air stung like needles as it passed through his nose and chilled every part of him. The chill went deeper than his bones, almost as if caressing his soul with its stinging touch.
“‘You’ll understand when you feel it’, my ass.” No matter how long he froze atop that mountain, observed the frozen landscape, felt the chilling breeze on his skin, and suffered through near-hypothermia, his Disciplines remained sturdy and defined.
Ice, Air, and Wind. Somehow, someway, he was supposed to find a way to coalesce them from their base components into a single Discipline. No amount of attunement brought him closer. Enlightenment seemed further than ever.
Individually, he could utilize his Disciplines in this environment. To use Water, he had to get a bit more creative, but Wind and Ice thrived. There was an abundance of magic, almost as if the world around him were trying to smother him with the element. The magic within seemed to wish to make him one with the mountaintop.
He resisted. We would be the one to control the power, not be consumed by it.
Trying to merge the Disciplines seemed simple in theory. In practice, he’d spent days sitting there without an iota of progress. All the time spent felt more and more like a waste, especially with the constant ache of emptiness in his soul. The longer he went without notable progress, the less he was inclined to merge the Disciplines at all.
Would it really make all that much of a difference? But Arkayan had advised him to go through with it, despite the amount of protesting and grumbling Aiden had put up. Not for the lack of wanting to, but for all the lack of clarity in his given instructions.
As he’d learned before when training in Paths and Mysteries back during the Game of Authority, Disciplines were the Arcana-adjacent method of utilizing Essence. Disciplines were more solid and less versatile than the alternative.
But nothing was working. Trying to utilize all three Disciplines at once as a single entity and not individual components failed after each try. No amount of smashing, mashing, or compacting caused his attempts to work.
“I need a new approach.” He’d tried everything to think of, and Arkayan’s advice was as useful as a single snowflake among a blizzard. “Maybe I’ve been going about this the wrong way.”
With a deep breath, he cleared his mind of all the things he’d tried that failed. He’d been going about things with the assumption that he needed to force the elements together to actually merge them into a single Discipline.
But if that were the case, why would he need to come to this place?
Opening his eyes, he looked at the freezing storm raging around him. It reminded him much of the process of ascending. The raw power of the elemental phenomenon enamored him. He wanted it, and not a poor replica mishmashed together.
“So where do I start?”
If he had all the components to create the magic, then what was stopping him? Attempting to combine his Disciplines in different ratios hadn’t worked, but maybe it was because there was more to it than that?
“‘You’ll understand when you feel it’... Why can’t he ever give advice that makes sense?” Through all his attempts, he hadn’t felt anything besides frustration at constant failure.
Willing to give anything a try, he went back to the ascension storm. Raw power brought under his control. He’d already attempted to usurp small fragments of the blizzard.
Not it.
Groaning, he rubbed the pressure of a forming headache from behind his eyes. “What if I’m thinking of it too black and white?”
His confidence in anything waned. The way he’d been looking at the process, he’d thought he would only use the Disciplines to make things work. But he had other tools at his disposal, like his Paths—Versatility and Crystallization.
One of those seemed more useful than the other, but he hadn’t used it yet, thinking this process would be simple.
How wrong he’d been.
If using his Path could help him accelerate the process, why shouldn’t he use what he had at his disposal?
So rather than try to use his Disciplines at all, he decided on a new approach—trying to take Arkayan’s words at face value and seeking out that ever-elusive “feeling”.
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With very little enthusiasm his approach would succeed, he halfheartedly started his next attempt.
The blizzard around him felt mutable, though it still resisted his attempts to take control. This was definitely a different feeling than what he’d experienced so far. Figuring out how to progress now was the next challenge, but this was already more progress than he’d made as of yet.
But what now?
Taking control of the power failed, even after a hundred attempts, so that method was out. That led him to wonder. What if he’d made more than a few assumptions about the process?
The storm raging around him held hidden clues in its primordial beauty. With a new lead, he set out to uncover the secrets within.
*
Instead of running away in the middle of the night, Josh and Maria got cleared to embark on a genuine mission into the territories not under Aiden’s control to seek survivors and clear out more of the invasive monsters.
Before they’d left, they’d checked the registries to make sure their families hadn’t been taken in and weren’t going through in-processing. Afterwards, they met with a pair of Fallen who’d done reconnaissance in the area they presumed their families to have taken shelter in. Gifted with a useful map marked with different suspected areas, they had a good idea of where to search.
However, part of their duties took a lot more time and effort than they’d imagine. The monsters hadn’t been cowed, their numbers swelling as they nestled into their new homes.
“Two monsters forward, one to your left,” Josh called, calmly standing with both hands on Bartholomew. The head of his club cratered the broken pavement further. He’d watched her dismantle these small fries numerous times since setting off. The amount of progress she’d made in such a short amount of time truly put her in the ranks of the elite hunters.
“Got it!” Her dual hand axes flew through the air in the next breath, and the two spares she kept at her side were in her hands. She confirmed her axes struck the two loping lizardmen true as she fluidly engaged the third.
She brought the axes up to block the attack, pulling toward her to snag the enemy’s spear. At first, it balked under her strength, but then the shaft splintered in half, leaving it useless and the monster without a weapon.
And that was all it took for her to press forward with savage brutality, her lethality inevitable.
“Good job.” He watched as she retrieved her other two axes and put all four back in their places on either side of her hip. The belt she wore had loops for the handles that she deftly slotted her weapons into.
She wiped her hands on her pants, then used the back of her hands to wipe some blood from her face. “They’re getting a lot easier to manage now.”
“Experience is a wonderful thing.” Josh tilted his club against his leg and pulled out their map and oriented himself in the direction they needed to head. All the buildings and monster dens made taking a straight shot to it a bit difficult. “Essence also works wonders for improvement.”
Maria nodded as the three milky-white Orbs dissipated. “Can’t get resources like this when working with a whole platoon.” She gestured toward him. “What about you? Don’t you need some?”
“These don’t have enough juice to give me the oomph I need to upgrade any of my attributes or abilities.” He folded the map up and began walking.
“Does anything?” she asked, stepping into a stride matching his own gait.
“Some things in Midrath do, but I’ve hit a bunch of walls recently. I can’t really get stronger until I find a method to ascend, whatever that is.”
“Huh. Even your skills are maxed out?”
“Didn’t say that, but the skills I use that are worth a damn require an amount of resources that would make everything you’ve ever gained look small.” He grinned when she huffed, a bit of her competitive edge coming out. He smirked. “I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you have.”
“You do have a habit of constantly reminding me of that fact,” she grumbled. “Feels unfair at this point. Almost makes me wish I’d been in the first group.”
“If you knew what things were like then, you wouldn’t say that.” Josh spoke far more harshly than he’d meant to, but nobody who hadn’t survived through the initial transition to Midrath, before Zion was set up, through all the havoc of the entirety of the Authority Wars… A blessing of ignorance that he abhorred. “I know there’s no way for you to know just how bad things were. Hell, if it weren’t for Aiden, I’m not sure any of us would’ve survived to get out of the school. We were all ready to tear each other apart, even as we were being swarmed by hordes of monsters, all while Aiden was fighting the boss by himself.”
She sucked on the inside of her teeth before nodding. “I didn’t mean it like that, sorry. I’ve only heard stories about the initial transfer, and everyone always focuses on how many monsters there were to fight and how much Essence was available. I forget they leave out the bad parts.”
“To be honest, I’m not sure which part of all of this isn’t bad. We might’ve stabilized and set down roots, won the war for Midrath, but none of us chose this. It was forced upon us. We never got to choose, just had to survive.” He breathed deep, loosening his tightened grip on Bartholomew.
“I get it.” She gestured around them at the signs of the monster invasions and fighting. “I’ve been told this place looks tame compared to what Midrath was first like, and I can’t even fathom that. If all of this is tame?”
“Surviving through the worst of it… Well, people often forget how awful things really were. So focused on surviving and seeking things that make it easier, no wonder.” Maybe if he hadn’t lost BB, he’d be the same as the others. But the constant reminder of soul-wrenching pain didn’t let him ignore the truth of what they’d survived through, the horror of it all, and how much it had taken from all of them.
Nobody had survived through it and remained the same. Of that, he was certain.
Even now, the endless pit of wrath boiling in his gut threatened to spill over. The Asura wished to manifest and release his wrath upon the world, but he was the one in control. It would bend to his will until he called it forth.
“Let’s go. The longer we take to find them…”
“Lead the way.”