I couldn’t find an exit from the garden of metal trees ... other than the blocked stairway leading back into the tiered underground city with hundreds of spitbats. Which I was not completely eager to revisit, considering the whole ‘roofied by bats, eaten by snails’ experience.
So instead of immediately heading for the exit, I decided to spend a little time training. Not because I was looking for an excuse for procrastination! I’d just learned brand new skill, and upgraded my abilities significantly. I saw more--sensed more--a dozen times more--and I moved faster.
I couldn’t place chains of smoke anywhere in the battlespace, like the original power had offered, at least not yet, but I could make them unspool from my hatchets. I could leave smoke trails around myself, each one with the tensile strength of a steel cable. A spiritual-steel cable. The chains only lasted for a few seconds, but they changed everything.
And as I practiced in a metal-fringed garden glade, I learned that the unspooling smoke could project my thrown hatchets farther and faster than possible with muscle alone. I even managed to curved them slightly, like target-seeking missiles. Well, as long as the target didn’t move more than a foot or two.
When I ‘imbued’ my hatchets, they turned for one heartbeat into charred shapes in my grip, like they were covered in shrouds of cracked black creosote. They returned to normal a moment later, though, and I wasn’t even sure if anyone else could see the transformation. Somehow, I thought not. And the smoke-chains didn’t unfurl from them; the chains extended from my burn-scarred palms and unfurled to my hatchets, like they were grappling hooks or something.
When I tried firing smoke-chains from my palms without a hatchet on the other end, nothing much happened. Just a trail of feeble smoke. Still, something told me that eventually I’d learn to use smoke-chains almost like extra limbs. Long, skinny, weak, temporary extra limbs at first, but I was only level 10. How strong would they be at level 20?
I experimented for a while, keeping an eye on my dwindling mana points, then gazed--well, with my spheresense--in a circle around myself, aware of every direction at once. The garden of razor leaves and scalpel branches made the perfect training ground. Nothing like an obstacle course combined with a food processor.
“Okay,” I said, cracking my neck. “Let’s see what I can do.”
And with a daredevil recklessness, I took off between the trees, moving at a ... stroll.
Well, I didn’t want to rush into anything. I just wanted to train. So at first, I kept the entire three-hundred and sixty degree image of branches and trunks, floor and ceiling, as clear as possible in my mind. My brain ached at the flood of sensory information, but not badly. I was already getting used to my expanded awareness.
I kept strolling as I picked out a target to my right. A clump of metal leaves that must’ve fallen together over the years, absolutely vivid to me in the pitch darkness. Without turning my head toward them, I threw a hatchet sideways.
I missed.
So I imbued my other hatchet, then threw that one at the leaves.
That time I somehow felt the target, and the hatchet, and the throw, all at once. I wasn’t sure if I guided my weapon in mid-air or if I’d just aimed better, but I hit the leaves dead center before summoning my hatchet back into my hand.
A trail of smoke--a chain of smoke--lingered between me and the target. Strong enough that an ollie could tightrope walk along it ... at least for a few moments.
The smoke dissipated and I thought about the possibilities--and limitations. For example, I couldn’t use ‘Charred Blade’ if I wanted to attack from hiding, as it left a smoke trail pointing right back to me. But forming a, well, a spiderweb of temporary, unbreakable chains around myself felt like a game changer, if I learned how to use it. I kept strolling, my senses alert to every lump on the ground and every seed pod in the trees, and I experimented both with and without my Charred Blade ability.
I aimed for targets in front of me, then to either side. I aimed above myself, at static points on the ceiling, and behind myself. For a while, I only aimed to the rear. My senses extended in a complete sphere, yet I still needed to train my arms to throw behind myself. Which didn’t work very well--my muscles and ligaments didn’t swivel that way--but I still improved pretty substantially.
Pretty fast, too.
Speaking of which, I finally sped up to a slow jog. Still aiming, still throwing. Still occasionally chopping at nearby branches. My unimbued blades only scraped the metal but they carved deeper gouges after I poured mana into them. Which made no sense. ‘Charring’ my hatchets gave them a kind of soul-based impact, right? Yet surely metal trees didn’t have souls.
Still, my blades did significantly more damage now. So maybe there was a little soul in everything, in this world. I kind of liked that.
Then I took off between the trees bladed trees.
What I’d realized, after fighting too many goddamn monsters on this floating island, was that I’d been using my smoke gem all wrong. Or at least as not as effectively as possible. I’d been holding off on turning to smoke. I’d been hoarding my maya and turning vaporous for the maximum amount of time when everything else turned to shit. I’d been using my gem as a sort of emergency “Get Out of Trouble Free” card, but I needed to start using it more strategically.
I needed to incorporate the power into my fighting style. Which meant turning to smoke repeatedly for a few moments at at time. ‘More often, for briefer periods’ would be far more effective than ‘just once, when you totally freak out.’
That idea had been half-formed in my mind for a while, but thinking about teleportation--fine, thinking about Nightcrawler--really brought it home. If I disappeared in a puff of smoke for a second, that was shockingly disorienting to my enemies. Imagine if some interior-decorating human you were trying to kill--the one who was hacking at you with his silly hatchets--suddenly turned to smoke? Your sword or fangs or claws landed on nothing. You stumbled, then the guy reappeared a step away, his blade already in motion?
You couldn’t plan for that. You couldn’t lose yourself in the rhythm of battle, the habits of training, the power of flow, when your opponent went suddenly foggy.
So yeah, I needed to master brief strobes of smokiness.
I took a breath as I ran across a blade-leafed glade. I turned to smoke, spun, returned to my body and took off in a different direction, making a sharper turn than should’ve been impossible after I bled off my momentum. I reappeared two steps from thicket of razor thorns then drifted through them untouched and reappeared on the other side. I couldn’t re-form inside an object, so I used objects to push me faster from place to place. I sprinted at a low-hanging branch, and instead of ducking beneath it, I wafted into it and reappeared two feet farther along, still sprinting.
I kept throwing and chopping with my hatchets the entire time I practiced movement skills ... which was why it took me a while to realized that my mana was ticking down more slowly than before. When I turned to smoke, I barely burned through two mana. Plus, I transformed more quickly than ever before.
Apparently as I’d increased a tier, I’d also increased in mana efficiency.
STATUS: Think of each tier as providing global modifier to your stats, though not a uniform one.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“I have no idea what that means,” I said, slowing to a halt beneath a spreading metal tree limb. “It is true, or should I just think of it that way? What kind of modifier? To which stats?”
Status didn’t answer after I asked four times.
I threw my annoyance into training, and pushed myself harder. I moved faster, I spun in the air, throwing both hatchets at once at different targets. I put one hand on a chain of smoke and vaulted over it a moment before it dissipated. It was like a double-jump in a video game, or walking on clouds ... except that I placed the clouds around myself.
Hell, I even threw an imbued hatchet at the ceiling, thirty or forty feet above me; somewhat to my surprise, the blade chunked into the stone and anchored in place. It left a dangling smoke-chain behind, so I swung like Tarzan on a vine before the chain dissipated two seconds later and I tumbled ass over elbow toward a stand of spearlike saplings.
Instead of turning to smoke, I threw my other hatchet to my left. Not aiming at anything, but leaving a line of smoke behind. Then I swung around the new chain like a gymnast on the parallel bars, my boots barely missing the top of the spears.
My dismount wasn’t quite as smooth, but you couldn’t have everything.
I threw another smoke chain, then another. One of them I swung around like a lethal pole-dancer ... and the thought gave me pause. Not because I mourned my failure as a stripper, but because if I was thinking ridiculous shit, that meant that sure, I was training, but maybe I was also trying to exhaust myself. Just trying to wear myself out. Because those wraiths had been terrifying ... and to tell the truth, those level-ups had been terrifying, too.
So I retreated to one of the hexagonal niches. I splashed my face and hands with water, then drank and ate. Raw snail again--to my delight. Never got old. I rested my head on a ‘pillow’ of a folded blanket and closed my eyes, replaying the images of the day. Letting the terrors and aches fade away ... and acknowledging that I’d grown far stronger.
Increasing a tier meant far more than increasing a level.
“Now, where were we?” Princess said, speaking from behind me.
Jerking in surprise, I opened my eyes and found myself standing on the balcony of her dream-mansion. The endless coppery forest below glimmered beneath a white sun, and sharp edges shimmered in the light. Great. More metal trees. The balcony ballooned into a semi-circle in front of me--a big one, maybe fifty feet wide--with a parquetry floor that looked like cobwebs.
Princess crept beside me--one ton of gem-like spider with blue fur that ruffled in the breeze and a deep kindness in her compound eyes--and leaned against me comfortingly.
I said, “That’s funny, with the metal trees.”
“That’s not my contribution to the landscape, my hydra-headed human,” she said. “It’s yours.”
“Huh?”
“We share this dreamworld now, Alekoshi. Our minds are twinned, not merely bonded.”
“Oh! Oh ...” I frowned at the metal trees stretching toward the dream-horizon. “Does that bother you, that we’re so tightly linked? Maybe I should’ve ... Should I have asked?”
“There was nobody to ask, Alex, and I’m neither bothered nor fretted nor even slightly discomposed. I’m pleased and proud and even, I might add ...” She paused. “I can’t think of a third word that begins with a ‘p.’ Pleased, proud, and ...”
“Preposterous?” I suggested.
When she laughed, the white light of the sun warmed toward the golden. “Propitious!”
“That too,” I said.
“Well!” She tapped my elbow with a claw. “Shall we continue?”
“Continue what?”
“Where we left off the other night, my bearded baron.”
I touched my chin, and realized that even in dreams I was now unshaven. “Sure. I only have one question. What the hell ...” I reached for another word that started with ‘hell’ so I wouldn’t bother her by swearing, and ended up saying. “--helmet are you talking about?”
She giggled, which ... well, just imagine a giant tie-dyed spider giggling. I didn’t even know how she talked. Spiders didn’t make any noise, as far as I knew. No vocal chords. Anyway. Princess giggled and said, “You never remember! Every four or three or five or ten days you join me here and we train.”
“Uh,” I said.
“We never remember. At least not consciously. Your body remembers, though, at least a little. Your body learns.”
“You don’t remember either?”
“I would’ve mentioned it! I mean, when you’re here, I remember all the previous times you were here--which is more than I can say for you!--but when you’re not here, those memories feel more like daydreams or woolgathering. Though we should have guessed. I mean, how did you imagine you fight so well?”
“I’m not sure that I do.”
She managed to roll her eyes without pupils. “Really? Even before unlocking the ability to hunt wraiths--wraiths! you now strike directly at the soul, my noble axeman, I’m so pleased that that is not at all disturbing--even before unlocking that ability, you defeated gemmed warriors of substantially higher level than yourself.”
“Well, I figured the system in my head sort of ... transfers the knowledge?”
“It does. As does the other ingenious being in your shaggy head, who happens to be a gorgeous, generous, kindly example of arachrys-hood, by which I refer to myself. How else could you possibly be excelling with fighting hatchets after frittering away a lifetime studying only loops and surfboarding?”
“Loops?”
“With the orange ball in the basket?”
“Hoops,” I said.
“Hoops, loops, floops, whatever it’s called! Your world is very strange, my sweet. However, I still refuse to believe in your so-called ‘petroleum!’ Fueling carriages with the corpses of extinct lizards? That is at least three kinds of nonsense. And don’t get me started on stuffed animals.” She shuddered. “Just gruesome.”
“O-kay,” I said. “So you’ve been, what, teaching me hatchet forms in my sleep?”
“Fundamentally yes, except completely no. Not even slightly. Pre-learned forms and sequences may help a warrior battle other bipedal opponents of normal capacity. However such rigid approaches are not merely ineffective but counterproductive, deleterious, and even nugatory when faced with gemmed individuals and creatures of a magical bent.”
“‘Nugatory’ isn’t a word.”
“Nugatory is absolutely a word! You hush! You hush and shush! You’re usually more eager to train and less eager to flap your fleshy mouthparts. As I was saying, training in forms is unhelpful against opponents who are limited by neither biology nor mundanity. They don’t come at you in predictable ways, Alex. So I’ve been training you to improvise. In the brutal art, as you call it, of hatchet jazz.”
“Oh. Okay. That actually makes sense.”
She huffed. “Naturally. I said it. And today, we’re going to focus on your newest ability.”
“Smoke chains?”
“Indeed. Do you know what they remind me of?”
“Chains of smoke?”
She smiled with all her fangs. “Strands of a web, which happen to be a strength of mine. So. Are you ready to train?”
“Sure. Just one thing first.”
“What’s that?”
“Never use the phrase ‘fleshy mouthparts’ again.”
For the first hour, she mostly had me unfurling smoke-chains around the balcony. Checking my placement, my control, then making me hang on them until they dissipated, so I’d learn in my bones how long they lasted, and how they felt in my grip a moment before they faded.
Then we spent dream-hours combining that with movement.
She wanted to fully exploit my new, extremely-spidery ability to basically transform any fighting ground--an alley, a field, a corridor, a bedroom--into a deranged jungle-gym of my own design. Sure, the beams and posts and struts faded after a handful of seconds, but the mana cost was minimal and I could always paint new ones in the air.
But while they lasted? I owned the battlespace. Well, at least the parts directly around myself. Where I’d managed to lay down chains. As long as, you know, nobody had an effective counter-power.
After I practiced for a time, Princess shrunk to the size of a pit-bull--an eight-legged pit-bull designed to climb webs--and chased me across smoke-chain constructions that I built on the fly. She caught me every time, but I made her work for it. Then I started building a wobbly smoke-chain tower into the sky, a tangled gaseous scaffolding. I fled upward as lower bits of the ‘tower’ dissipated beneath me, trying to isolate Princess on the fading chains of smoke, laughing as she leaped toward me and ...
Colors swirled. Bronze, white. Knotted ropes of smoke stretched around me ... and I woke in the pitch darkness of that hexagonal corridor with a smile on my face.
And I remembered. Only hazily, but still: I remembered what I’d learned that I remembered that I’d learned.
I gave a little laugh.
She sent me a wave of fond sleepiness, then I stood and stretched a little. Damn, I still stank. I needed some fantasyland deodorant. At least I’d thrown a few toothbrushes into my domain--well, ‘mouth-sticks,’ which were twigs that frayed into bristles when you scrubbed your teeth, and tasted like sweet eucalyptus.
I grabbed a waterskin and took off my shirt and cleaned my pits. Then I took my very last clean shirt from my domain and I headed across the garden, still in a cloud of my own stink. Apparently a sponge bath wasn’t enough to help. I picked through the murder-trees to the stairs where I’d entered, then paused to take a breath.
Those sunken city blocks still felt like failure to me. They felt like pain and hallucination and retreat. I’d stumbled away from that cavern, sick and injured ... but I wasn’t sick and injured anymore.
I was stronger than ever, and eager to repay a debt.