Chief Warrant Officer Charlie David Wasserman (Kushiel)-

I had received a notice on my wristlink from the node. I was racing through the passageways, panicking a little, and wondered if Taera needed me, and had just formed her spiritual root… without anyone around to help her through the trauma.

Congratulations! You have unlocked the secret achievement, ‘heart’s hope’.

This achievement is for preventing the force key from being forcefully or unethically bonded, shutting down a potentially galaxy-wide fate chain. The system congratulates you for holding the line against the destruction of a significant section of this universe.

This achievement grants you a 10% resistance to the corrupting effects of acid, toxic, radiation, and necrotic essences.

What did that MEAN? I was using most of the value of my purifying trait, subsuming almost all of my life essence affinity to fight off the effects of the necrotic essence. Did that ten percent mean I could finally catch up and start purifying it? Or that I could turn part of my life essence back towards my other gifts, like healing and stabilizing, the way a paladin should be able to?

Was this a turning point for my infection? Or was it giving me just a few more years, hope that the horse could sing?

“Taera!” I yelled, pounding on the XO quarter’s beautiful wooden door. “Taera, I need your open-door policy right now!”

I heard her voice faintly, “David? Come in. I am taking a bath.”

I opened the door, and charged in, through her meeting office and overly-wooden bedroom, and right into her bathroom, where I stopped. Yep, taking a bath. “Crap, I’m sorry.”

She shrugged a little, waving at her toilet stand. “Sit. It’s not like I am showing anything, or have anything to show. Tomorrow’s a big day. This was one of the most successful raids we have had since the new captain took over. What’s wrong?”

I shivered a little, and she suddenly looked incredibly concerned. “David, what’s wrong?”

“I just got a secret achievement, and it’s… I don’t know. Did your benchmark update?”

Taera shook her head slowly and grabbed a towel. She didn’t really bother to conceal anything as she wrapped herself up, but it didn’t really matter, she was a taer, as smooth and sexless as a child’s doll. I turned my head respectfully aside as if she were a girl, though, before she had her towel wrapped and sat on the edge of the tub.

“Scrot,” I muttered. “I hoped it would be enough.”

“You hoped what would be enough? And how did a Paladin become infected with necrosis essence and risk deviating despite holding to his vows, anyway?” she asked.

I sighed, “I was stupid. Do you know the paladin path?”

She nodded, “It’s not exactly a secret, just really hard to hold to.”

“I… broke with the church.”

She nodded slowly as I looked back at her, swaddled in the towel. “I was wondering how you came here like a mercenary to fight rifts. Obviously, there was no way I’d say no to you joining the troopers, but I thought you were on a mission from the church to protect the girl.”

I sighed. “There were parts of the church that just struck me as wrong, their political maneuvers, their acceptance of certain non-scriptural facts as commandments, their tolerance of certain evils…”

She nodded, “You must have been closer to the core of the church than most paladins. holy knight?”

I nodded, “Yes, for ten years. I was born a commoner, which meant service for training. Most Paladins just go and fight and never see the seedy underbelly, but as a holy knight I was exposed to the dirt every day… often I was sent to discipline priests who took their authority too far, but all too often politics allowed even the truly evil to simply get shuffled around and spread their slime someplace new. That was the start, and guard duty where I heard too much. I still believe, but I couldn’t support it directly anymore.”

She nodded slowly, “Did that cost you your protection?”

I shook my head, “No. Divines, both true priests and Paladins gold core and above, still protect paladins who have not lost their path, even if they are not connected to the church at all. But I chose to throw away my protection, to become a divine paladin before I gained my gold core, because I gained the path at bronze instead of iron. I thought it was just another of the church’s flawed doctrines, that I was too powerful to be bound by a silly rule that a divine paladin needed a gold core because the class was right there.”

“As a result, I didn’t gain my refined body when I gained divine paladin, and by lost the protection from the divines that the lower ranks received… and then, like a complete moron, I decided to prove my superiority by hitting a necrotic rift ruled by a necrotarsic lich, full black core.”

She sighed. “How’d you escape?”

I shook my head, “I didn’t.”

“Huh?”

“He infected me, knowing I’d never be able to afford a gold-core life purification, and corrupted four of my meridians… both of the ones in my fighting arm, that I use to control my energy blade, and the one in my left leg and left wrist, to ‘balance’ me, as he said. And then he let me go, laughing at how I’d struggle and eventually fall, either dying or becoming deviated. Apparently, it’s not every day he gets to corrupt a paladin without killing them. He thought it was an absolutely brilliant joke. Of all the dark-hearted angsty liches in the universe, I had to find the one with a sense of humor.”

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She nodded slowly, “Well, you are still alive. You haven’t deviated yet, that has to be worth something.”

I sighed, “Yeah, but I just completed a secret achievement. It gave me a ten percent boost against all corruption essences. I was hoping that was… enough.”

“Enough to prevent your deviation? Which would have hit my first benchmark.”

I nodded, “Yeah, but apparently it just wasn’t enough. And now Gabrielle’s threatening to try to directly alter the essence when she hits iron tier. Even with forces, the necrotic essence could infect her until she hits gold tier herself.”

“Well, she did use her swarm to affect your repairs, then again, that was all technology essence and remotes, which is mostly immune to necrotic contamination… if parts of her swarm were infected, she could just dispose of them.”

I looked at her in surprise, “She worked around my scorched meridians, and set up pass-through channels past the necrotic essence using nothing but drones?”

Taer laughed, “Yes, very small ones. She has a special gift that allows her to control millions of microscopic drones. It’s a bit like those mythical nanites, but they don’t have any expert systems, she just remotes the whole swarm directly. I was really impressed. That ability could terrify the uneducated and make her stupidly rich even when she was just tin. Didn’t you notice her using it during her training? Did you think she just magically turned an entire Sargasso into a huge fleet of drones overnight using a wrench?”

I shook my head, flushing a little, “I didn’t really think about it… I’m not a tech, I am not really sure how it works, I was just there to try and pressure her aura enough to threaten or break her control.”

She looked at me closely, “Are you willing to tell me how you got your secret achievement?”

I nodded slowly. Oddly enough, I actually trusted this taer, despite her meddlesome reputation. “Yes. She told me that she couldn’t be force bonded anymore, and bing! Secret achievement.” I looked at the alert on my bracelet again and read it aloud. “This achievement is for preventing the force key from being forcefully or unethically bonded, shutting down a potentially galaxy-wide fate chain. The system congratulates you for holding the line against the destruction of a significant section of this universe.”

She smiled a little, “Well, there goes one of my sticks, even if it wasn’t enough to give me a benchmark.”

“I’m not sure how it happened though.”

She leaned forward and poked me in the forehead with one slender, pale fingertip. “Apparently you didn’t learn much from your mistake, you are still arrogant and stupid.”

I glared, “What do you mean? Ignorant I will accept, I don’t understand the whole bonding thing, but arrogant and stupid?”

“Did she talk about your aura?”

I nodded slowly.

“You already started bonding her, dummy. You probably did it the first time you meshed your aura with hers, and it just got stronger as you interacted. I mean, obviously, there’s still the physical part, where you actually transfer and join your essence, but the hard part is done.”

“We are already… bonded?”

She nodded, “Aurally, yep. That means that a forced bond would just be rape instead of rape and mind control. You probably want to forgo the final step in true bonding until you get your little necrotic problem taken care of, though… a full transfer would likely corrupt her, even if her bond boosts you enough to cure yourself.”

“The bond would boost...what?”

She nodded, “I don’t understand the bond that well, but I was around when the church first created maenads. She has forces affinity. Let me explain this very slowly… Forces can influence ANY energy essence, including necrotic or life. That’s what scares the fleet so much.”

I nodded.

“She probably already HAS some kind of energy enhancement trait. I know damned well that she already has some kind of remote force trait.”

“Right…”

She sighed. “Do the math. Remote is not just control. She could, with proper training and that ridiculously misnamed triage trait, identify and apply, and potentially identify and utilize, ANY trait linked to an energy essence affinity. It should work on any willing target, and with enough willpower, she could do it to an unwilling target too.”

“Wait, what?”

She laughed, “I told you forces affinity terrifies fleet. With the right training and classes, especially with the spiritual affinity, she could potentially boost, shut down, loan, or borrow, ANY energy affinity or trait as long as she has the energy. And if you give her a full bond, she could use those, and you could use hers, without losing them or draining energy to maintain a remote link.”

“That’s what made the technomancers so terrible. They weren’t all tech, and not all of them had necrotic affinity, but every one of them had forces affinity and could swap traits and affinities around constantly in a fight, or even lend powerful traits to drones, golems, or undead minions. People always talk about the technomancer army like it was a horde, but the horde was just their minions. In the end, there were only three of them. One lich, one droner, and one spiritualist, and yet they bid fair to conquer all of human-controlled space.”

“In the end, they weren’t taken down by a fleet, or an army of paladins, or gold-core duellists. The technologist was removed by a strong poison in his coffee, the spiritualist was blown out of a faulty airlock, and the lich got caught by a collapsing rift when some smartass pulled the control core while he was inside building advancement and meditating. Assassins, not high-tier heroes or fleets of warships. Evil, dirty, rotten killers took out the greatest threat humanity has ever seen, the villains that singlehandedly tore apart the old empire.”

“That’s a heck of a speech. I may be a paladin, but even I am well aware that assassination has won more wars than valiant warriors. I’m sworn to uphold the right, not ignore reality. So what’s needed to complete the bond? So I don’t accidentally infect her?”

“Essence transfer.”

“I am not sure how to do that. I mean, I can’t heal her?”

She shook her head, “Think old school. How does a man, a normal man, transfer his ‘essence’ to a woman?”

“Oh.”

She laughed, “Yeah. That’s what I meant about you already doing the hard part. You two have extremely compatible auras, clearly, but she can’t be forced bonded anymore… not even by you, if you hook up, the bond will be anything but forced.”

I blushed, “Right. Okay. I guess I have worn out your open-door policy?”

She shook her head, “Not at all. This has been extremely useful to both of us. Although I do need to get dry and head to bed. I just need you to remember something…”

“What’s that?”

“Both you and Gabrielle have the potential, if bonded, to become a force terrible enough to make the technomancers look like schoolyard bullies, or alternatively make the chaos lords, corrupters, and lich kings run in terror for a very long time. She’s on my ship for a reason. If you deviate, and drag her with you, just remember that someone out there knows how to make an absolutely killer cup of coffee.”

I nodded, understanding the threat for what it was, and headed out of her quarters.