I was shaken from my reverie by Athena’s high voice.

“Well, I don’t know about him,” she said with a thumb in my direction. “But I’m reaching the top!” Her posture straightened and her eyes bored into Kurian’s as if challenging him to disagree. “I’ll be an Aspect one day.”

Kurian smiled sadly and Athena’s brow furrowed.

“It’s not a destiny I’d wish on my greatest enemy,” he said softly. “But I believe you.”

Before she could question him, he clapped his hands and shooed her away with a wave.

“Back to training. A future Aspect doesn’t have time to dally.”

Her eyes went wide, then hardened. With a determined nod, she departed, racing back to the course.

I followed her passage with my own sad smile. To be so young and so driven. It reminded me of myself. And I wanted to cry. Her childhood was dead and buried—those bandits had made sure of that—but she still had a chance at a life. A husband that loved her and treated her right. Children pulling on her shirt and serving as the bane of her existence. This life wouldn’t allow her those experiences. But I’d already learned that she wouldn’t be dissuaded. All I could do was be there for her when she needed.

Snapping out of my malaise, I realized that Kurian was studying me with a compassionate gaze.

“You understand, then, what a Cultivator’s Path requires. I see it in your eyes. For her, and for you. Are you prepared to make that commitment?” he asked seriously.

Rather than answer automatically, I considered. After a moment, I responded.

“I don’t know. But for now, I don’t have a choice.”

He pursed his lips and nodded.

“A wise answer.” He clapped once more, startling me. “Come, let’s not dwell on the future. You still have another core to evolve. Once your Mass core reaches the cusp, you will be ready to break through to Adept.”

I nodded agreement, then paused. “What about my Fate core?”

“No. Your Fate core is a unique case,” he said with shake of his head. “That is borrowed power of a mature origin. While it is important that you continue to increase your understanding of its nature and elevate it through the Stages, it is not one of your foundational cores. It will evolve once you reach Adept.”

Looking inward, I considered my Fate core. That familiar golden energy swirled inside its core, powerful and temping and oh so dangerous.

“What if I didn’t want it to?” I asked quietly. Looking up to meet Kurian’s eyes, I saw conflicting emotions there. “Say I wanted to cut ties with…Her? Is it possible?”

Now, I wasn’t an idiot—at least, not all the time—and I knew how powerful that energy was. I mean, obviously the redos given by Fate had come to define my time in the Tower. Without them, I very much doubted I would have made it half as far as I had.

On the other hand, I hadn’t met a single person, demigod, or Aspect that had a single good thing to say about Her. Her energy deep inside my soul felt like a ticking time bomb and it wasn’t a matter of if, but when, that bomb went off.

But Kurian shook his head and the answer was clear.

“My recommendation would be not to tamper with your Fate core.”

My eyebrows rose at that answer.

“You’re not saying it’s impossible, though. What if there came a time I needed to get rid of Her influence?”

He looked away with a thoughtful expression and I waited for him to formulate his thoughts. After a handful of breaths, he turned back.

“There are Beings capable of expunging that core from your soul. At my full strength, I could manage—though it would be fraught with dangers. There are even more individuals and factions that could mediate a dialogue between you and Fate to part amicably.” My hopes rose at that, only to be dashed immediately by his next words. “Though I’ve never heard of Fate entertaining those discussions. And even if you were to make a clean break and forfeit that power, Fate is a jealous Aspect. To spite Her in such a way would be to invite her full attention.” His eyes bore into me and I felt a physical pressure under that gaze. “Only the guarantee of protection from another Aspect could give you the chance to survive the consequences.”

It was clear what he was driving at, the unspoken portion of his words nearly screaming out.

Only Conflict could protect me if I chose to buck against Fate.

“Thank you, Kurian,” I said solemnly. “I understand.”

He nodded once, then waved toward the waiting rug.

“Then let’s continue.”

I approached the meditation rug with less trepidation than before. Now that I understood not only the basics of meditation, but also the goal of the session, I was excited to get started.

Settling down cross-legged, I closed my eyes and peered into my soul space. Focusing past the swirling gold of the Fate core and the chaotic grey of the Friction core, I centered my attention on the Mass core.

Its energy moved sluggishly, crawling around the core like molasses poured from a jar. When I examined it with my mind, it had a weight to it, a heft, that my Friction and Fate energy didn’t. As I worked to shift it from the core to begin cycling it through my body, it resisted at first. It was like pushing a sled over grass, the inherent inertia resisting me before giving. Once it began to move, it picked up in speed. After only a moment, it was coursing through my body just as fast and powerfully as my other two energies could.

Now that the energy had momentum, I turned my attention to entering a meditative state. It came so much easier this time and within less than a minute, my mind was relatively clear—if not empty.

I thought back to the revelations I’d had with Friction, realizing all the ways it interacted with the world, my fighting style, and its auxiliary effects.

But how could I apply that line of thinking to mass?

Well, first I considered the ways I used it regularly. By cycling my Mass energy to boost my own mass, I was able to drastically increase my Strength and Endurance. It also increased my weight, but I put that thought to the side to focus on that first thought.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

The question was, how did increasing my mass increase my Strength and Endurance? Was it one of the hand-wavy components of these powers, where there was no rhyme or reason? I didn’t like that possibility, because it meant that I couldn’t explore the correlation deeper.

Assuming there was a scientific, or at least, a relatively valid, reason that my Strength and Endurance increased as my mass increased, then there had to be some connection between the two. So what did I know about Strength and Endurance, besides the obvious? The easiest stat to qualify was Strength. Number go up, lift big things, right? But I knew from my life of athletics that strength in the non-stat variety was not as simple as that. There were different types of muscle fibers that excelled at different functions. There was lactic acid thresholds, sacroplasmic versus myofibrillar hypertrophy, and so on. Was the Strength stat increase simply a function of being heavier or did the System actually modify my muscle fibers in response to the Affinity?

Reaching a dead end on that train of thought, I switched my attention to my Endurance stat. That stat in particular felt more nebulous to me. I knew that bumping it high enough could literally make my skin and muscles hard enough to stop bullets. But how could I reconcile that concept with endurance in the athletic sense? Just because my skin and muscles became harder didn’t mean I should be able to run or fight longer, right? And now that I thought about it, I wasn’t actually sure that I could run or fight longer with a boosted Endurance. My baseline athletic endurance was already at the upper echelon of humans and getting winded was never my limiting factor in the fights I’d had since I’d unlocked my Mass core.

Then a thought hit me like a lightning bolt. What if Endurance increased proportionally to my Strength and weight? Meaning, a 150 Endurance stat didn’t mean I had godly endurance, but that it was simply increasing to maintain my existing endurance in relation to how much heavier I was becoming by boosting my mass.

I was having trouble resonating with that concept, so I thought of a practical example. If I threw one of my baseballs, the acceleration was a function of mass and force, right? But what if I boosted its mass and applied the same amount of force? The acceleration would be lower. So, if the baseball was a part of me—my hand, for example—and I boosted the mass, it would be harder to swing at the same velocity with the same amount of force. But my whole body increased in mass, not just the fist, meaning that the force I could apply behind it was higher as well.

Perhaps that was what the System was indicating by increasing my Endurance stat. It was simply indicating that I could run or perform some action for a certain amount of time at base mass and strength, and by increasing my mass and strength, the same action didn’t take any more effort relative to me.

And that was the key! The stat lines were relative. I was fairly certain then that 150 Endurance on a 200 pound person was not the same as 150 Endurance on a 2000 pound person!

Okay, but so what?

A particularly painful-sounding grunt from across the room caught my attention. Opening my eyes, I saw Athena windmilling through the air, a log padded in cloth swinging in a pendulum manner the obvious culprit. She hit the ground with a thud and rolled around as she groaned. Above her, a thin balance beam crossed a large gap between two platforms. Five of those swinging logs moved back and forth across the beam at varying intervals.

As I watched Athena, she rolled over to her hands and knees, heaving in gasping breaths as she recovered. After a minute or two, she rose to her feet with a determined set to her lips, her eyes narrowed as she studied the moving logs. Not realizing I was watching her, she gave them two middle fingers before striding back to the starting point.

A thought had occurred to me as I watched her sail through the air and now I was eager to test it out. She hit a button that seemed to reset the course, then took off at a sprint toward the first obstacle. With a grunt of effort, she leaped to the first of a dozen spinning surfaces that were separated by about five feet. As she hit the third pad, I finally found the connection I had been reaching for.

With the slightest flex of intent, I reduced her mass by about a quarter. As she leaped for the fourth pad, her eyes went wide as she nearly overshot it. But she recovered and turned her momentum into a second jump, then a third. What had before taken all of her strength and focus, now came easy as she leaped from pad to pad with casual ease.

As she leaped past the final pad to the platform separating her from the second obstacle, she paused with a surprised expression on her face. But I could tell she was in that same state that I had been in earlier. Her lips were set, her posture low and athletic. She was ready to go.

Standing before her were two parallel walls, about four feet of space between them. For someone her size, it would be a literal stretch to get her four limbs wide enough to brace herself. I knew she could do it, because the pendulum logs were further down the course. But I wanted to test my powers.

Swapping energies came easy now and I quickly replaced the Mass energy with Friction. Instead of affecting Athena herself, I focused on the two walls and their surfaces. The friction quadrupled easily and I was sure I could bump it even more, but I didn’t want her to get stuck to the wall like Spider-man and wonder what the hell was going on.

Taking a few psych-up breaths, she got a running start and leaped into the air between the walls. At the apex of her jump, she threw her feet and hands wide with a shout. Wherever they made contact, they stuck easily and she began shimmying up the parallel walls without even taking a second to wonder how.

It went this way for a few more obstacles—me alternating between my two energies depending on the challenge, her passing through the course at a breakneck speed. By the time she hit the balance beam with the swinging logs, she was out of breath from her pace.

She wisely took a minute to recover her wind as she closely studied the pattern of the logs. Even with my trait-enhanced Intelligence, I was hard pressed to find a timing that didn’t involve getting clipped at a minimum. The logs followed so close to each other and had such a small gap between them that you would have to do it in a single pass. Pausing to time the next swing would just see you sent flying on your ass.

Apparently, she came to the same conclusion, because she crouched and appeared ready to sprint. I considered reducing her mass to bump up her Agility, but then realized that a hit from one of the logs would probably break every bone in her body. Another option was to increase the friction in the logs pivot mechanism to slow their passage or even stop them, but she would very clearly recognize something was fishy there.

Before I could make a decision, she was off like me in one of my races. She was past the first two logs in a blink, but I knew instinctively that she wouldn’t clear the fourth before it came back around. On instinct, I reduced the mass of the fourth and fifth logs by half. The speed of their swings were altered slightly, but not enough to make a difference. As she reached the fourth log, it clipped her shoulder and nearly tripped her up entirely. But she caught her balance, staggering forward as the fifth log hit her dead center.

But as it did, she leaped with a wild shout, the momentum of the strike interacting with her own jump to send her forward and at an angle instead of straight off the balance beam. As she sailed through the air, I contemplated changing her mass to adjust her trajectory, but knew that it’d be impossible for her not to notice a mid-air change.

Even without my help, she managed to collide with the edge of the next platform. She bounced against it with an explosive grunt, the wind clearly knocked out of her as she clung wildly to its edge. Her feet dangled below as she kicked them against the surface. With a switch of energy, I bumped up the friction of her grip against the platform and she managed to hold on. Slowly, she began dragging herself up and over the edge. With a final shout, she rolled over and onto her back. Her fist rose weakly in the air in triumph and I smiled.

“Fuck yeah!” she cried out and I snorted. She shot up and saw me watching her, an embarrassed flush rising to her cheeks. “Were you watching me, creep?” The slight smile at the corner of her mouth took the edge off her words.

I shrugged and indicated the rug with a nod. “Meditation is boring. Plus, you were making a lot of noise. Like, a lot.”

“Pssh, duh,” she replied with an arrogant tilt of her head. “I’m over here doing real work. All you're doing is taking an upright nap.”

Laughing, I was about to fire back when the opaque wall shielding Lacy’s training disappeared with a shimmering haze. She stood there on an elevated platform, looking over the castle facade like a player of a tabletop game. When she noticed the wall drop, she spun around in surprise.

Kurian waved her and Athena over as he approached.

“Now’s a good time for the next stage of training,” he said ominously, his voice loud enough to fill the entire training room. “It’s time…for a group scenario.”