Chapter 21: The Scene of the Crime
“This troubled young man on the ground is Raja Jagar,” Aliyah said, gesturing to Raja who was generously demonstrating how to make a dirt angel, wrong side down.
“Jagar?” The name was familiar to Nara, but she couldn’t quite place it. She had heard a flurry of names in the first two weeks she’s been in Erras and her memory has never been all that reliable. Really, it tries it’s best. (And she knows, she knows, that it’s probably best to remember the names of nobles in a society where nobility (or their equivalent of it) actually matters, but she can’t throw water at glass and have it stick.)
“One of the six prominent families of Sanshi. Are they unfamiliar to you?” Sen questioned, and rather passively asking if she was a new addition to Sanshi. Those seeking an Adventurer education from afar was not uncommon.
“I’m very bad with names and faces,” Nara explained, “and ranking up didn’t fix that for me. I’m a lost cause and I’m afraid rank won’t fix it.”
“My, I can certainly understand that,” Aliyah said, “I tend to lose track of my time with my research. Sen here helps to keep me balanced,” she said, throwing a casual compliment to her companion. “Raja had been interfering with Sen’s formation of a team for quite some time now.”
“Why would anyone get in the way of team formation? Seems like a silly thing to come to blows over.”
“Why would they indeed? It’s a silly conflict—I completely agree,” Aliyah said, shaking her head disapprovingly. “Of the six foundational families of Sanshi—Arlang of the wolf, Nisei of the snake, Fenhu of the phoenix, Dasan of the bear, Lugu of the turtle, and Jagar of the dragon—three of the families have distinguished themselves over the years.”
“Let me guess, the Arlang family is one of them?” she said, gesturing with twirling fingers to Sen, who remained impassive.
She nodded. “The Arlang, the Fenhu, and the Nisei have differentiated themselves in recent years. The widening status has resulted in some contentions with the youngest generation. The high pride of the Jagar is holding them back.” She glanced at Raja, still face down in dirt. “He really isn’t such a bad young man, but the influences of his family are rather evident and unpleasant.”
“And your family doesn’t care?” Nara said, gesturing at Sen.
Surely in these sorts of settings, the righteous young master asserts the power of his own family right back, except that they were more competent and powerful than the other side. Then, Raja Jagar (the incompetent young master and destined to be a steppingstone) has his face slapped and he runs away like a sore loser, swearing revenge. So begins a years long feud (months for novel timelines—got to move quick), culminating with Sen annihilating Raja’s entire family for aiding and abetting his crimes.
“I could not call myself a proud member of my family if I cannot handle a conflict of this scale,” Sen said, straightening his posture, except that it was already impeccably straight to begin with. Still, somehow, he seemed to stand taller, with more steady confidence. Sen agreed that the scale of the conflict was small scale, and felt empowered by his family’s trust and non-intervention. Nara’s fantasies wouldn’t manifest this time.
There was only one place they would.
“Mm, that’s not quite right,” Aliyah drawled, “His mother likes to take a bit of a hands off approach. She wants to give her son the space to spread his wings. She knows you have to balance privilege with hardship, or it can all go to the head.”
The pointed end of her statement was Raja, sprawled out on the ground, a trust fund child spoiled by equally spoiled adults; Bananas rotting bananas.
“Speaking of,” Sen said, turning to face Nara directly, “I would like to offer you an invitation to join my team. I appreciate the sort of person that would intervene in the face of injustice, on Penna’s behalf.” He didn’t think Raja’s interference in his business was injustice. They were parties of equal strength.
“Wait a minute. Shouldn’t you care about team composition or something? I’m new here but I know that must be important.”
“The team is only Aliyah and I. Team composition is not a concern yet. I care more for character.”
“I hate to break it to you, but my character isn’t particularly standup. Untried and untested,” Nara said, “Any sort of pressure, and my values are going to fold like paper in the hands of an origami master. I wasn’t even going to do anything, and what I did was mainly pointless.”
A bit of her speech was confusing; Sen didn’t understand what an origami master was, but he figured it was simply a term he was unfamiliar with. He was well education in Sanshi culture, but there was much he did not know. Still, he persisted in his offer.
“Why did you assist us then?” he asked.
“The dude starting kicking her when she was down. That’s low.”
It had curdled her stomach. Nara had never seen anyone get beat up before in her life (as far as she remembered). Her life had been peaceful, mundane, and safe. Such blatant, scathing assault, both verbal and physical, on someone who had already bowed out, fired up the kilns to fight injustice—or something like that.
“There’s no need to respond to my invitation today,” Sen said. “Just consider it.”
“You just don’t want her to reject you today,” Aliyah said in a teasing tone, inadvertently exposing his hidden intention.
He gave her a mildly unappreciative look.
“There’s no need to responding to my invitation today,” he repeated, clearing his throat, “but if you have no other commitments, consider this team.”
“I’ll consider it, I guess,” Nara responded noncommittally, “I’ll see you all later; I have no intentions of sticking around the scene of the crime. I ain’t that kind of predictable criminal.”
“You’re not a criminal,” Sen pointed out, confused with her reaction. “You didn’t break any laws.”
She departed with a wave and a node teleportation that she thought was sufficiently mysterious.
“Nailed that one.”
*****
Ever since she awakened her Dimension Node ability, it had been incorporated into Amara and Laius’ training. The ability comprised of two distinct parts—the ability to create dimensional loci and the ability to teleport to dimensional loci. In her limited experience, the latter was useless without the former. The loci she conjured were invisible. It consisted of an invisible core—the locus—and a spherical field or around a 6-foot radius, like an electron cloud around a nucleus. She could teleport to anywhere within the spherical field, even onto the incorporeal core, if it was not obstructed by other magical effects or physical objects. Any small physical objects or magical effects, like dust, small pebbles, sticks and leaves, or stray magical disturbances, she displaced (thank god for that, because teleportation would be completely impractical otherwise). The limit of what she could displace was more or less intuitive; if the object was not fixed and not heavy, like a helium-filled balloon, she was likely able to displace it. Anything too large and too fixed, and she could not node jump into that location. Although, combined with Phase Shift, she could Node Jump into solid material, although that was a dangerous and expensive combination. She didn’t want to die because she tried to shortcut through a mountain, only to fuse flesh into solid rock and be discovered as an unexplainable fossil in a few million years.
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The nodes may be invisible to mundane perception, but they were not imperceptible nor indestructible. Even without Nara’s dimension sense, they could be detected by any essence user, although it required more focus than it did for them than it did for her. Her dimension sense just made the cores visually perceivable and perceivable in ways she couldn’t quite describe—like she had awakened an 8th sense. (The 6th sense was aura, and the 7th sense was magic, both of which didn’t directly rely on eyesight.) She could sense these things around her, and not just within her line of sight.
Thankfully, it took more than incidental damage to pop the cores. It took a targeted attack enhanced with non-physical types of damage, and decent precision. Most low rank monsters, aside from specters and elementals, would not be able to destroy her nodes, but essence users would have their ways. With 20 abilities each, they always did.
Amara was right—the single ability, Dimension Node, already had so much nuance that she had barely explored. If she had awakened all of her abilities all at once, she would not know what to tackle first. Those of the jungle compound did know. They focused on her evasive abilities, both basic and in combination with her essence abilities.
“The most important ability for an adventurer is the ability to survive,” was one of Amara’s adages. “Your survival abilities lie in your evasiveness and your ability to escape, and so that will be the first aspect we hone.”
Despite Amara’s warrior attitude, she had an unexpectedly nuanced approach towards escape and survival. Live to fight another day. It seemed obvious, but if Amara was drumming it into her skull like the omnipresent snare of a military march, it may not be that simple.
And so, her parkour training had evolved.
At first, she had just been leaping across gaps, climbing up faces, jumping through holes, swinging on bars, and sliding down slopes—channeling her inner monkey. They were all chained together relatively smoothly, boosted by the instant skill from the skill book from The Way of the Seeker. That was difficult enough, but Laius and Amara amped it up further.
Now, she had to use Phase Shift at precise timings to avoid a rock sent hurtling at her body or foot, or else it would disrupt her landing, or worse, shatter her bone. Dimension Node was used to rapidly gain verticality or to cross impossible gaps, and Amara took it upon herself to quickly correct one of Nara’s emergent bad habits before it could solidify.
When she first used Dimension Node, she would conjure and place her nodes in advance. They were hard to pinpoint and destroy, after all, there should be nothing wrong with that.
Amara took issue with that assumption, and made sure Nara knew.
A hurtling rock from Amara with accuracy beyond a professional baseball pitcher destroyed her nodes before she had a chance to use them. After a few failed jumps caused her to faceplant in the grass and dirt, spitting both from her mouth in a frustrated huff, she learned to conjure her node then teleport to it in rapid sequence, before Amara punished her delay.
Amara still had the chance to destroy it. Nara knew she was much faster than she could possibly link her conjuration to teleportation, but that was the evolution in skill Amara encouraged. This was the creative thinking that educators of essence users wanted to cultivate.
Cosmic Path was a mainstay in her parkour. It increased her Speed attribute, which encompassed maximum movement speed, reflexes, perceptual speed, flexibility, and coordination (and was quickly becoming the attribute she was best at harnessing). Once conjured, she could also use the starry shadow conjuration to reduce her weight to slow-fall and moon jump. It allowed her to execute superhuman jumps through the parkour course.
The final and newest component of her parkour training was Dream’s Wake. The ability was innocuous; It had no visual effect. If she actively intercepted an attack, she could nullify its damage and non-damage effects, to a limit. This could be used with her bare body, or with a weapon. An attack that she didn’t make a move to deflect, such as a rock she saw about to hit her thigh, would still deal its full damage.
They also started to incorporate swordplay. Like all of their lessons, they built upon the basics, which, in itself, was an important lesson. Connect all of your lessons. Connect all that you learn. All of your skills should work together, work for each other, and enhance each other. Building each part separately then integrating them together to form a stronger whole, like an alloy of metals forming something superior to their individual elements.
Nara used Dream’s Wake to deflect those terrifying bulleting stones. The stone varied between light rocks she could easily deflect with a casual swing, and mobile black holes, as if the rocks were made of lead, which she had to heft away with the heavier staff-form Nirvana or avoid altogether—it was part of her training to learn which was which. Frankly, it was easier for her to deflect stuff with her hands like Karate Kid, but she needed to practice with a weapon.
All of this culminated in parkour training that was more battle than movement. She phased through speeding rocks seeking to knock her off balance, simultaneously deflecting another that sped towards her the moment she exited Phase Shift. While Phase Shift had no cooldown, if she repeatedly used it in a short time frame, she’d completely empty herself of mana. Amara chastised her.
“You must choose what to avoid. If the attack is not an extreme threat, use your other options. Suffer the weak hits, and avoid the strong ones. That is the instinct you need to cultivate.”
*****
Her meditation sessions with Redell doubled as light therapy, and well a calming change of pace from the insanity of rock-dodgeball-parkour. Redell was interested in using the soul to speak, and it was something he picked up easily himself. The two were working on applying the ability to communicate with the soul through music, but they made little progress.
Redell set down his instrument, laying it across his lap.
“It may be an issue of equipment. Normal instruments may not be able to channel the effect I seek.”
“You’ll have to develop something specialty, then?”
“There are techniques and objects made for channeling the soul and aura,” Redell said. “I’ll have to discuss it with the other two.”
Amara had invented the aura pen after all; she had experience with creating objects that could be imbued with aura.
“This is as far as we go.”
They had managed to develop a technique similar to telepathy, using their auras to channel their thoughts directly to the soul. The receiver had to accept the link from the sender, due to the inherent inviolability of the soul.
It wasn’t a practical technique—it involving weaving the aura into a channel, then extending it to someone with aura range. It required great concentration and skill on the part of the sender, although the receiver could use the same link to communicate, which reduced skill requirements.
At dinner that night Nara received a bombshell announcement.
“Tomorrow, I will take you to fight your first monster,” Amara declared.
“...Are you sure I’m ready for it?”
“Will you ever be completely ready for something you’ve never done before?” Chelsea commented. Her words were sharp, but her expression revealed her concern. She was letting Amara hold the hopes, despite her better judgment. Amara wouldn’t let Nara die under her care, but she didn’t have the gentlest hand. There were no training wheels with Amara (not exactly anyway—all her work was in preparation for the real thing.) The soft outworlder needed a toughening lesson. They wouldn’t aways be there to yank her back from the maws of death. To master the magic needed to traverse dimensions, then she needed to raise her rank past what cores would reasonably allow. Combat was the only option.
The magic to cross dimensions invited danger. The power to intrude into other worlds was a guarded secret, one none of Innovation’s Retreat knew themselves, or perhaps, they’d offer it sooner and spare Nara the trouble.
*****
The next moment was the fateful day. Nara wasn’t the anxious type, but she found herself buzzing in anticipation, a combination of fear, anxiety, and excitement. She had been training for three weeks now—it wasn’t much, but it was a night and day difference than when she first crash-landed in Erras as a shaky-legged fawn-like outworlder. Would her training be realized in practical application, or would she flounder?
She didn’t want to disappoint Amara and the others after they had invested so much time into her. The weeks had felt simultaneously short yet long.
She astral jumped into the outskirts of Sanshi, while Amara utilized a portable portal generator. Amara had no portal power, only Chelsea and Laius did of the four. If they had business together, she used one of theirs.
“I hope I get a portal power.”
“You don’t need a portal power,” Amara pointed out. Her portal folded in on itself back into a spherical ball, which she stored. It was one of Chelsea’s creations, “Your inherent racial ability is better.”
“I might want to bring some friends along, like Chelsea does.”
“You do have friends now,” Amara agreed, “That’s an option now, isn’t it.”
“I do have friends. Don’t act so surprised.” Nara narrowed her eyes, “It feels like Chelsea has rubbed off on you.”
“She is always rubbing on me.”
“I’m going to tell her you said that.”
So Nara threatened, but Amara’s expression was one of amusement. Her threat had backfired.
“I think I’d enjoy that. Make sure you tell her.”
Nara groaned. Really, she should stop trying to use Chelsea to win against Amara. It was never going to work.