Xard sat down on one of the benches in their private workout room under the mansion. He had just completed his standard workout routine, but nothing had felt different. There was still his specialized machine to go for his Curse training, but he wanted to figure out what was different first.
He stared at the 0 tattooed under his wrist. It hadn’t changed at all since it appeared. Xard actually hadn’t had a chance to use his Curse with it yet—too caught up in the other chaos going on.
Nothing changed when he flicked the 0, but then he tried it again with his Curse activated. The 0 turned into a 1. He flicked again and it turned into a 2. Once more, except it was now a 4. It seemed the unit of measurement wasn’t perfectly measured in flicks. He tried a different part of his arm and it still went up to 5.
So is this just measuring how much energy I currently have? Not super useful.
Xard absorbed his bullet ring and the number jumped up to 2,083. The other three digits instantly appeared below the first along the length of his arm. He absorbed it again and it increased to 4,159. After a few more tests and mental math, he realized it added exactly 2,076 each time.
Next were the grenade and missile rings, which added 502,081 and 4,184,659 each time, respectively. Even though he was decent at math, he still had to pull out his phone to figure those out.
“Oh,” Xard just realized something. During all these tests, he never had to expel any energy. In fact, he couldn’t even feel it swirling inside of him anymore. There was no need to redirect it out of himself as soon as possible. Did that mean he could hold onto it infinitely? Was his body now just a big energy storage tank instead of just a catalyst that it could flow through?
He sat around and absorbed his rings for a while longer to confirm it, and there was no change, but he still wasn’t convinced enough to rely on it. Xard stepped into one of his personalized training machines.
The point of the training was for it to pelt him with blows until he couldn’t contain the energy anymore, but that moment never came. Xard never felt even an ounce of the strain that would increase exponentially until just a few days ago.
By the time he got bored and left the machine, the number on his arm had moved onto the billions. Would he ever find the upper limit? In the moment, it never felt like he would. Maybe it was limited to how many numbers could fit on the space on his arm, but there was still a good amount of room to go—an insane amount if it would move to his upper arm as well.
Xard fired a shot into the ground absorbing floor. He’d gotten pretty decent at metering out the amount of energy he needed to reach a desired effect. In this case, he fired an amount that would be enough to kill a person with a single shot to the head. The number reduced by only a little more than a thousand. That meant with his current stored energy, well he could cause innumerable chaos and destruction if he felt so inclined.
Maybe now that I have a rough estimate of how much each drop of energy translates to a quantifiable number, I can fine tune it even more. For the purpose of his test, Xard wanted to fire exactly 5,000 units of energy—he’d have to come up with a name for it at some point.
He got pretty close on the first try, overshooting it by 40. A few shots later, and he was shooting exactly 5,000 every time. Now, he increased the amount and kept climbing. Once he was able to fire exactly 100,000 with each shot, an amount that could reliably kill most monsters if kept concentrated, he decided to end that side of training for now.
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But, there was still something telling him that this wasn’t all his new power could do. More storage and more control would benefit him immeasurably, but there was another part of this he didn’t yet understand.
His mind drifted to Drim. Not that this was an odd occurrence, but something in particular floated to the front of his thoughts. He imagined when Drim would place his hand on an object and imbue nature energy into it. This wasn’t really a tactic Drim used often, but it was a good way for him to delay or discreetly use his Curse.
Xard felt that he could do something similar. He placed his hand on the nearby wall and triggered his Curse. Normally, it felt like energy bursting out of Xard whenever he used it, but this time was different, feeling more like it was being pulled or drained out of him. A ‘1000’ appeared on the wall in the same font that was tattooed on his arm.
He let it sit for a while, wondering if it would trigger on its own or destabilize, but it never did. Xard thought about the spot and released his hold. A hole blew in the wall, akin to that of a bullet hole, but a bit more perfect in its spherical spread.
“I think I may have gone overboard,” the soon-to-be-yelled-at-boy stared at the almost fully destroyed wall. He had gotten so caught up in testing this ability that he’d completely forgotten about the damage he was doing with each try. At least it had proven fruitful, learning that he could change the direction and focus of the burst of energy.
He’d also learned, however, that he couldn’t choose the amount to expend at once like he could with his body. If 1000 was on the wall, 1000 worth of energy would explode. If the wall was destroyed by other means before it could be triggered, the energy would dissipate and there’d be no explosion at all.
One final aspect he’d learned was that he could also set a timer. It appeared as a smaller number below the energy amount. Mostly, he’d set timers for a few minutes or seconds since he didn’t want to stand around all day and watch them countdown. But, he also set one for the next day on the energy-absorbent ground so that he could witness during his workout the next day.
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“And here’s the ring you wanted,” Nathym held out the small piece of jewelry. It was a bit smaller than Xard’s other rings and had an infinity symbol on it. The ring was designed to be worn on his pinky and vibrate at an unnoticeable rate without stopping.
Xard would unconsciously leave his Curse active for that finger for as long as he was awake, hoping that he’d eventually be able to do it in his sleep as well. The idea was that the ring would be a constant source of energy. While it was weak enough to the point that he shouldn’t notice the vibration in his daily life, the amount of energy would add up quickly over time.
“Actually…” Nathym closed his palm and pulled back the ring for a moment. “There is something I would like in exchange for this. I’ve done some calculations on your energy conversion and there’s a particular number I’d like you to reach. It’s too specific to say out loud, so I’ll text it to you later.”
“The number may take a while to reach, years even if you just use this ring. But once you reach it, I’d like you to never go below that threshold. I don’t know if we’ll ever need it, if I can find other solutions, but it may be the key to getting Project Fiendless off the ground.”
“How very cryptic, but I accept,” Xard didn’t really care since he knew Nathym only worked for the betterment of their plans.
Nathym gave a quick jab of a laugh, though. “Heh, I don’t mean to be cryptic, but nothing’s set in stone yet. I’ll provide your more details on it once they’ve been worked out. Let me know if you need anything else.”
Outside of the workshop, Xard slipped on the new ring. Leaving his Curse on in perpetuity would take some getting used to, especially since it didn’t actually feel like anything was happening.
Now who should I test this on? Would using real people as test subjects for his experiments be considered monstrous? Possibly, but he’d only feel slightly bad with the breed of humanity he had in mind. Maybe he’d known Ahvra for too long and her morals were rubbing off on him.
A certain drug dealer popped into his head, one he had been tracking for a while a few cities over. What would happen exactly if he managed to brush her hand when making the drug exchange? He had a good idea, but the jury was still out if his energy transfer would work on living beings to begin with. So why not give it a quick test, one that may be a trite bit painful?