"Ow...argh! Gosh!"

With all due respect to Aya, Wu honestly had no idea how she carried around the One-Shotter with them as they walked through the forest. Perhaps riding with a chariot is far easier to avoid the longbow clipping the branches as you can lay it down horizontally. For him, he's carrying the legendary weapon like an accessory, securing it in between his backpack and his back, and it's literally hitting everything that had ever grown in the Endless Woods.

"You sure you don't want to just...hold onto it?" Lera asked, knowing that her Lightening would not have helped him in this case.

"Maybe I could...do something about this." Wu said, pointing his index finger to the side of his dome and smiling, "The bow can't clip the trees if it's no longer a bow."

Lera didn't really know what he's referring to, and when Wu took a seat on a fallen tree by the side of the stream that they are traveling along with, she simply stood there and watched on.

Wu tossed his backpack to the side and held onto the legendary bow. Then, he gestured for Lera to come close as she also dropped her small bag of luggage given to them by the Dwellers.

"What do the lines do?" Wu asked.

"That..." Lera said, trying to decipher and trace the flowing Casts that were embedded onto the body of the Bow. It's not entirely alien, but the conventions of the Cast Writing had completely changed in the past few hundred years as the Casters researched into more efficient ways of constructing Casts, "I can't tell you exactly, especially when it's inactive like this."

"Then, why don't you try it?" Wu asked, handing over the bow to Lera, "I saw Aya inject a bit of the Wave and pull on the string at the same time to generate her shots."

"But isn't this a legendary weapon? How can I..."

"Just try it!" Wu said, shoving the bow into her hands as she sighed, "Start tiny!"

"Yeah right...tiny." Lera murmured, drawing the bow and unleashing all but a tiny drop of the Wave into the bowstring as she pinched her fingers around it and pulled it back. The lines of writing on the bow sprung to life, a glowing light flowed through the lines in the exact same way that all of the Casts she has seen before did.

The light shows the progression of the wave, and it all culminated in a small orb of light forming in front of the body of the bow.

Pointing the arrow to a tree opposite them across the stream, Lera released the bowstring, and it whipped forward, sending the orb of light off.

Instead of dashing through the air and cleanly chopping its target in half, the little orb moved like a balloon in the lazy afternoon gust, wobbling and flopping from side to side in the wind before slowly dropping into the water and dissolving away.

"HUH?!" Lera's jaws dropped as Wu died of laughter, "WHAT'S THIS SUPPOSED TO MEAN?!"

"How...HAHAHAH...hard did you pull the...HAHA...s-string?" Wu bent over while holding onto his stomach as Lera snarled and nearly threw the bow at him.

"Not that hard!" Lera said, swinging the bow back and forth, "But still! That is pathetic!"

"Well, from what I am seeing, each of the set of lines is acting as a sort of control mechanism," Wu said, standing up and moving in front of Lera until they are practically breathing into one another. Lera swallowed hard and tried not to flinch as Wu squatted down and ran his fingers along the body of the bow, "Look. The lines start from the end of the bowstrings, and it looks like the role of the bowstring is just to conduct the flow of the Wave, right?"

"Yes." Lera nodded, slightly surprised by how intuitive Wu is with the Wave despite his lack of knowledge and experience in this.

"Can you try to pull with the same intensity, but feed it more Wave?" Wu asked, his eyes darting back and forth before he put a hand up and stopped Lera dead in her tracks, "Actually, let's do some tests more systematically."

Picking up a branch, Wu went ahead and drew up a table. One of their personal favorites by now.

Lera turned around and stood beside Wu as he filled in the boundaries of the table, "What is this about?"

"This is basic science." Wu said, pointing to each of the rows first, dragging the tip of the branch horizontally across, "In each row, we are isolating and controlling how much Wave you are injecting into the bowstring, and that allows us to test for the effects of the physical pulling of the strings. It's vice versa in the columns, and we are interested in seeing how at the same physical strength, the injection of the Wave changes the attack."

"But what would we use the information for?" Lera asked, and Wu simply gave her a mysterious smile before asking her to start filling in the tables with her attempts. Obviously, being a well-trained scientist, there will be 3 attempts for each of the conditions.

The trees on the other side of the stream did nothing wrong, and Wu silently noted them as a victim of his science as Lera unleashed a total of twenty-seven shots of Wave energy shots of varying power into it. As she's blasting away and actually enjoying the sheer destructive power of the legendary weapon, Wu became busy filling in the table.

Intensity\Strength

Pull not that hard

Pull medium hard

Pull very hard

Just a touch of Wave

Saggy Balloon

Flying Football

Very fast basketball pass

Some bits of Wave

Tennis ball return

baseball pitched

too fast to see, like a cannonball?

Quite a lot of Wave

slow, and detonates on impact

very fast, like a bullet

too fast to see, like a bullet

"Wow...now this really brings me back to high school..." Wu said, finishing up the last spot in the table as Lera lowered the bow down slowly and turned to look at him, "So...what do you think?"

"I think Channelers are the easiest class to learn." Lera said, looking down at the bow with an expression mixed with jealousy and disgust, "I mean, what even is this?! Anybody with the slightest Wave control can do so much with this!"

"But when Aya used this, she was blowing up the settlement and making entire craters and stuff..." Wu said, reaching over and grabbing onto the bow from Lera, "Look, there is a pattern here."

Lera bunched over and sat next to Wu, their thighs scraping against one another. She leaned over the table, and the contents of the first two rows completely flying over her head.

"It seems the physical pull controls the speed of the projectile, right?" Lera asked, "what does the intensity do?"

"It changes the size of the projectile, inversely." Wu said, "The more wave you inject into the bowstring, the smaller and concentrated the projectile is. And different parts of the bow were also glowing with different intensity of light as you moved through the table, meaning they have their different functions."

Lera nodded along. It all made sense, and the way Wu broke it down was actually extremely similar to her own attempts at analyzing the Portal back at the Pinnacle Research Institute. The biggest difference being in how hands-on Wu liked to be.

"Lera," Wu asked, breaking his thoughts and looking towards the girl beside him.

"Hm?" She was briefly lost in her thoughts and turned to look at Wu with her beautiful grey eyes.

"If you recreate a cast, but instead of it being on the surface of the bow, it's actually written on paper, would it change what it does?"

"It shouldn't." Lera took out her book of Casts and held it in her hands, "That's why the pages of the books can be made from many different Wave-compatible materials."

"Excellent." Wu said, pointing to the bow, "Can you do me a favor then?"

Lesson 1: When Wu asks Lera for a favor, it usually means being his lab rat.

However, she just couldn't say no to him, and when he asked her to make an exact copy of the lines of casts from the writings on the bow onto her book of Casts, she said yes before even realizing how detailed and complicated the Casts on the legendary weapon are.

While Lera's working away at writing the Cast, Wu watched from a distance as she first ran through a Cast at the first page of her book, which generated a small lump of dark viscous matter that all of her Casts seemed to be written in.

It's immediately obvious that a different ink is used solely for writing. Funneling the dark matters into the body of a pen, Lera then started copying the Cast of the legendary bow on a piece of Book of Cast paper while Wu went ahead and scout out a perimeter, gathering handfuls of berranges in the process.

Initially, Lera thought of this task as a chore, but as she moved deeper through the layers of Casts, she began to slowly understand the patterns of the lines. The conventions and smaller sub-Casts used within the Casts were slightly different, but even she could tell that many smaller units join up to form the bigger one and served to funnel the wave into a single place.

By the time Wu returned, Lera had already made a complete duplicate of the Cast. She tried to inject a small orb of the Wave into the two parts of the sub-Casts which are connected to the bowstring, and only one of those lit up in response.

"Ah-hah!" Wu sounded excited as he clapped his hands together, "Now we are doing science! I mean...the way you create Casts are basically how we program and create electrical and software systems."

"Elec.....what?"

"Here, let me do this." Wu said, picking up his trusty branch and squatted down in the mud again, "We call it a block diagram, and it simply describes the functions and relationships between each of the individual blocks."

Lera made a surprised sound when Wu started drawing the boxes on the ground. That was actually exactly how she tried to describe the inner functioning of the Portal. However, when Wu started adding more and more details of description into the diagram, she then began to appreciate how much more can be done with this way of representing complex systems.

With the rough outlines of the diagram drawn up, Lera and Wu then went ahead and tested each of the blocks separately before he wrote down the functionalities of each of the blocks.

After devouring some berranges, the first schematic diagram of the One-Shotter is complete at last!

https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FCjcYI1s.jpg [https://i.imgur.com/CjcYI1s.jpg]

"Honestly, this seems...pretty straightforward, apart from the bit in the middle," Lera said, pointing to the back and forth arrows around the gemstone.

"Yeah, so far, that's a black box for us." Wu said, thinking back to when they tested the individual blocks, "But I think we should be able to make something based on the rest of the blocks."

Lera turned her head robotically, "Make something? What are you-"

"We are making a better version of the One-Shotter!" Wu said, winking towards Lera with a smile, "We already have everything we need!"

"But it's a legendary weapon! It was passed down for hundreds of years!" Lera said quickly despite her internal conflicts. On one hand, she wanted Wu to be able to protect himself, but on the other hand, the thought of destroying one of the legendary weapons that were a crucial part of the world's history made her head spin as someone infatuated with history and artifacts of the past. Like Ver, she grew up on the legendary histories of the past.

"Don't worry." Wu chuckled excitedly as he rubbed his hands together, his eyes glowing like stars, "It will be an upgrade. If you think that the Channelers have it easy, wait until you see what I am going to do."