Jace adjusted his armour. He made sure the scavenged silver plates were still fastened tight overtop of his jacket and wouldn’t move when he ran. As he checked his plates, he walked back to the cockpit. Kinfild had locked the control yoke (there was a straight path to their destination) and retreated to the engine room, and Lessa sat in the copilot’s seat.
They didn’t need to enter hyperspace, according to Kinfild. The sublight thrusters would carry them across the star system fast enough. But that meant that there was only an empty void ahead. Lessa stared at it with a blank expression
“Are you alright?” he asked. She’d asked him that plenty of times, and he could at least return the favour once or twice.
“I’m…” she trailed off, but finally, turned to look at Jace. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? For what? You…didn’t do anything wrong.” He raised his head and gazed at her. The first aid kyborg tended to her, sealing large cuts and providing medications. As it was, he could barely tell what was a wound—instead of blood, clear waxy liquid dripped out from beneath her skin.
“I should have been faster. I should have been stronger, or fought my way out. Why shouldn’t you have continued on without me?” Lessa muttered. “It’s not like I’m important. I’m just the runt, without any special magic or strength, or—”
“Hey, hey…” Jace whispered. “You’re—”
“Don’t even try that,” she said. “You know that whatever you say…it won’t be true, or it won’t be genuine.”
Jace sighed. He leaned back against an exposed bulkhead, and said nothing.
After a few seconds, Lessa sighed. “Alright, well…you saying nothing is a little—no, much worse.”
“What would you like me to say?” Jace asked.
Again, silence. He began to fiddle with his sleeves, and was tempted to activate the Reader to begin planning his final adjustments before they entered battle. But, before he could reach into his backpack, Lessa said, “Look, I just didn’t think that my first adventure was going to go like this. Leave, get on a spaceship, get captured…then chucked into a pit and made to fight against other prisoners for the entertainment of a bored crew.”
“Adventures don’t really work out, I guess.” He shrugged, again unsure how to comfort her. Telling Kinfild what he needed to hear had been easy. Telling Lessa? He didn’t even know what she needed to hear.
Slowly, Lessa’s face contorted into a scowl. “No…” She swivelled as far as the chair would let her. “I can’t believe that, either. It doesn’t have to be like that. Mom doesn’t think I can make it out in the galaxy, but I don’t want to believe that. It has to be possible to…do important, good things.”
“Always a ray of sunshine.” Jace knelt down beside her. “You might not be the strongest, but…your words did stick with me, you know. I’ve never had anyone tell me I have purpose before. You aren’t useful, you’re helpful.”
She smiled. “Path of the Wandering Star, huh? It suits you.” She flinched when the first-aid kyborg tied a knot. “Have you ever heard of knights-errant?”
“A little. We had something like that back at my home, though they were long gone in my time.”
“They’re gone here, too. They were once the wandering, lordless warriors of the old galaxy,” she said. “They would always look for chivalrous adventures and duties to partake in—they’d help whoever needed it, regardless of the star system they found themselves in.”
Jace nodded slowly.
“They might have been wanderers, but they had purpose,” she said. “You don’t have to be lost if you don’t want to.”
He smiled. “Thank you, Lessa.”
“Hey, you know, anytime…”
He turned away and walked back into the hold, then to the engine room. “Kinfild? I’m ready. How do I make a Foundation Pillar?”
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
“Technically, you already have one,” Kinfild said, pulling one of the levers in the engine room. He didn’t turn to look at Jace, but the engine room door was open, and Jace could hear him well enough. “The core acts as one. You have around twenty-five percent avancement progress, correct?”
Jace activated the Reader and pointed it at himself. “Yeah,” he said. “Twenty-six point three percent, to be precise.”
“Wonderful. Take a seat and cast your consciousness down to your center.”
Jace did.
“Now, using your Aes, split the clumped-up core cloud in half. Use your willpower and breaths, and guide the spiritual energy into a wedge.”
He gathered up his Aes, which was mostly hyperspace-aspect, but had a bit of a pure aspect to it, and turned it into the blade of a sword. It had to stay in the Aes channels, but there were so many little tiny channels around the core that the Aes could practically move however his mind could imagine it.
He kept his breaths steady, like he was using the Base-Essence Rotation pattern, then drove the blade of Aes straight into the core. It smashed into the little marble of blue light, severing it in half.
That was a hypercore, divided in half. Spiritual energy leaked out, searing his channels and the center of his body, and he clenched his teeth.
“Now, hold them together,” Kinfild said. “Like how you disintegrated the core seed, mould these into Aes spheres of their own.”
Jace guided the Aes into a whirlwind, forging one of the half-spheres into a tight circle again. It didn’t exactly strike him as a pillar, but that was probably more figurative than anything.
“The faster you move the Aes and the tighter you push, the stronger the pillar is,” Kinfild said. “The weaker it is, the more cracks it will have, and the lower grade of card it can store.”
Jace sped up his breaths. He pushed the air deeper into his lungs, and sweat poured down his forehead. Every muscle in his body clenched, and a pressure built around his body, just like it had in the advancement from Foundation One to Foundation Two.
With a boom, one of the spheres formed into a half-sized sparkling marble. It had reabsorbed most of the spiritual energy it had leaked, but now, a few cracks of dark blue light shone through it. He moved to the second sphere and repeated the process until he had a second fully-formed sphere. It had less cracks, and the few that it did have were hair-thin. Only one reached from one side of the marble to the other.
“If you want to make any more pillars,” Kinfild said, “you will need more advancement progress. More Aes.”
Jace opened his eyes, then sprawled out on his back on the ship’s deck. “Two pillars, huh…”
A chill ran down his spine—Kinfild’s spiritual scan—but Jace mustered the golden sheets again and observed. It warned him about four unassigned attribute shards and an increase in level rating (from fifteen to seventeen).
With intent, he said, “Foundation Pillars. Uh…view? Show them? Information on them?”
[Analyze Foundation Pillars?] it requested.
“Yes.”
[Pillars Formed: 2/5. Pillar 1 quality: common-grade. Pillar 2 quality: rare-grade.]
Jace nodded, then dispelled the sheet with a push of more intent. It dispersed into golden sparks.
Kinfild looked over his shoulder. “One rare-grade is very good for your first two pillars.”
Heart pounding, Jace socketed two of his technique cards—Hyperdash and Wanderer’s Banishment.
Two at the same time. He breathed a sigh of relief. He could swap in the Cooldown Cleanse card if he ever needed, but he’d rather have his two most active cards present at the same time.
But he didn’t have all the time in the world. He stood up and said, “I’m going to assign more Attribute Shards, now.”
He tucked the reader back into his backpack and walked over to the cots, then laid down and pulled himself into the dreamspace plane. Four glowing shards rested beside the sapling, ready for him to distribute them. He picked them up one by one and placed them down on the root-map of the body.
He placed one into Strength and one into Agility, then, after a short pause, placed one on top of Vital and one on top of Resistance. For Vital and Resistance, the feeling of slight power increases was twice as forcefully as before, and he was certain that he’d received twice the boost to those specific attributes—a benefit of his selected Path.
That left his attributes at ten Strength, thirty-six Vital, twenty-eight Vital, eleven Agility, and one Potency.
He stepped back, satisfied with the placement. There was still a little time to pass, and it couldn’t hurt to improve his Aes base. He drew himself out of the dreamspace, grabbed the Vault Core and activated it, then pulled himself back in—this time, to a Vault.
He ran through the dark underbelly of a city planet. Neon lights glimmered high above, but they were barely brighter than stars down in the valleys of metal and stone.
He hacked apart vratghouls, absorbing Aes, until he found the elite beast the Split had called him here to defeat.
With his new, enhanced attributes, a second foundation pillar, and multiple technique cards, he defeated it in seconds—it was only level thirteen, and rightfully weaker than him. It faded into black dust.
There wasn’t anything else he could do. He was either ready, or he wasn’t.