Heath and Sonja continued fighting for another forty seconds before the effects of the potion began to wane — first from Sonja, despite having consumed the drug slightly later, and then from Heath shortly after.

“Holy crap, that was absolutely insane!” Heath exclaimed as he jumped down from the raised platform. “Dude, can you make more of those?”

Eik recalled the mind-breaking agony of the purple miasma crawling up his arm, shivers running up his spine. “… Yeah, of course, man. Anytime.” He shook off the mental image. He had Profound Toxin. He could purge any aggression from the hostile energy of the mixture if it came to that again. It wouldn’t be a problem.

He stayed and trained with them for the rest of the day, trading blows with all four, both in duels, team fights, and free for alls until their stomachs began to ask for a trip to town. Sonja still hadn’t managed to make contact with the multiversal matter so she had joined Heath and Michael in a half and half split between aura training and combat training. They would grasp it eventually, Eik was sure.

The day after tomorrow would be a busy day for Atla. She had told them as much. Just one meeting after the other, apparently. That would be the day to attempt their plan. It was a simple one but risky nonetheless.

Eik ordered a vegetarian dish. It was a colorful array of thick, fleshy vegetables grilled on skewers accompanied by soft, freshly baked bread and a spiced oil to dip in. The crunch was exquisite and the juices flowed freely, sour and savory mixing like two opposites coming together in harmony. Not having a kitchen in his apartment was a good excuse to go out to eat often.

Leafy Sundries had been closed on the way home so Eik went to visit Wanjihan the next day and bought enough ingredients for another fifteen Potions of Mighty Strength class 1. He spent the rest of the day with his head in the cauldron. Each portion was made in small batches the size of his first success in order to not work with too much of the volatile mix at a time. Profound Toxin certainly seemed to have annihilated it with absolutely no difficulty but there was no reason to take a chance like that.

Accounting for waste, the total number of potions came out to fourteen. A number he was very satisfied with considering the fact that he had only barely begun learning alchemy. Although he had still been forced to grind down any hostility from the natural energy of the ingredients, he had a feeling that his ability to withstand the corruption with just his aura alone had improved slightly.

Towards the evening Atla came by to visit him and for a moment he thought she might somehow have figured out what they had planned. Her purpose was something completely different, however.

“I hear you’ve made meteoric progress in aura control lately,” she said as he let her inside. He offered her something from the bowl of fruit on his table, half of which he didn’t even know the name. “I knew I was right to pick you.”

“I appreciate the compliment.” Eik was having trouble figuring out how to feel about Atla and the handling of the Menka Tokanami case. Especially now that it was only the two of them together. It wasn’t easy to simply forget that a person who had committed attempted murder in front of a room of people had been allowed to come back and do it again almost immediately. It was an abhorrent miscarriage of justice that Eik sincerely hoped wouldn’t set a precedent for their continued relationship with the Nidafjeld Alliance.

He realized that Atla wasn’t entirely to blame for it. She wasn’t responsible for the quick release of Menka Tokanami. That had apparently been a result of eager lobbying by her family to prevent them from losing face as a whole. It was outrageous by Earth standards but he didn’t doubt that it had happened all the time before their induction into the Unified Mass.

Atla was certainly not perfect and the fact that Earth was the first new world she had been in charge of establishing contact with showed. She was overeager and nonchalant — a flaw Eik was capable of recognizing in himself as well. And she tended to dismiss many of their concerns as unimportant which was frustrating.

But what could they really do? They needed her because they needed the alliance. The more he saw of the new world, the more convinced Eik became that that was the case. Earth and humanity wouldn’t survive without them. They functioned as the safeguard that would prevent total extinction.

“Is this what you’ve been working on?” she asked and picked up one of the potion vials to inspect it up close. The dark contents seemed to swirl languidly inside. She gave the rim a tentative sniff without removing the stopper. For a few moments she was silent. “What is it?” she finally asked.

“It’s… It’s a Potion of Mighty Strength class 1,” he admitted.

Her eyebrows rose in mild surprise. The corners of her lips quirked up slightly. “Brave.”

Eik snorted with amusement. Of course that’s how she would react. She wouldn’t condemn a risk like that. After all, risk was directly linked to progress and progress was king. What she always seemed to forget, however, was that risk was also directly linked to death. And death was death.

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“What can I help you with?” he asked.

She bit into a juicy orange pear with a crunch. “Well, this ‘training arc’ as you called it has been quite fruitful for you thus far, I’d say. You’ve taken some of the F-rank Crucible tests, including the E-rank practical, gotten some more real life experience against the hired assassins, and even gotten some items and money. And your friends have been training hard at the training grounds every day while you have thrown yourself into alchemy head first.”

He nodded. Where was she going with this?

“And the degree of aura control that you’ve managed to attain is… stunning, to say the least.”

“Thank you.”

“Since you’ve made it this far, I though I’d come and tell you about one of the first things new Awakened usually learn after learning aura manipulation.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“The trick to hiding your status from prying eyes. Wouldn’t that be particularly useful for you to learn?” she said with a grin.

“Wait, you can do that? Why didn’t you tell me about it before?”

“You can indeed. Aura is just the multiversal matter inside you influencing the matter in the atmosphere in one way or the other. And when the glowing script etches itself into your body when you first Awaken, for example, it’s simply the matter in the atmosphere influencing the matter in your body instead. So when you become capable of controlling your aura, you also become capable of resisting that influence to a degree, essentially.”

“Damn, That’s… Wow, why didn’t you tell us about this until now?”

Atla pursed her lips as she thought it over. “First of all, the concentration of multiversal matter on Earth is still so low that someone who had never felt it before would realistically never be able to grasp it until that changed, even if they’re a high-ranker. That’s different for you and the others now that you’re spending some time here, and…”

“And?” he pressed.

She gave him a look. “And, well, frankly, I never thought you’d become proficient this quickly. It’s a little startling, to be honest. I can’t wait to see how you turn out. The only thing I’m sure of is that it will be something monstrous.”

“I appreciate it,” he said with a small bow of his head. “By the way, what do you call this multiversal matter anyway?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, puzzled.

“Like, don’t you have a name for it or something like that?”

“Yeah, that what we’ve been calling it the whole ti—" she began but stopped herself as realization hit her. She chuckled. “I get it now. Our shared word for it is a remnant from a different language where it was a simple literal translation. The translation skill must have bungled the nuance.”

“So what is it?”

She looked around the apartment. “Got anything to write with?”

“Uh, yeah, just a sec.” He went to the nightstand and grabbed his notepad.

“Alright,” she said and started writing. “Since the skill will also translate writing, I’ll write it out in parts. Here, take a look.”

She had written out several characters spread out across an entire page of the notepad with as much space between each part as possible. “Read this first, then this, and then this…” she said and pointed to the character written in the lower right corner, then to the one on the upper left and then upper right.

“Ak… kh… ki. Ak’ki? Is that what it’s called?”

“Yeah, if you can hear me say Ak’ki now then you got it right.”

“I hear it differently now! I hear you say Ak’ki!”

“Good. So shall we get to it?” she asked and gestured for him to sit down. “Have you gotten to the point where you can emit a stable aura around your whole body?”

Instead of answering, Eik simply took hold of the Ak’ki in his body and willed it to surround him like a white smoke.

“Very good,” she said, circling him to inspect his performance. “Now, do you have that plaque you use to display your status?”

“Always,” he said and fished it out of his shirt.

“Could you display your name, please?”

“Yeah,” he said and drew the necessary sign into the wooden plaque with a finger.

“And by the way, don’t show your status to anyone… Except me, of course,” she grinned.

“Uh huh,” he drawled.

“No, but seriously, nobody here will expect you to show them your status. It’s considered very rude, like asking you to take your clothes off. It’s private information. It’s a vulnerability. So knowing how to hide it is important for your safety.”

[Eik Magnasen]

[TX 497 - 81414 — NEW}

[Human]

“Right, so Ak’ki will interact with your body and then inscribe the text into the best and nearest surface or, in the absence of such, inscribe it into your skin, painfully.”

“I’m aware,” he said dryly, remembering the pain he’d endured in the hole after first Awakening, not counting the numerous bites and envenomations.

“Great, so what you’ll want to do is will your aura to interfere with the atmospheric Ak’ki’s attempt to interact with your body in order to write out messages. That will make your aura essentially function as a shield to block it.”

“Won’t it also interfere with the activation of abilities and stuff like that?”

She shook her head. “No, don’t worry about that. They don’t work the same way.”

“Actually, how does all of that work? Who writes out all this crap and grants abilities and ranks and all that jazz?” he asked. That particular topic had been discussed to death on Earth since the dawn of the apocalypse. Nobody had the answers. Some people claimed to but Eik thought those people were delusional.

“That’s a bit of a mystery, unfortunately. We know that it’s very, very old. And powerful. A few of the Worldbreakers of the past have claimed to possess knowledge of the Prime Age but as far as I know they never actually revealed any of it publically.”

“The Prime Age?” Eik repeated with furrowed brows.

“The Prime Age is what we call the time before all of this, like power rank and abilities, came to exist,” Atla said.

“When was it?” Eik asked. “A hundred thousand years ago?”

Atla snorted. “Oh, no, it’s much longer than that, although we don’t have a precise number.”

“So at some point everything was… normal?”

“Presumably, yes,” she said with a nod. “It really was a very long time ago, Eik,”

“Right, right. Let me try this thing then.”

Atla leaned for in her chair. “Alright, so as I said, will your aura to interfere with the Ak’ki. I know it sounds simple, but this is something that takes time to get righ—”

“Got it!” Eik said with satisfaction as the script faded from the surface of the wooden plaque.

“No, but… Wait, that was so—… How did you do that so fast?” she stumbled, wide-eyed. “It’s supposed to take… longer than that…”

Eik couldn’t hold back a grin. Atla’s jaw hung open as she stared.