“What the—…” Eik whispered as the barrier moved up, down, and from side to side in response to his will. Was this a new aspect of his ability brought about the evolution to Instinct of Toxin?

“What the heck is that?” Michael yelled from the side line.

“I don’t know either!” Eik answered. Another arrow came flying and the shield instinctively maneuvered up to deflect it.

Instinct of Toxin, huh?

“Wait, wait, stop shooting! I don’t know how to get this thing to go back!” Eik yelled but Heath ignored him and charged in, keeping low to the ground as he brandished his baton for a sweeping uppercut.

Eik leapt back even as Profound Toxin blocked the attack completely. Heath almost forgot his defense as he pressed forth with the weapon, Sonja wielding her own baton and coming to join him.

Eik found that he could split the solid shell of poison into two but at the cost of mass. Splitting into three made it difficult to control, like balancing three spinning plates on the tips of three different sticks.

He danced away and as the two siblings followed he abruptly rocketed back, far surpassing their speed and ramming his shoulder bodily into Heath’s shield. The shell of solid poison covered his shoulder, smoothly and rhythmically matching his movements.

All of the air in Heath’s lung was expelled in a great moan as he flew back, sailing past Sonja who screeched to a stop of the flag stones.

Realistically, Eik wasn’t going to be able to test his full strength against E-rankers, even if there were two of them at the same time. And even though blocking their attack with the solid toxin was fun, when he wanted to retract the barriers again he couldn’t figure out how.

“Come on!” he muttered under his breath as both Heath and Sonja rained attack after attack down on him, which he either deflected with the shields or with his bare hands.

“Go away! Go away already!”

And then it shattered, utterly and completely, like a thick pane of glass dropped onto a concrete floor. Each of the fragments shattered further into millions of tiny, glittering motes, spreading rapidly across the raised platform like a glowing mist.

Instantly both Heath and Sonja broke into violent fits of coughing, Michael on the side line joining them a second later. As the hypocenter of the deadly blue cloud, Eik felt Profound Toxin’s invasion of his three friends’ bodies with gruesome clarity.

“Eik,” Sonja coughed and he saw her fall to her knees as she clutched her throat. “Eik, Eik, get it—” — She was overcome with another fit of coughing — “get it away, please!”

“Shit, shit!” he yelled. With a thought, the mist returned to his body as if sucked through a vacuum cleaner. The poison was still present in their systems. He could tell.

Again this shit was happening. And it was his fault again. A knot settled in his stomach as he rushed to Sonja’s side. He caught her just as she collapsed to the cool floor.

“No, no, no!” he pleaded. “Get out of them now, you fucking blue bastard!” he roared.

He just hoped the second or two of exposure to the Profound Toxin in its gas-like form wasn’t enough to kill them quickly. Unlike the incident with Heath back during the raid to kill the lake serpent, however, this had already entered their systems wholly.

Like he had done in his recent visit to the world of Profound Toxin, Eik began to circle the essence of the poison inside his body. It just kind of happened subconsciously. It made it easier to focus. The Ak’ki followed suit, seemingly of its own accord, and began to revolve.

Albeit faintly, to his ears the forces began to hum rhythmically to the tempo of their rotation. And with it came a greater sense of connection to his ability, as if the motion synchronized them.

With a hand on Sonja’s neck, he finally retrieved the toxin from her system and a gesture of his hand saw the deadly mist that had entered Heath and Michael come flying back as well. They all coughed and spluttered.

“Are you okay?” Eik asked Sonja and took her by the shoulder to help her to her feet. She slapped his hand away without looking at him.

“Please… Don’t touch me. You need to get a handle on your ability, Eik. The way it runs amok without warning like that… it- it’s not normal. It’s dangerous.” Her knees could barely support her as she shuffled toward the steps. At least she didn’t seem to be at death’s door.

He didn’t try to follow.

“Sonja, I… I really am sorry. I didn’t know that was going to happen.”

“I know you didn’t,” she said tiredly. Anger would have been preferable to this jadedness.

“Sonja, I swear I’ll do better.”

“Eik, we live in a mysterious world with mysterious powers. Accidents like this are bound to happen from time to time. I just need a bit of time to myself, alright?”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

She used the baton as a cane to keep her balance as she walked back toward the ramp leading to their rooms. He looked to Heath but the man only threw him a couple of glances before stumbling after his sister.

“Heath, wait. Heath, are you okay?” The initial gleeful feeling of having reached the equivalent of D-rank in his Unique evolutionary path had been thoroughly replaced by the distinct feeling of being the biggest failure in the Unified Mass. How shitty of a teammate was he to be responsible for a significant portion of serious injuries and near death experiences?

“I’m fine,” was all the tank offered in reply.

“Mikey?” Instead of running away, the healer was actually climbing up onto the raised platform. Slowly, he crawled over to Eik on all fours, looking significantly worse for wear. He stopped halfway as a spell of dizziness seemed to come over him and Eik hurried over to his side.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not… great.”

Right, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

“What’s going on with you? It’s like you’re growing stronger at a pace you can’t keep up with.” He looked more worried than angry.

Eik shifted uncomfortably on his knees. “I… I can’t tell you.”

“What? Why not?” Michael frowned.

“I want to. Really want to, but I just can’t. At least not yet.”

“But why?”

“It’s dangerous. Very dangerous,” Eik said. “Like, it could get you killed kind of dangerous.”

“Oh.”

“I promise I’ll tell you at some point. Just not yet.”

“When can you?” Michael asked and got to his feet.

“I don’t know.”

They started back toward the apartments and Eik took Michael around the shoulder to support him as they climbed the ramp into the long, branched hallway raised above the ground. “We’re going back to Earth soon.”

“Yeah. Tomorrow or the day after.”

“Are you scared?”

He gave it some thought. “Yeah, I think so. But I want to see my mom. In the end I never went back once she left. She must have been worried.”

“I don’t know if my parents are even alive. Or if any of my friends are. Or the rest of my family…”

“They’re all back at your home, right?”

Eik just shrugged. “Presumably. It’s been nine years, man. I don’t know anymore. Anything could have happened.”

“Why don’t you ask Mikla to take you there by fracture? That shouldn’t be too difficult for him, right?” Michael suggested. He had already regained some strength and could even walk more or less normally now.

“I could, I could. But I’m not sure if that would work. They probably had to move around a lot, like we did,” Eik mumbled. “I wouldn’t even know where to start looking for them.”

“You have to start somewhere though, don’t you?”

Eik bit his lip as he hesitated. “I’m scared, man. What if they’re all gone? What if there is nobody left for me to find back there? What if I have no home to return to?”

Michael stopped and gave him a look of pure pity. “I- I… I’m sorry, I can’t even imagine.”

“Yeah, well,” Eik snorted and gazed out of the enormous window. “I’m sure there are plenty of other people who have the same problem. Everybody’s suffering.”

“Yeah, you’re right, of course, but still…”

“Thanks, man. I’ll ask Mikla later.”

“Really?”

Eik flashed him a half smile. “I have to start somewhere, don’t I?”

***

The next morning Eik visited Wanji down at Leafy Sundries and bought enough ingredients for Potions of Mighty Strength class 1 to fill at least fifty vials with the magical liquid. At this point he had spent more than a third of his credits on alchemy.

Once he got back he made a batch of four vials in two minutes. A simple blanket of mist of Profound Toxin to keep the angry, purple miasma in check while he worked on the mixture made the process smooth and easy.

His evolution into Instinct of Toxin also seemed to have done more than just improve his sense of control of Profound Toxin. The manipulation and manifestation of Ak’ki had also become easier, reinforcing his assumption that it shared several similarities with Profound Toxin.

On his second batch he doubled the amount and got almost nine vials of potion. Even this was almost too easy, however. So why hold back? He tossed the rest of the ingredients into the small but heavy cauldron, filling half of its capacity. It was more than three times the size of the previous batch. That meant three times more of the aggressive miasma to fend off.

His now delicate control allowed him to get a good hold of the energy before it retaliated against his influence, but even when it did he easily suppressed it with blue mist. At the end of it he had forty six filled vials. Hopefully enough for what he had in mind.

He was in the middle of stuffing the lot of them into the rucksack of holding when there was a loud knock on the door.

“Eik! Eik, are you in there?” It was Heath. He didn’t bother to wait for an answer.

“Hey, Heathy. What’s u—”

“What the hell, man?” Heath shouted as Michael tip toed into the room after him. The healer quietly took a seat on Eik’s bed and appeared to do his best to turn invisible.

“What’s going on?”

“You won’t believe what Mikey just told me.”

“Oh, I have a feeling that I might just…” Eik said and shot the healer a look. Michael quickly looked away and pulled Mis closer to scratch her belly.

Heath slammed the door shut behind him. “Damn right you will, because it came from you! Why is your ability so out of control? You’re putting us in danger and we have every right to know why!”

Eik carefully pushed aside the rucksack and the small pile of vials and pulled out a chair. “Take a seat, will you? You have to underst—”

“No, you’ll tell me right now, damn it! I could live with it before — we all fuck up with our powers, but if your secret can make it safer for us then you’re an asshole for keeping it to yourself!”

“No, Heath, I swear that’s not what’s going on here!”

“So you’re saying that there isn’t something you’re not telling us then?” The tank asked, crossing his massive arms across his chest.

Eik sighed. “No, there is, but—”

“Then tell me!”

“Heath, I seriously can’t. This is the kind of stuff extreme high-rankers could come after you for, man. It’s better if none of you know. I never even meant to say this much.”

“Extreme high-rankers? What, A-rankers? S? How the hell could you even know that?” the tank asked.

Eik massaged the bridge of his nose. “Atla told me.”

“So Atla knows about this crap — a woman who has proven herself moderately trustworthy and barely competent at best — but your own teammates don’t?” the tank shouted with an expression of disbelief.

“Heath, I didn’t tell her myself. She forced me to show her back when I first came to headquarters.”

“I don’t care! Just tell us!”

“I can’t!”

“We’re teammates! How can we trust you when we don’t even know something that you say is this important? It’s not like it’s something personal, right?”

“Heath…”

“This team isn’t going to last much longer with something like this hanging over our heads. Eik, I’m serious. This stuff is all about trust. So if you can’t trust us with this then this team is already dead in the water.”

Eik ran his fingers through his hair with a groan. “You know what? Fine! If you’re this insistent on getting yourself into trouble, who am I to stop you? In fact, get Sonja! You can all hear it!”