Alyx stretched in her seat, stifling a yawn.

Another failed test, but not without its perks.

After a rigorous trial and error process, leading to numerous micro-implosions of Johrei shards – thank goodness for her remembering to wear a face shield this time – she found that Juvenile shards, separated from the adhered Bastion metal, fostered the capacity to shape the metal, even when it was no longer synched with it. This was impossible and went against all she knew originally about Johrei as a concept.

Though currently, all she had was a standing hypothesis.

More research after all, she thought.

Alyx had mixed feelings about her method of discovery. She tried pushing the level of Johrei to its utmost, something normally impossible. Johrei abilities could only be pushed so far before it entered a state most hunters dub “overburn”. If it passes that threshold, the Johrei burns the remaining storage all at once, resulting in the instantaneous loss of all associated abilities, at least until the stores of Johrei were replenished or regenerated. This is why strength users can’t push their strength thresholds to absurd degrees, no matter how large of a Johrei pool they had in their armor.

Juvenile Johrei was different, however. She found she could push Juvenile Johrei past its brink, albeit slowly. Doing so even a fraction of a second too quickly would result in the shards imploding on her. However, it was in one of these implosions where she noticed shards that collided with the nearby Juvenile carapace actually warped parts of the metal’s surface. This shouldn’t be possible given how weak these shards were. Even juvenile carapaces had enough defense to withstand a basic blade strike, without anything more than a small crack or chip. The warping though, was different than damaging the metal. It looked similar to how putty could be molded under one’s hands.

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So what if, Alyx theorized, Bastion metal didn’t affect Johrei? What if Johrei somehow affected the metal? Could the Onyx Technicians have had this all backwards? I mean, it was comprised of a molecular structure similar to that found in living creatures.

She had always found it odd that cores of Enthipids never seemed to do much when the Johrei around it dissipated. Could it be that Johrei was the actual source of all the abilities of the Inners, and not the cores themselves? Come to think of it, no one is stupid enough to wear Enthipid armor sets that don’t have Johrei synched with it, though she has seen a few hunters wear Johrei shielding on top of non-metallic clothing.

And there was the enigma of the cores themselves. None of the Technicians were able to ascertain exactly what these things were, only that their outer shell comprised of a thin layer of Bastion metal. Breaking them open in the past had resulted in major damage in the past, resulting in the deaths of multiple researchers, so to this day, no one had dared attempted to replicate the early experiments.

Alyx was finding all this quite interesting. However, with the bags gathering under her eyes from the hours of experimentation she conducted today, maybe it was time for her to relax. She decided to boil some noodles and reverse engineer an old idea that humans had back in the day known as video games.

After that she would sleep a beautiful sleep. Oh sweet, sweet slumber.