Julia had not made her play. Kostya had.

Jack hadn't ever really been able to put his finger on the suspicion of the man for every reason; Full-Fruition was ahead of Jack but it was behind Kostya. Julia had been believing that their shared source of power he had seemed to give free was just that, free and good, like the people themselves.

But Kostya was neither free or good. He surely was no angel as told.

That thought enough crippled her in every way, knowing if he wasn't what he said he very well could be the opposite, and going on that premise meant Julia was lost. The source of her rebirths and knowledge was tainted. That meant that now, all the knowledge she had and potential to start again, those were tainted too.

It only took Jack six months with the forces that they'd been told would get him to the end best let him push with the Cockatrices to the third division.

Officers relayed his commands by teleporting to and from where they were sent telepathic commands by Jack, who used bright-barrier to efficiently chart and choreograph their movements through dungeons, and the use of adamant tipped cartridges and explosives were only a part of how they cleaned through powerful foes quickly.

Solar crystals they began seeking in mass on the third division allowed for the creation of more powerful weapons. They had high intensity but low energy overall, weapons for the worst threats, like the terrasques they began training to countermand there where those draconic beasts were plentiful.

Six-legged, four-winged, four-horned, shelled, lightning-breathing dragons that ruled whatever environment they chose. Land, air, sea, terrasques were the one draconic being fit to all climates. Even in arctic climate, plentiful fat and their shell and scales were protective.

But those players who were called demons and weren't, Jack killed, and like Julia and hers had helped prevent knowledge and workings of the real demons - now the scapegosts were to blame for the ills mankind suffered awareness of. They'd been without such a group to point to before, yet now even mutants were ill-treated.

Even Jack himself was not spared being made to act against them, lest he lose command of his forces, and public opinion.

Mutants and demons, characters who weren't as humanoid were mistreated, with the exception of Jack's own mutant party-members there was only contempt for inhuman looking humanoids now instead.

This was wat happened when you tried to blame forces you were not able to competently identify. The real demons were in plain sight among the people, and Julia knew she'd just livined up the real demons lives, given them what they wanted. A collected and more vulnerable humanoid collective.

Near limitless leverage to wield against Jack, have him wield back, groups to move the whole around with by escalating tensions back and forth. The bulk of that burden had been on one man too long, in all but the opinions of those around him, and while there were more men than before there were less women.

She'd never known how much worse it would get for women in the third divisions world.

Too much else was wrong and worse.

There was no way for Julia to undo what she had done perfectly.

In their contest had been more than she realized though, some part of the man eventually resurfaced as it tried to approximate who he'd been with the staggering changes drastically unhinged from what he'd known.

Being one solid person in such a split state, it was only effecting both of them, but it was killing each.

Julia wondered if repeating the trick he'd used on their spirits would help him become whole at the cost of hers.

Except, Grub, or Grunt now - this man actually treated women as incapable. Civilians, he limited his view and their capacities to that, while he kept his other confidences in his men and upon combat. Now he was the only one with the big picture he saw, only it was a very narrow window in which he sought only contentions, enemies to be put down.

Already at master by then, he over-achieved beyond mastery with esper and element, the vessel element and the spiritual esper.

That was when there seemed to be no hope for what Julia had been planning. There was just desperation left when he finally faced her with the truth.

He knew after six months things were wrong. He grew lost, forgot things, confused the knowns of both realities. When he'd ask for certain given things out loud, it made the many others under him know he was losing sanity, if only by the things he'd begun asking that were impossible to consider here and now. It was clear, every day, the obvious slippage was worsening.

"What were you talking about that day? That time I helped you up, you were talking about something important. That was the first and last memory I have of things being right. The last I was myself was at that place and time. I'm not just losing myself and reality though.

"This side is better. There are so many more people, the resource and powers aren't divided or scattered so much. A million men follow me, and I only have to order Generals who're responsible, and that's nothing the other sides me could've done. There's almost a billion people in the third divisions plane of existence.

"But the other side isn't gone, it is still there, I'm the me that is here and there but just one person between both places. I can't hold two realities that are going on in my head anymore. I'm torn into too many pieces. This side is the one I want to live in. The other side is the one I need to go back to. I don't belong here where it's better."

Her timefulness had burned up in her act, but it didnt' move him, he noticed but did nothing.

"It's your fault. You did this to us both. You're going down with me when I go. I'm taking you back to the hellish side. The glory you experience is at the cost of my every essence. You might get to have saved the world but you won't enjoy it at my expense here, I'm going back there with you to have you pay there instead."

Julia hd spent this whole time defeated and wishing to do just as he said. She'd gladly have given her life and eternal spirit to pay for that very thing. The difference was she was not so sure Jack was wrong, here. On one hand she knew there was no way he could wield time, nor undo it. On the other she remembered his interferences.

She knew that you could not mettle with the unknown knowingly.

But Jack didn't seem to know that before, now, he really was crazy enough to try. Some part of the powerful spellform she had been charging perpetually for twelve-centuries; there was only a piece of the original in what he suddenly revealed. Not even a spellform any longer.

They were solid, even when scattered, any power you could shape was attached to itself, until it was spent after the duration it's energy charged or fed after release ran out.

Instead of limitations of shape or size, the mediums that powers took were naturally imagined and seemed unlimited, the limitations were that power and energy needed at least equal and meet for even a burst effect - where power was the factor associated with form or space while energy fell into the spell or time.

Spellforms were the traits or descriptions a power could be explained by. Spell was time related. The when. Form, space relative. The where.

For a moment she was only sure that Jack wielded some power, it felt minimal, but she susected distantly it should be maximal.

Then it clicked he'd been wielding a power the whole time and hadn't used the first since he'd wrestled over time with her.

There was a strand that led them back towards when and where they came from time, even when it had been invisible, but what she could sense through the other side was all wrong. Trusting and loving Jack, Grub, it didn't matter she wanted and needed to risk everything. Not after sensing the other side he mentioned.

She'd seen what he was doing and knew the risks. Travelling time was certainly risky.

Dialing time was an endeavor that only Kostya was capable of doing after millions of years of existence. There was no world at all on the other side as Jack said - only the void - but both were still in contention over it. Julia would have ran if she could, but all she could do was sprint to try and gain any measure of manipulation of the spellform.

Control would be impossible since he'd shaped it out of her reach, but manipulations of her energies only began the moment he started its manifestations.

Even having more power over the time he somehow wielded, nor it being built upon her own power and energy she had thought lost, not even her own defense to her energies being manipulated would help her. She knew all this, though only the last should matter, since she had put those energies in the spellform he had part of.

"You're just going to kill us. I've never sensed the void so clearly, not even surrounded by it."

He shrugged and used the spellform, skipping any steps involved to a thing he could not wield, damning them to a certain death. She'd went to grab him a last time while she could and felt him but then closed of her last senses. That would last her until the void scattered her soul and all into oblivion.

But seconds later she wasn't dead in any convincing manner. Did things seem to just keep going if you died? They didn't with body and spirit destroyed, no way, that was pure annhilation.

When her senses returned she wasn't sure that wasn't the case for all else besides them.

She had no answers for why Jack had been in her arms, but was lying on his back far from sight. Then clarity and perspective started returning when she saw where they were.

The sounds and feelings she picked up emanating from Thomas, the living one on this 'side' as Jack called it, they were to terrible to face standing up. Laying the hundreds of feet away besides Jack with herself blacked out to sound did not help much, but it helped.

Something truly profound and terrible dying did not ignore that easily, even a minute portion being reflected from who knew where, even subtly from a spirit body without physical parts to it. No sounds, vibrations, or any but mental senses should have even been possible to come from Thomas. Even alive, he couldn't speak with earthly voice, or touch earthly things himself.

That only made her creep closer to Jack, but then she noticed what her senses were screaming over all the other fears, the heart she had felt beat near her for more than a million years still. It had never been so while she was alive.

They should never have been where they were for days, other Legands and what she was now sure were demons used this intermediary location, but that was how long she pushed at his heart until it started again. Her wrists were worse off than his sternum or ribs, but every bone mentioned was damaged.

She couldn't see his confusion as cute for once.

"Hurts- breathe." He explained healing her first, but in trying to draw her wrists back the right she'd drawn harsher snapped worse than the left. Her tears started silent, but each breath out she was in a worse state until she was shrilly screaming, and the pains in her wrists hadn't lasted long.

Every stream of tears was so hot and salty they reinforced how shamed and angry she was. The heat of shame in being nurtured by the person she only had thought she'd had the power to protect, yet had cost everything in trying to do so. Salty and angry were understatements. Kostya deserved to pay, but neither she nor Jack had a way now. She deserved the fate he was damned with.

His soul! What the fuck had she done?

At least he'd left her alone a few minutes, but she needed hours, there was just no composure to be had. Her greatest asset was the liability that made her fail where success had seemed to be. Had she even really been with him twelve-centuries, if not even the years she had added up over a million before counting lost importance?

This wasn't being a guiding light, just a burdening blight on him.

She knew she should move but slapped his hand away when it came upon her shoulder, somehow breaking her heart worse and setting her emotions back to the same staring wound, as if she'd have to suffer it worse every time she saw him Julia started to think of places to escape him.

He'd been right to avoid and flee from her. That thought killed her, the hand she reached for his knife with steady and sure. The look on his face of nothingness only made her resolution more clear, she was already dead and better off so than an even worse burden now, one less intense but longer lasting. It might even be a part of Kostya against Jack.

"If you do that, you better put it in me first, right here." She didn't open her eyes to know where he'd indicate.

"I'll just bring you back, and have to put more effort into watching over you. You don't run from mistakes, you taught me that by running towards a mistake you hid them better, that day you got me to skip school you were suspended from with you. If we hadn't been caught wandering the roads like you decided we-."

"You didn't make a move." Julia protested. As he started to reach for her instead of the knife, instinctively her mind created every protest and sought to stall a motion she could not stop a quicker opponent from, yet a comrade gently took it slow which she had not expected.

He trusted her with her life.

If he hadn't, she was unaware, but he knew they would both lose theirs. All would.

"We serve each other. Isn't that how you put it? I didn't want or need anyone but Kate, knowing I wouldn't lose her even if she died, I could never have gained her the way I have you. The way you, Natalie, Heitir, Syorina and I, how we serve each other will be how you said. Both ways.

"I could and would let her go. This is all because I did not, your actions were only a correction. I don't blame you like I said I did over there Julia. That avatar took time for me to make sense with, and with my consciousness split, I couldn't find a way that wouldn't get us both back without hurting you.

"But we're both back and alive. We have all the things we didn't before this happened, and now we can use those to our advantage. Even when I knew a part of you couldn't be trusted, I knew that it was either something I had done or someone else had convinced you. You're too perfect and good to have been wrong or done anything improper.

"Neither of us would deserve each other that way. I love you, and I need you, even if I still wonder if I deserve you I know I never can or will. Can't we just keep serving each other? How can we if you die? You kill yourself and you'll deserve us both. I can't live and love the same again if you do."

She shook her head knowingly and fiercely, not at all sadly, just informingly.

"He'll sense through me distantly. I can't be even a li.. lid.. lit..tel..part. I don't want to live like this. I can't not be around you, but I can't be around you either, you let go of Kate so it should be easier. You have to let me go so we can both serve each other."

He offered a knife, but there was one in each hand, and he wouldn't let her take the one he held towards her.

"I can let you go anytime you can let me go. If you can kill me then I can kill you. That's just the way I'm built, I'm just, so I can't concede anyone to a fate they don't feel justified with. You don't want to die, or you could kill me, because if you wanted to die you would not mind taking me with you.

"If this place means you die for real here, then let's go. I'm not afraid to leave everything alone, nor am I scared to leave you to everything if you could only kill me. I'd be terrified for you to leave me behind, but I seemed to leave you that way and it has caused you to feel like I can live without you.

"I'm still learning I can't live without you like I thought, like I'm learning I could live without Kate. If it wasn't so I can vow to you that I wouldn't have stopped you, or offered to join you, but I never would have gone after you where you went if I could live without you."

I didn't mention I'd have done that for many people, wouldn't need to later, she'd remember if she snapped out of her recklessness.

"I can't. I can't make everyone pay for my mistakes. You should have just left me there."

"Then let them reap your successes. Without your 'mistake' we'd have no intel or understanding. There's no reason to fear our lives being known at all, even if in full, Kostya will only know to fear us and bring proper challenge. Demons aren't worthy of fear, they just seek to make us afraid because they're terrified of our potential, so they try to use fear because it's all they know.

"Our own fear of ourselves is more worthy than any fear for any of them."

"You're underestimating him."

"Only because he's overestimated himself and underestimated us. You heard him screaming, didn't you? That's just a taste of what lies in store."

His spirit somehow returned to him. Victoria was moved by what he was saying, but Julia was not, and she had been Julia more whether or not she was thousands or a million years old. Julia knew to be afraid of things she had been blind to the depths of as only shallow parts had been clear once.

Now she was seeing other sides to a lot more than Thomas' coma.

"Find a way to live with it, for everyone, or it's all for nothing. I'll find a way to do worse than bring down the moon if I can't make a body your spirit comes back to, because it won't matter if you're not here with me when this madhouse ends. I'll just give up here where you do."

"You aren't subject to that. You haven't been brought here. You broke into this place."

I wish I knew more to argue. I'd bind myself to the death here if I could for leverage. She was only becoming more despondent than she'd been before she left with an avatar half of me.

She stabbed herself with ki but I bled.

"Told you so." Was the last thing I said. Numbness and nothing became stinging into something, death and dark and cold back towards life and light and warmth.

"So this is the prime."

There wasn't anyone there to hear me say it, but watching a division come to life, it was easy the most eerily experience I'd had recently.

Not even the experience of the spirit-mans body transmitting sensory information, or seeing six months of another division of division worlds existing in the span of seconds, neither of these were as spooky. Being unable to be myself much at all in the other place, even as myself, that did come close.

The unnatural had never been meant to be experienced.

Dyings lack of the normal consequence had changed people to admit easily no fear of death. They knew what would happen and that in a way it was very bad, but yet it seemed very good there was only so far to fall before you could still rise back up. Many did without powers.

But rising to the top here was where things changed. The prime division or first, that was closest to the void, the thing I'd realized when Julia imagined by ethereal chakra flipped. If I was that way, I'd be pulled upward, but here hell was up by what she'd pointed out. The demons descent started here.

Power became inverted here, where they seemed weakest they were strongest against me, but where they were stronger against others was higher. It wasn't like they had no alternative means, just that the demons advantages could be neutralized.

The other Legands would remain.

Here there was no dungeon.

This was that tower, built in the highest of worlds in a tower of them, not the exit or entry to any but a place none would ever willingly enter.

To hell.

Gargantulae as big as two-ton-trucks on legs like thin young trees crept around the capital as it crawled towards life the same way as them.

The square was silent and new, grass young everywhere without a weed in sight, there was no marring or wearing on anything. All as if an after image that was in the distance becoming before my eyes, rather than any after effect, was matter energy taking power and form to become earthly matter.

The entrance to the tower was locked. There was a clue to open it.

'Wield a weapon of world-weaving.'

Most people would be antagonizing extremely hostile gargantuan tarantula right about then, but I wasn't going to be able to do that even to save myself. Only death awaited those who played with murder-incarnate, those things that preyed on dragons and elephants. Why did people think dragons needed wings to survive in the first place?

There was worse things than dragons. Wings weren't a sign of any superiority or dominance, they were appendages for escape, gargantula were so bad that dragons couldn't even make their limbs run from them when they were around. Their legs froze up and their wings took over. Birds flew, fish swam, gargantula spammed you with barbed stingers like nails and then walloped you.

Humanoids were too small for them to prey on or even take offense to if not provoked. Non-hostile unprovoked, extremely at the first hint of agitation. I had a fear of spiders, not bad once, but I'd seen another squire throw a spear at one from behind once. Thankfully the gargantula had enough eyes to see behind as well as forward.

It didn't let the measly spear hit it, as if it feared anything people tried, maybe since it had been tricked with magic.

Something that big moving so sudden was like hearing and feeling the mix of a wreck and a storm. The feeling of its motions along with the sounds, each booming and escalating as it had first thrown its left side legs up against trees it was beside and the rights ones tucking in with its body. Then the spear had passed over it.

The boy had already run.

Maybe that was how it knew if not sight.

The sound of it approaching, the wind we could already feel sharply shift direction towards us from over a hundred feet away where it had been laying, each step as if thunder booming and lightning striking all so rapidly one behind the other.

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When it had flung bristles, he was already going to die not only from exsanguination, but die itching and screaming even if it hadn't had mercy. Gargantula have a lot of mercy, they truly prefer killing anything they en-venom, but besides the mild decades long side effects should you survive was the way they killed humanoids.

Swatting them.

It had retreated slow, facing us until it back away several body lengths, backing over one young tree that it pushed back until it had flung forward towards me and the other boy. That tree falling towards us was of no regard, even though it shredded the skin of the others right arm and leg, we knew not to move until it turned around.

We ran long before it turned around anyway seconds after the tree fell, the moment it stopped, and yet it had stopped moving so we had. A second later we each went on our way more calmly, us and it.

I'd never forget seeing a mostly crushed person. Liquified crushed isn't so bad, splattered is nasty but there is so much to see spread everywhere you are underwhelmed, while half crushed is sickening. Think accordion, straight one moment, curved with way too many angles in sight the next.

It was still enough for fluids to come out of both ends, most insides could be seen from the outside, and there was every way to describe someone who'd died balling up into the fetal position. Small, fragile, and broken.

Every bit was as bad. The sight and smell after, the sound and feel during, this overwhelming thing making me feel like the bug in its world.

They weren't world-weaving anything, but if their young weren't so hunted by everything, I'd never have been able to hold my head up above ground.

If things didn't work out, I was going back to two-thirteen either way, there surely was a division they'd die off in. Forty-three years hunger wouldn't kill them though.

A weapon of world-weaving. Were we not the ones weaving this world?

I imagined a sexless vessel and created them, one like my first party had shown only without inherent gender even. This one filled and fell, the tower opening, and an empty spark coming to the vessel. They looked too tired to have been called born.

"Kostya."

I addressed the spirit inside it.

"Not Master?"

"The only things your master of, you didn't teach me at all. Only the worthless gifts were given by you in an attempt to take everything worthwhile from everyone."

"You've caught me then. I don't have as much knowledge as you boy, but I have every insight into people and sight out of them, in every world I hold all the cards you can only think you're playing with. There is no card I haven't stacked that wasn't played to my favor, no play or act in the game is unaccounted for.

"You're moments from defeat."

"That's funny. You lost a long time ago, and I stand to lose nothing anymore."

Both of us smiled convincingly and confidently, him smugly and me grimly. This was that moment you revelled. Just not too long, or without losing focus.

I headed towards the towers door when he made his move.

I was already making mine, catching him completely off-guard as I moved to unvravel the physical and spiritual sides of the vessel element the vessel he was in and seal his spirit into the once seemingly average avatar, in his throes I knew he'd been bluffing as well.

The cost was a sucker punch, the kind that didn't change reality, but changes when and where you were in it.

The other-side, that dark reality, where that version of me had started Akyria with a physical crack instead of a spiritual crack.

The difference was I carried my spiritual crack and it had left it's physical one inside the body. Our spirits swapped, our bodies did not, but beyond that I would know when I arrived there Kostya had been right. A much weaker me was where I should be, and an even stronger me was where I was.

I was sealed out of my own version of reality, but hope wasn't lost.

They had to be connected again in the future, because I'd deviated the time spellform against me, my second encounter with it left me more sure of manipulating when I went back to.

I had only one concrete option, which was holding the age I was at, fifteen. Earths time was the same naturally, where I'd been it took five times longer for people to age, the seasons were the same - in the division worlds.

It was definitely an eye opener, standing on the bed awake I should have been laying in with my eyes closed and me asleep, wearing clothes and a knife at my side I'd never owned. Mostly because of the where and when, but a who really shook things up walking in.

"Hey dipstick - what the fuck are you wearing? Where'd you get that backpack?"

The old leather rucksack he eyed admiringly, I handed Jason with a smile, but pulled out the liquor inside. Medicinal, yes it was, but strong enough to run a vehicle too.

"I can't say, but it's mine and you can have it. If only you ran with me in the mornings."

"You run in the morning? Damn, no wonder you stink all the time. Just playing, let me see that. Damn! Bro, did you even look in here before you forked this over? Are those fucking gold coins? Is that a fucking jar of grease? Fucking spices? Who carries so many fucking ropes around? Bro! Bro why is there a fucking pistol? Why is there fucking gold?

"You can keep this mother-fucker, dick. I don't even want to know where you got it or how. You tryna' pawn the evidence off on your own family."

"Hey, I've had this stuff for years. They're heirlooms!"

"Sure, take the junk and criminal shit, I'll take the backpack and coins."

He stripped everything out but the coins and jewels - the contents were a pretty hefty pile - but when he started to fondle the raw gems I knew he was not fooled. His eyes were large when he palmed up an uncut diamond and gouged my window. Then he pocketed it, looking at me, and sneakily thumbing it into his pocket.

My window cracked a second later, and started a small centralized spider web like pattern.

"I know you just did not cut into my window with a damn diamond and slip it into your pocket like I wouldn't notice. When you sell a coin, you owe me a window. I'm not explaining how this one got messed up. That pistol is just a toy man, but I'll keep it, looks real."

Of course the crystals inside wouldn't work yet. I probably shouldn't have checked by pointing it out the window for a test fire, but we lived enough in the country here it would've been fine. Probably.

It only made him more suspicious, but his silence was purchased.

"If you get seen wearing that shit, you're either going down as a badass or a dumbass. We're broke enough, no need to wear rags and make us look that poor. Those boots are just gay bro, burn em', I thought you had a bitch in here for a second when I saw those tall ass leather boots.

"I'll rip those sumbitches off and beat you with them if you try to wear them anywhere in public."

"Yeah, yeah. Go get ready for school."

He started and then stopped with a look of concern on his face, unable to ignore the clear buy-off in his face.

"You're not gay, are you, bro? It doesn't effect me either way, but some warning would be nice. I don't want to have some sugar-daddy of yours come for this shit later and say it's his, or the fucking police come knocking on my door over this while I'm smoking a bowl."

"Are you hearing yourself right now? I'm not gay but what the fucks that got to do with the police?"

He shrugged but kept the serious look up. "It's not stolen, and it damn sure isn't payments or gifts for sex. Just hand me my shit back then, that way you don't have to worry about my sugar-daddy or the police asking you about my prostitution earnings. I guess I can't say my little brother was pimping me out anymore like I planned.

"Fuck, it was too orginal and well planned to fail, I guess I'll just have to pin it on pops."

He snorted.

"Sure. Tell the police to come kicking down Daddy's door saying his son is a sissy he is selling, when I bond him out for that I'll bond him out again after he beats your ass. You better not fu-."

"Enough with the shit. Please let's just get ready for school and accept this for what it is - all bullshit. You're coming out of this like a king for nothing because you're my brother, not because you're being made an accomplice to any secret or crime."

He nodded. "I'll buy us both VR setups and the Valkyria game that launches tonight, but we should wait a few days and see how people take it. For now we keep grinding where we were yesterday in-."

"Fuck Valkyria. We're just starting to be able to make profits while we up our skills, and our Pay-Versus-Per-View-Player membership clock is ticking away. VR takes too much software and hardware, the electricity might not be terrible, but we wouldn't even have the guest-and-game room for all the space two rigs take."

"But we only have a computer and a laptop right now, you could fit another computer in your room. Hell we can just buy another house and rent this one, let other people pay stay here and pay for it. Daddy and Mary could put up money into savings and catch up on debt."

"It's your money, spend it how you want. I'll set you up with someone to sell that stuff to, the government is going to want answers to questions about that stuff you don't have yet. You're going to say you got it at a flea-market for twenty bucks. That pouch of gems anyway. The coins were our grandparents."

He laughed and shook his head. Our stepmother hollared out from her and my dad's door to get ready and stop talking. We complied.

I'd wanted to run and hug them all, but I usually did that before bed every night anyway. My mind was on searching for the differences this world had. It was not exactly my world with it being an alternative reality.

It didn't take long before my class schedule peeled my eyes back wide. There was no gym block or period.

'Ki & Chakra Manipulation - 1st Period.'

That was right. The bastards had taken my chubby ass and put me in gym first-period, not on purpose, but the coach had changed my life around. Everyone ran a mile everyday, two miles on friday for the one we'd skip saturday, and he'd have made us run three friday if not for sunday.

Being the day God proclaimed was rest day, he wasn't one to insinuate what we did on our sundays. As for him, he rested and suggested we did. He put us through enough and he knew it, but never too much. If you just walked your mile it was fine, passing marks for effort, but if you strove to improve you got high marks.

Well, he was less biased than most, the athletic types made high marks on an off day because they were athletic. Nothing and noone is perfect. He was not the teacher anymore now, nor was there just one. There was no alternative gym classes, but it wasn't so terrible to see what they considered ki and chakra.

The relatively small high-school gym was pretty moderate for size and quality, but it wasn't much different. The realities paralleled, clearly sharing half the same physical spectrum, but each their own half apart from each other as well.

In my half there had been religions in the twenty-first century.

Here they had been all but abandoned when something measurably and obviously 'greater' cropped out from the universes confines.

Heating instruments warmer than ones skin surface, cooling others that were cooler, both designed to do so by speeding up and slowing down the molecules - they inherently wanted to heat or cool slightly if utilized properly. The part people were trying to figure out was how to interfere with these materials more articulately.

It took more than changing ones breathing and feeling, intensities or frequencies of emotions and thoughts, but whatever these materials were had in fact some crude chakral relationship to those in the body.

Rods. Not just heating and cooling.

An electrifying one that a few in the world could get light to emit from, but the materials were not conductive of electricity at all. A circulating one that placed in water many could create current with after a few months use, but that manipulated air. A similar inversed one could draw condensating from the air. If it dampened you showed a positive, else it stayed dry.

The petrifying rod was supposed to turn oxygen and carbon gases into some type of stone.

But the ki-stones were the one everyone was eager to see used if possible first. Nobody had gotten one to work and I wasn't going to leave things that way if I could help it. I didn't have to use it around anyone, or at least I'd ask to use it and have my results kept confidential.

Or so I thought until every usage being recorded and monitored was quickly.

Ki-stones were seven in number, and two. One on each hand and foot for four, one on the head, over the heart, and over the pelvis for the seven applied. The eighth was flat and used to measure, a disc one stood on, with the other and last external stone a disc of the same purpose overhead.

The effects were pretty showy, but people could only experience the archetypal and primordial agitations of ki. They weren't doing it themselves, and every person trying to punch and kick themselves silly while feeling weightless was not close to agitating anything but myself, to do so they needed to move without moving their body at all.

It would be more effecient for them to use the material in another design. A block pushed by another block that had no physical connection, or if they wanted a less efficient test using what they had, something in the area of the discs to focus the effects on indirect.

A sphere immersed in liquid would require the least effort to manipulate. By my estimate if the material was as up to parr as the others, then more people would be able to use it. Full-fruition meant I could sense and especially feel at a distance any power, none had any even novice in the mile I felt out at.

Not since I'd come here haf my bright-barriers greater-omniscience alerted me to any.

Even the thousand mile dark-domains lesser-omniscience didn't.

Instead of people sitting in the bleachers before school started, most who hadn't tried already were lined up. As for me, this was my first class, so I was more interested in thinking and observing while I observed. My brother would be at this school next year. He was the one I'd have put the meat on the table at this place for our school.

As for me, I was already considering deals with the people who made these materials, they obviously had shit-for-brains designing ground-breaking tests meant for R&D on the supernatural forces that someone high up had been made aware of. We needed steady legal income, some corrupt official could very well claim the resources I gave my brother were stolen from them.

Once the resources were analyzed and quantified, they'd wind up in an evidence locker, and some crooked cop would let it be known in higher circles that a fortune stood to be made for anyone with enough money and legal-aid besides name to claim such an easy take. 'Kid makes millions spending twenty-bucks on a sketchy backpack at a country flea-market.'

Not impossible, but not likely.

'Famous family reunited with centuries stolen heirlooms. Local celebrity explains how they lost millions in . '

More probably, and more acceptable to society. A lawyer and notary would help prove the contents had come as they had, no seller would be identified though they would be searched for, and the exact story and conditions would have to match. A cop might get a corrupt higher up to take a risk with the right phone call.

But the lawyer might do it better, and worse, evidence against you could pop up if you told them too much. I'd have to make sure to have both by the balls, but each necessary evil towards simply popping up with riches had that potential, if any one individual got greedy and made the right phone call..

I'd need alternatives.

I was going to enjoy some simple tims with my brother and family first. Online and games, foods I'd missed, I nearly skipped the day just for pancakes and coffee. The vices I'd wanted to sneak, I'd seek here and there too. I had plenty of time for Akyria coming - Valkyria was the name of the game this side of reality - where the other division of division worlds had come from I saw.

Not others from my world the way I'd thought at all, but I'd had a peak at the best of those this side in the future.

There were phone calls to make.

I feigned the same annoyance as others messing around with the materials, but let's face it, those around me deserved as much of a dose of excitement as I did. So I made the air rod blow bubbles in the water a moment, after a moment of playfulness just after a sigh, a great time for air chakral movements.

It was only supposed to be bubbles, but this shit was seriously sensitive. A pinhead of power generated by stimulating external air chakra, not even true agitation of air, it was enough to blow the water all over the whole gymnasium in a fine mist. It was also enough to get me out of school for weeks, without messing with my attendance at all. Score.

I smiled as I saw my completely scalded hand. The surface flesh hadn't just been flash-boiled by water, it had been blown off. I didn't even need to scream or roll around and scream lawyer and lawsuit. I was fucking smiling when my hand got blown off, as far as everyone was concerned, the mental and emotional trauma had already started at maximum.

Wet as the surrounding area was, my blood literally swept across the whole modest gym floor thinning through the water, no doubt sure to spread rumors someone had died here before it could be cleaned, but it started spreading slowly. I was resolved to bleed where I was as long as possible as everyone stared, wondering what the fuck had showered the whole class all at once, and seeing yours truly smiling.

"Gentlemen! The girls are officially soaked. You're welcome. Did anyone see where that rod went, cause I'm not reimbursing shit for a faulty product. You can just kiss my ass if you think I'm paying for this. Nobody said that I wouldn't be able to wipe my own ass for a month if it backfired! How could you let students handle explosive devices?

"What kind of shit is this? So what if I used it wrong, you said these were safe." I had to stop ranting, they were all too shocked.

"Nobody rush all at once or anything. If you see the skin of my hand, let me know, it'll look like a glove that's shaped like my hand. I'd appreciate if you didn't use it for anything criminal or immodest."

The teachers finally moved, one trying to use his sweaty and filthy shirt to wrap around my hand.

"Don't put that filthy thing around my exposed muscle tissue, were you raised in a barn?"

"S-sorry! You're bleeding so bad, I think we need to use a tourniquet. Bring me a-."

"Fuck me! No! You're bound and god-damned determined to make me lose what's left of my hand, aren't you? It's not an arterial bleed, moron. Bring me a roll of bandages - just those mind - it's not like I need it disinfected when my skins been boiled off. It's about as clean as it fucking gets when the skin of your hand is boiled and scraped off by hot air and water."

The bleeding quickly had slowed, but the pink pool had reached most of the central part of the floor. It chased away all those around it to the edge. One girl with a blistered side to her face winced and seated on the still extended bleachers, the only other harmed. She had been next in line for the nearby water rod. "Check on your other injured student, you fucking prick. She's hurt."

I pointed and he complied.

Meanwhile I located the still whole air rod.

It wasn't like it could be made to disappear, the evidence would have been recorded, and they'd informed us all of that lovely fact so willingly. Didn't the idiots know to hide monitoring softwares and hardwares? Had a major corporation not gotten that memo from their lawyers? Boldness bites back.

Things went well, I thought, facing the legal representatives I could easily gather they were closing in on this easily open and shut case. If it saw court I'd get limited remuneration. If it didn't I'd get millions right away. I wasn't going to throw it away playing hardball with an entity I couldn't win a financial war with. Everyone knew courts were rigged.

All you got to decide was whether you got the money in these situations for the corporations to sweep under the rug their failures and limit public scrutiny, or whether the money went as bribes to people who would make sure you got nothing by filling their secret accounts with what you pissed away.

There was some middle ground.

I threaten a bit and cry about my future and going to the press with a sob-story. 'Brilliant future light burnt out by unscrupulous corporations dangerous expiremental and unproven product.' They retaliate, 'Kid from a dark and broken home with no future seeks to greedily choke out earth-shaking and sky-rocketing corporate venture.', and cry broke and honest to the public.

I was going to push it to hundreds of millions out of court, with the right lawyer it could only go up normally though they'd get a hefty chunk then.

But I wasn't a milk-cow, I was a bull, if they milked anything it wasn't going to be utters they ended up with their hands full of. Forget them and the lawyer.

I cut off the tape I was recording after producing the recorder where they could see it.

"You can't use anything on that to help you kid. This isn't a movie."

"Thanks, you shmucks. For trying to consult with me in a state of severe shock. Without my parents or legal counsel of my own either, of course. The real fuck-up was the last bit; when you snakes thought I was sheepishly about to accept medical and therapeutical treatments paid for the rest of my life with a measily million.

"Have a listen, and just remember, besides what I've got you on I'm pretty sure the public would love to hear what the DA will. I don't need this to even be admissible in court, I just have to play a video of you lovely ladies mentioning your client by name and what his piss-ant precursory bottom-line was to people. It's better than money for me, I just hate big-business and the so called legal system."

I clicked play and let them have a listen at themselves spilling all their own beans. Powers; you had to love near limitless powers.

"Gregory Anderson isn't about to shell out any more than pocket change for this mess. Treatments and all the money he could need for nursing all his life, at least if he wasn't so young, that's about all we'll put on the table for some broke ass kid." Legal-lackey one started. He looked shocked and his hair should've visibly greyed by the look alone. I paused it there a click.

"Uh-oh." I mocked. But that wasn't all he'd been thinking, it continued after.

"At least the most loose-ends are buried under confidentiality agreements. Greg himself has those egg heads by the leashes. Nobody will know to talk to the tens of thousands of underpaid researchers who paved the way for the breakthroughs those so-called egg heads think they figured out, expirementing with the combined efforts of the lower class."

He listed off dozens of involved aristocracy and the names of the chief individuals involved in said families, besides their own families members who were there just to take credit for others work for undeserved boosts to their celebrity statuses, but the kicker was him naming names and crimes that could be put to paper trails.

Dates and times, who had known what besides where and when, the breakdown of who had pushed what part of the corporations agenda forward and through what agency.

Numbers; dates, times, places which could be seen as coordinates and numerized too, account-numbers with transaction amounts and volumes. All there, and others knew less but had more intense and obvious surface knowledge, but only lackey one had plenty of crimes he was implicated in and listed along after he finished spilling beans.

He spewed marbles instead, when the beans started being unspilled back to him.

The others had thought he was the goat amongs them for a moment, they'd scarcely dreamed of being as heartless, but they were the face of the legal lackeys. This was the brains they let run them, heartless but seen as the more mindful, intelligent and cold as the serpent he truly was in human skin. The type who really gave them their bad names.

"Now that we've come to an agreement, ladies, I'm sure that many rich-bitch families can scrape together a measly billion untraceable and untaxable units of currency in the highest current fiscal currency on the global stage. They can shove it up their ass though, I want a million in Corporeal-Coin, or all of you can swim in shit and be broke with me.

"Call your client and tell him exactly this-."

Twenty-minutes. Graham couldn't believe what he was saying, not when he had started making calls, and not after a change twenty-minutes made.

There was always time to get his act together and create the ideal scenario where logic simply shat on his enemies. Whoever was put across from his client lost, simply because he was careful with who he worked for and had long taught them to cover their tracks, there was never a defeat that he didn't see as paying out the settlements he was careful never to lowball by much.

He'd naturally had to up what the price went to from time to time. Most people were too poor to argue when time was literally money in court, those he worked for had all the time in the world to wait for their opposition to die down over ten years or twenty, breaking them by tying up individuals or businesses funds when they played. He never played games.

Emotions were best kept out of court in his opinion completely, but the other masks who were better aware of sentiments kept his composure as well as the publics, and that had been the one weakness Graham admitted. He could play anyone stupid and wrong in court, was great at providing details spun to incite distasteful reactions that made the innocent squirm to appear guilty, but if they came out from his mouth..

No, none were perfect and he had never understood why smart as he was, the words from his mouth that were medicine to his clients ails were treated like poison towards them. He'd learned early in debates before ever becoming what he had others would need to use his words and add their humanity back to it. He thought like a shark when it came to weaknesses.

But this kid came along like an orca.

Fifteen years-old, frothing words like fire out of his mouth, that bloodthirsty nature burning Graham like nothing had in his life. Even being spanked by his mother because his father was too soft as a child was not so infuriating or embarassing, the two emotions he so rarely felt but more than any others.

The last and worst call connected.

"I was in the discussion where it was secure, I'm not happy to have to be in it, or miss it. Explain to me why there's a fifteen year old cock broken off in my ass, and start burying yourself where your suicide will go unnoticed if your smart, unless you know where the leak came from. I know it wasn't you or me, not only are we not so stupid, but we have people around watching to make sure this doesn't happen.

"I already know it wasn't your end, but my hands are tied here."

"I'm not going down for this shit, let's get that straight. If you want to know what happened, I'll need assurances I'm not.. 'relieved' of my services." The conversation paused for a brief moment only, relieving Graham instantly. More than that and he would have hung up and started running to hide somewhere. Anywhere.

"If you can answer how this happened, by all means, we can assure it is a one-off thing and take precautions. The losses would be worth those gains. I can't leave myself or those I work for out of knowing where this shit-storm came from, funds can be created for our benefit, but weaknesses have to be eliminated."

"Some powder-drug. Fucking freak blew it in our faces as we walked in and started asking questions we didn't know we were answering, then when we were recovering, he flipped the script and started acting like he was in shock. He was a little out of it, but the bastard agreed to talk, except when that side of the talk started we were the ones who sounded normal but were not ourselves.

"He'll play both sides here, Greg. Not just the blackmailing, he's telling us to take the fall in court. He isn't content breaking it off in your ass in the dark where none can see, he wants to fuck you in the face for the world to see in the light. Not just you, ev-."

"I don't need to tell you what has to be done then. It'll be handled in court or out of it with money, but I'm not being fucked by a kid Graham. You bury this or someone will bury you with that big ass dino-turtle's you keep like dogs."

'Alligator-snapping turtles, at least he knew them that way.'

"It's arranged. There's a doctor here on bond in a DUI and hit-and-run homicide case in the hospital tonight, kid falls into a coma, doctor gets killed by a smack-addict tonight for a couple hundred bucks when he goes to pick up the check. He stands to lose his house for the debt he's in already, a real gambler and drinker, honestly more worried about losing the wife he lost a decade ago than the house.

"Desperate and stupid, so a perfect lackey."

'Lackey. He'd use patsy usually himself but that fucking kid called him a-.'

"Hold on." Long pause, Graham didn't like that cold tone either, Greg was about to blow his top evidently. He couldn't know the man was seeing his adult sons babysitter.

"Find more, dig deeper, take some measured fucking leaps here Graham. I'm." Short pause. Seething. "We have another issue connected. My son just got us doubled-down in this. We're going to need his whole family out of the picture now. Just make sure by midnight the boy and his brother are gone."

"Another connected issue? His brother?"

"Something about gemstones. A cop mentioned some kid with the devils luck buying millions in gems for twenty dollars - get this - from a fucking flea market. No telling how that fortune wound up lost or stolen, some collector or explorer likely had a kid hock it without knowing stones or their asshole from a hole in the ground.

"Instead of waiting any sort of time before the legal threshold for contesting ownership, he jumped on a ball he very well couldn't know would put us too close to these individuals twice. I'm sure there is a leak now."

Short pauses were seething. Long ones were raging he'd enact. These longest were something he had only seen once when a prostitute had gone forward to police with piss-poor evidence that Greg's son had raped her, the semen still in her, something easily buried in twelve years waiting time and court.

She'd been blocked from social media the moment she even tried to post the defamatory crime and its specifics, the court order literally set up to an app they used to expedite such processes not only printed immediately the moment she tried, but the woman would still be in the psychiatric hospital when the court date came.

The state would drop the case then, and she'd come out still in La-La-land a few weeks.

"This kid is only a burner someone is using, someone found one of those little anarchist bastards to use to toy with us, we've been played here Graham. Back off now before we overstep and cut our throats. We need to put as much time and space between us and these kids as possible. The real suckerpunch is waiting in the shadows.

"All we know now is that we have an enemy among us, one we can't fight when they have us by the short-hairs. This is on my end, I'm just going to have to hose the whole house until I find the source of the leak. Get those intelligence guys up and running for me, it's time to start leaking lies and telling truths, we'll see which sources come back with the same ratio of oil and water I give them."

Graham inhaled sharply, uneager to start running those sorts of operations state-side. They were harder in the third-world and impoverished countries and areas, unlike common theme dictated by hollywood, it was easier to run such operations in plain sight of high-density populations.

Urban people didn't trust or know everyone. Rural people were too stupid to know better.

These mercenaries never seemed like a threat, and never seemed like they were even working together.

That hollywood bullshit of agents stalking sites for days?

That was just logic for idiots to get excited over and imagine what an agent was like in ways they could relate to. But there was little secret revealed in how such really operated.

It was so much simpler in reality.

Tell a crackhead who to point and shoot at for brother benjamin when jonesing, the lackey who commits the crime of covering up your mess.

Abuse institutions people trusted, exploit through those vulnerable and untrustworthy in the systems.

Anarchists killed each other best.