As the instructor walked off, I pulled my Aerial from storage while adjusting my sleeve, strapping it on in one smooth motion. The device glowed the instant it touched my skin as it scanned my Crest, and I felt a click in my mind.

I tapped it a few times to get it into working order, feeling the connection grow stronger with every touch. I really could operate this thing with a mere thought. It was nice.

Abby leaned over and looked at it.

“Wow. Is that an Aerial? I’ve never seen one up close before. Are you a noble, John?”

“God no.”

“Those are really expensive.”

“I wouldn’t say they’re that expensive. Not compared to some of the other things I’ve had to buy. Seriously, the Capital drives you broke if you’re not careful.”

Once my Aerial had fully booted, I saw a message each from Umara, Feiden, and Tana. They were all finishing up their basic training as well. Umara was already getting transferred to her new assignment, near the frontlines, though not on it. Feiden and Tana were in similar situations.

I messaged them back, taking only a few seconds to send all three messages. With the speed of my mind, it was ridiculously easy to send and receive data. Unfortunately I still had to look at the thing. It was only a step away from becoming a fully-fledged neurally-linked computer.

Magic was insane.

Once that was done I set it down and looked back at Abby.

“Go ahead and be with your family, Abby. I’ve got some things to take care of before I leave.”

“Of course. Though, I have one small request, if you don’t mind…”

Abby glanced back at her parents with a bit of excitement.

“Could you… use your weapons? I know they’re dangerous but I can’t stop thinking about how cool they are.”

“Hm… I don’t see why not. They are pretty cool after all. Loud though.”

I smiled and took out a Lewis Gun, testing the slide a few times before slotting in a pan magazine.

“This is the Lewis Gun. It fires full-power cartridges at a rate of over 500 rounds per minute.”

I tossed Abby one of the bullets, her head tilting as her parents looked over.

“This thing?”

“Indeed. That little metal bit on top is launched out of this tube going two-thousand feet per second.”

“That sounds kind of impossible.”

“Better believe it.”

I raised the gun, pointing it over the walls at an angle. These rounds would fly well beyond the base.

I looked over.

“Cover your ears.”

“Yes! Dad, mom, hands over your ears.”

Abby, who knew how loud these things were, hurried her family to cover their ears.

Once they did, I pulled the trigger.

Explosions rattled from the gun, booming across the base. Spent casings fell from the gun in the same rhythm, little puffs of dust accompanying the tingling of brass before they simply vanished into wisps of Psyka. I saw a little flinch from one of the nearby instructors, who cut his conversation with a parent short and started storming over.

Once the pan was spent, I stopped, bringing down the smoking barrel of the gun with a smile.

Abby’s eyes were wide.

“... My ears hurt.”

“They’ll get better.”

“You could kill a lot of monsters with that thing.”

“Hell yeah. I basically just fired a hundred arrows. Only took ten seconds. You have that bullet I gave you?”

“Mm.”

Abby brought up the cartridge, giving it another curious inspection.

I watched her for a second before putting out my hand.

“Let me see that.”

“Aww, but I want to keep it. It’s interesting.”

“... It's dangerous. Let me.”

“B-But it’s the one thing I have to remember you by…”

Abby clutched the bullet and dodged my hand. I almost frowned, thinking it weird. I didn’t know she could be so persistent.

Perhaps realizing her mistake, she opened back up her hand, looking down at the bullet.

“... Would it really be so bad for me to keep it?”

“...”

I was silent, slowly approaching her while settling my Aura. I put on my best poker face, my hand rising to just under hers.

And then, with a bit of my own time dilation, I slipped the bullet out of her palm, sending it right back into my dimension.

Her eyes widened, unable to react. And because of that, I sensed a surge of anger when she looked up at me.

Uncharacteristic, I thought. It didn’t quite faze me, especially when I saw her calm down so quickly.

Weird.

“Sorry Abby. I don’t want you hurting yourself. There’s a reason my weapons are so deadly.”

“... Yeah.”

Her face fell as I walked off, waving to her parents.

“Good to meet you all. Enjoy your time together.”

“O-Of course, Mr. Cooper.”

They smiled as best they could, the situation having obviously turned awkward. They were probably disappointed that I treated their daughter like that instead of getting all fuzzy with her.

Well, I only gave bullets as promises. And now, seeing what I did, Abby’s trust for me disappeared entirely.

It was unfortunate. For a bit, I had actually taken a liking to her.

The instructor intercepted me on my way to my dorm and gave me a quick earful about firing the gun for a bit too, but I wasn’t really paying attention. Having not spotted Sein while making my over, I just continued after he finished lecturing.

I packed all the standard issue gear into the duffel they provided while throwing everything else into spatial storage.

From there, I went to the warehouse, where I grabbed my old clothes back from them. With that, I was ready to leave.

I made my way to the Terminal well before I had to be there. Since I had time, I ended up texting Umara for a while, working out the new functions of the Aerial.

Tomorrow she would be deployed to Nagalev Bastion, a familiar name. It was one of the earlier bases we had gone to on Magisterium excursions: relatively safe, but the rapidly changing frontline meant nothing was off limits.

Thinking, I brought up a data packet, something I hadn’t checked out since I got it.

The map the Puppet Master gave me while we ran from Anarchy detailed most of the frontlines while giving a general overview of the entire Kingdom.

Turns out, there was one particular landmark that separated the frontlines from the rest of the Kingdom. It was called the River of Desolation, a massive river that cut through the middle of the continent and acted as a dividing line between the Kingdom and its enemies. The frontlines were located beyond the north side of the river, holding back the Scourge to what could be considered their part of the continent. The Kingdom rested relatively safely on the southern half of the continent.

Purple Sky, which was now destroyed, was one base located deepest in the Scourge’s territory in the north. There were adjacent bases and forts, but even those were slightly behind Purple Sky. It was considered the first line of defense.

I could only imagine what was happening among those other bases. If Anarchy was leading the charge, then all those adjacent bases were probably gone by now. On the other hand, the Scourge wasn’t marching on Kingdom territory yet, so they had to be doing something right.

As for where the Church fell on the map, I had no idea. Very few Church establishments were displayed, one of the exceptions being the Holy See. I knew the Church had a military, but that was the extent of my knowledge.

Still, it was nice to see all the dividing lines. It gave me a better idea of how much room we had. It was clear though that if the Scourge made it over the River of Desolation, that would mark the beginning of the end.

An alarm sounded, interrupting my thoughts. The Rail glided to a stop in the Terminal, slowing to a halt before doors hinged open.

Some people walked out while some walked in. Others were leaving while some were simply unloading cargo.

“Next departure for Fort Octus!”

A conductor shouted through the terminal, so I walked up to him and handed him my ticket.

He checked it before handing it back.

“I was told about you, Ensign Cooper. Go ahead and board.”

“Yes sir.”

We saluted each other before I boarded. I just took one of the many seats on the sparse car, throwing my luggage beside me. It wasn’t long after before I felt the Rail move beneath me again.

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……

…

“Get off my Rail! All transfers, report to your commanding officer immediately! All fresh recruits, report to Commander Georro at the armory! Double time! We are under siege!”

Umara’s book snapped closed, a page of a dozen doodles disappearing amidst the massive stack that was her new scientific grimoire. Her gaze pierced the walls around her to find the towering Aura of the Scourge army in the distance.

They really were under siege. But this wasn’t anything like that led by Anarchy. This army was pitiful, hardly worth worrying about, and certainly nothing that she would stress herself over.

She stood, glancing at Tana beside her. Tana hoisted their bags as they made their way out.

“What’s the plan?” Tana asked as they slipped into the stream of people. Umara shrugged, grimoire disappearing into her personal spatial storage. “We do what we’re told. We need to report to Commander Georro.”

“I meant in general. You think we’ll even get the chance to prove ourselves? Your mother won’t let you do dangerous things.”

“I wouldn’t worry so much about that. My mother won’t have a choice. Unless she plans on posting me behind the River, we’ll encounter more than enough danger. Besides, they won’t have a choice either. If they think they can keep us out, then we’ll just have to pry our way in.”

“Lead the way.”

Tana fell into place behind Umara, her presence fading to nothing in the sea of people.

Umara smiled a bit as they walked. Whatever happened to Tana during her coma, it seemed to be extraordinarily beneficial to her Aura. They were now at the same level, but due to the path Tana seemed to have chosen, Umara couldn’t actually pick up on her if Tana didn’t want her to.

She initially noticed the phenomenon when Tana had killed that Heartstopper. She had appeared on its back as if manifesting from the ether. Nobody knew how she had gotten there undetected, not even John. The only issue was how she exposed herself when she attacked, something she couldn’t really control due to the power disparities.

Now though, Umara wasn’t sure how extensive those abilities were. No matter what though, she had chosen a path much like Johns, but dealing with completely vanishing versus illusions and trickery.

Umara’s fingers fluttered, micro vacuums appearing on the tips before sputtering away.

She had yet to choose her own path. There was ample opportunity to think, given she hadn’t really been forced one particular way. Even Feiden had a developing path. He was always one for speed, and, according to Tana, there was no way he couldn’t now project blades of Vigor like the genius Ponteck. They were also close to breaching Authority Six.

But her? She had all this scientific knowledge exposing the secrets of the universe, the talent of her mother guaranteeing her rise to at least Authority 11, as well as the incredible tempering of her Aura by Anarchy. The possibilities, the paths she could travel, were limitless. She’d be grateful for all the options if that didn’t also make it much more difficult to find her way.

And frankly, she didn’t feel like she had a lot of time to figure it out. Not only was there the pressure of her friends, but her Aura was making her anxious in a way a Scourge siege never could.

Was this what John always felt like? She felt like she was getting a glimpse at the incessant paranoia that John once felt, the overwhelming demand for progress, the fear of falling behind and losing everything.

It seemed she wasn’t alone in feeling like John. Even Tana had told her something about it recently, which meant that Feiden, and likely Vetsmon, were all feeling it too.

If it kept up, she couldn’t imagine what they would all look like a year or so from now. She had to make sure that when the time came, she would be an irreplaceable part of their team, and finding her path would be the first step toward making that happen.

Umara and Tana weren’t the only ones to report to Commander Georro. There were many from other forts who had just undergone basic training. All of them, however, were at least Authority 4. Only the ones with some power were sent here.

Once they arrived, they found Georro shouting out orders from the armory. They approached and saluted.

“Ensign Talerria and Ensign Choron reporting for duty, sir!”

“Talerria? Drop your bags off in…” He flipped through his clipboard. “Residential Block 3. You’ll head up the wall and join Section 3. Your partner can join the repulsion forces below.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Before you go though.”

The Commander sifted through his pocket, pulling out a pair of pins and insignia.

“Congratulations, Corporal Talerria and Corporal Choron. Your performance thus far has been exemplary. Just remember that paperwork usually takes a few days to process.”

“... Thank you, sir. We won’t let you down.”

Umara and Tana saluted once more, taking the pins and insignia. It hadn’t even been ten minutes and they had already been promoted twice.

Their rank still didn’t match their Authority, but rising in ranks took both power and responsibility. It would take time before Umara was allowed to do things like lead her own squads or platoon.

From what she knew, formal promotions didn’t even start until one was slated to become a First Sergeant, the Authority Six equivalent. Until then, they were more like a whim, handed out in order to quickly catch a powerful soldier like her up to her equivalent rank.

Once she got to Master Sergeant, the promotions would slow and follow her power.

When the conversation finished, she and Tana left to go find resident block 3. Only after traversing half the base did they finally find the blocks.

Resident block 3 was one of the nicer blocks, certainly better than what their Corporal status should afford. But Umara didn’t care. She’d take whatever the Talerria name gave and run with it. Anything to eliminate potential roadblocks and speed up her progress. Plus, there was no reason she saw to deal with being uncomfortable or put on airs.

After entering the block they went through the rooms. Each one had a pair of name tags on the door, so when they found one without tags, they entered and set themselves up.

“When are we going out?”

Tana threw her bag onto a table, Umara responding.

“Today? I’m not. The siege is already past its climax. I’ve got more important things to work on instead of standing out there for the next five hours.”

Umara brought out one of her books while looking through her Aura. She could feel the intensity of the siege, and it was only going down. Tension was dropping, so she didn’t have to worry about it. As for the order from the Commander, well, she wouldn’t get in trouble for spending some time settling in. And by the time anyone thought about it, she wouldn’t be needed.

Tana shrugged.

“Okay then. I’ll go though. My training is out there. Unless you need me.”

“No, thank you. I’ve just got more studying to do.”

“...”

Tana watched Umara start to flip through the book. It had no title on the cover and was generally unmarked except for diagrams and pages of text within.

She got curious, walking over to read some of it. Umara didn’t mind, pretending like she was reading as normal while settling on a topic.

Tana read aloud.

“The three modes of energy transfer, expressed as conduction, convection, and radiation, can be generally narrowed down to the two principles that only physical mediums in contact and radiation can transfer energy. Fire and flame, or combustion, occurs among gas which is a fluid and thus falls under the category of convection. It only differentiates from conduction due to the difference in behavior between solids and liquids and gases. But the fact remains that if you want to transfer energy from one thing to another, you either need to make them touch or radiate to bridge the distance.

“This principle brings into question the nature of the Fire element. Fire is only a natural chemical process, a chain reaction that releases the energy contained between certain chemical bonds. There are plenty of reactions that release energy just like fire does, some that do so with millions of times the intensity (see section on nuclear reactions). So I ask myself, having seen the variety and extensive applications of singular elements, what else does the Fire element hold jurisdiction over? What physical phenomenon would fall under that ‘element?’ My immediate answer is the transfer of energy. If that answer is true, then the Fire element holds, by far, the most extensive array of physical interactions of any element, and by extension, the most powerful and destructive, the levels of which very few have likely ever understood. But this conclusion compels me to narrow my view, almost unwilling to believe that one element withholds such a broad concept. It would render all other elements almost obsolete. And so, the further sections are dedicated toward hypothesizing various phenomena, why they may fall under the element conceptually, and what about their specific functions would justify their place under said element…”

Tana scanned all the words, sometimes multiple times, yet still not understanding most of it. Some were just outright foreign while others implied much more complex definitions that she didn’t know of.

But a few lines stuck out, and pointed her in an interesting direction.

“He’s trying to define the Fire element? Is that even possible?”

Tana was a bit dumbfounded. The very nature of magic essentially stipulated that anything was possible, and that there were many unique paths that could all take a warlock everywhere, nowhere, and sometimes to the same places. It was so hard to definitively define any singular path toward learning magic that, to this day, they still couldn’t definitively guide a warlock toward understanding an element.

All warlocks were essentially left to try and comprehend everything on their own. Only the vaguest concepts were able to guide them in a general direction, but beyond that, they had nothing to help them except the spells they often used as milestones of comprehension. But spells, due to their nature, were reductions in the comprehension of an element and couldn’t be used as direct teachers.

So to read that there was a potentially definitive way to define an element by what it held ‘jurisdiction’ over was ridiculous at best, not to mention it came from a summoner with no knowledge of elemental comprehension.

Umara puffed out her chest a bit.

“Mm. And he’s succeeding, even if he doesn’t realize it himself. I won’t truly be able to test his hypotheses in-depth until I perfect my fire comprehension, but even now I can associate certain comprehensions with what he’s talking about and develop spells. If the spells can be developed at all, then he’s correct. If they can’t, then either I’m not strong enough yet, or we’ve narrowed down the jurisdictions of the elements more. The only issue is how complex and small some of this stuff is getting. We’re dealing with scales so tiny and yet so comprehensive that I’m having trouble developing spells without some serious buffering on my Foci’s part.”

Umara brought out her staff, looking at the crystal on its end.

The Foci helped warlocks buffer their spells so that the smallest mistakes didn’t lead to a catastrophic collapse. The more advanced ones even allowed them to multiply output by mimicking the spells as they were being made, turning one spell into five or six.

But even with a relatively advanced staff, Umara was pushing its limits. She had already hit its buffer ceiling several times, and it often led to collapses of the spell formations.

Which meant she either needed a better Foci, or she needed to change the way she approached spell formation.

Tana rubbed her chin.

“Can’t you just use Aura to compensate for the buffering?”

“Not really. Aura still relies on the mind to process information, and my mind isn’t like John’s. Plus, the buffering doesn’t address the crux of the issue.”

“Which is?”

“The sheer complexity. Even disregarding the buffer issues, collecting all that information is asinine. Most of it is redundant, but I don’t know that until I collect it. It's a nasty cycle keeping me from making spells.”

“Huh. So you just need to use Aura to collect the information, right? If you can see it with your Aura first, then you don’t have to worry about figuring out which is redundant or not and filter it before it even gets to you.”

“...”

Umara looked up from her book, tilting her head.

That was right, in a sense. What passed as sight for Aura was an odd combination of sensing sources of energy and piecing together magical interferences.

At least, that’s how Umara understood it. But she remembered John's stunt clearly while he was getting his Crown. An image of him projected in her Aura through his, similar to telepathy, but much more thorough. Perhaps that was the first step toward transferring visual information via Aura.

Either way, she knew that she could see with Aura. As John said, it was like a magic limb. It could do anything, become anything.

And suddenly, thanks to Tana, she was getting ideas.

She brought out another book, flipping the pages until she landed on a specific section.

“Precision, and what it means to be precise.”

She scanned the title, clenching her fist.

Normally, she wouldn’t know what to look for. Finding a direction was always the hardest part of advancing. But if she was having issues with complexity, and she knew exactly what to look for to gather the information she needed and rectify her troubles with spell formations…

She just had to do it.

She looked beside her at the bed, and suddenly, all the materials around her, from the solids of the sheets to the gasses in the air, started sharpening and turning into different colors and textures, taking on their own distinct properties.

Her eyes dilated, the hairs on her arms rising and goosebumps blooming all over.

Precision, dividing the world into all its constituent parts and properties, and revealing so much information that before long, her nose started to bleed. A few seconds after that, her vision started to redden. And yet, the elements all around her only became sharper.

“Umara?”

“Huh?”

Umara shook her head, looking at Tana as all the detail faded.

Tana stepped closer, touching near Umara’s eye and finding blood.

Then, with a widening grin, Umara grabbed Tana’s arms, ecstasy on her face.

“I oughta kiss you, girl.”

“Huh? Are you okay? Did Anarchy get to you again?”

“Haha! I just found the answer thanks to you! Come here!”

“H-Hey…”

Tana backed away, Umara moving forward with puckered lips.

After laughing some more, Tana left, though only after some reassurances that Umara was okay.

And she was more than okay. She was ecstatic.

The path she was looking for. What better way to use scientific knowledge than through complexity and precision? She needed to perceive more than just what her senses could if she wanted to manipulate the elements and use them as John described. She could only wield physical phenomena, chemical reactions and reconfigurations, if she could see the parts of those processes in the first place.

The only issue was that it was straining, hence why she was bleeding. But anything could be solved with enough training. And now, she finally knew what to train toward.

She brought back up her book, buckling down and entirely disregarding her military duties for the time being.