I was carefully working on another set of a new martial art I was trying to work into my basic training, a modification of Tai Chi called ‘Daoist Tai Chi’. It was weird since it was a lot more about emotional attitudes and balance than the strictly physical and energy aspects of traditional Tai Chi, but I already had a pretty strong foundation in hard and soft styles, and I needed a lot more of an emotional grounding than I did energy and dantian flow techniques after… whatever happened with Frost Phoenix.

Mostly because my emotional control, the tight reign I was holding over my reactions, was starting to fray. It didn’t help that when I came out of my self-imposed mental exile, I was busily kissing Frost Phoenix and hadn’t even realized it. Without wearing any clothes or armor.

I mean, we were not DOING anything but damned if I wasn’t ready to teleport someplace private and go for it, and based on her own reactions, even if we hadn’t shared a single word, she probably wouldn’t have protested.

That was not me. I’d never been one of those ‘is this okay?’ every step types, but I was NOT going to jump some girl that might be mentally, emotionally, or physically compromised.

Unless, of course, that compromising was something we’d already decided on. Honestly, I knew damned well that the wall I’d built against a repeat of what happened with Christine was likely to come down eventually. Maybe it was my innate chauvinism or machismo or something, but I think I figured out what was bothering me so much.

Every single girl I met was more of a man than I was.

I know some people would be thinking that was shallow, that it was just my insecurity speaking, and they’d be right. But that didn’t matter. Every girl I’d been with starting with Christine had been basically better than me in every way, and mostly I’d been utterly aware of that fact from day one.

Now? Heh. Not that anything had changed in the slightest, but I was beginning to realize that it wasn’t my attitude but my understanding that was flawed. My Paranoia was absolutely justified.

Christine’s reaction was probably absolutely appropriate. I mean, I hadn’t been qualified to run my dad’s company. Hell, I’d barely be able to keep the trucks refueled.

And that left the second part. The part where she, and my cousin, had just led me along to doing something unbelievably stupid. The worst part was that it made logical sense… from a certain point of view. It was one of those cases where the right and legal thing to do was also immoral.

James needed and wanted something, and he was powerful, charismatic, and clever enough to get it, that was my share of the voting stock. To be fair, he didn’t have a problem with girls more powerful than him, it didn’t cause him the same sort of funk as it did me, both because he was at the top of his career, and never was interested in gaining powers or being some kind of celebrity.

Christine falling for that when he turned his magnetism on her was natural. Not that it excused what she did, but it was a hell of a lot more complicated than I thought.

I couldn’t claim to be an expert on women, but I understood pretty well how social status worked. As long as I convinced myself I was no better than a glorified stevedore, a fence-sitting middle manager, and a convenience for my team, well, that’s what I would project. Self-reinforcement at its best.

Of course, the fact that my new helmet was reading ‘3300’ and I was drawing energy through my rebuilt suit and into my body probably helped. I felt strong, and I was strong, and while I still wouldn’t try to arm-wrestle Candace, the newly installed synthetic myofibril myocytes were able to resist my movements, and the charge created from that resistance was now visible in the mark one control panel.

I wasn’t going to try and use the myocytes to ‘increase’ my available strength and leverage except on a case-by-case basis, like taking a hit that would otherwise smash through the impact reduction might cause it to trigger for rigid stability for a moment rather than allowing my ribs to get pulverized.

But the whole ‘power armor’ thing was just a basket of crabs I wasn’t ready to touch. Not out of any moral or ethical or ‘showing your true strength’ thing, but just because the control systems were a nightmare that I didn’t want to get involved with, especially the ones needed to avoid hurting myself and others by accident.

I mean, honestly, you can build about a million toys into power armor, weapon systems, nonlethals, and flight… why do you also need to increase your reactions past your own body’s ability to handle it or throw in enough strength to smash someone into a thin layer of jelly with your steel-encased fists?

But hey, there was no accounting for tastes. I guess at some point I might have to create a strength-enhancing version, if only because the police could probably use a better version for their intercept teams. It was just the whole ‘hurt yourself through overextension’ thing that would take, not software defenses, but hardware limits.

Yesterday, while we were preparing for the match that I guess we lost, Abbey had been working on getting a very dumbed-down version of Ubuntu running on the hardware, something that supposedly mimicked tablet functionality, while still offering access to some very old tuning software that she thought we could beat into accessing the quantum comms we were using now.

Not well, it was still just on and off for each station, meaning the six suits, but it was there and it could modulate, squelch, and record voice, the three most important features, and the core for more advanced features. Some day. If someone could create them.

I had come back out of my trance when our cores were stabilized, although I had noticed that Katie, or Frost Phoenix, was still out of it and probably would be for some time. She was conscious, sort of, but she kept moaning and trying to snuggle into my chest until I’d finally apported both of us to the clinic and got her installed in a bed and both of us in scrubs.

And then I tested the changes, using the Myocytes and the new text file builder that recorded their energy build-up and put it into terms I could understand, meaning not in hexadecimal. Right now, if I tried to do a bench press, I am not sure if I could get enough weights on a standard set to challenge me. If I had to use old Dungeons and Dragons terms, I’d call my strength something like twenty, with a good eight hundred pounds max press. Thank you, body refinement! I wouldn’t dare to try and arm-wrestle Candace, but I was pretty sure I could take on a class two physical alpha, maybe even most class threes.

“So what did I do, exactly?” I asked Sabrina, who was watching me as I panted my way through a set in the exercise room. Daoist Tai Chi was a lot less about moving the energy and more about FEELING it, and how it interacted with your body and, in my case, my meridians or energy points, including the ones that interacted with areas I didn’t really understand. Dao Tai Chi was even further away from a combat art than traditional Tai Chi, but it was definitely more on track with the energy rather than just combat.

Sabrina was the closest thing to an expert on cultivation we had, and was, even if unintentionally, helping me translate the documents that the Serenoids had vacated. The more I studied them, the more I was convinced that they had been brought intentionally, perhaps as some sort of trade item, because, while they included simple flow patterns for creatures with six arms and three fingers per arm, those flow patterns were easily adjustable for fewer limbs with more digits. Right now, I could hit with my fists filled with energy flow nearly hard enough to dent my own multiplayer hardened plates.

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And, according to my current testing, that was the least of things. My enhanced three-foot range of direct influence? It was now almost eight feet. Eight friggin’ feet. I had no idea how much overall mass I could affect now, but I was eager to find out. I mean, an eight-foot range might not seem like much, but only a few months ago it had only been a few inches, and that was the range within which my abilities could have a DIRECT effect… indirect effects were as far as I could manage.

Sabrina tapped her teeth with one fingernail, a reaction I was trying not to pay attention to. On most of the other girls, I would assume it was an intentional habit to draw attention to their mouth, but Sabrina was oddly… innocent. She just did sexy things without realizing what she was doing, I think.

“Did you drain her energy?”

I shook my head, “No, but our energy patterns were damned close. The minute she stopped pulling energy from the source, her refinement dropped, but her personal energy pressure skyrocketed, and she reclaimed what was...leaking before my soul space could shatter.”

“This was after you healed her, right? You were in close physical contact?”

I nodded, “Technically, my microkinesis overloaded from her energy spillage. Lots of skin contact since I picked her up to keep her kinetics from interacting with the ground where I didn’t have enough mass control to stop, and I sort of disintegrated parts of my armor. Technically I was still wearing parts of my pants, mostly because of the density of my… special protection, but she’d burned off her entire costume.”

She nodded, “So you traded energy, that was on a similar wavelength, but you didn’t drain her, and she didn’t drain you.”

I sighed, “I think, if it were even a few weeks ago, she would have. Her soul space is smaller than mine, but her energy density was a lot higher because of her connection to the ether, it actually helped form mine into a liquid and stabilize it, and our soul space fractures.”

“Did you kiss her?”

I shook my head, “No, I was kind of busy not dying, exploding, or killing her at the time. Well, not until afterward, I think.”

Sabrina nodded, her dark hair bouncing slightly. “I think what you were doing was a lesser form of dual cultivating.”

I looked at her in confusion as I recovered into one of the Taijiquan, using it as a springboard to do a lightweight boxing combo and stance. The reality was, that the smooth flow from one style to another seemed as much about balancing energy as the Yang and Dao Tai Chi forms, but… then again, I wasn’t exactly built like your typical Eastern martial artist, and mixing in both hard and soft forms led to both decent damage and incredibly fast reactions.

Tai Chi was absolutely helping with my cultivation, to the point where the tunnel was almost overkill, but hard styles like boxing and savate were helping me keep my energy running and building my body too. It was having especially odd effects on my bones because it felt like every single time I struck something with energy flowing through and enhancing them, my bones gained a bit of that energy, shivered, and altered slightly, becoming durable the same way that resistance training in Muy Thai and endurance training in kickboxing forced your body to improve.

As I said, I wasn’t really a master of anything, but I had a bit of training in a bunch of different stuff, and as time went by and my training enhanced my body, all of the little bits of martial arts I stuck together because they suited my style and body were becoming better interwoven and flowed more smoothly.

I guess I’d call it Doyle-style boxing. A boxing art named after an Irish fighter was not exactly a new concept and wouldn’t surprise anyone until they had to fight against it.

“I thought you said dual cultivating was sex.”

She shook her head, “No, it uses sex as the medium for cultivation. Sexuality, primarily. It also brings people’s energies closer. Like it or not, Frost Phoenix is going to be closer to you. She won’t be able to help it any more than you will, and you will both be able to cultivate better when you are together. You need to be careful, though… she is used to pulling hellish amounts of raw energy from the abyss and then refining it… make sure you don’t let her use YOU as a cultivating vessel by mistake!”

“Is that possible?”

She nodded, “Possible but unlikely, as long as you are aware. You have a lot better energy control than she does, as well as a much stronger cultivation method, since technically she doesn’t have one other than a basic instinctual method right now. So I guess that means you have two choices.”

“I get a feeling I am not going to feel particularly comfortable with either of those.”

She nodded, “One involves keeping her close, the other one involves pushing her away. To be honest, I have no reason to be on your team directly. I couldn’t give the slightest damn about my position in the rankings, I am fairly useless to the team until we can get some materials, and my progression is chemical. I’d suggest putting her on your active team in my place.”

“I don’t even know if we still have a team, and I am not sure she’s going to give up her own team to join ours,” I said, starting to cool down and grabbing a towel to sponge myself off.

She smiled slightly, “I have no idea if the experience is different between men and women, but getting nearly perfectly dao-aligned essence infused into your dantian is somewhat transcendent. While it was possible she will reject it, it seems very unlikely.”

“So this uhh… dual cultivation only works if you have closely aligned dao?”

She shook her head, “Non-invasive, yes. Invasive cultivators using someone as a cultivation vessel can forcefully alter their root before stealing their roots and cultivation base. Technically that can also be used to repair a broken or weak base, but I’ve never seen it used that way.”

I sighed, “Great, so now I'm technically a rapist.”

She shook her head, “Not any more than someone who uses mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save someone’s life. You are doing it again.”

“Doing what again?” I asked, refitting my newish armor. At least I’d been able to recycle the pieces of the old stuff, and with the material handy, it had only taken me a few hours to re-craft it.

“Taking responsibility for something you had no control over. She had barely any control over her power, utilizing it in one of the most crude ways I have seen. I mean, come on, kinetic alteration? You were able to use it a thousand ways with almost no energy. What did she use it for? To move really fast by absorbing it. And the moment the kinetics shifted, what would you have done?”

I sighed, “Re-absorbed the energy or redirected the kinetic load.”

She nodded, “She just burned. Over a hundred Alphas kill themselves through foolishness every single year, your only sin was denying her destiny to become another statistic. You said it yourself in the van… It is not your responsibility to take the blame for other’s crimes or mistakes.”

I nodded, “Responsibility or not, She’s still going to be on my problems list.”

Sabrina laughed, “You are one of the few men I know that would refer to a bunch of attractive women chasing him as a problems list.”

I nodded, “Yeah, but at least I figured out the problem.”

She raised an eyebrow, “Really? Care to share?”

I nodded, “Sure. I am not fond of girls who are more powerful than me. Maybe it’s my man thing, You know, I have to drive, beat my chest, make grunting noises, pay for dinner, and be the big gorilla in the relationship. Do I find someone like Chinook attractive? Absolutely, but not enough to shut off my brain, ego, and common sense. She is trouble I don’t need.”

She nodded and finished setting up her own costume. Mine was a bit bulkier than hers now, but she had zero interest in the myocytes and without a little enhancement, the slightly heavier plated sections were a little too confining for comfort. Still, she looked damned good in the costume as we headed towards Kaiju tactics. She had mentioned a couple of fascinating ideas earlier, and I intended to make them happen.

Yeah, the whole ‘better living through chemistry’ idea that was central to a lot of cultivation fiction was a bit of a turn-off, but I would be highly interested in seeing what her powers could do with some of the herbal concoctions she could mix. That meant getting her out of the city, and probably into a high-essence zone filled to the brim with the most hideous and horrible monsters available… Jersey Shore.