It’s not as though you’re actually moving so quickly you leave a literal afterimage. Even if you could move at the speed of light - and you can’t, seeing as the laws of mass times acceleration logically culminate in any material carrying mass requiring a literally infinite supply of energy to match that speed - it still wouldn't be sufficient. You would have to theoretically surpass that speed to leave a conventional outline of the light that reflected off of your body and was interpreted by enemy eyes as your being. In short, the afterimages you see in your comics and anime aren’t feasible even within the realm of fantasy. the dragons told Richie as he took stock of his tools.
“But, clearly they are, though, seeing as I’m doing them. Quick bursts of super speed seem to be the main point of Level 2, right?” Richie asked.
Yes, along with heightened reflexes, flexibility, and acrobatic ability. The four levels, as you’ve deemed them, which constitute the staging of draconic power we share together symbolically reflect four gifts our creator bequeathed to you, cast off from his own flesh and blood. You have the wind under his wings, the vistas flying away beneath him, his impenetrable hide, and his indomitable strength.
“Your creator… his own flesh and blood? So what the Faceless Man said about my father being the one who grafted you guys onto me, that was true?”
Something like that.
“Then what exactly does that make me? The way you described the levels, that abstract shit only fits if-”
If you break it down piece by piece. Take the wind under his wings. Our wings. Your wings. Level 1, which enhances your fists with our skulls, is not purely an aesthetic change, as you’ve seen. Our muzzles gather the wind when we are thrust as you punch. The aerodynamic form of the azure dragon we are modeled after is suited to slicing through the clouds at mach speeds, sailing the sky on shining wings. Not only are winds parted, but so too are they manipulated, and thrown outward. You understand the mechanics of an explosion, yes?
“Boom.” Richie said.
How dull. In layman’s terms, an explosion is, at its most basic, a sudden, violent outward surge of energy. This surge, or blast, has the same principle no matter how much you increase its scale, from tiny firecrackers, to atomic bombs. In the case of the latter, and other military explosives, you can see the mechanics at play on a morbidly functional level. Anything can be a bomb, with or without shrapnel. Volcanic tremors and eruptions, overfilled truck tires suddenly blowing, even the beat of certain whale hearts are sufficient to cause fatal hollow organ damage. This is because of the effects of a shockwave. In an explosion, as with bombs, the rapid outward surge pushes everything around it in the target radius outward and away at high velocity. Debris, victims caught in the blast, yes, but also the air itself. Air is not without material, although it is invisible under most circumstances. Tornadoes are air, dyed by the dust and debris that marks their path. Clouds are air, and water vapor. Air carries vital oxygen to your lungs, and into your system with every breath you take. In this world, air is a vital element, and one you can easily underestimate when you think of it as invisible. An explosion displaces the air outward. When dealing with large-scale explosive devices, this wave violently interacts with the hollow organs inside an organic body. The pressure change rips you apart from the inside out.
“You know, I missed Hiroshima by a few generations to say the least, you didn’t have to take me back and give me the cliff notes in gory detail, you long winded fucks.” Richie sighed.
Long winded? Was that an air pun?
“Could have been.” Richie shrugged.
It sucked.
“Fuck you. Go on?”
Very well. In principle, the punches you use in Level 1 are directed, localized explosions, or sonic booms, propelling the air in front of your knuckles, encased in our likeness, quickly enough and with sufficient force to form damaging shockwaves. The beings whose likeness we were painted in also have finer control over the air and wind. By vibrating our scales, we can siphon it as a power source, or store it to expel later. Increase the rapidity of those vibrations, and we gather more air. Refine control of it, and that air can be spread as a thin layer over the body, deflecting outward, to subtly ward off incoming blows or projectiles, or thrust the wind under your feet to enhance your jumping ability. Or, as you learned in the woods, you can extend this aerokinetic armor to objects and weapons in your immediate vicinity for a short while, as when you enhanced the ax’s edge.
“Blue bitch used air attacks too, I think. She swung aerial slashes out from her blade. Were those shockwaves too, like my airballs?” Richie asked.
Not quite, the mechanism was different. So far as we can tell, she possesses no direct control over the air. Her elemental affinity, as you can see plainly, is of the ice and cold. However, like you, she can extend her elemental energy to a medium - in her case, a katana. She likely understands the properties of cold inside and out, as though it were second nature, to use ice as precisely as she does. A culmination of years of training, most likely. Cold carries weight.
“The fuck are you on about? How can temperature differences weigh anything?”
Don’t be naive. You understand that hot air rises, and cold air sinks? It’s why hot spring mist, or smoke, float into the sky. Knowing this law of nature is a key part of surviving incidents such as house fires, when smoke fills the air. Standing in it invites suffocation. Clever survivors crouch low to the ground, or crawl, where there is a layer of breathable air. The air they breathe is proportionally cold compared to the heated suspension of burning particles that comprise smoke. Do you understand?
“Yes, I think so.” Richie said. “So, cold air sinks. It’s heavier. You can skip ahead a bit, I’m just going to flush most of the science lecture the moment I go to the next thing. Keep it simple and relevant to how our abilities work, if you don’t mind.”
We are. Cold air is heavier. If it gets cold enough, it is also thicker. Take blizzards, or lake fog. What that woman is doing is extending the range of her freezing aura through her sword when she cuts the air. The extreme cold, focused in the area of the stroke, condenses the air into a current that is tangible enough to deflect at high speeds with the stroke of the slash itself. She creates her own ammunition as she swings, and her ability to briefly control the ice constructs she detaches from her aura also means that she can will the displaced air blades to retain their cutting edge until they hit the target. Because it isn’t directly connected to her, or comprised of her more familiar, controllable ice and snow, these air slashes last only long enough to hit their target. And even then, because they lack the mass of the actual sword itself - metal - they tend toward more superficial damage. The situational uses also differ. She obviously uses the air primarily to cut, acting as an extension of her swordsmanship skills, while the aerokinesis you boast while enjoying the perks of Level 1 is used primarily to enhance and inflict blunt force or ballistics damage. The airballs you punch across the arena are essentially instant bombs.
“So I’m the bomb?” Richie asked.
Are you even trying? We expected this lowbrow idiocy from the puppeteer. Coming from you, it’s just pathetic. And a little disturbing.
“Tell you what - you get to your fucking point, and I’ll spare you any further attempts at humor.” Richie sneered.
Level 2 is the next step up from Level 1, as straightforward as the numbering indicates. When you switch between the four levels, you are not entering different modes of draconic physiology - you are building upon prior ones. However, as these abilities stack, the focus and assets are de facto hardened into other traits. Level 2 combines the principles of the wind with the enhanced leg muscles, core, reflexes, and perceptions of the dragon. Altogether, it enables you to move and react much faster than a baseline human, so long as you can perceive your surroundings and keep track of them. Keeping track is the core concept here as well, for it isn’t just your body that gains a speed increase - your eyes become pinpoint sensors as well. You cannot consciously perceive the signals your optics send to your primal brain - your reptile brain,
“Now you’re the ones making shitty puns. Reptile - dragon?” Richie raised an eyebrow.
Silence, knave. they said defensively. Blindsight is a phenomenon in which the functionally blind can sometimes unconsciously perceive and react to stimuli their eyes pass over. That same principle is heightened in your Level 2 form. Your dragon’s eyes can see the rhythm of other bodies, see the electric impulses heralding the contractions and expansions of their muscles, even see the neurons firing in their brains, and the light gathering in their eyes. Your body, on a kind of biological autopilot, is able to create pre programmed responses to the sensory data that predicts what moves your enemies will make. If the data indicates someone is about to lunge toward you, your dragon instinct sends the signal to your legs to move automatically, dodging you out of harm’s way apart from your direct input. However, not only are you perceiving the minute and infinitesimal telegraphing signals of your opponents - you are also able to implant those perceptions in those same targets.
“What? You mean, like, I beam an illusion into their heads or something? Is that where you’re going with all this? The afterimages, I mean?” Richie scratched his head.
You scratch your head compulsively when you’re confused or nervous. You should be aware of that particular tic, twofold because it betrays a poker face, but, more importantly as far as you’re concerned, at least two females find it cute on you. Seeing your chronic fear of incurring proverbial cooties, we suggest you learn to keep a better lid on your body language.
“Mind your own business! I don’t judge you for your shortcomings!” Richie snapped.
We have no shortcomings.
“You-!”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Moving on. You do in fact create afterimages when you perform that special dodging technique at top speed. However, you are neither exceeding the speed of light, nor creating physical illusions, as with desert mirages. You are performing a far more complex feat. There are blindspots and gaps in both optic biological systems, and how they integrate visual information into the brain. Your nose is always right in front of your eyes, but you generally do not perceive it unless you voluntarily notice it. The brain edits the image out of your line of sight to better observe your environment. The same principle applies to other periphery information, and explains the gray area of peripheral vision. You can see things outside your conscious sight, but you also edit out sights the brain deems useless constantly. In the events of traumatic run-ins with violent criminals, eyewitness testimony and suspect lineups are notoriously unreliable, because human brains are not well-equipped for objectivity. Shock and distress alter their perceptions, and they can create false memories all too easily under duress, or simply over the sea of time as the years stack up. There are gaps in visual processing. You, in Level 2, are able to weaponize this chink in the armor of your enemy’s perceptions. By moving, at high speed, in exact, subliminal ways, when you perform your afterimage dodge, you move between the frames of the brain’s camera. What you call vision is basically the brain rapidly integrating still shots from the eyes into one cohesive composite. That’s why it edits out blights. The way you move registers as one of those blights, and enforces a kind of deadlock in the brain. Your physical body has already long sprung from that spot, but it takes your enemy precious moments to stop seeing you there. You burn your image into their minds.
“What the fuck is this science fiction nonsense?!? I call bullshit, there’s no frickin’ way I can move that perfectly to glitch out someone’s brain reliably every time I pull that quick escape trick! I’d have to be moving faster than sight, that’s-”
Strictly speaking, the speed at which objects cannot register to the human eye is in excess of Mach 11. I would, at the generous estimate, place your top speed in Level 2 at Mach 1 or 2, in extremely brief instants verging on microseconds. However, the speed of sight is not exclusively defined by literal speed. It is situational. If you can escape while someone’s back is turned, and be gone when they look for you, you could make an argument that you are moving faster than sight. The same goes for your afterimage fakeout. And as we’ve said, your body is primed for peak dragon reflexes in this state. You have autonomous control over your movements for the bulk of your time in this state, but when you react on impulse, particularly to perform the afterimage swap, autopilot takes over and performs the nuanced movements, combined with great swiftness, that you cannot do consciously. Thinking about it is a waste of time. By the time the electricity in your brain conveys the message that you want to move, it has already taken too much time to psyche out your opponent’s visual integration. You could say that it isn’t just your opponent you trick with an afterimage - you yourself are dazed when you snap out of the reflex. Like the tiger beetle, whose proportionally extraordinary sprinting speed exceeds the speed of its own thought, forcing it to stop and reorient itself before it can move again.
“So, what I’m getting from this is that I can’t even predict when I’m going to swap out for an afterimage, and don’t realize I’ve done it until I’m already out of the way.”
Or in the way. the dragons amended.
“That’s right, O’Gravy! Cuppy…” Richie remembered how he had intercepted Cuppy’s kamikaze flight into O’Gravy’s charge, and how he had thrown the puppeteer out of the way of the blow and taken it in full himself.
Even if the boy’s internal sutures had not come undone midair and paralyzed you from defending yourself, there was little you could have done. Like the pre-programmed responses your heightened reflexes have to move you in preset directions based on the movements of your opponent, you could not alter course once you had traded places with Cuppy. Yet, your reflex, which from a Darwinian perspective should have been triggered only to move you out of harm’s way, instead sprung you into the brunt of a crushing blow. You protected your comrade, at great cost to yourself. Altruistic behavior is not exclusively an aberrant pattern seen in human beings, but your species is perhaps the most common to exemplify and exalt such actions. But, we don’t think morality or high-minded ideals were what was going through your mind when you put your life on the line to save your comrade. You yourself disdain moral preconceptions, and the hypocrisies that come with them. The police who are sworn to protect and serve have only ever given you grief, the charity and compassion that flocks of religious preach is never extended to you even as you starve and freeze, and the rights of property owners are protected with brute force over your physiological needs for food, shelter, and resources. You have been trapped in an animalistic cycle of being victimized, and victimizing others to survive. Such predilections don’t lend themselves towards suddenly throwing the life you clung to so bitterly away for a, as you would say, fruitcake, you’d barely known a few weeks at most. So, why, do you think, your instinct was to trade places with that boy when the leprechaun came swinging?
“Are you fucking retarded?!” Richie yelled all of a sudden. “You talk with a lot of big fancy words and can lecture me about human nature and design inside and out all day long, but at the end of it all, you still don’t grasp what makes us human, do you? What separates even someone like me from that freak in the costume, cutting people up for shits and giggles?!”
Oh? This line of questioning drives you to anger?
“Of course it does! He was going to die if I didn’t block the hit for him!”
So what?
Richie felt himself trembling with rage. “So what? He helped me when I needed it! He took the chance first, without any promise of a reward! He was the first person since my mom - not counting Freyja, come to think of it - to treat me with basic human kindness and decency! He didn’t care that I was a thief, or rude, or volatile, he just saw someone who was hurt and spent the day taking care of them! For someone like me!”
So the case you’re making is for mutualism? Equivalent exchange?
“No, goddammit! I -”
-
Richie tutted. “What makes you think I want to talk to anyone? No one asked you.”
“I dunno, just a guess. I mean, since you are talking to me, after all.” Cuppy said.
“Don’t get the wrong idea, I just want to know what’s going on. Why did you drag me out of that forest to patch me up?” Richie demanded.
“Do I need a reason? You needed help.” Cuppy answered.
Richie could feel the boy shrug. He gave a bitter chuckle, adopting a wry grin that didn’t match his sad eyes. “Lots of people need help. Someone’s starving or dying in a gutter every day, and the world keeps turning with or without them. If you stopped to help every fly stuck in a web, you’d never see the end of it.”
-
“I don’t need a reason to risk my life for a friend. He needed help, and I didn’t want him to die. No more, no less. Maybe it’s selfless, maybe it’s actually selfish cause it still comes down to not feeling guilty for letting it happen. Either way doesn’t make a difference to me. Cuppy’s my friend, and I’m going to protect him. That goes for Freyja too. They’re my friends. I don’t care about logic. Not about that.” Richie said.
Then you have finally resolved one of your conflicts. the dragons intoned what sounded like approval, as though they had once again discreetly guided Richie toward some conclusion that was already hiding inside himself.
“A conflict? What do you mean?” Richie asked, feeling his fuming anger begin to give way to confusion, and a growing sense of numbness.
The day the leprechaun attacked you, all you could do initially was run away. The survivor’s guilt of the violent hobo’s death still weighed on your consciousness. How you had dehumanized him with slander, earned or otherwise, of his being a crackhead or other. Scum. Beneath you. Brought his own ruination upon himself when he attacked you. Someone was hostile, you defended yourself. Pure and simple. Natural. And, to appease your human sense of ethics, you created justifications to distance yourself from the feeling of guilt that the man you knocked unconscious was left easy prey for the killer who began stalking you thereafter. What happened was not your responsibility. You told yourself that, and it’s true, but you don’t truly feel it inside. Each man makes his own decisions, chooses his own path, and ultimately has to lay in the bed he makes at the end of the day. The hobo chose to attack you - a child - and you made the understandable choice to fight back. You ran - again, for self-preservation, to escape the biased and unequally-applied punishments of your society’s authorities - and the hobo was left in an alley to writhe in pain he brought upon himself. But the jester’s decision - his choice - to kill a man who was rendered defenseless, was his own. His cross to bear - not yours. We believe the guilt you bear for that nameless man - and the same guilt that stayed your hand from repeating justifiable self defense against O’Gravy - stems from the belief that you abandoned your fellow kidnapping victims to their fate in the child kennel. The cultists who kidnapped you and marked you for ritual sacrifice because of our brand had collected others of your ilk, or matching your description. You blamed yourself for dragging them into it because they were like you, and you blamed yourself further when you survived without knowing whether or not they did as well. But you did not kill them. It isn’t your fault.
“I know it’s not my fault!” Richie snapped.
You follow our logic, you may even agree with it in principle - but you do not feel it in your heart. You burn with guilt. And that guilt repeated itself when you realized that your inaction - what you branded your own cowardice - almost allowed another child to be killed, this time by a different pursuer, down in the sewer depths. No matter what decision you made - to fight back, or to run - you endangered others. There were no right things to do. That is what you believe. That is the burden weighing down your heart.
“I- I…” Richie sighed. “Cuppy has it easy, in that way. He doesn’t waste time beating himself up about laying the smackdown on people who pick the fight first. I don’t think he has the concepts in him to think of it any other way. Responsibility to his fellow man had nothing to do with anything. He helped me because he wanted to. Probably because he was lonely too, and he would have wanted help. Freyja saved Cuppy in turn, and she admitted as much that she wasn’t sure why. Not at first. But, a vague feeling told her that we were a source of warmth. We are all, ultimately, alone. We look for little lights, small fires, to warm ourselves by. It’s the loneliness of humanity. And we create familiar faces to make ourselves feel a little less alone when we’re around them. Everything else - peace, love, justice - those are just words, and they all mean a thousand different things to different people. So, why…”
Richie fell to his knees and started clutching his head.
“Why can’t I ever notice what I have… while it’s in front of me?!?”
He began crying. Hot, unrestrained tears. Leaks in the plumbing of the human heart.
Your frame of thinking is wrong. You did indeed fight the foe in the underground. We don’t believe the concept of sins carry any weight. We are not human. But, from your frame of reference, you redeemed yourself for letting the hobo die. You paid for your callousness when you threw yourself between Cuppy and O’Gravy. You did fight. And you fought well. Not every battle is fought with fists.
Richie dried his eyes.
He admitted it to himself. He cared about Cuppy and Freyja. He wanted to keep them around, and protect them. He wanted to grow closer to them, if he could. He craved the warmth of a bonfire that only forms when lost souls throw their meager flames in together, to survive a little while longer against the cold.
His mother, the children in that kennel, the hobo, and - had some other group of people died where he should have instead, while he was away? - so many people had died because of him. Because he existed.
“Tell me… was there a point for me being born into this world, or was it just a fluke? Is it worth anything?” Richie asked.
We believe… your mother would say yes.
Richie, stifling sniffles and hitches in his throat, nodded.
“Ok.”
He stood again.
Enough moping around, back to fixing things.