“Close your eyes,” Alder said, his lips curled in a smile as if there was some unsaid joke that only he would get. “I’m going to extend my aura to directly focus on you. It will be subtle, but try and simply feel what I’m doing.”
Sitting across from him on the soft forest floor, Kya nodded and closed her eyes. “Rory showed me something similar to this back when I first got my class,” she said. “How similar is this?”
Though she couldn’t see, she could almost hear the smile deepen on his face as he said “You tell me, how different is it?”
At first, she felt nothing. Even with her eyes closed, she could still get a sense of the outside world. It was basic, telling her vague details. There was the ground all around her, there was Alder in front of her. She couldn’t see him with her aura, not precisely. She knew he was there, and would know if he moved, but it was like looking at the silhouette of a person, like a shadow dancing on a wall. She idly wondered how exactly her aura worked, and how it related to the idea of space. Was she getting the impression of him, or the physical space he occupied?
Her train of thought was cut short as she suddenly noticed it, there was a change. It was even more subtle than she would have thought possible from Alder, but she was forced to once again reevaluate her opinion of the man. He was quick with a joke and seemed so flippant, but his skills were real and he could exercise them when needed.
Her awareness through her aura was slowly, ever so slowly, being eroded away. A minute ago, she could see about a foot past where Alder sat in front of her, now she could barely see him, and even that was slipping away. She also got to examine and feel Alders aura. Rory’s had been warm and inviting, like a campfire for telling stories. Wades had been almost like a stimulant, propelling her and making her feel stronger and more confident. Alders though, was… simple? Stable might be a better word for it. It felt strong and calm, patient. Gentle but absolutely unyielding.
“Have you noticed yet?”
Her brows furrowed in concentration. “Yes, I have, what are you doing?”
“You tell me, what am I doing?”
Kya opened her eyes as she answered, “it seems like you’re slowly taking away my aura. When I first awakened, Rory clamped down on my aura so I wouldn’t accidentally do something with it, but this feels different. It’s like I’m slowly losing control to you.”
“Hmm… That’s not inaccurate. There are many applications of aura, we’ll explore them all in time, but the basics need to be understood before moving on to more advanced applications. You’re already able to pull your aura in, and you’re able to relax it and let it go to it’s natural limits. This morning, I want you to do the opposite. Right now, my aura is dominating yours by simple virtue of power. I outrank you by a whole star, and by years of experience on top of that. Your job, and the only thing I want you to do right now, is resist my aura. Maintain at least the space in arms reach until we stop for breakfast.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Kya rubbed her chin, “why do I feel like this is more difficult that you’re letting on?”
Alder grinned and gave a noncommittal shrug. “Close your eyes, let’s get started.”
Closing her eyes and focusing once more on it, she realized that Alder hadn’t paused while they’d been talking, her small sphere of awareness had shrunk even more until she could hardly feel more than an arm's length away.
Brow's furrowing in concentration, Kya set about trying to resist the gradual, inexorable advance of Alders aura. She found it to be a paradoxically straining mental exercise while entirely relaxing her muscles. Her body felt completely fine, more than fine even, just sitting still in the glade. After the strain from the previous day, her muscles were grateful for it.
Sweat beaded down her face as she pushed with as much strength as she could muster, and finally, she felt his aura advance slow and finally stop just where her outstretched wrist would have been. She grinned in triumph and was about to say something, but the momentary lapse in concentration allowed his aura to creep forward once again, even if only by a hair.
The grin melting from her face, Kya renewed her efforts pushing against the force of Alder’s aura.
Thirty minutes later, Alder finally called “Alright, I think we’ll stop here for today.”
Opening her eyes, she saw Alder was already on his feet, stretching his back and shaking out his legs. “That was pretty good for a first attempt, though I had hoped you’d be able to push back a little harder.”
Kya, for her part, was drenched in sweat and upon hearing his words, just sighed and collapsed back in the grass.
“Is there a technique or something that I should know? That felt like trying to roll a boulder up a mountain, it was all I could do to not let it roll right over me.”
“That’s a pretty good comparison, actually.” Alder mused. A ghost of a beard had started to grow there, and he was obviously unaccustomed to it judging by how he rubbed at his chin and jaw.
“But no, there isn’t really a specific technique or ability to enhance your aura strength. Not to say there aren’t ways that might help you in general, but it’s like any other skill. The more we practice, the better it will be.”
“Are we going to do this again tonight?”
“Absolutely, we’ll do it twice a day every day until you can push off my passive aura entirely. Then we’ll be ready for the real training.”
Kya looked up sharply, “Passive aura… real training? What was that if not training?”
“Uh… do they have kid's books where you come from? Or maybe like… a toy sword?”
Kya’s eyes narrowed “yes, we have both… why?”
Alder's eyes brightened “Oh good! This kind of thing is like a kid just learning how to read, so they get the books with letters the size of their fingers, and a sentence on each page. This is just my passive aura, expanding outwards. If I were to push the way you’re learning to do… that would be quite a different thing entirely. We’ll get to that eventually; actual aura manipulation is like a full-length novel. For now, you need to learn to read the kid books.”
Kya just sighed as she laid her head back down, staring up at the fluffy white clouds in the aquamarine morning sky. She still felt thrown off by that sometimes. She knew it would return to its normal familiar blue as the suns fully rose into the sky, but each morning saw tinges of green and even purple that just felt… wrong.
“Come get breakfast!” Called Wade. They’d decided early on to take shifts in the preparation of meals while on the road, and Wade had been making food while they’d been training with their aura’s.
Rolling to her side and lethargically to her feet, Kya walked over and sat on a log, where she was handed a plate of steaming vegetables with some spices on top. There was a mixture of orange, green, and dark blue cubes, all three of which were from vegetables that she couldn't have guessed at if she tried. Excitedly taking a bite of the meal… well… it was something alright. Though she wasn’t a professional chef by any means, she guessed that Wade had put all the food onto the heat at the same time, causing the orange one to have a sad mush to them, the green ones to be practically raw, and the dark blue ones were perfect, but that just made them stand out more compared to the other two. Kya looked up surreptitiously to see Wade eyeing both her and Alder as they took their first bites.
“I told you both several times I hate to cook. You cannot blame me for this.” Wade said, before attacking her own breakfast like it owed her money.
Alder took a bite, and after chewing slowly and swallowing, smiled at her and was about to speak when she held up her spoon at him.
“If you tell a single transparent lie about how good this is, this spoon is going in your eye.”
“I-I was just, uh” Alder, still smiling as he fumbled for a line, looked over at Kya… who made herself busy with her own meal. “Betrayed.” he muttered softly before turning back to Wade. “I just wanted to say thank you for the meal, and uh, maybe next time put the yerds in last so they don’t lose their liquid and turn to mush.”
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Wade held her spoon threateningly for another moment, then put it back to her plate and took another bite with it. “You’re welcome” she said through a mouthful of food.
After a few moments of silence save for the scraping against plates, Kya asked casually “So out of curiosity, would you have actually stabbed him with the spoon?”
Wade nodded, and then said with a wave of the hand “I would have healed him after, he probably wouldn’t have even suffered permanent damage.”
“Hey!”
Kya nodded along. “That makes sense. Plus, he’s a 2-Star, so he would have recovered on his own eventually, right?”
“That depends, actually. Healing is a far more difficult art than a lot of people think it is. It’s not as simple as ‘use ability, Alder's eye regrows good as new’ but yes, with his natural regeneration and my healing, and if we had the eye still with us to reattach, then it would have been fine.”
“I really don’t like this topic. At least wait till we’re done eating.”
“That’s pretty interesting. So, if you have whatever it was that was lost, you can reattach it? What if you don’t have the thing that was missing? Can you regrow an arm or leg or something?”
“It’s not strictly needed to have the missing body part, but it does make it a lot easier. Time is also a factor, like when your arm was severed, we were able to almost immediately reattach it and-”
“Wait, I Lost My Arm?!”
~ ~ ~
Three hours and about ten slow paced miles later, and the small port town of Cetus came into view. It was a sleepy little town, most buildings looking to be no taller than two stories and a simple squat stone wall around five feet high going around it all, and even continuing out into the sea.
The three Users came to a slow walk as they joined with a spattering of traffic heading towards the town, though there really wasn’t as much as Kya would have assumed. Two wagons with bizarre furry chicken-ostrich looking animals pulling them, and a handful of other groups on foot.
After waiting in the small line to enter, they came up to the main gate of the town where two guards were stationed to check people off. Both wore simple armor, a lightweight metal breastplate with straps around the shoulders and sides. Leather bracers and greaves for their arms and legs, and a pair of black gloves completed the look. It wasn’t much, but Kya knew from experience that it would be enough for most of the smaller monsters in the forest. Not to mention the basic but quality looking spears each held.
“Next!” Barked one of them, a taller man with a black handlebar mustache that shook as he spoke. “We just need your names and whether you’ll be headed back out before nightfall.”
“I am Alder, that’s Wade and Kya, and we’ll likely be staying in the town for a couple of days while we deal with those crabs of yours.”
Looking up from where he’d been writing, the other guard, a stocky man sitting on an old wooden stool, squinted his eyes and gasped. “Sampson’s beard, Users!” he said in a gruff voice, jumping to his feet “You didn’t need to wait in line, please, welcome to Cetus and thank you for assisting our town.”
Laughing good naturedly, Alder clapped the man on the shoulder as he walked by. “Thank you kindly, but please, we wouldn’t disrespect the queue. We aren’t animals.”
~ ~ ~
The town had that same feel to it residential neighborhood on the beach. There were lots of small homes on pillars and stilts, with stairs leading up to wide porches. There was a smattering of tall trees with wide frons that made Kya think of palm trees, the only difference being the deep orange of the bark and the almost aggressively bright purple fruits growing at their peak.
By Kya’s request, the group split up at a small crossroads near the center of the town. Wade and Alder went off to find lodging for the next couple of days, while Kya wanted to simply wander the town before they would all meet back up again at the beachfront to begin scouting out the situation with the crabs.
Not for the first time, Kya got flashes of something like the uncanny valley as she walked the wide stone streets. The small trails of sand and the tall trees blowing in the warm salty spring breeze were the exact hallmarks of a beach trip. But the architecture was just ever so slightly wrong, the scents of cooking food were foreign, and every now and then she would hear a bird call that sounded more like a drowning cat than any bird she’d ever known.
She stopped in several places just to see what they offered or to sample some of the odd foods. This morning during their slow jog, Alder and Wade had handed over a purse containing her share of the profit from killing the big jellybat and its offspring back in the forest, meaning that though she still wasn’t exactly rich by the standards of some, she had more than enough to splurge a little on some snacks here and there.
Though it came as no surprise considering their very purpose in the area, there was crab for sale in every single store, restaurant, general goods shop, everyone seemed to be selling crab in one form or another. There were children's toys made from crab legs painted different colors, there were helmets and pieces of armor made from the shells, there were axes and swords made from the shockingly large claws, there were carts and wheels and boxes, everything Kya could have dreamt up was here, and made from some part of a crab. And above all was the food. Steamed, boiled, fried, smoked, baked, dried, charred, roasted on a stick, frozen and raw, in the span of twenty minutes, she tried no less than six different samples of crab, all cooked in unique ways and all delicious. Only two restaurants she found in all her searching sold any meat that wasn’t crab, one seemed to be the nicest restaurant in town sitting just across from the mayor’s manor, while the other was a stall set up by a farmer who had recently slaughtered three animals called Orts.
The man had been extremely reverent towards her as a User, but after he got over his initial trepidation, helped along Kya assumed by her eagerly snacking on his wares while asking about the animals he raised, he described them to her as about knee high, scaly, and almost as round as the wheel on his wagon. They apparently rolled around in small herds eating all the insects they could find and were quite popular with children. Their hard scales meant they felt very little pain, and when kids found something like that well… many games of Ort ball had been played on his farm.
The entire time Kya had spoken with the man, as pleasant as he had been, she’d remained guarded and closed off. Polite and curious, yes, but she hadn’t asked his name, nor given her own. She couldn’t help but look at him, tanned skin, hands like leather gloves from years of work, and think of Arthur, the last farmer she’d spoken to.
Her mind occupied and mood somewhat worsened, she decided to go ahead and make her way to the shoreline. She was maybe thirty minutes early from when they’d agreed to meet, but whether it was a walk on the beach, or a walk on the beach killing some crabs, either sounded like just the thing to clear her head.
At the edge of town, there was a large embankment of sand sloping up and blocking the view of the beach itself. Stone steps ran up the steep hill at regular intervals, with a wider set just in front of Kya. She figured this served both to ward off any crazy tides coming ashore, as well as the invading army of crabs they so regularly had to deal with.
Even with all of this in mind, even with the sheer quantity of crab for sale in the city, the quest to kill as many as possible… Kya wasn’t ready for what she saw.
She crested the top of the stairs, and found the sandy embankment actually had battlements built atop it facing seaward. Straight ahead, there was a single wooden ramp in place to make it down to the beach, and then to a single long stone pier on the water. Well, Kya assumed it was the only pier, she wasn’t quite sure. Apart from a semi-circle of about a hundred meters around the ramp that was clear, almost every other scrap of beach was covered in crabs. And not the little sand crabs she’d known on earth, not even some mutated Alaskan king crab, these things looked like they belonged in some crazy graphic from the History Channel about how aliens built the pyramids.
The biggest were the size of a bicycle from end to end, and their bodies were oddly elongated to look almost torpedo like rather than the roundish shape she was familiar with. Mismatched claws extended out from either side, one large enough to snap a tree in half, white the other was thin and webbed, but still enormous. They were all various shades of blue, with spiky crowns poking up from their heads and what looked like two smaller arms coming out where their mouths should have been. Crabs were already crazy creatures on earth, but these things were the most alien, unnatural things she’d seen since she arrived in this place. Even the spiders, as horrific as they had been, were still just big spiders. These things though, seemed wholly unnatural.
What gave Kya hope though, was two-fold. One was that while they seemed to move around quite quickly in the water, on land their stubby legs and large claws slowed them down a lot. The other was that, even as she watched, a group of seven users was absolutely laying waste to the horde of crabs with the casual air of someone mowing the lawn.
One man, a 2-Star from his aura, sat cross legged at the center of the clear area simply observing the other six. Following his gaze, she watched as they used various powers ranging from fire and ice to sand and even shadows to kill crab after crab after crab. Finally, she turned her attention to the last member, a younger man in a navy-blue robe wielding a sword covered in glowing runes, that she finally got a reaction she hadn’t remotely been anticipating.
- - - - -
Quest Update
No Tag Backs: Though it remains to be seen how this gap occurred, you somehow failed to understand the status quo of a game about evasion: evade the other guy. Nevertheless, before you now lies your chance at retribution. Your path to redemption. Your ladder to success. So, bop bop bop your way on over there and get that guy!
- Objective: Tag another 1-Star member of the evasion league.
- Time Remaining: 10d:17h:12m:38s:
- Reward: Rewards contingent on manner of quest completion.
- - - - -
.
.
.
Kya smiled, then laughed, then wiped a tear from her eye as pulled out her cloak and wrapped it around her shoulders. She wished she had one of those orts right now, because it was apparently time to get her head in the game.