Chương 29: 29-Cannonry

Pulling yet another egg from her pouch, the 'mon carefully holds it up to eye level and draws from the endless geyser of love in her core. Separating the emotion from the raw power once again, she pushes a slow trickle of the energy though the shell and into the liquid beneath. She does have to remove the emotion, one of the first things she'd tried. It turns out pressing raw love into the egg soft boils it, the exact opposite of her objective.

Slowly easing her gentle pressure of power, she casts her senses into the egg and finds it just on the tipping point she's found before the shell cracks and the biological ordinance explodes without interference. Turning the egg over in her grip, she watches the shell for any signs of weakness. At this stage, the egg is little more than a firecracker, but she's noticed in her testing that the more power that's inside the egg the further away she can be before the strange connection snaps.

Which is extremely useful if she wants to not be right next to it when it explodes. Placing the egg on the ground, she takes a few steps back before drawing on more power and feeding it across the connection, concentrating on the strange feeling of compressing the energy into the space the egg occupies, preventing that pressure from transferring to the shell and rupturing prematurely. It's at this moment that Amelia jogs around the lake again, panting heavily as she enters her sixteenth minute running.

When she passes a line in the dirt Tanya sits next to the human half falls/half stumbles into a dead sprint to start another lap without stopping. Tanya flicks an eye at her partner's retreating back and grimaces at the poor form. She'd had a textbook perfect running form at the beginning but allowed that discipline to completely disappear when it's most important, when exhaustion means every movement wasted means another step lost.

The fraction of a second distraction has her control over the energy in the egg almost falter, but even that tiny lapse has a hairline crack appear on the top, glowing a fiery pink from within, swirling with yellow and white. The 'mon grunts, cutting off power and focusing entirely on containment as the shell cracks further. Realizing containment is impossible, she quickly wraps psychic energy around the egg and flings it up into the air as hard as she can.

Two seconds later, she feels the egg 'disconnect' as it travels too far, and the already brightening glow flares to be visible even in the bright summer sky. A quarter second later there's a flash. And a half second after that the shockwave hits, and Tanya winces at the sound. Squinting her eyes at the cloud of smoke as the explosion's glow fades, the former artillery spotter assesses the range and pound of the shot. Sixty five–eighty five metre vertical with lateral displacement five to ten metres.

Wind probable displacement cause, four knot variance 85° east. Charge approximately 50 kilograms. Amelia makes her way around the pond again, wheezing as desperate, heavy breaths aren't enough. Despite that, the trainer breaks into yet another dead sprint as she crosses the line again.

Tanya feels muscles and organs in her body get to work on the formation of a new egg, and as they do she carefully tries to feel the process as it occurs, to isolate and pick comprehensible pieces out of the completely alien sensations. In the discussion before starting their respective training, Tanya had remembered something she'd read on complications in chancey egg laying, being that sometimes she can form the shell of an egg too thick, and must be trained to make the shells thinner for safe…

Tanya grimaces, glancing down at the empty pouch as her body creates… ordinance. Regardless, the fact one can train for thinner eggshells means that it should be equally possible to train for thicker ones, which will be necessary if this 'egg bomb' strategy has any chance of becoming combat viable.

She squints as unfamiliar organs under her bulk work and shift, before slightly more familiar muscles contract and yet another egg appears in her pouch, shell soft to the touch for the first few minutes of existence or until removed. Her current eggs cannot contain enough explosive power to do any kind of serious damage in a combat scenario, because the 50 kilogram shot –while impressive– was only possible with complete concentration and nearly two minutes of careful infusion.

But she's noticed that the explosive charge is multiplicative to the amount of power she can store in an egg naturally without the shell cracking, not to mention the advantages of longer range control. Currently, the most extreme egg she'd be confident of being able to create in combat would perhaps work as a weak concussion grenade. In any other reality an essentially infinite number of concussion grenades would be invaluable in combat. But here…

Tanya glances at the blackened crater of her first attempt, twin rays of reverse shadow cutting though the ash where she and her partner stood. In any other reality that would have killed them both. The former soldier clamps down on a shiver as today's activities conjure ghosts of the past, before forcing her eyes to a healthy Amelia as she crosses halfway around the lake, staggering as she runs though the first of three unavoidable waterfalls in her path.

It's clear that 'mon are more durable than they should be, even before using aura to reinforce themselves, but this is the first indisputable proof that humans have similarly increased durability. Not to mention her research on the world and the 'bond phenomena' in an attempt to solve the occasional breakdown of communications that led her to the… controversial but well respected writings of Professor Samuel Oak.

His claim of bonded trainers being resistant to damage caused by their partners is one such piece of controversial literature, the counterfactual arguing a biased reading of statistics on trainer injuries and anecdotal evidence backed up by a too small study to prove such a large claim. Tanya had been firmly in that camp before today, but… Amelia comes around the final bend, legs wobbly and path wavering close to the mud of the shore as she approaches the starting line.

The 'mon will hold her judgement until more research is done. Regardless, as it stands, her egg bombs don't hold nearly enough stopping power for any 'mon she'd anticipate facing. Coming up to the line, the trainer's legs give way, and she collapses to the grass, sliding slightly as her head comes to rest just a few steps away from where Tanya sits. The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Tanya waits a few seconds for her partner to get up on her own, but as the seconds wear on and all she does is tilt her head so she's not breathing through dirt, the 'mon approaches. Walking to the human's prone form, she reaches into her bag of pokechow and throws back a large handful of kibbles, as the creation of so many eggs in such a short period has quickly creating a ravenous hunger. She stops at her partner's head, staring down in silence for a few seconds to finish chewing.

"Is that it?" She asks, easily falling back into the role of drill instructor, its clear success last time resulting in the mannerisms and voice being filed away among all other useful masks. Amelia doesn't respond for nearly half a minute, but just as Tanya opens her mouth again, her partner gasps out words through labored breaths.

"Everything hurts… I think…" She takes a few seconds to breathe.

"... I blacked out for a second there." Tanya nudges her partner with a foot.

"So you're done?" She asks, as if the idea is insulting. Truthfully, the fact she managed this much on her first day of genuine endurance training is impressive, but it's more a testament to her willpower than to her body's strength. The trainer breathes heavily, before struggling to move a shaking arm toward her water bottle nearby"Please… I… I need…" She pauses to take a few more breaths.

"... I need you to heal me. I've got enough calories in my bag to… keep going. But I can't… move my legs anymore." Staring down at her partner, Tanya blinks, caught off guard by the request. Heal her? Would that even work? Her first thought is no, that there's no shortcut as simple as that. The process of endurance and strength training involves a lot of complicated biomechanical processes beneath the simple idea of 'work out, heal, be stronger.'

Healing could very well 'heal' the results of her effort away But the more she thinks about it, referencing her admittedly incomplete knowledge of physiology and…

'feeling' how her healing works, a combination of instinct and knowledge says yes. Despite using psychic energy, healing doesn't require formulas or, really, conscious thought beyond the desire to do so and– I love you. Power flares violently inside, almost breaching ironclad control and erupting into a wave of green sparkles. –emotional components. Presumably because the 'move' is an inborn skill, and her body's instincts offer… nudges of what she can do, like a hunch coming from deep inside.

The first time she'd identified those instincts for what they are, she'd been wary to say the least on the concept of those mental influences. Fortunately, it only took a few days before she'd realized how ridiculous it is to be concerned over the human equivalent of being born knowing how to swallow food without suffocating. Her musing is interrupted as Amelia coughs, a motion that turns into a dry heave.

Tanya compresses her bulk until her face is as close to the ground as possible, and looks in her partner's eyes. And, looking through that sheen of sweat, red face, tears, snot, and heaving breaths? She sees an unbroken will that stares back, defiant. The same one that Tanya sees every time she looks in the mirror. Amelia drags the water bottle to her mouth with shaking arms and, uncapping the built in straw with her teeth, takes a long drink as Tanya smirks and reaches out with an arm swirling in green sparkles.

"Alright, recover fluids, get food and salt in your system, then start again." The human groans in relief as the heal pulse flows over her.

"Right… Ok…" She pauses, and yelps in pain as she tries to move her freshly healed legs.

"That mega egg bomb is incredible. I know we said we were working on increasing shell thickness, but the minimum egg bomb could already be useful as an irritant and zoning tool to get close. You mentioned trying to get past that 'multiple eggs' mental block, if you think it is a mental block, if you can get even two eggs primed at once by the time we challenge Wattson we'll be good." She says, interspersed with grunts of pain as she gets to her feet.

"Maybe try using gravity at the same time as an egg bomb to get a feel for using two moves at once?" Tanya blinks, surprised her partner had been watching, or able to think about that while exhausted, before tilting her head as she considers the suggestion. She's not had much success with increasing shell thickness, she's fumbling in the dark trying to learn it herself, and that kind of multitasking is much more well known to her.

Following that logic she'd be better served learning egg development training from another chansey. Nodding, she pulls her egg from its pouch and holds it up to eye level, then prepares to start again, mentally pulling up the equations for gravity before pausing as a thought occurs. She glances over at Amelia, then back to the egg, then over to an empty spot of grass in front of her, before her eyes flare purple and the grass flattens as gravity multiplies.

The human is durable, whether by 'bond phenomena' or plain biology these significantly weakened egg bombs wouldn't have a chance of truly injuring her if the big one didn't, and just standing in enhanced gravity was one of the first things Tanya did to train her endurance once she learned to use the move successfully. The trainer tilts her head as she finishes off her water bottle and fills it up again from the water purifier.

"What?" Tanya tucks her egg back in its pouch,"When you're recovered, don't start running, I found a way to combine our training. We're honing your reflexes." Amelia drinks half of her new water bottle in one go and hums in agreement.

"With gravity?" She asks, continuing at her partner's nod.

"Then you can also train at keeping the center of the effect on a moving target, next time we find another 'mon who wants to challenge us we need to do that too." Tanya nods again as she finishes pulling energy into an egg and telekinetically moves it a safe distance away. Then carefully tries to keep the connection while squeezing that indescribable something in her gut to start the creation of another.

"Right. Remember to stretch thoroughly to keep mobile." Amelia grumbles which turns into another pained groan as she tries to get up from her crouch and get some food.

"I know..."