Chương 34: practice

Mana manipulation had reduced it fight against him. He worked the wisp of mana over his palm through the first hours of the shift, drawing it out, shaping it, folding it back, and everywhere he pushed. The struggle he remembered from those first nights in the grass, the wisps collapsing, the reserves bleeding away into nothing, reduced and sanded off by weeks of practice and by the pile of Intelligence and Wisdom his new class kept feeding him.

He ran every drill he knew and invented two more, and by mid-morning he had to accept a strange verdict. He had improved but probably not as good as Liam, though. He had a lot of improving to do. He rested his arms on the parapet, let his mana crawl back, and looked out at nothing in particular. Which was how the sun caught him.

It sat high over the field, wrong star in a wrong sky, pouring down the same indifferent light it always did, and the physics student in him woke up mid-thought the way he always woke up, uninvited and asking questions. He had thermal manipulation. He had a Star affinity the system called Perfect. And the thing about stars, the thing every undergrad got beaten into them in the first semester, was that heat was only half the recipe.

Recreating a star was impossible, and Alex made himself say it internally in full, like a disclaimer. The mass alone ended the conversation. The sun held something like ninety-nine point eight five percent of everything in its solar system, all of it crushed together until the crushing became the engine, and the gravity that did the crushing sat around twenty-eight times Earth's pull at the surface. A human body under that would fail in every way a body could fail at once.

Even a red dwarf, the runt of the litter, the dying ember he'd written a term paper about in another life, would fold a person like paper. Millions of Kelvin in the core. Pressure past the point where numbers stopped meaning anything to a mind that evolved dodging predators. His fire was hot. It was not that, and it never would be through heat alone. But the recipe had two ingredients. Heat, and the force that held the heat down.

And Alex, standing on a wall with an unscheduled afternoon and a Star affinity, found himself wondering exactly how far the word star stretched. Thermal had come to him absurdly fast, and he'd chalked that up to the affinity. Stars weren't just heat, though. Stars were gravity wearing heat as a jacket. If the affinity covered the whole star and not just its temperature, then somewhere in him there might be a door he'd never once knocked on. There was one way to find out, and it was going to look extremely stupid.

He started with imagination, because that was how thermal had gone, feeling for the heat as a thing he could hold. It went nowhere. He closed his eyes and tried to picture gravity itself and got nothing usable, because gravity didn't look like anything. Gravity is the curvature of space and time, which is difficult to try to recreate. Curved grids from textbook diagrams. None of it had a handle he could grip. So he went smaller. Things fall. Start there.

He found a stone on the walkway, palm-sized, ordinary, and began throwing it up and catching it. Up, down. Up, down. He watched it the whole way, every time, trying to feel the moment the rise died and the fall was born, trying to find the seam where the world took over. Then he started reaching into that seam with mana, not shaping the stone, not pushing it, just asking the fall to be more than it was.

Willing it downward the way he willed fire into existence, which he'd realized weeks ago he didn't fully understand either, the ignition just happened in a way that felt natural, mana becoming flame because he meant it to. So he tried meaning the stone toward the ground. An hour of that. A full hour of an enormous man on a wall throwing a rock straight up and staring at it like it owed him money. Katelin watched him for a while from her post, visibly decided not to ask, and went back to her kit.

Somewhere below, he was fairly sure the helmet kid walked past and judged him. He kept throwing, till on this throw something seemed to have changed. He almost missed it. The change was small, a fraction, but the stone came down wrong, faster than the throw had earned, and smacked into his palm with a sting that physics had not authorized. Alex went completely still.

His mana was low, he registered distantly, most of an afternoon's worth burned on nothing, enough left for one or two more attempts at whatever had just happened. He threw the stone again, put his arm into it this time, and reached into the fall with everything left in his pool, meaning it downward, willing weight into the world. The stone came back like it had been fired.

It shrieked past his catch entirely and slammed into the walkway hard enough to crack against the stone surface, the report snapping down the wall, and the notification bloomed across his vision before the echo died. [Gravity Manipulation (Novice)] Joy arrived in him like a physical event. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. He read the words four times.

Gravity, the quietest and most absolute force there was, the one that assembled galaxies and lit the stars and had never once in the history of the universe been argued with, and a notification was informing him, in the same font it used for cooking skills, that he could now touch it. The kid who'd taped star charts to his ceiling was doing laps somewhere inside his chest. He wanted to yell. He wanted to grab someone by the shoulders and explain escape velocity to them against their will.

He was, for one whole unguarded moment, purely and completely happy. And then, the way it always came, the bill arrived. The thought didn't announce itself. It just surfaced, quiet and specific, that this joy was made of the same material that had killed Grandpa.

This system, these notifications, this entire magical machinery he was learning to love, was the thing that had opened a portal in a field and poured out the wave that took an old man who should have died decades from now in a bed with his family around him. Alex was standing on a wall falling in love with the machine, and the machine had eaten his grandfather ago and hadn't slowed down since. Cassandra's people, whittled down before they ever reached this camp.

The group by the second gate that the Canifolk had gotten to first, the ones the shaking man had described. Somewhere beyond this field, right now, it was happening to strangers at a scale he couldn't hold in his head, families learning the same lesson at worse prices. He didn't deserve to feel this good. That was the shape the thought took, fair or not, and it sat on his chest with real weight while his face, trained by nine days of being watched, stayed exactly where it was. He let the grief have its minute.

He'd learned that much, at least, that shoving it down whole just meant it came back with interest. Then he set it beside the joy instead of on top of it, because both things were true, the machine was monstrous and the machine had also just handed him a way to keep the people still alive that way, and he went back to work. Thank Heavens to college-free therapy. He rested first, and made himself be disciplined about it.

He was on watch, and a guard with an empty mana pool was furniture, so he set a floor for himself, a reserve he wouldn't train past no matter how the experiments went, and between attempts he ran polearm forms along the walkway to keep the time honest. Because there was an experiment now. There'd been an experiment assembling itself in the back of his head since the moment the notification landed. Heat, and the force that held the heat down. He had both.

He couldn't create mass, that was the dealbreaker in the real recipe, no mana trick was going to conjure a solar system's worth of hydrogen into his palm. But he kept circling something Liam had said during one of his lectures about sand, that mana could transform far more cheaply than it could create, that mana could in principle do almost anything if you paid its price. He didn't need a real star. Real was off the table.

What he could maybe build was a forgery, an imitation of sorts, thermal manipulation providing the heat and gravity manipulation standing in for the mass, squeezing where matter should have been squeezing, condensing the core past every ceiling thermal alone had hit. His mana came back over a slow hour. The sun leaned west. Alex stood up, rolled his shoulders, and cast Blazing Core.

The sphere formed over his palm, white-gold and familiar, and he took it down with thermal first, compressing along the well-worn path, marble-sized, denser, hotter, until he felt the old ceiling rise up under him, the point where his control simply had no more to give. Every previous night, this was where it ended. Tonight he reached for the second door.

Wrapping gravity around the core turned out to be the easy part, a shell of borrowed weight closing over the sphere, and he felt it bite immediately, the flame crushing inward past the ceiling, brighter, angrier. The hard part was everything else. He had never once run two manipulation skills at the same time, and the strain arrived instantly and everywhere, like driving two cars with one hand on each wheel, each skill demanding the exact full attention the other was using. Thermal slipped. He caught it.

Gravity wobbled. He caught that, and lost two percent of the thermal grip doing it, and the core sat in his palm getting smaller and brighter and less his with every heartbeat. Then it stopped being his at all. He felt the instability arrive the way he'd felt the fortress spheres arrive, a pressure change, a wrongness, the sphere beginning to breathe in a rhythm he wasn't setting. There was no version of holding it.

There was only the throw, and he put his entire G-rank frame into it, hurling the thing as far out over the empty field as a body built like his could send it. It made it about a hundred meters before it let go.

The explosion was the biggest thing he had ever produced, a white-orange bloom that slapped the wall with heat and noise and rolled a pressure wave through his chest, and when the light died there was a scorched circle out in the grass big enough to park the camp's entire tent row inside, smoke climbing off it in a lazy column. Alex checked his mana. Well past half gone, scraping toward the floor he'd promised himself. He became aware of the silence second, and the audience third. Every head on the wall had turned.

Katelin was on her feet with her kit half-raised, having apparently prepared to heal whatever was left of whoever had done that. Two of the new watchers had arrows nocked and nowhere to point them. And Uncle Bartholomew was pounding down the walkway with his spear in hand and his shield already set, arriving in a full defensive crouch at a fight that did not exist, taking in the smoking field, the intact wall, and his nephew standing there with one guilty scorched hand still extended.

"It was a skill," Alex said.

"I was experimenting. I'm sorry, I should have told everyone first." Bartholomew looked at the crater. He looked at Alex. He straightened up out of the crouch with the slow dignity of a man in his forties who had just sprinted forty meters in full armor for nothing, and the look on his face was not anger. It was the specific, profound disappointment of someone who had been fully ready to stab something and had been robbed of it, and against every ounce of the moment's gravity, Alex had to fight down a laugh.

"Warn people," his uncle said, and walked back to his post. The wall slowly went back to being a wall. Katelin sat down, muttering something he chose not to hear. And Alex was still watching the smoke rise off his handiwork, already redrafting the experiment in his head, when he realized someone was standing beside him. Cassandra. Staff still on her back, eyes still on the field, curiosity finally holding a bridge it could walk across.

"How did you do that?"