Chương 44: Proto

The first attempt failed so completely it was almost educational. He built the Blazing Core the way he always did, drew it down with thermal until it sat tight and white over his palm, and then reached for gravity and tried to do everything at once, wrap and crush and heat and hold, and the whole arrangement came apart inside four seconds. The gravity shell slid off one side. The thermal grip wobbled trying to compensate.

The core guttered out into nothing and left him standing in the dark with a warm hand and a lighter mana pool. Alex sat down on the churned grass and thought about it properly instead of just wanting it harder. The real problem wasn't the star. The real problem was that he had owned gravity manipulation for exactly one day and had never once used it for anything. Thermal he'd lived inside for weeks, it had a groove worn into him, he could reach for heat the way he reached for a doorknob.

Gravity was a stranger he was asking to help him. Of course the two of them couldn't work in the same room yet. So he stopped trying to build a sun and went looking for the dumbest possible use of gravity instead. It took him about a minute to find one, and it was so obvious he was mildly annoyed with himself. A glaive comes down. That was the whole idea.

Every overhead strike he'd ever thrown was already a partnership with gravity, and he had spent a month letting the world provide that part for free at whatever rate the world felt like. He stood, took the practice ground's open stretch, and threw a downward strike with a hand on the fall. The blade hit the dirt hard enough to jar his wrists.

Alex looked at the divot, then at his hands, then at the glaive, and threw another one, and this time he ran thermal through the edge at the same time and felt the heat lay itself along the steel without the gravity slipping at all. Both. Simultaneously. The thing he had failed at for two straight nights, working on the first honest try. He kept at it for a while just to make sure it wasn't luck, and it wasn't. Somewhere in ten minutes of overhead strikes he understood why.

When he'd been trying to hold a compressed core, both skills were doing delicate, sustained, contradictory work, two hands doing surgery on the same patient. This was different. This was heat on an edge and weight on a fall, two simple jobs pointing the same direction, and his body already knew the motion so well that neither skill had to compete for his attention. Which meant the affinity was doing more than he'd credited it for.

He'd assumed Perfect Star Affinity meant thermal came easy and that was the end of the accounting. But gravity had arrived in an afternoon and was already cooperating with heat inside a day, and Alex thought about how long mana manipulation had taken him and decided the affinity was quietly paying for a great deal that he'd been putting down to his own cleverness. And that thought turned, the way thoughts did lately, and went somewhere less comfortable. Jeremy hit Apprentice yesterday.

Alex kept swinging and let himself sit in that, because there was no point pretending he hadn't noticed. Jeremy had a Common class and had crossed a mastery threshold that Alex, with a Rare class and an affinity the store's own knowledge packages had never heard of, was nowhere near. Every manipulation on his sheet still read Novice. All three of them. It wasn't jealousy.

He turned it over carefully to check, and it genuinely wasn't, because he'd stood on that field this afternoon watching Jeremy move and felt nothing but a kind of proud alarm. It was simpler and worse than jealousy. It was doubt. If a perfect affinity was worth what the system implied it was worth, he should not be sitting at Novice across the board while the quiet guy who fixes networks went past him. What Alex could not see, standing alone in the dark with a glaive, was Jeremy's last two weeks.

Every free hour, every rest between dungeon runs, every night after everyone went to bed, one man and one weapon and nothing else. No fireballs to evolve, no runes to write, no compressed stars, no profession. Jeremy had gone narrow and gone deep, and Alex had gone wide, and the sheet was simply reporting that difference back to him without explaining it. He didn't work that out. He just set the doubt down where he set most things, picked the glaive back up, and went back to the actual problem.

His mana had crawled up while he swung. He gave it another stretch, ran forms until the pool felt honest, and then cast Blazing Core again. This time he took it slow and did one thing at a time. Thermal first, alone, no gravity anywhere near it. He compressed the core the way he'd been compressing it for weeks, past the size of a fist, past a plum, down and down until it sat over his palm about the size of a small grapefruit and refused to go further. That was the wall.

Same wall as the fortress, same wall as last night, the point where his control simply had nothing left to give and the flame started to argue. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. Then, instead of building a shell around it, he tried to change what the fire was. That was the idea he'd been circling all day without being able to name.

He'd been wrapping the core in gravity like a hand closing around an egg, an outside force squeezing an inside thing, and every failure had come from the two of them being separate, one skill fighting the other for the same few cubic inches. But that wasn't how a star worked. A star wasn't fire with gravity applied to it from outside. A star was a thing so heavy it crushed itself, the mass and the fire being the same event, the pressure coming from the material's own weight and nowhere else.

So he stopped pushing gravity at the core and started putting it into the core. He reached for the fire itself, the little white knot of it, and asked it to be heavy. To pull on itself. To have its own weight, and to be dragged inward by a thing that was already part of it rather than a thing arriving from outside. The core shrank. It shrank without him compressing it, and Alex felt something in his chest go very quiet. Because now the loop was doing his work for him.

The more gravity he fed the core, the harder it pulled on itself, and the harder it pulled the tighter it packed, and the tighter it packed the hotter it ran, and hotter fire took the gravity better. He wasn't fighting two skills against each other anymore. He was pouring both into the same object and letting them multiply, and he stood there in the dark on the practice ground feeding mana into a thing that was consuming it faster than he could give it and getting smaller and brighter the entire way.

The colour climbed. Yellow-white to white, and then past white into something that hurt to look at directly, a hard glaring point sitting over his palm no bigger than a walnut, and the heat coming off it arrived in waves he could feel pressing against his face and chest. It barely touched him. That was the strange part, and he'd noticed it before with Blazing Core, a partial immunity to his own fire that he'd never questioned and now filed to think about later.

The waves rolled over his bare skin and registered as warmth where they should have registered as damage. Behind him, he heard a very fast set of footsteps going in the opposite direction, and had a half second to register that the archer, who had apparently been sitting out here this entire time hoping for more arrows, had made an excellent decision. Alex threw it as far as he had ever thrown anything.

The core went out over the black field in a long flat arc, a white spark shrinking with distance, and it was still shrinking when it stopped being a spark. The light came first. The whole field lit up as though someone had opened a door onto an afternoon, every blade of grass throwing a hard shadow, the wall behind him printed white for an instant. Then the sound arrived, and then the pressure, a hot flat shove that crossed two hundred feet of open ground and hit Alex in the chest hard enough to move his feet.

When it faded, the field was burning. His mana was gone. Not low, gone, scraped down past anything he'd have called a reserve, and Alex stood there swaying slightly with the certain knowledge that he could not have produced a basic Blazing Core right now if something had walked out of the dark to eat him. Three notifications waited. [Thermal Manipulation has advanced to Apprentice.] [Gravity Manipulation has advanced to Apprentice.] [Blazing Core (Uncommon) has evolved into Proto Star Core (Rare).] Alex read the third one about six times. Rare. His fireball, the skill he'd bought as a curious kid on day two, had climbed all the way from Common to Rare because he'd refused to leave it alone.

"Proto Star Core," he said out loud, and heard how it landed. It was a good name. It was a genuinely cool name, and it was also four syllables too long to shout at somebody in the middle of a fight, and he could already picture himself trying to warn Jeremy about an incoming proto stellar something while a monster removed his head.

"Star Core. We're calling it Star Core." He walked out to see what he'd done. It took a while, mostly because his legs had opinions, and when he got there he stopped at the edge of it and stood for a long moment. The burn about 30 feet across, charred. Most of it wasn't burning anymore, it had already finished, the grass gone entirely and the ground under it turned to a pale ash that shifted when the wind moved. A ring of small fires guttered around the outside.

The center was simply gone, scoured, a bare dark circle where something had been briefly hotter than anything on this world had any right to be. The Blazing Core had made craters. This had made a landscape. Alex looked at it, and the first feeling was exactly what anyone would expect, a hot bright pride running right up his spine. He'd built that. Out of a store-bought fireball and a physics degree and about hours of sitting in the dark being frustrated.

The second feeling came in right behind it and cooled the first one down considerably. He was, he was fairly sure, talented. He'd stopped being falsely modest about that somewhere around the G rank. But talented was a comparison, and the comparison only ran as far as the people he'd met, and the people he'd met were a hundred and fifty terrified Chicagoans who had learned about mana days days ago. Out past the tutorial there were beings who'd been doing this for centuries.

There would be someone out there who could do what he had just done, and do it faster, and do it in a way that made this look like a firecracker. He was standing at the edge of the largest thing he had ever made, and the honest conclusion was that it wasn't nearly large enough. Which settled a question he'd been circling since the wall this morning. There was no amount of strength that would let him relax.

There was no line he could cross where the camp would be safe and he could put the glaive down and be a large man with a physics degree again. The only thing available to him was to be strong enough that whatever came looking decided the price was too high, and then to keep going, because prices get reassessed. He sat down at the edge of the ash and started working his mana back, and when he had enough he practiced anyway, gravity on the glaive, heat on the edge, over and over in the dark next to the burning field.

He was still at it when the voices reached him. Alex turned, and saw the scouting party coming through the gate, four of them, moving fast and looking like people who had found exactly what they'd gone out to find and had not enjoyed it. Bartholomew was at the front, and the man's face pulled Alex straight to his feet.

"You should come," his uncle said.

"We'regoing to Chris before we get knocked out by tiredness"