Chương 76: 68. New Tools

"A new tool teaches the hand. The hand teaches the body. The body learns last, and at the highest cost." - Codex of the Long Watch, On the Adoption of Instruments New Tools Arthur reached for the notification, and the notification opened in front of him.

TECHNIQUE EVOLUTION: COUNTERFORCE PLANT WINDOW: 20 SECONDS EFFECT: KINETIC IMPACT STORED AS RESERVED FORCE; DISCHARGED ON NEXT STRIKE STORAGE CAP: PROPORTIONAL TO STR/CON FAILURE: OVERCAP RESULTS IN ROUTED DAMAGE THROUGH USER He read it once, while the others watched his face. Then he read it again and worked his jaw for a moment.

"Well, I'll be damned," he murmured to himself.

"Well?" Steve asked.

"We'll have to test it, but it seems like the Nadi-Matrix was cataloguing all the shield bashes," Arthur said.

"From what I can make out, I plant for twenty seconds, and whatever hits me during the window gets stored instead of passing through. The next swing I throw releases the stored energy on top of my own force. I can probably hold three or four solid impacts before I cap out. If I take another hit past that, the energy routes through me as internal damage." Sarah was watching him with the expression she used on patients who had already decided not to listen.

"Don't past-cap, Arthur. I'd like to hear you say it."

"I'll be careful."

"That's not the same sentence."

"I won't past-cap."

"Better. I'm going to keep saying it anyway, you understand."

"I'd expect nothing less." He stood up and looked at Donna.

"Hit my shield. Don't use full force. I'm trying to feel the storage, not test the ceiling." Donna walked over, axe reversed, and tapped the boss of the Ironhold with the flat back of the blade. It was the sort of impact a man makes when knocking dust off a tabletop.

"Haha, very funny. Harder," Arthur said. She put her hip into the second one. The Ironhold rang dully against his forearm, and he felt the impact compress into him rather than rebound off him. The shield did not move. The kinetic moment of the strike stopped where his arm should have given a fraction. The blue lattice strengthened across his torso in a wave he could feel. The wave settled into a steady glow. Arthur turned and brought the hammer down on the limestone behind him. Chalk exploded outward.

A finger-thick fissure ran up the wall for half a metre, and a section of stone the size of his palm came off and hit the floor.

"Again," he said.

"Smaller." Sarah picked up a small piece of stone and threw it at his shield.

"Nothing," Arthur said.

"So the storage only happens in combat situations, or at least combat-type impacts. I'm willing to bet that hitting your own shield will do nothing either," Steve said, taking notes as usual. Arthur rapped his hammer against the shield and, as Steve had predicted, felt no charge build up.

"The lattice draws across your arms and torso when you are charged," Sarah said in her medical voice.

"I can see it light up. When the window closes, the lattice fades. That is your timer."

"Twenty seconds," Arthur said.

"I think I can discharge in fragments or all at once."

"Don't past-cap."

"You have said."

"I will keep saying." Donna spoke from where she had returned to her axe-cleaning posture.

"Useful in three or four solid hits. I can think of fights that would have gone differently."

"The Notre-Dame raptor," Arthur said. He had been thinking the same thing.

"And the Mother. The blocks would have stored neatly." Arthur sat back against the wall. Twenty seconds, three or four hits, a cap he hadn't yet found the size of. He would find it the way he had found the limits of the last technique, with his body. * Donna was the next to go. She reached.

TECHNIQUE EVOLUTION: THRESHOLD DRIVE WINDOW: 10 SECONDS SAFE / 12 SECONDS LIMIT EFFECT: ETHER CHANNELS OPENED ABOVE OPERATING ENVELOPE; REFLEX, MOTOR, AND PERCEPTION SATURATION ELEVATED RECOVERY: PROPORTIONAL TO DURATION HELD FAILURE: CHANNEL COLLAPSE AT SUSTAINED USE BEYOND WINDOW Donna read the notification and the corner of her mouth pulled up by a fraction.

"Threshold Drive," she said. Steve looked up, pencil poised.

"Tell me everything."

"It opens my Ether channels above the standard operating envelope. My whole nervous system runs hotter than it's meant to. Reflex arc, motor coordination, perception, all of it fires together. I can hold it for ten seconds without consequences. Twelve at the absolute outside. Past that, the channels fail and so do I." Steve was writing with the focus he normally reserved for unknown inscriptions.

"Cost. Walk me through the cost."

"There's a biological cost. We'll have to experiment and see. All I know now is that beyond twelve seconds it would be bad, and Sarah will come into play." Sarah answered her without looking up from her kit.

"I would prefer not to be a tested variable in your technique. Please ration." This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

"I am going to ration." Donna walked to the centre of the chamber, closed her eyes, and activated the technique. The lattice raced up across her arms and her throat and the sides of her face. It was a brighter blue than Arthur had ever seen run under anyone's skin. It was bright enough that her irises caught the colour, and the line of her jaw lit from below. Arthur saw her start across the chamber. Before he could follow her movement, his shield was dumped on his lap.

He looked down, startled, and then heard Sarah yelp as she found herself holding Steve's focus rod. Donna was moving in stops and starts. It felt more like a series of minuscule time-jumps than a glitchy video. Steve was staring down at his empty hand. His pencil had vanished from it and reappeared on top of his pack. The word he had been writing was cut off mid-letter. Donna dropped out of Drive and sat down harder than she meant to. The lattice dimmed and the chamber returned to its ordinary blue.

Sarah flung the focus rod back to Steve and reached Donna a second later, one hand on her wrist, the other tipping Donna's chin to check her eyes.

"Your pathways are inflamed and your pupils have not settled. Five seconds is the upper edge of cheap. Anything past eight and you'll feel it for the rest of the day," she said after a moment.

"Five seconds covered the chamber twice," Donna said.

"Five seconds is plenty."

"Hmmm. So you basically got super speed," Steve said, closing his ledger.

"You do realise what you are now?"

"Don't."

"Donna."

"I am not."

"You absolutely are." Arthur chuckled from the side.

"He's not wrong."

"I am surrounded by children." Donna closed her eyes and breathed through whatever was happening at the base of her skull. When she opened them, the lattice had gone.

"Five seconds is plenty," she said again, mostly to herself. * Steve stood up, stretching his body and shaking out his hands.

"No need to limber up, Steve," Donna said, looking at him.

"With your stats, you're not getting anything physical."

"I'm loosening my Nadi-Matrix," Steve shot back.

"The Nadi-Matrix is a lattice for processing higher-dimensional Ether. It is not a muscle that can be stretched," Archie commented.

"And you don't have a functioning nervous system to have first-hand knowledge," Steve said. Arthur and Sarah looked at each other with amused smiles. Steve was most definitely nervous. Steve accepted the notification and went still for a very long moment. TECHNIQUE EVOLUTION: CONVERGENCE EFFECT: SIMULTANEOUS PROJECTION OF TWO MODES THROUGH FOCUS, CONVERGING AT SINGLE IMPACT POINT COST: RESERVE DEPLETION SCALED TO INTENSITY AND DURATION FAILURE: SUSTAINED OUTPUT BEYOND MATRIX TOLERANCE PRODUCES CHANNEL STRAIN"Hmmm.

Two at a time," he said.

"Any two." Archie's geometry brightened by a fraction.

"Correct."

"I have been pushing one mode at a time since the start," Steve said, pacing around the chamber.

"Heat, cold, compression. One at a time. I did not stop to think if I could push two at once."

"Your Matrix has the channel bandwidth for paired projection at your current Acuity and Resonance," Archie said. His voice carried something Arthur had not heard in it before, the small dry pleasure of a teacher whose student had finally graduated.

"Two Ether effects interfering at the same coordinates produce damage profiles single-effect output cannot replicate."

"What are the damage profiles?"

"Variable. The interaction depends on the pair selected and the substrate of the target. Your discovery of the relevant combinations is left to you."

"He's making me work it out," Steve said with a grin.

"I am simply declining to provide the catalogue," Archie replied.

"Well, the joke's on you. I love research," Steve said.

"Steve, that there is how you bored all your girlfriends into leaving you," Donna said with a sigh.

"As opposed to your preferred method of intimidating them?" Sarah laughed and immediately turned away from the pair. Arthur spoke, trying to get the conversation back on track.

"What does the cost look like?"

"Reserve depletion scaled to output. Sustained high-intensity output produces channel strain across the Matrix. The rest we'll have to experiment and find out," Steve replied, ignoring the still-scowling Donna. Channel strain brought the doctor back into the conversation.

"So if you push too hard, you risk frying the channels you've been building since the start?"

"Frying is an imprecise description," Archie said.

"The relevant terms are loss of channel capacity and reduction in mode isolation. He would still be a conduit, just a worse one." Sarah walked up to Steve.

"We are testing the lowest intensity you can hold, once, to see what happens. Pick a pair you can guess the interaction of, nothing exotic."

"Thermal and endothermic. Heat and cold. They are conceptual opposites, and I have the cleanest intuition for both. Thermal I have been doing since the start. Endothermic is new, but I have it well enough to control at low intensity. If I am wrong about what they do together, the failure mode is a hot face and a cold face on a rock that does nothing else. The others will take more work to predict."

"I'll keep an eye on your Nadi-Matrix while you test," Sarah said. Steve picked a fist-sized piece of limestone from the rubble at the chamber edge, set it on the worked ledge along the back wall, and stepped back ten paces. He raised the rod and aimed it at the stone.

"Lowest intensity I can hold, for just a second," he said, mostly to himself. The rod tip had a faint glow around it, but it wasn't anything remarkable. Then Arthur watched two things happen to the stone at once. The face Steve was aiming at heated. The surface darkened first, then a heat-shimmer came off it. At the same time, a rim of frost climbed around the edges of the stone from behind, a creeping white against the grey limestone.

A second later, a crack ran down the centre of the stone from top to bottom, along the line between the hot and the cold surfaces. The two halves fell off the ledge in opposite directions and landed at different temperatures on the chamber floor. One was hot enough to scorch dust where it touched. The other carried a film of frost that began melting the moment Steve released the technique. Steve lowered the rod and turned with a wide grin on his face.

"Heat expanded the front of the stone," Steve said.

"Cold contracted the back. The middle had to bridge both stresses, and it could not, so it cracked along the line where the stresses met." He turned to Archie.

"What would be the effect on flesh?"

"Different substrate, different interaction. You will discover it when you discover it."

"Archie."

"I still decline to provide a catalogue." Sarah had his wrists in her hands.

"Pulse is elevated but not bad. How does the Reserve feel?"

"Lower than a single thermal pulse would have left it, but not catastrophically. The channels feel warm but not painful."

"Define warm," Sarah said.

"Like running for the bus. Not like running a marathon." Steve sat down with his back against the wall and opened the ledger. For the next few minutes he was dead to the world, an archaeologist cataloguing a new find for posterity. * Donna set the watch rotation and the party settled down to rest. Arthur slept in pieces. He woke once on his own and once when a piece of limestone shifted under his shoulder, and each time the hum from below was still there, steady and indifferent.

When he finally woke, he found the others already up. Steve was lacing his boots one-handed, ledger tucked under his other arm. Sarah was rechecking her supplies, and Donna was running a piece of leather across her axe. He stretched and checked his equipment by touch.

"Time to see what's waiting downstairs," Donna said, moving to the stairs. The party descended. FIELD NOTES OF STEVEN PARR On the question of what lies beneath the molecule The 'magic' effects are kinetic manipulation of molecules in the immediate medium. All operating at a molecular scale. All can be described in the vocabulary of an undergraduate physics course, which is itself the most suspicious thing about them. Question: Can Ether interact with what is beneath it? The molecule is bound atoms.

Can I affect electrons? I suspect the barrier is not knowledge. The barrier is bandwidth. Electron-scale manipulation is orders of magnitude finer than molecular-scale, and my Matrix may not yet have the precision for it. But suppose, eventually, it might. Lightning. Magnetism. Plasma arcs. Cold luminescence. Effects classical evocation has assigned to magic for as long as humans have written about magic.

Every culture I know of describes four or five element categories, and the categories are remarkably consistent. Fire, water, earth, air. Sometimes a fifth - lightning, void, spirit. I think the cultural taxonomy is older than the cultures themselves.