58 - The Deadly Laser

Mercy missed sleep.

Aunt Charity always said that there was no substitute for true rest, even if you were a Lady capable of going without it for days or weeks at a time.

Still, it wasn’t something that Mercy would allow herself to have. Not while she was training with her newfound friends.

Friends.

The thought warmed her heart as she pulled back her bowstring and loosed the String of Shadows arrow on a distant school of Silverfang Carp swimming above the tablet library. She fired from where she stood, on top of a stone bookshelf wide enough for only two people  to stand side-by-side.

The loss of her Puppeteer’s Iron body had been a nightmare at first, until Mercy had settled on appreciating the brighter side of it—the potential for true training. It wasn’t that her coordination had become worse than the average person. She could control herself just fine when she concentrated, or when she didn’t lose her head to strong emotions. Most people learned to do this unconsciously, but with her Iron body, she never truly had the need to do it.

Everything came naturally to her. 

Still, even if her instincts for perfect movement had disappeared, her training hadn’t. 

The arrow landed.

Not on the carp that she had aimed for, annoyingly enough, but it did manage to strike dead-center at another carp in the school. She grumbled in irritation.

It was hard being this helpless.

The added strength from all that carp-eating was appreciated, though. As well as her coordination, she had also lost all of her physical tempering from her training with the clan, reducing her strength only to an average level. That, too, had been difficult to deal with. She got tired much faster, and the muscle soreness from training had taken some time to get used to as well.

Now she would regain it all. Thanks to the spirit well, she had made more progress in just over a week than she had for the months that she had wandered the Blackflame Empire, cycling aura and doing odd jobs for advancement resources.

At this rate, she would regain all of her advancements.

As much as the thought excited her, the reality of it also did place an additional burden on her. Advancement was the least of her challenges. She still hadn’t made any decent headway into the real reason she had left in the first place.

What was her identity?

Would anything really change?

How would her Underlord revelation change? 

She had spent five months in a vassal state, but none of that time gave her much more perspective or any sort of special self-insight. 

Inwardly, she felt like nothing had changed.

She hadn’t left all of that soul-searching up to herself, either. She had spoken to masters, sect leaders, ascetics, monks and nuns, engaging in dialogue regarding the nature of identity and the self with as many people as she could find.

She learned nothing new. Certainly nothing that the Heart Sage herself hadn’t told her. Given that she was the pre-eminent expert on matters pertaining to the heart, that wasn’t a surprise.

Your identity was amorphous and ever-changing. No one was ever one person, or could be boiled down to a single thing or sentence.

And yet the Underlord revelation sought to do exactly that. It sought to pin all of her efforts of advancement down to a single statement. 

“Nice shot!” Palutin congratulated, patting her shoulder as he looked at the distance, where the school of carp were swimming around the air in a frenzy.

Mercy grinned as she reeled the fish in with her technique. The school abandoned their ensnared kin and sought to swim away.

Then Palutin unwrapped the roped harpoon from his chest and threw it like a javelin.

The harpoon flew, striking through several carp after just a couple of seconds. Mercy blinked as she took in the diminutive boy. She hadn’t sensed any technique activating from him.

He had done that using pure strength. Just his Iron body. “Incredible,” Mercy said, “You’re really strong!”

Palutin flashed a grin at her as he shoved madra that felt to her like dreams into the rope. It pulled back on its own. A sacred instrument, then. “We got good eatin’ in the Wastelands if’n your teeth are big enough, if’n you catch my drift.”

As always, it took her a moment to decode his words, covered in that thick drawl as they were.

Mercy’s smile fell a little as she thought that over, “And how are things in the Wastelands now?”

“Terrible,” Palutin replied. He still hadn’t lost his smile as he pulled in his string of carp, four in number. “The honored Monarch stomped all over the place with her big feet, and the Phoenix wasn’t any nicer. Sure, could have been worse, since the Wastelands ain’t exactly, whaddya call it, densely populated? Now there’s a whole patch of it cordoned off, filled with them blood eggs. Anything that gets even a mile close gets eaten up in a flash. It was a mess, but it was a Dreadgod, so can’t expect much else, can ya?”

Mercy’s guilt grew despite knowing that she had nothing to do with all of this. This decision was on her mother.

Worst of all, it was a decision that she could see herself having made, if she were in a similar position. You didn’t always get to choose where you fought a Dreadgod, and in that case, you had to make the best of a terrible situation by moving the fight to the least densely populated area that you can.

But people would always die. There was no avoiding that.

That was the burden of rule that Malice always tried to remind her of.

The burden that she was to inherit.

A burden that she never asked for.

“Eeeh,” Palutin said, “Sense I said somethin’ boneheaded just now. ‘S a bad habit o’ mine, ‘pologies. Didn’t mean ta besmirch yer ancestor, was just sayin’ it like it is. Truth is, I don’t even blame her.”

“No, no!” Mercy waved her hand in front of her, “Don’t apologize for saying the truth! That’s not why I’m quiet. It’s just…” personal. But then again, Palutin was definitely a friend now. “The Monarch is my mother.”

Palutin whistled. “I done dove right into that mammoth dung top-first, didn’t I?”

“I’m not angry,” Mercy said. She found it easier to understand Palutin through context rather than dissecting and understanding every individual word. “It’s just,” Mercy paused, “She’d have wanted me to be able to make that decision. Moving the fight to someplace more desolate, where fewer would die. She’d call that the burden of rule. That sort of choice would have made her proud if I’d made it.”

And that was why she practiced the sacred arts.

So she could make those choices.

To make her mother proud of her.

No matter how much the rest of her rebelled at the very idea.

“It’s nasty business,” Palutin said with a nod, “Then again, it rarely looks pretty when the powerful make choices, ya know? When it be my master’s turn to square up, ya best believe maps get redrawn. He only ever lifts a finger when all hope is lost, and it don’t matter what he breaks cuz it’s all broken anyhow. That sort o’ thang ain’t ever pretty.”

Then what was the point of getting stronger if it all led to destruction and carnage?

Not for the first time, she found herself in disagreement with the very existence of the sacred arts. If it hadn’t been for that, then the world would truly have been at peace. Nothing could ever grow strong enough to destroy the world. Certainly, it would have made life harder in the small scale, but that would have been a worthy cost to pay in Mercy’s estimation.

But as always, she did not allow those pointless thoughts to last longer than necessary. The world was as it was, and there was no changing its immutable conditions.

But you could help by making things easier on the least of the world’s inhabitants by protecting them from monsters. Like the Dreadgods.

And Mercy wanted to be a protector. It was just that it was difficult for her to conceptualize paying the cost in the form of human lives, even when it was totally unavoidable.

She feared once more that her mother was right, and that all her paths would inevitably lead back to becoming the heir of the family.

Before her, she saw two paths. One would lead to her becoming another version of her mother. The other would lead to mediocrity and weakness, but it would allow her to keep her hands clean. That path felt selfish to her. Selfish and cowardly. 

And more than anything else, not enough. She didn’t want to protect the smiles of a single village. That would be her fate if she remained as powerful as she was now.

She wanted everyone to be happy. As many people as possible within her power, at least.

If she was less talented, less driven, then this would have been so much easier on her conscience, because then her Path might not have had much hope of stretching beyond Underlord. But she knew herself.

She knew that she had a good shot at Monarch. She always did.

That was her curse.

After finishing reeling in her carp, she turned to Palutin, who had thrown his harpoon strung with four carp over his back. “What would you do if you knew you could one day become a Monarch, but you have no interest in ruling or hurting anyone?”

Palutin blinked. “I reckon I’d go Northstrider’s way. He ain’t the emperor-type, but he did his part when duty called. Can’t speak to his character, but he always struck me as one o’ the good ones,” then his eyes widened, “Not to say that your momma ain’t sweet as a peach cobbler herself, or—”

Mercy shook her head with a laugh—she had never heard anyone refer to her mother as a dessert of all things. “No, don’t worry, I understand.”

Palutin gave a sigh of relief and nodded. “Truth is, Mercy, I don’t think the strong could twitch a pinkie without someone out there dyin’. That’s just how it works. But if’n the good ones weren’t out there twitching their pinkies, then the bad ones would be throwing their hands around like nobody’s business. Perfect heroes are just a pretty fantasy. Ain’t no heroes in the world. Just helpers. And when help is needed, ya gotta help.”

And before anything else, Mercy had always been a helper.

That was how she saw herself.

She wondered how her newfound friends saw her. Did they also think she was a friend?

How did she see them?

Lindon was industrious, hard working, polite, but kind too. He wasn’t just pretending in order to be polite. From what she had seen of him, he treated everyone with respect and politeness. 

Yerin was strong and dependable. At a glance, she seemed rough and confrontational, but really she was just utterly straightforward to a fault. At times, she would let her personal feelings get in the way of cooperation, but the only example she had of that was when she was being made to work with people that had almost caused her death, and had put their whole group in danger. In comparison, her irritation was quite reasonable.

Orthos was… afraid of Mercy. She couldn’t blame him. The Akura clan had gone above and beyond in their campaign to protect their territories from sacred beasts, especially dragons, and the dragon turtle had lived during the height of that aggression. He must have been raised on the stories of Fury’s escapades. The thought made Mercy queasy.

Then there was Glassy Sky.

She couldn’t quite figure him out. He knew so much. At times, it felt like he had a near-perfect understanding of the future, and was prepared for anything to befall them. And then he would stretch himself to his limits and get hurt, breaking the illusion violently. He had done that twice now, in recent memory. Firstly, when he dove to rescue Yerin after she had been thrown off the Skysworn’s cloud fortress, and the second time when those Tidewalkers had attacked.

He was sincere enough to risk his life for his friends, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that he knew far more than he let on. 

That he knew things about her, specifically.

Your mercy is legendary, to the point that even I have heard of it.

He had known who she was right off the bat. Known about her status as heiress of the family, too. He knew about her circumstances to a greater extent than even his emperor did. 

He definitely knew more than he let on, but for now, Mercy would extend her trust towards him. He must have had his reasons to keep secrets from her, and she wouldn’t pry until he was ready. Above all, he was dependable. Self-sacrificial. Daring beyond hope. He worried her immensely.

He made her worry that his recklessness would deprive the world of another person that saw the world for how imperfect it was, and had the drive and potential to change things.

As the two of them walked back to the Spirit Well, Mercy pondered what her impression of Palutin was. She found it to be very uncomplicated. He was also a helper.

How did he see her?

“I have a sort of a weird question,” Mercy began, “But what do you see me as? Who do you think I am?”

“If I had to nail it down,” Palutin shrugged, “I’d reckon you’re just Mercy,” then he laughed uproariously.

Mercy chuckled along politely. She supposed a silly question did deserve a silly response.

000

After days of searching, I found the next best thing to the holy grail.

Arakmedes of the Path of the Broken Star had a dream tablet in this library.

It was on the physics of the sacred arts of all things.

Arakmedes in his heyday had long preceded Northstrider, and had certainly never participated in the Ghostwater scholar’s community. The tablet wasn’t even labeled under his own name. The tablet had something of a history of its own, as far as I could tell from reading the attached author’s foreword–by a more recent Archlord scholar named Pentegraius who had collated many of the library’s works. 

The dream tablet had been considered the inheritance treasure of a school—or perhaps a philosopher’s ascetic circle, it wasn’t quite clear—of pacifists, sacred planetologists in the island archipelagos off southern Ashwind, who had been treated the tablet as the institution’s keystone, the legacy inheritance of the sect’s founder; an unnamed ‘Star Comet Immortal Venerable’—which I knew for a fact had been one of Arakmedes’ dozens of pseudonyms over the millenia. For centuries, Arakmedes had acted the part of wandering sage—not a Sage, but a sage, the real deal, a seeker of truth, sharing knowledge with the world, creating schools and sects wherever he saw a certain concentration of people who had whatever qualities of potential that he respected.

Centuries later, and a few less centuries ago, this school had succeeded in creating an entirely original Path, called the Path of the Second World. Pentegraius only went over the Path in the broadest, most general strokes, but if I was understanding right, it had been a force Path that could expand its foundations into every other madra aspect type. The Path had been very expensive, incredibly demanding of natural treasures, and somehow (I had difficulty believing what I was reading) involved opening the soulspace in the early Gold stage, which was then used to turn the sacred artist’s soulspace into a nascent microcosm of a world that also doubled as a multi-aspect madra engine—this boggled my mind, and begged further investigation.

This internal world/madra engine could be brought outside in the Lord stage, where it doubled as a Ruler technique by seamlessly controlling vital aura across entire regions. A manifested Second World apparently only showed its real chops at the Lord stage - it couldn’t be used to work sacred arts with any level of fine control, but rather functioned as something along the lines of, in times of peace, a terraformer, raising islands from the sea, levelling mountains, and reshaping maps. In times of war, it functioned as a mobile city destroyer, bringing down the biblical equivalent of all ten plagues on entire regions.

In any case, much later, the planetologist’s school had either tragically fallen from pacifism, or was forced to abandon it (also wasn’t clear from the foreword). They made the decision to weaponize their Path, at least in part due to the pressures of a famine-related war in the archipelagos at the time.

After weaponizing their Path, the planetologist’s school had matured into an entire sect beginning to exert dominance over the southern archipelagos and thalassocracies. In and of itself, this would not have been remarkable. But the sect’s strange Path attracted the attention of a force-path Tidewalker Herald named Gamonga, leading to the school’s collapse not long after, after he razed the sect’s headquarters and slew its one Archlord, seeking the sect’s foundation Paths knowledge and treasures. 

By then, of course, Arakmedes had been gone for centuries.

The tablet had been treated as a secondary part of Gamonga’s personal library, and stayed with him through his rise to Monarch. Later, after the Dread War, it had become a trophy of war of the Tidewalkers, put on display in their undersea capital in a national museum dedicated to their fallen Monarch, before eventually being transferred and forgotten in a different undersea museum’s artifact archive for a few more generations. Much later, after Northstrider stole it, it was treated as a curiosity by the Ghostwater scholar’s community, who hadn’t known what to make of it; but Pentegraius had deemed the tablet’s more abstract, even eldritch musings on the nature of the sacred arts valuable–valuable for something, valuable in the sense that all knowledge was connected. Apparently, Pentegraius had the insight to see that the tablet might hold value to some other future scholar, even if the contents had been baffling to him personally.

Unfortunately, Northstrider’s library had no dream tablets from the fully matured Path of the Second World. But Arakmedes’ dream tablet, the origin point of it all, was certain to have value of its own.

And so, for the past generations, the tablet had been left on these shelves, only one of countless that had rotted here, ignored by the Monarch faction aspirants who only sought direct knowledge on sacred arts techniques and advancement.

It was after going through the author’s foreword and examining that history that I reached out with my dream madra, and connected to the tablet’s records, but not before making some preparations of my own.

Immediately, I felt a resonance with it in my starseed, like I was not only receiving memories of the tablet, but a Remnant vision as well.

Arakmedes sat in his study, his mind a whirlwind of equations, geometric constructs, and the fundamental principles that governed the universe. He knew that the key to understanding the aura of stars lay in comprehending the intricate relationship between mass, gravity, and the warping of space. His goal was to develop a system of mathematics and physics that could explain how gravity could warp space so profoundly that it created regions where the internal dimensions far exceeded the external ones.

He began by considering the foundational principles of gravitic warping. "If we take the general equation for gravitational attraction," he mused, "Force equals gravity times the product of two bodies of mass divided by the square of the distance between the centers of the two masses. However, this equation only scratches the surface of the true complexity of gravitational interactions."

Arakmedes scribbled furiously, integrating higher-dimensional calculus into his equations. "In higher-dimensional space, the gravitational constant itself may not be constant. It could vary depending on the curvature of space-time, represented by the Yinlong curvature tensor Rμν. The Rose field equations, Gμν + Λgμν = (8πG/c^4) Tμν, where Gμν is the Rose tensor, Λ is the cosmological constant, gμν is the metric tensor, and Tμν is the stress-energy tensor, must be adapted to account for the aura interaction."

While my mind was swimming with the vision, I swallowed the mouthful of Dream Well water that I had held in my mouth since the start of the dream once the thoughts had grown too heavy. Too many sub-thought branches, stray musings, random observations, as well as the sheer weight of the man’s spirit, had caused my concentration to slip.

Arakmedes paused, reflecting on the implications of the cosmological constant. "If Λ is not truly a constant but a function of the star's aura, Λ(Φ), where Φ represents the aura's intensity, then the warping of space could be more dynamic than previously thought. This would require a redefinition of the metric tensor in relation to the aura field."

Arakmedes turned to the concept of spatial pinching. "When enough mass accumulates in a localized region, it could cause a singularity, a point where space-time curvature becomes infinite. However, this pinch doesn't just lead to a collapse but to a form of spatial inflation within the pinch." He began to derive the new equations:

"Let's denote the metric inside the pinch as g-in-μν and outside as g-out-μν. The transition boundary, Σ, must satisfy the continuity conditions of general relativity, but with an additional term to account for the aura. Hence, g-in-μν|-Σ = g-out-μν|-Σ + Φ-Σ, where Φ-Σ is the aura's influence at the boundary.

The intrinsic curvature of the space within the pinch could be expressed by the modified Rose-Quanyi action, S = ∫ d^4x √(-g) [R + 2Λ(Φ) - F(Φ, ∇Φ)], where F(Φ, ∇Φ) represents the field interactions of the aura. The resulting field equations must be solved in a way that ensures the continuity of the metric and its derivatives across Σ."

Arakmedes' equations grew increasingly complex as he delved deeper. "The key lies in the relationship between the mass density and the spatial warping factor. If we express the mass density ρ as a function of the aura density, ρ = ρ(Φ), and introduce a warping function ω(ρ), then the effective metric inside the pinch becomes ds²_in = - (1 - 2ω(ρ)) dt² + (1 - 2ω(ρ))⁻¹ dr² + r² dΩ²."

He paused, considering the physical implications. "The warping function ω(ρ) must increase rapidly as ρ approaches the critical density required for pinching, creating an exponential inflation of the internal spatial dimensions. The resulting geometry would resemble a Sambal manifold with a rapidly varying scalar field, influenced by both the mass and the aura."

Finally, Arakmedes turned his attention to observational consequences. "If this theory is correct, stars with sufficient mass and aura density should exhibit observable discrepancies in their gravitational lensing effects, as the internal space-time inflation would alter the path of light rays more drastically than predicted by classical general relativity."

He leaned back, satisfied but aware that much work remained. His equations, a blend of higher-dimensional calculus, tensor algebra, and aura field theory, represented the first steps toward a comprehensive understanding of how gravity could warp space so profoundly, creating regions where the internal dimensions far exceeded the external ones. 

Blood dripped on the floor. I was tasting weird things.

I seized my vial of Dream Well water and had some more. 

The shot made me acutely aware of how fucked my brain was. Everything felt weird. Strange. I felt totally weightless, like I was about to take off from the floor at any minute. I opened my void key and went up to the Life Well water, taking a scoop of it from one of the available bowls and drinking the equivalent of a teaspoon.

I experienced immediate relief.

I cursed the fact that I even had to dip into our stores to begin with, but for a moment there, I was terrified that I had fucked with my brain in some sort of irreparable, or fatal way, and I was only seconds from experiencing some kind of massive brain bleed.

I was fine now, but holy shit.

Arakmedes, you never fail to impress, do you?

I recognized this branch of research as one that he had pruned from his star aura research. The other Archlords and Sages of the Broken Star Sect had had more interest in dimensional theory than he did.

How had this tablet been the origin point of the Second World Sect? Things weren’t quite adding up - the origin point didn’t seem quite planar with the endpoint.

Then, after an examination, I saw a series of other memories contained in the lower parts of the tablet. Just from examining the forewords, it seemed these memories branched into other sciences that ‘Star Comet Immortal Venerable’ had seen as directly interrelated; such as stellar formation, planetary geoscience, actual geology. Including… personal observations? What the hell. Had Arakmedes actually visited the moon at some point? Apparently, if I was understanding these forewords accurately, he had visited a city located a thousand miles deep within Cradle’s mantle? What the hell.

In retrospect, three days to teach me exactly what he thought was the most important parts of his research—and not all of his research—was a rather naive endeavor. There was clearly so much more to his journey as a scholar than just that.

That said, now that I understood the introductory contents, I could see that this dream tablet–despite being over a thousand years old, even older than the Dread War–fit what I had seen of Arakmedes’ personality. He had never respected the lines of hard separation between the sciences that lesser men and scientists blindly followed. He treated all knowledge as being connected, seamlessly weaving together the sciences into a single tapestry of understanding and discovery, and when that wasn’t enough, he created a new branch of mathematics, or if need be, an entirely new field of science to fill in the gaps. Of course he could draw a straight line from higher dimensional theory that speared through half a dozen intermediary sciences only to wind up at geology, of all things. 

Now I really wished I could read a dream tablet or two from the Second World sect. Just how far had they taken Arakmedes’ insights? But those tablets weren’t here. Did the Tidewalker Sect still have them? 

If so, I was basically screwed on that front. I didn’t have even the beginnings of an idea of how to tackle that problem. Being given access to all of this, however… it made me wonder.

I had long-since hit a wall in the star aura research. Might as well backtrack and play around with the things he had already dismissed. Where he found copper centuries ago, I could just as well unearth gold.

This, like almost every endeavor I had undertaken in the tablet library, did fuckall to help me in the present.

I needed to get a goddamn grip now. 

I was making decent headway into growing my core, certainly, and the carp no longer knocked me out for six hours, but three instead. I could even get full on the carp now without it taking me a quarter of the day to recover from it. That was good. I needed to eat, after all.

I had tried measuring some baselines of my strength as well, and I was proud to say that if I enforced my limbs with just madra, I could deadlift Orthos, which was a sight better than the best I could do before.

It had been eleven days since we had locked ourselves into the spirit well, and the only one to advance to Truegold had been Yerin, and that was before we even began our training.

Anxiety was creeping on me. Soon, the security measures on the Spirit Well would break, and then our security would be entirely up to our skills as fighters.

Lindon had, at some point, advanced to Highgold on his pure core. Add that to his growing proficiency with the Soul Cloak, and we were more or less safe from most threats.

Still, I couldn’t see us beating Jingye even if we all ganged up on him, and Parizad was an entirely different wildcard, a true unknown. Harmony, at least, was a predictable known factor. I didn’t have a damn clue what the two princes were after, and I had a bad feeling about whatever it was they were chasing on the seafloor. I doubted they were chasing more of Northstrider’s abandoned experimental materials, not with the way they were seemingly ignoring the pocket world’s entire habitat system. 

What the hell was on the seafloor anyway? There had to be a way to find the answers, preferably without braving those deeps.

I would think on this.

But I was keeping this dream tablet. Into the void key it went, after a few careful uses of Nova Blade to incinerate the scripts that had been bolting it to the shelves

Later, in a barren part of the tablet library, where the dream tablets had been ripped straight from the shelves, I practiced my Deadly Laser.

This time, I tried to channel it through my finger.

Each time I used it, it required every ounce of madra control I had built up over the months, perfect control and finesse. 

When I released it through the finger, charging but also moving the energy, the resultant beam was fat, almost as thick as my finger.

It burned a hole straight through the shelf, but stopped well short of the range and intensity I had expected of it.

But just like Yerin said, I had learned something from the exercise.

All that was left to do was repetition.

I felt heavy footsteps land as I fired off the deadly laser for the twenty-fifth time. This attempt was even more of a failure than the past twenty-four, but that was good. I could emphatically cross that approach off the list of what worked.

I turned to the direction of that black sun in my Jade senses and saw Orthos chewing on some broken-down bookshelf. I gave him a wave. “Practicing this new technique. I think it might really compliment my current playbook. And it doesn’t hurt to have two Striker techniques I can pick from.”

“It’s a hassle,” Orthos decided with finality. Hold on a moment… this guy’s entire Path consisted of three techniques. Of course he would say that. “Two Striker techniques means two different methods of aiming and striking. And the cases of use are infinite. You would do better adapting your one technique to many different situations.”

I deflated for a moment. “Does that mean I should give up the Solar Flare and focus on… this?”

“It means you should find what makes this Striker technique different and special enough that you would want to split your focus between your Solar Flare and it.”

I nodded. Sure, that was true. “It has more penetrative power than anything else I have.”

“And it takes far too long for it to charge,” Orthos said. “And how good are you at aiming it?” Orthos turned around, opened his mouth, and struck a distant part of the tablet library’s ceiling. “Hit that,” Orthos said.

I focused on the black smudge on the ceiling, pointed my finger at it, and slowly charged up for the laser.

The laser missed.

I dragged it back towards the target, but moments later, it dissipated.

“You’ve never had to aim before,” Orthos said, “To quite such an accurate extent, because your Solar Flare is… powerful. Domineering. Wide. An attack worthy of being compared to a Dragon’s Breath,” he gave me a nod, and I could sense that this was rather high praise coming from him. “To throw that away for this tiny blade of light… you must make that trade worth it, one way or the other.”

“Contrary to your beliefs, Orthos, I am battling with many misgivings regarding my Path. It’s not as if I’m taking this technique lightly,” I said, a little more testily than I should have.

Orthos scoffed. “Humans always like to complicate things. I suppose it comes with the territory of having bodies and spirits that make everything more complicated than it should be. I have survived three hundred years with just three techniques. And I suspect I may add only one more before I die. I am satisfied with what I have. You need not be satisfied as well, but you do need a clarity of purpose. It is the role of a Highgold to meditate on their Path. Quick advancement may entice, but there is no substitute for this sort of deep meditation and introspection. What do your techniques mean to you?”

“They are all options in battle,” I said.

Orthos nodded. That was a satisfactory answer to him. “And what is battle to you? You are fast, your weapon is deadly, your Striker technique swallows up lesser techniques and can incinerate within seconds. What more do you require? What more are you lacking?”

The nerve project. That would only catapult my skill in battle to heights that did justice to Eithan’s tutelage.

But a technique that pierced defenses… that was not something I could afford to go without, especially if there was a method to bring it to existence right now.

“It’s a shieldbreaker,” I said. “It’s a scalpel. A sharp knife that does what a bludgeon cannot do. I will always be weaker than other sacred artists in a head-to-head confrontation, and if they have a shell that stops my technique, I’m in even more trouble. This technique can equalize the situation.” I thought of Kiro and his Divine Treasure, or even the Skysworn armor. I had no idea if Nova Blade could cut through it, but I knew that the Deadly Laser had way better odds of it.

“And are you certain you cannot go without it?”

I nodded.

Orthos returned that nod as well. “Then go on.”

Orthos trudged on away, seemingly satisfied with the pearl of wisdom he had imparted on me. I grinned at his back as he retreated. This was a nice and cozy little moment that we had. 

And… he didn’t call me weak. Not even once.

He even complimented my Solar Flare, and said it was worthy of being compared to a Dragon’s Breath!

That almost brought a tear to my eye.

Right, okay. Back to the Deadly Laser. I alternated between using a variety of different body parts as well as the spear to see what exactly went into eliciting the most effect out of the technique. And by far, the easiest way to aim, if not channel, the technique was by using the spear and pointing it like I would a rifle.

Still, I felt like something was missing. Some use of my channels that were more optimal. I still hadn’t fully tested out every body part though, had I?

Then an idiotic idea struck me. One that would have allowed me to take care of all of my aiming problems.

I closed my eyes and visualized my channels. Specifically the ones on my head.

This was…

Despite myself, I grinned.

And the more I thought about this ridiculous idea, the more in love I grew with it.

Doing this without a weapon would be hard, but it was worth trying out.

I cycled my madra through channel coils in my head, emphasizing the sword aspect for precision and sharpness, as well as the light aspect for unerring direction and range. I did this for an entire minute, eyes closed, before I opened them.

All the world’s colors looked like it had been flipped in negative. This did, in fact, remind me of staring into the sun, only the sun was everywhere I looked.

I focused on that spot of damage in the ceiling that Orthos had left behind, and let out the Deadly Laser.

Through my eyes.

Twin beams flew out from them, landing on the smudge in a near-instant.

It hit dead-on.

Of course it did. It hit where I looked.

The blast lasted for several seconds. I tried to drag my eyes around, but found that my eyes moved far, far slower than they should have, like they were being forcibly slowed down to a near-crawl. Unfortunately, that meant that I couldn’t drag the laser everywhere I looked with my eyes alone. I had to use my head to do that.

The experience was disorienting. I couldn’t look where I wanted, and my head wasn’t the greatest at aiming the direction of my eyes. That usually wasn’t something one would consider. Humans weren’t owls. We could change the direction of our sight without turning our heads.

Controlling the technique after it landed would take practice.

Just making sure that my technique hit my intended target would take no practice at all.

I blinked.

For a moment, I was terrified that I had just ripped a horrible furrow through my eyelids, or caused my eyeballs to pop from the backwashed energy. Instead, my madra just stilled by itself and the technique cut off.

A natural defensive response, no doubt. Those were always quite nifty.

I deactivated the technique and opened my eyes. 

The ceiling was just blackened with char lines originating from the smudge that Orthos had made, the smudge that I had hit dead-center.

Orthos’ Blackflame fire had merely burned the surface of the scripted tiles. But where my laser had hit, I could see a tiny hole, melted straight through the tiles.

Orthos was a Truegold.

The blast had to have been as thin as pencil lead, through the light and heat surrounding it must have widened the blast radius by a bit. Right off the bat, I could sense that this technique would have been enough to pop the Maelstrom Hide that the Tidewalkers had used.

This would be an appropriate weapon against Prince Jingye as well, if it came down to it.

All that was left to do was train it. Then, I would go and see about checking up with Orthos, making sure the maudlin turtle wasn’t being intimidated by our pace. 

He definitely was. 

Thus, it fell upon me to ease the burden of his feelings, to reassure him in any way that I could.