“And that’s the deal.” Calvin said to the assembled people he had any respect for. And Nadia.

Baroke, Kala, Nadia, Ella, Grant, and Ghulad the engineer all sat around the fire in a semi-circle.

“I’ve got one point of Warp left, and I’d like to learn a skill to expand my abilities or shore up some weaknesses.”

“You could learn Lumomancy, or Phasing” Kala said. “I don’t have the Skills, but I learned the basics under my tutor. They’re two of the twelve classic schools.”

She held up a finger and a dot of pale white light formed on it. “Lumomancy is good for things like illusions and turning invisible, Phasing is good for putting things through other things without damaging them.”

Ask her if anyone’s ever done lasers. Elliot said urgently.

“What’s a laser?” Kala asked without prompting, receiving a few curious glances.

Compressing light into a tiny stream that cuts through things.

“Oh, people have done it, but it’s rather difficult to do and the effect is somewhat weaker than more specialized spells.”

Shelve that one, then.

“Phasing seems interesting,” Calvin said. “Let’s put it on the list.

“Engineering seems like it would go well with Dupdomancy.” Ghulad said, raising a hand nervously. He was a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of high Break individuals surrounding him. “It’s really helpful for building intricate things right the first time. Makes them stronger, too.”

“How do I get it?” Calvin asked.

“It’s a hybrid of Mathematics and Drafting.”

“I only have one Warp left. Drafting is definitely a possible though.”

Remind me to teach Ghulad dupdomancy later today, since he’s already got Engineering.

You gonna teach him Calvinian summoning too?

Of course not.

Good choice.

Ghulad put his hand down, satisfied with Calvin’s assertion that Drafting was on the menu.

“Your defences suck.” Grant said. “I think you should pick up Meat-Shield or Toughness. So you won’t get done in by a surprise attack.”

It’d have to be a hell of a surprise attack. Calvin’s senses had come to the point where he could feel most everything around him.

“What about Ilethan mind-magic?” Calvin asked, glancing at Nadia.

“Those skills are reliant on high natural Intuition.” She said, raising her chin. “Which you definitely don’t qualify for. Besides, you’d need to achieve at least two hybrid skills to qualify as a decent sorcerer. Memory Reading, and Projection for Mnemonic Illusions, and then Mass Influence and Emotion for Mass Suggestion. That’s six, total. Something tells me you’re not interested in dipping that deep into Ilethan magic to achieve mediocrity.”

Well, screw you, too.

“How about enchanting?” Baroke spoke up, attracting everyone’s attention.

“You know how to do it?” Nadia asked, frowning at him.

“Naw, it just seems like…Calvin’s specialty is making things out of thin air. if he could enchant them too… that would be cool, right? plus he could make me a bow that shoots lightning.”

“If you don’t know how to learn the skill, don’t suggest it!” Nadia said.

I know how to learn it.

Huh?

Oh yeah, back in the day, a guy named Zeke coded on enchantment and he wouldn’t shut up about it. It’s basically coding with mnematite dust in Harbinger Script so that it creates an effect when Warp passes over it. When you get complex enough to include semiconductors, then you start being able to make logic gates. Most of the enchanted stuff I’ve seen while you were walking around was simple Boolean logic or a passive effect. You’d need computation or AI design if you wanted to take Enchanting to its logical conclusion and make magical artificial intelligence. Like the System. Pretty sure that’s a mind-bogglingly large supercomputer composed of Mnematite Dyson-Sphere’d around a supermassive Siphon. That’s one theory anyway.

I have no idea what you just said.

Forget about it. It’s a cool ability, but it doesn’t synthesize with your Dupdomancy as well as you might think because Bent can’t easily duplicate Warp-Reactive Material, which is required in the construction of enchantments.

Hmm…bummer.

It’s one of the reasons that Nem is the unit of currency in so many countries. No wizards going around copying the stuff en masse. You didn’t think about that?

I just figured they had ways of checking to see if the money I was using was duplicated.

The big companies probably do. Like, built into the desk or something.

I see.

Calvin glanced up and saw Kala scribbling furiously in her notebook, Her dark hair hanging over her eyebrows, pipe resting beside her knee.

“Enchanting is too much of an investment right now, Baroke. Jinsei can do it, and that’s good enough for me.”

Your Knick-Knacks could probably do it, too.

Calvin ignored that and moved on, glancing over at Ella.

“Ella. Any Skills you think I should learn?”

Ella raised her eyebrows, then put her index finger in and out of her circled thumb and forefinger.

Baroke broke into a belly laugh, falling backwards onto the dusty stone.

“I agree, he does need to learn that skill!” Baroke said, chortling.

“What?” Kala asked, looking up from her notebook while Nadia rolled her eyes. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing important,” Calvin said, shaking his head at Ella, scowling.

Grant had taken the opportunity to fish through his pockets for a sheet of smoking paper and some longweed, eyeing Kala’s nearly indestructable pipe enviously.

“You fools are missing the obvious.” Nadia said archly. “He needs to learn Bent Manipulation. It’s the foundation of every classically trained wizard or sorcerer, and will make every other non-Skill supported spell easier to learn and recreate.” She eyed Calvin disdainfully. “You’re obviously not going to have many more spells as Skills, after all.

“That sounds pretty good.” Calvin said, nodding as he planned Nadia’s reward for the last few weeks of work she’d done. I DO need a watchman to make sure we didn’t miss anyone.

“So, how do you do it?” Calvin asked.

“I…it’s hard to describe. I could show you, before you made me into this.” She motioned to herself.

“Kala?”

Kala shook her head. “That was never part of my curriculum.”

Nadia looked really pleased with herself, puffing out her chest and looking down her nose at everyone.

“Well, I’m on my Forming Day, so I should be able to figure it out. Temporary savant and all. Nadia, go ahead and try to describe it to me.”

“Well, you push the Bent out of yourself and then stretch it, like some kind of elastic that gets bigger the harder you pull. You shape it into these weird fractal fourth dimensional images that you become a part of, like everything you’ve ever done is a tiny facet of this reality…snowflake.”

Calvin blinked.

“I said I’d try!” she said defensively, crossing her arms and making sure to accentuate her bust.

She’s right, manipulating Bent without the training wheels of The System is pretty mind-bending. The origin of the stuff is called Warp for a reason.

“All right, well, might as well give it a shot.” Calvin said, beginning to tug on the bent inside him, raising the black veins in his arms as he moved it toward his hands.

There was a soft scraping behind him, and Calvin felt eyes upon him, filled with bone-deep need.

That’s interesting.

Calvin let go of the Bent, the veins of his arms regaining their normal color. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the old cobalt…drifting toward them.

He was walking, after a fashion, his legs barely touching the ground as he dragged himself across the earth with seemingly great effort. And yet, the strange creature was drifting, only held down by the overgrown claws on his feet.

“May I make a request?” he asked, slumping down against an empty rock, panting with exertion.

“Depends on the request.”

“I would like for you to learn the Skill of my people.”

Elliot chuckled. Let me teach you the song of my people. He then proceeded to make silly noises.

“I appreciate the offer,” Calvin said, eye twitching as he tried to tune Elliot out. “But I’ve only got one Warp left, and not many more Skill slots, either.”

The ancient cobalt looked at him and heaved a huge, shuddering breath.

“You don’t understand. I’m the last one who knows the Skill, and I’m a pariah. There isn’t a single Cobalt in these lands who would willingly learn the Skill from me. It’s tainted by association, even though it used to be such an integral part of our lives. We dug with it, we built large houses of stone, we fought like devils.”

He looked down at the ground, seemingly contemplating something, then back up at Calvin. “I won’t live much longer, certainly not long enough to find another cobalt willing to learn what I have to teach. I want to give it to you because they seem to idolize you, and maybe one day you can put the Skill back in the hands of those it belongs to.”

“Allright, spit it out then, and I’ll add it to the list of maybes,” Calvin said.

“It’s a magic to link two objects and shift their combined weight between them.”

“That’s…nice, I guess?” Nadia said.

“You fought with that?” Grant asked. “What did you do, make people too heavy to move?”

“Among other things.” The cobalt said, nodding.

Calvin on the other hand was thinking about it seriously.

“You said establish a link and shift. Does that mean you can move it back and forth on command? It’s not just a one-time change?”

“With an Ability upgrade, that is possible, yes.”

That does sound pretty flexible. Calvin thought, imagining the uses for the spell. Calvin always did like flexible.

In your women and in your skills, amiright?

“Oh, come on, a little spell that makes people heavy isn’t gonna do anything to a Legend, let alone a veteran!” Grant said, scowling at the cobalt. “Just get a defensive ability and call it a day.” He turned to Calvin. “I could beat you up enough to get toughness right now. I been waiting for the chance.”

In response, the rheumy-eyed elder cobalt smacked his lips, squinted at Grant, and picked up a pebble.

“Whatcha gonna do with-“

The elder flicked the pebble at Grant with his huge digging claws.

Grant waved a dismissive hand at the pebble, but rather than knock the stone away, it continued on unimpeded by his arm, trapping it against his side and bowling the legend over, sending him tumbling out into the desert.

Not weight…Mass…ooh, I like that.

Once Grant came to a halt, he stood up with a furious expression, his swords unsheathing themselves.

A second later they all buried themselves in the ground, and Grant himself staggered, as if an invisible weight had settled on his shoulders. His nose began to bleed as he marched his way back toward the elder Cobalt.

The elder, seeing this, stood up, once again almost drifting in the air. He lifted a shaky hand into the air, then drove his massive claw down, sinking them deep into the boulder he’d been resting against.

With a flick of the wrist, the boulder came up out of the ground it’d been buried in and was hurtling toward Grant. Grant bent his knees and jumped out of the way at the last second, dodging the oncoming mass of stone.

Grant’s feet never came back down.

He began to float up into the sky, his arms and legs flailing for purchase on nothing at all.

I’m starting to see the appeal.

The elder squinted for a moment, and Grant’s upward rise slowed, then stopped, leaving him about twenty feet above ground, drifting on the wind. He sat back down, wincing in pain.

“Have I made my case?” The old cobalt asked.

“I think you have.” Calvin said, nodding.

“I must warn you though, a demonstration like that is the result of a lifetime of practice. Level twenty. What you’ll learn from me will be significantly weaker for a long time.”

I wouldn’t be so sure about that.

I guess Shadow Boxing is on the restricted list for a reason, Elliot said again.

Then why do I have it?

Somebody miiiight have unlocked Administrative Access on your System Account through a backdoor.

Calvin suppressed the urge to roll his eyes, and refocused on the old cobalt.

“Pardon my asking, but if it’s that powerful, why didn’t you free your people yourself?”

“I’m one man.” The Cobalt said. “Sure I can bring one person to a standstill for a time, maybe even kill him, but it took a large portion of my Bent to make it happen. There’s no chance I could subdue an entire fort.”

Ask him if he wants to be a Calvinian summon. We could totally bridge the Bent skill from Chained spirit and be able to summon an entire army of little guys who can make a Legend look like an idiot. That’d be handy when you come across One again.

It was true. Grant did look foolish trying to twine together his belts and shirt into a makeshift rope, trying to hook something solid on the ground to pull himself down.

On the other hand, Calvin could feel the emotions in the old cobalt’s gaze.

He’s absolutely done living, Calvin thought. Using him as a summon would be cruel to him and dangerous for us. He doesn’t have Nadia’s aversion to true death.

Fair enough.

Calvin considered for a moment.

“All right.” Calvin said, offering the cobalt his hand. “I’ll learn your skill and pass it back to your people when they’re ready to accept it.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” the cobalt said, “from beyond the Abyss, if I have to.” The cobalt’s claws folded over Calvin’s fingers and they shook on it.

“What about Bent Manipulation?” Nadia asked.

“I may not ever get another Break,” Calvin said, nodding at the cobalt. “And this looks like fun.”

Nadia scoffed and rolled her eyes.

Calvin knew that Bent Manipulation was probably the better choice. Between the Abilities and Mutations, it would probably be very powerful, but something was tugging at his mind to take the offered Skill from the old cobalt. Maybe it was sympathy, or maybe he’d been somehow motivated by the pure need he’d felt in the man’s gaze. Or maybe it really did sound like fun.

In any case, he’d made his decision.

***

Calvin sat crosslegged, with two nearly identical small stones sitting in front of them, listening to the Cobalt describe the process of linking them together.

Calvin slowly formed the bridge between them, as the cobalt described.

The spell itself was oddly similar to Sense-grafting, the way it felt in his mind. The similarity made it easier to picture a bridge between the two stones, and once it was fully formed, he began tugging the heaviness from one to the other – It’s mass, not heaviness. –

Calvin ignored the distraction, focusing on making the spell happen, drawing mass through the bridge. Bridge my ass. To Calvin, it felt more like a tiny straw, only able to allow the smallest bit through – grudgingly at that – Calvin bore down with all his will, drawing the mass through the straw with every fiber of his being.

Finally Calvin felt something give, like a chunk had cleared the straw, and the mass began flowing between the two objects. At least until another chunk blocked it. this one didn’t seem to have any give to it.

You have Manifested Shifting!

Shifting: A utility spell developed by the cobalts to offset their small size and lack of building technology. Move mass between two objects. Efficacy, duration and maximum size dictated by Skill level.

Shifting level 1: 5% shift, 1 minute, targets limited to 1 pound in mass.

0/31 Warp Remaining.

6th Break complete.

…

Definitely less impressive at level one.

Not gonna stay that way forever, is it?

Nope.

“I’ve got it.” Calvin said.

The cobalt blinked.

“Already?”

“Here,” Calvin said, picking up the two rocks. One was definitely heavier than the other, now. with the five percent moved between the two of them, the total difference between them was greater than ten percent. Enough to feel the difference by hand.

“It definitely worked.”

The cobalt reached out with shaking claws and lifted each stone out of Calvin’s hand before setting it back.

“Jibeyashtun.” The old Cobalt hissed. “That was fast. I expected some difficulty.”

Calvin shrugged. He didn’t want to mention the similarity to Sense-Grafting in front of the elder. The linking portion of the lesson had been easy.

“It seems as if you’ve truly learned it,” the cobalt said, shaking his head. “Now I can go die in peace. They don’t want me here, after all.”

“Wait a moment,” Calvin said as the old creature pushed himself to his feet.

“What is it? There’s nothing of any importance to discuss.”

“What’s your name? Where do I tell the cobalts it came from when I teach it to them?”

“My name…” The cobalt mused for a moment, his eyes watering. “My name is unimportant. Tell them the skill was given to you by Entunshi. He was the last one who stood against the Uleisans. He was a great warrior, and a master of the art.”

Calvin nodded. Perception was more important here.

“Alright. Thank you for teaching me your people’s Skill.” Calvin nodded deeply.

“You’re welcome.” The elder glanced off into the distance. “Now, I have to get on with the business of dying, I suppose. I’m not welcome back there.”

He pointed over his shoulder at the fort, where the rest of the Cobalts were busily practicing with Calvin’s company to hone their new Skills and increased Abilities. Now that they were all veterans, they could be considered an elite fighting force: assuming they maximized their potential.

Calvin watched as the Elder pushed off the ground and floated up into the air, then he began drifting away, following the breeze.

Five bucks says there’s a mutation in there that will let you fly.

What’s a buck?

…you suck. You and all your savage, sword-swinging friends.

Grant let out a yelp as whatever force was keeping him suspended in midair suddenly cut out, and he plummeted back to the ground.

“Think it was worth it?” Nadia asked.

“Yep.” Calvin said. The old man had demonstrated the ability to toy with a Legend, to some extent, and Calvin’s imagination was bursting with simple uses for it. the most obvious of them were to increase and decrease weight – Mass – in the middle of combat to simulate a massive increase in strength. The old man could barely move his own body, yet he’d sunk his claws into stone, and thrown a boulder like it weighed nothing, most likely because it had weighed nothing.

It’s mass, not weight! Get it through your skull!

What’s the difference?

Inertia! Reducing the weight of an object by having a friend lifting it up, or by reducing gravity, doesn’t alter its mass, meaning it’ll still be difficult to apply speed to it. for the old man to do what he did, he would have to be controlling mass. Pretty fine-tuned too. The rock he flicked at Grant didn’t have mass until it left his claws, or else he wouldn’t have been able to flick it. Then it gained mass midflight without losing speed! That’s a staggering gain in kinetic force, from nothing! That’s physically impossible, but we saw him do it! God, I love magic!

Calvin tuned Elliot out after a while, and motioned to Ghulad.

“Do you still have Warp left? Calvin asked. Ghulad nodded.

“Right, I want you to learn Dupdomancy. It’s a good one for an engineer to have.”

“O-okay!” the company’s engineer said, giving him a salute.

“Everyone else got their Warp taken care of?” Calvin asked.

Kala nodded. “I’ll be borrowing that puzzle box for the rest of the night, if you don’t mind.”

“Anyone else?”

“I knocked out my Body advancement this morning,” Ella said, “Save for two Warp. I want to get a couple more fighting skills.” She eyed Grant, who was sitting back down. “think you can help me with those?”

“Sure, sure,” Grant said, waving dismissively.

“And Nadia,” Calvin said, turning to her.

“What? You know I don’t have any Warp.” She motioned to herself. “This isn’t even a real body.”

“For doing such a good job these last few weeks, I’ve decided to reward you for all your effort.”

“N-now?” she stammered.

“Is there any better time?” Calvin asked sweetly.

***

“You bastard!” Nadia shouted into Calvin’s ear as he adjusted her rock to face the valley below them.

Calvin had lashed her naked body to a boulder high up in the mountains above the fort, in a location with an excellent view of the abandoned Uleisan camp.

“Now now, Calvin said before stuffing a rag in her mouth, tying it around behind her head. “There’s a really good reason for this. What if one of the army was hiding in the wreckage of the camp and once we left, tried to escape and tell Uleis what happened here? We need someone to stay and keep watch for a couple days, to make absolutely sure our story is the only one that gets told. You can warn me the moment I resummon you back in Uleis.”

Nadia let out a series of moans and groans through the rag, glaring at him.

“What was that? Why not just have you do it without the humiliating stripping and tying up part? That’s because you have just been behaving so well recently.”

He tweaked her nose as her gaze betrayed deep satisfaction.

“That and everyone else was all for it, cuz you’re kind of a bitch.” Calvin shrugged.

Calvin pulled a ripe Kumner fruit they’d scavenged from the Uleisan supplies out of his pocket and squished it, causing juices to dribble out onto his hand, before resting it on her lower back, where the juices started trickling down toward her inner thighs.

“For the ants,” Calvin explained before glancing around at the arid, scrubby mountain. “Or whatever goes for ants around here. Beetles, maybe? I’m sure you’ll find out.”

He got one blast of Nadia’s horrified and yet deeply enthusiastic gaze before he decided to pack it in. Being cruel as a reward was difficult to get used to, and it required its own separate box in his mind, separate from his other thinking.

Otherwise he might hurt someone who wasn’t indestructible.

“Alright, see you later,” Calvin said, waving as he started back down the mountain. “Probably gonna fool around with the better princess on the way back and talk shit about you while you’re otherwise occupied. I’ll let you know how it went when we get back to the city.”

There was a hint of genuine anger there for a moment, and it warmed Calvin’s heart.

On the way back down, there was just a little extra bounce in his step.

It’s probably best that you waited until AFTER the Break was over to do this. Otherwise you’d get a Leather Daddy skill or something.

Probably. Calvin thought. Is it possible to enjoy opposite things?

Totally. The brain is capable of seamlessly handling HUGE contradictions.

So I can like being nice to Kala and Ella and hurting Nadia at the same time?

Why not? Those aren’t exactly opposites, anyway.

I just feel like I’m put together wrong, sometimes.

Pssshhh, that’s one of the most common feelings. Just own it.

Calvin consulted with the thing in his head the rest of the way down the mountain until he got back to camp, where the combined forces of the Uleisan mercenaries, cobalts, and First Mujenan Volunteers waited for him. a combined force of just over two thousand people/creatures.

“Alright, the scarecrow is set up, let’s move away from the fort and see what comes crawling out.”

In the meantime, I need to practice my new spell before it’ll be of any use in a fight.