Mitch had lost count of the number of times he had iterated through the form but, as he finally reached a point where he felt progress had halted, there was no exhaustion. Instead, the feeling could only be defined as exhilaration; something akin to a runner’s high. His mind felt stimulated, his body invigorated: the sensation was utterly unlike the pain and exhaustion he, and Joel for that matter, had experienced previously while practicing these movements.

When he finally opened his eyes, he turned to see Joel looking at him with the oddest expression.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

It took a moment for him to register the question but when he did all he said was a straightforward question. “What did you just do?”

“What do you mean?” Mitch asked; he felt like he was missing part of the equation here.

“That! What you just did with the form. What was it?”

“Oh, those last three moves? I’m not sure, they just felt right.”

“No! I mean yes, but the other stuff too!”

“What other stuff?”

“You don’t know?”

“If I knew I wouldn’t be so confused,” Mitch said, exasperation and patience warring within his voice. Joel took a moment and seemed to be calming himself before he launched into an explanation of what he had seen while Mitch was practicing. Just two years ago his description would have sounded like a fairy tale, the ravings of a broken mind, but now Mitch paid close attention and took him at his word. The pulses he had felt within himself had affected the world in an incredibly tangible way.

“At the end, it looked more like a dance than martial arts, but that is when the effect was strongest.”

Mitch attempted to explain what he had done, the paths his mind had followed, but it was to no avail: nothing he said seemed to make sense to Joel.

“I need to gather my thoughts. I’ll go check on my experiments, and we’ll talk again after lunch.” Although his eagerness nearly induced him to force the issue, Joel ended up agreeing to a brief hiatus for the discussion. Joel went off to do whatever it was that he did when he was by himself, and Mitch went to look at the progress in his own projects.

Despite knowing that weapons were the most important thing for their survival, Mitch had been unable to resist the call to experiment with the formation that had generated that pearl of solidified energy. His thoughts had centered around compression and time. His idea had been to make a stronger formation that could withstand greater pressure, and to increase the duration of the energy build up. Hypothetically, the reinforced formation would allow for a higher pressure to form, and the expanded timeline would permit a more stable transition from the energetic state to the solid state. On top of that, he was not sure where to start with making a weapon. He examined the photos he had taken of the spiral formation inside the engraver, but both the text and the concepts behind it remained obtuse.

The first several experiments had been miserable failures, but this did not halt or even slow the tests. He was quite excited about this most recent instance because it was a substantial evolution of what he had been doing so far with the formations. Thinking of how much energy the engraver had survived, he had come to the conclusion that physical reinforcements would help to maintain the integrity of the formation.

With that in mind, he had used the lathe to turn down a log of dead hardwood, possibly a type of ash, into a four-inch diameter cylinder which had then been cut into eighteen disks that were each about two inches thick. Into twelve of these, a tabletop drill press had been used to punch a two-inch hole into the center, and a Dremel had been used to carve the variation of the formation which had achieved the most success in the previous trials. The only changes were that the drilled hole formed the center circle and, that the sinusoid lines from extended all the way from the center to the edge of the disk, rather than terminating in crescents.

The disks had been divided into three sets with each set composed of four carved rounds, and two blank disks to be used as caps. For one of these sets, he had added just enough water to some salt to form a slurry which he had then packed into the grooves etched into the disks and dried with a heat gun at its lowest setting. This had essentially resulted in an unbroken inlay of salt. Then the disks had been glued together, each offset slightly from the last. This pattern had allowed the terminus of each line to be connected by a crescent carved on the outside of the cylinder. Each arc began and ended at the center of each cap with a small gap left between it and the ends of the other crescents. An ideogrammatic embodiment of his own devising was carved into at the center point of each crescent rather than the physical one that was typically used.

For the second collection of disks, silver wire had been used for the inlay instead of salt, and on the final group the carved lines had been left as they were. The cylinders had been placed in the furthest corner of the quarry in case of disaster, but so far no problems had manifested.

As Mitch came into visible range of the tests, he was greeted by a strange sight. Two of the three cylinders were obviously cracked down the side and lay on the ground inert. The last bottle however, the third cylinder with neither salt nor silver, was floating about six inches above the ground and spinning madly. There was no way available to measure how fast it was spinning, but it appeared reminiscent of a drill bit at full whack: just an indistinct swirl.

Deciding not to mess with the cylinder that was obviously still active, only the two cracked tubes were collected. After bringing them to the workshop, the large tent that now housed all the tools and equipment from the truck, Mitch proceeded with disassembly. What he found pleased him immensely. The empty core of both cylinders had been filled with a solid rod of condensed energy.

Upon dissecting the cylinders, the rods that had been formed, each about six inches long and two wide, were easily distinguishable from each other. The rod produced by the salt cylinder had the same shimmering appearance as the small sphere, whereas the dowel produced by the argentine formation was nearly pure white. Mitch, of course, could not be sure without more testing, but it seemed that silver took some action to purify the energies passing through it. Or perhaps, the salt introduced impurities that the silver did not. That assumed of course that the visual aspects of the rods were indicative of their true nature. It was equally likely at his point that the shimmering rod could be the purer of the two and Mitch admonished himself for making assumptions without proof. For a moment, there was a feeling that there might be a more profound lesson hidden within that train of thought, but it faded as quickly as it came, leaving only a vacuous “what if” in its wake.

Ignoring that discordant note, the success was exciting. These rods were near to precisely what he had set out to produce with this whole endeavor. They appeared virtually uniform in dimension and so, he believed, would be able to interoperate with whatever variform weaponry he might find himself able to produce prior to the next Tolling.

His mind put at ease regarding this portion of his future armament, industrious gray cells turned their collective attention toward the manufacture of the remaining, much more difficult, part.

To produce an effective weapon one needed to be able to not only direct but also control the forces in use. With sword, stave and all manner of hand wielded weaponry this was accomplished by training one’s body and reflexes to the point where the actions demanded for the use of the weapon became as natural as drawing breath. With firearms, chemical and physical mechanisms were brought into harmony using the most tangible aspects of physics. The breach closes one side of the barrel, the propellant is ignited via firing pin or flash pan, the walls of the barrel directly oppose the expanding force of the gasses produced during ignition inducing that force to direct the greater part of its energy upon a single vector: toward the open end of the barrel. All of this occurs betwixt the bullet and the breach, leaving the bullet with but a single option: egress at deadly speed.

With directed energy weapons things become a bit murkier. Energy weapons are as multifarious as their energy sources. Railguns operate on electrical resistance, gauss guns upon opposing magnetic fields, lasers, masers and other beam weapons concentrate energy into a minuscule area to cause damage. The plurality of options to explore was staggering.

The one example available, Kanshou’s engraver, was most akin to a laser although the beam was wide and thin rather than a pinpoint. With this in mind, Mitch had begun a supersized replication of the engraver. He had started with an arm length white oak dowel one and a quarter inches in diameter which he had, on a whim, split, rather than cut in half, lengthwise. From there he had used his hobbyist grade milling machine to create a half moon channel one-third of an inch deep in each side leaving several inches on each end undisturbed. After which, no further progress had been made.

The next couple of hours were split between examining the photos of the formation inside the engraver looking for any clues as to how it functioned and sketching out possibilities from his own knowledge, none of which showed much promise.

He must have lost track of things because after what felt like far too little time Joel scuffed into the tent with a couple trays of heated up canned goods from the stuff Mitch had brought with him. The other man chose not to say anything and simply plunked the dish with his portion down on the worktable near the latest doodle. In the way of men, the silence was reciprocated, a nod and a semi-articulate grunt exchanged in lieu of proper thanks. Neither felt the need to break the silence as they ate, each keeping to their own thoughts.

Mitch used the time to actually do some serious thinking on the events of that morning. There wasn’t enough information available for a reasonable guess on the whys of what had happened, but he gathered his thoughts on the how. Having some time to step back and get some distance made it easier to be objective and sift out the things that really seemed to make a difference.

When the food was done, they washed their trays in the lake and put them on a sunny rock to dry and disinfect.

“Ok, let’s talk,” he started as they made their way back to the tent. Joel waited expectantly for him to start talking.

The explanation mainly centered on the vibrations. Joel was aware of energy channels as a concept but had never stumbled across the trick of observing them directly and had used just the physical feedback so far to develop the technique. That took things off on a bit of a tangent, ending with a promise to help Joel get to the point where he could do the same. After getting back to the point, the breakdown focused on using the vibrations to know when the movement was losing its potency and continuing to the next move to create a continually building cycle.

“Essentially, when the cycle gets strong enough the waves escape your body and, apparently, start to affect the outside world. I wasn’t trying to make that happen, it was a side effect.”

“That side effect could be huge. Other than just looking cool, if we can take it beyond just random effects, it could be handy in combat.”

“You think so?”

“It will depend on how it scales and how finely it can be controlled, but yeah I definitely think the potential is there.”

“Thus are born the combat conjurers,” Mitch said the corners of his lips lifting upward slightly.

“I like it,” Joel said with a chuckle, he gestured to the various sketches on the table. “Is this what you’re working on?”

“Yeah, its based on this spiral formation from the inside of this engraver thing I got before,” he said pointing to the printouts he had brought from the city, “but I can’t seem to make sense of it. It would be easier if I could read this stuff but I think it’s from the next realm.” Joel looked at the printouts for a few moments.

“That’s not a spiral.”

“Yeah it is, see where the lines would connect if you put the two halves back together?”

“Yeah, I see that, but it’s not a spiral, it’s a double helix.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, see, if you start from either end and trace away from the center, there are two parallel spirals.”

Now that it had been pointed out it was clear as day. “But they closed it on either end so… they turned one circle into a three-dimensional formation!” Rushing over to his drawings he flipped one over and started a new sketch on the back.

“And he’s gone,” Joel said from behind him.

The last thing Mitch heard before his focus blocked everything out was Joel yelling back at the tent as he walked away, “Martial magicians!”. Shit, that’s better.