Star Force: Foothold (SF25)
Page 10
Pulling back from the sensation no longer worked, as it seemed to seek him out now. Nor did distraction or overloading his senses with extraneous data. He’d tried audial, visual, and tactile stimuli but none of them would kick him out of his spidey sense mode and he began to wonder if this could actually kill him if allowed to escalate further.
With the blood rushing into his head and seeming to counter-push the cranial pressure he tried to relax and slip into a meditative serenity but literally every thought he made felt like barbed wire, so the only way he could avoid mentally cutting himself into ribbons was by holding absolutely still in mind’s eye…which he couldn’t do with a massive headache pounding him nonstop. He had to push back against it, and that mental activity ground on him. When he got frustrated with it, it became even worse. Jason couldn’t find a way to beat it or escape it…he couldn’t even find a way to fight it, for everything he did or didn’t do just made it worse.
So he was just trying to ride out the storm, keeping his frustration and mental activity in check and causing as little additional damage as possible, hoping that this would right itself eventually. Holding his handstand he closed his eyes…yet was still able to ‘see’ everything around him in faint outlines that helped him orient his balance. After 10-15 minutes he began to make some progress, with the painful hurricane flying through his mind settling down to a mere thunderstorm…then like a flash of lightning a random jolt of pain blinded his new sense for a split second and he lost his orientation.
The next thing he knew his back smacked the floor, knocking the wind out of him and undoing all his mental barriers as he lost connection with reality from the unexpected jolt. The pain was still there, however, and as soon as his brain woke up enough to feel it he instinctively pushed back with all the frustration and anger that he’d been containing before he could remember to stop himself.
Like Goku going super saiyan, Jason screamed inside his head with every muscle in his body clenching up in effort as he tried to blast away the pain by sheer force. When he realized what he was doing it was too late, so he just went with it…tired of backing down against this internal enemy no matter what damage he caused.
The mental scream intensified and soon found its way to his vocal chords, which matched in intensity what he was feeling inside. His back arched off the ground as he stared at the ceiling through closed eyes and yelled, not a scream of pain, but of power and rage as if trying to vocally beat back his enemy.
Somewhere in all that he felt something pop, and when he ran out of air and the yelling stopped he felt a warm, wet trickle rolling down the right side of his face. He flipped over onto his belly and reached a hand up and swiped at the liquid, then saw the blood on his fingertips. With a sigh he just laid down and let it drain out for a bit. The pain in his head was still there and now throbbing, but the building pressure had diminished, and for that, at least, he was grateful.
When the drips coming off his nose got annoying he reached up and pinched off his right nostril, intent on holding it closed until the breach sealed. He slid a few inches away from the small pool of blood on the mat and stared at the dark red puddle, acknowledging the fact that this mental problem was definitely spilling over and having an effect on his body. Part of him had wanted to just see it as a software problem, but in biologicals the software and hardware were never completely separate entities, and as much as a good run could clear his head, a messed up head could certainly screw up his body.
The blood stood out against the lightly colored mats, but it also stood in perfect clarity within his mind. He could feel its shape and texture, as well as the cloying nature of the liquid. Even with his eyes closed he knew its position and could feel the millimeter of height it had up off the mat. When he looked at it his visual senses seemed to enhance the 3d sense, causing it to go into more detail as if it were piggybacking on his sight data analysis program in his brain.
The mass of blood seemed to take on a special presence within his mind, as if it were a tiny pressure point of its own alongside the monster inside his head and the physical pressure of his finger-blocked nostril that was now pulsing amidst the coppery smell. He couldn’t do anything with those two aside from wait them out, but he reached out and tried to push the blood from his mind, feeling it weighed as much as a rock but gave slightly as if it were made of half-dried play dough.
A ripple formed in his mind…and to his shock his vision registered it in the blood as well, like a slight tremor impact. The pool quickly reformed its mirror-like, smooth surface as if nothing had happened, but Jason had seen it and despite the maelstrom in his head he was damn sure not going to let it sweep away that memory.
He found the tiny pressure in his mind again and pushed, harder this time. A shot of adrenaline followed as he realized that the big pressure in his mind drained a bit as he pushed, as if the effort was siphoning it off just a touch. Glad as he was for finally finding at least a small outlet for the mental pressure he also saw the blood ripple again, this time from a slight impact crater on the surface his side of dead center…which was the exact position he had pushed against it in his mind.
Emboldened by both discoveries he put a good amount of force into his next push, feeling like his mind was shoving its way through a bush leafed with razor blades. He clenched his teeth against the searing pain, trying not to flinch in body or mind in the process. Another spurt of pressure left his head…and the center of the pool of blood pushed out away from him, dragging and spreading the liquid a good inch further out onto the mat.
Tears welled up in Jason’s eyes from the pain that didn’t stop when the effort did. It lingered on as if he’d just took a piece of sandpaper made with glass shards and scraped it across his knee. Take the paper away and the injury lingers, as did this insane shredding of his mind.
Through the tears he stared at the misshapen pool of blood and grit his teeth as he forced his mind into a semblance of function along with a body that had begun to shake.
“Worth…it,” he pronounced piecemeal, as if needing to convince himself by hearing the words. Stealing himself against the pain to come he slowly built up mental pressure on the blood, as if spreading out the pain into smaller pieces that he could handle, then he pulled from the pressure in his head and pushed in a long, steady flow that, while rubbing his mind raw, relieved another portion of it like a deflating balloon that nearly compensated for the pain.
With his head turned to the side and his mouth closed so there could be no chance of his breath being responsible, he watched in both sight and 3d sense as the dark red liquid stretched out as if someone had drawn their finger through it and created a tendril offshoot.
Jason pushed it further, then released and pushed another section…nearly choking on the pain of transition. The second tendril pushed out at a slightly different angle forming a shallow ‘V’ that Jason then expanded upon with a third, shorter offshoot more to the side that seemed to drain away nearly half of the pressure in his head, giving him back a portion of his mental capacities that had been pain-numbed for days.
Flinching against the new damage he’d just done, he managed a laugh as he looked at the crude Vulcan salute he’d drawn with his mind.
He blinked away more tears, half from the pain and half from sheer joy. Not only had he finally made a breakthrough against the mental pressure that was literally killing him, but he’d also just discovered he was telekinetic…and the significance of that wasn’t going to be lost on him no matter how much pain he was in. Not after all those hundreds of hours of watching TV and movies as a kid and wishing he could summon the remote control from across the living room with a mere thought and twitch of his hand.
Though back then he had no idea that a mere thought could prove so painful, but that didn’t matter now. He had force powers…and a way to bleed off the pressure continually building in his head, which meant this internal war was now a fair fight, rather than the hopeless struggle he’d been enduring for months.
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br /> He had a lot of painful work to do, and was by no means out of danger, but he was going to win this fight...no matter how long it took.
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