Descend- Seeing Stars

by Sean Oswald

  She smiled at him and said, “Now do we get to go somewhere private. I hear this part is kinda fun and I didn’t show you what I can do yesterday. I was lowkey for our first time.”

  Jay tried to think back to what their first time had been like. He felt a teensy bit of guilt because nothing really stuck out in his mind, then again he had slept with like a hundred women yesterday even if it was spread out thanks to Tempus Fugit.

  “We don’t have to, I can do this without. Or as I have started saying, we can do it the clothes on or the clothes off way,” Jay said. Then he added, “I don’t even actually know what your power does. Self-Duplication, right? You grow extra arms? Or make a clone of yourself that you can control? Esseme has a power like that where she can create a version of herself that is all PSI energy but can still do a bunch of things without any risk to her.”

  Scarlett suddenly became rather bold and lifted her hand up to run her finger under Jay’s chin. “Oh, you just have to see what I can do. I think the best way to describe it is you can’t really know what it’s like until you experience it.”

  He felt very motivated then and reached out with his PSI to create a tiny opening through the tempus fugit field they were training in. This allowed him to use Psionic Teleportation and in an instant Jay was back in his private chambers with Scarlett. The field closed right behind him as they passed through it. His imagination was running wild as he said, “So, like you can make more of yourself. Can you control them all at the same time? How many can you make at once?”

  Scarlett laughed. “Looks like somebody has a vivid imagination. Let me explain first. I don’t actually make clones or anything like that. I mean sorta, but I don’t think of it like that. What I do is create a whole new person, but that person is an imprint of me at that moment.

  “After the moment of creation though they become their own person. They have all of my memories, abilities, skills, knowledge, and so on, but I don’t control them. They are their own person. I don’t have any special connection with them and the longer that they live the more they become their own person, although none of mine have lived longer than a month here.

  “I could see however if one lived say ten years the two versions might become quite different people. In fact, I’m technically not the Scarlett who was born on Earth, I’m a duplicate of that Scarlett. Although all of her memories are my memories. They make me who I am,” she said.

  “So, what happened to the original?” Jay asked.

  “See that is what I am trying to say. I am an original in that I don’t feel like I’m a clone or anything and none of the other versions I have made have felt like they were either. We sometimes even have different opinions or feelings about each other, but again that tends to happen the longer that it has been since the new duplicate came into being.

  “As far as what happened to the quote unquote original, well the same thing that has happened to a bunch of people here. She died. Some monster got her in the dungeon, and I will never know the details because it isn’t like we are the same person. I can’t read my duplicates’ minds or anything like that.”

  Jay suddenly began to worry about how this would interact with the fusion. “So how many of you can you make?”

  “So far I haven’t been able to make more than three of us including me at a time. I don’t know if that will change if I get stronger or not. I just know that seems to be a hard limit now,” Scarlett replied.

  Jay then told her the story of what had happened when he fused with Amelia and she along with Mia and Ava had switched bodies. She laughed as he described some of the oddness of it. Then he got serious and said, “So my concern is two-fold. If I fuse with you will the duplicates you make also be fused? And if I ask you to make duplicates first and then fuse with all of you at the same time, will that mess with your ability?

  “I would think that even if you changed bodies, it wouldn’t matter at least now, because your minds would all essentially be the same now. Not enough new information to make you substantially different. Does that make sense?”

  “I can see that. And I guess I see what your concern is. I don’t know how it will work, cause as you pointed out I don’t know exactly what fusion is. So does this mean I’m disqualified?” Scarlett asked.

  Jay grinned. “Are you kidding. Now my mind is racing about the potential here.” Then he explained to her about intention in the fusion and asked that she try to pass on her duplication ability to him. What caused him to pause was he wasn’t sure if he should ask her to pass it on to the other fuses. He had a vision of combined bliss and nightmare as he pondered the idea of multiple Jays running around with multiple versions of each of his fuses. He was just torn about it. So, he defaulted to not making a decision about it.

  Then he asked her, “So can you make duplicates of yourself now?”

  “Probably only one. It takes me quite a while to recover from the process. It is about more than PSI or even more than the necessary nutrients in my body. There is an emotional toll on me, but I am stronger after that refining thing you did to us, so I will try to make two if you want,” Scarlett answered.

  “Yes, please,” Jay said perhaps a bit too eagerly.

  As he watched, Scarlett started to strain. Her body trembled from obvious effort and then her back seemed to become almost fluid. She was wearing a halter top and the skin he could see seemed to bubble. A full minute later another version of her was standing there, except she was completely naked.

  The first Scarlett had already pulled out a matching set of clothes. Which she immediately handed to her duplicate. It was so bizarre to see Scarlett one say, “Here you go, Scarlett,” and then second Scarlett looked over at Jay and said, “Thanks, Scarlett, but do I really need to put these on if I’m just gonna take it off in a minute?”

  They giggled and first Scarlett ate a snack, drank some water, and then began the process all over again. It was clearly much harder this time and she began to cry with the strain. He had watched what she did last time and saw how she used Stamina and PSI to build the body, but she was right, it did produce a strain on the resources in her body.

  This however touched on a subject that he was starting to believe. Jay thought that if they evolved and refined far enough, they would reach a point where they subsisted solely on PSI. Of course, that brought him back to that same confusing question. What was the source of PSI? It seemed to be created in their cores; he still wasn’t able to determine what his body drew upon to create PSI.

  That was a question for another day. For now, Jay felt he could help Scarlettt out. He quickly scanned both her bodies and found them to be identical. Then he fed PSI into Scarlett one and used it to produce nutrients and raw materials inside her body.

  Suddenly the process of creating the duplicate changed entirely. Whereas before it had taken a minute and this second time had been taking much longer, it was now completed in seconds.

  A couple minutes later he was trying to decide where to look as he saw three identical versions of Scarlett. It was odd and intoxicating at the same time.

  As their passion reached its pinnacle, Jay saw the tendrils of PSI that connected him to all three duplicates and equally bands of connection between them. He felt the rush of the fusion, but it exploded in his head as he simultaneously merged with not one but three different girls.

  Sure, they were all the same, but in the fusion, in his mind they were all unique individuals. His power pushed into them and they each received the full four thousand seventy-five of his Metabolism score. Hers had only been seventy-eight so he received back three thousand nine hundred ninety-seven stats split between his other four stats.

  What caused him to lose consciousness though was that he didn’t receive it once, but three times. When he woke a bit later, he was staggered by the changes. His power had ballooned again, and he had even gained three levels from each of them. Most interestingly was that on his shared status sheet it listed each of the girls as their own individual
s.

  Chapter 14- One Man’s Stand

  When Jay woke up, the girls were all still out but by checking his chronometer he realized he had been out for over an hour. It must have been a huge shock to his system to fuse with three girls at the same time. On the other hand, the stat increases were an incredible payoff.

  Even though he had his room set at the same pace of time dilation as the training room, he still was gonna be late getting back so he was forced to increase the time dilation slightly. If the shock had been that bad to him, he didn’t want to push them too hard. They ended up being out more than another hour but were all excited when they woke up.

  As his overall power had increased along with his skill, so too did the skill levels that he passed on start out higher. He granted all of the duplicates Evolved Strength Forged Body at level one thousand and Primal Speed and Adaptation Mastery at level eighteen hundred.

  Those levels were far beyond what any of the other fuses had and because they got more advanced forms of the skills, they had a good chance to become much stronger. Besides their duplicate skill which they passed onto Jay they only had one other skill which was vaguely interesting, a Kinesis skill called Telekinetic Juggling.

  Now that Jay was fused with them, he knew the skill was only good for manipulating objects under five pounds but could handle five objects at their skill. It was of course distinctly possible that as the skill increased that they would be able to juggle significantly more objects. It turned out that was the skill that she passed to the other girls but only to Meikiyo so far.

  A short time later, Jay was back in the training field. The Scarletts synced with the other ten fuses in there. The syncing process didn’t seem to be any harder than normal. Scarlett passed out but the other girls were okay.

  “I assume you all have had time to think up strategies that you want to use against me. The fusing took a bit longer than expected but I will still take on as many of you as we have time for. Who is first? Oh, and don’t forget that there is a prize for any team that can take me out,” Jay said.

  Trina stood up and said, “I won the right for my team to go first. I’ve got Kayla, Abby, Uremi, and Sora with me and for our new person we took, Bianca.”

  Jay smiled, and the rest of the girls moved to the edge of the field. Then the attacking team came at him. He reacted only enough to protect himself while still allowing them to practice their attacks. He raised rotating PSI construct shields that moved around and blocked Trina’s necrotic blasts.

  She tried to keep him busy long enough for Kayla and Uremi to get in close. Uremi continued to fight with the double short swords she always had but now they were charged by PSI crystals that gave them an electric charge. Meanwhile Kayla fought with Jay’s favorite invention the girls had come up with. It was part plasma rifle and part plasma sword. He jokingly referred to it as a lightsaber although Ava tried to tell him that wasn’t correct.

  Jay dodged again and again, faster than they were able to attack. Bursts of kinetic force blasted out from him. After avoiding them for a while he teleported behind them and sent out a wide blast of energy to knock both of them flat. Once again, another wave of attacks came at him as Abby had thrown a number of small explosives into the air and used her rebound ability to deflect them from their normal courses at him.

  Jay could have just shielded himself. Instead of creating a dome to protect himself, Jay used Phase Burst to move through the explosions without being affected. The next attack that came at him though required a bit more effort. First Abby threw a series of projectiles at him, but they ended up being charged by Trina’s necrotic energy and blasted through his shield. He was forced to time skip to evade the secondary blasts.

  The problem for them though was that his greatly enhanced precognitive sense had already led him to understand that all the attacks had only been to allow them to create a special combo attack. All of them threw abilities into it. Suddenly there was a massive spider coming at him.

  The creature was like something out of a nightmare. Ten feet tall and formed of some type of ectoplasm like Amelia could make, but what made it so difficult was that it was charged with vitality by Sora, making it faster and stronger. Its multiple legs moved like a blur as it chased Jay around the room. The ectoplasmic nature of the creature made it so that he couldn’t phase past it.

  The problem with this exercise became painfully clear to Jay after just a few minutes. This was no challenge to him and while he could encourage them to attack, he wasn’t really helping them. It was a lie that this was even a match. He didn’t want to discourage them, so it turned out that it was quite a mistake to engage in this tactic.

  Jay rushed forward at a speed beyond anything that they could react to. His PSI blade cut the spider apart. Even its ectoplasmic structure wasn’t enough to stand up to the constructed weapon. It parted to allow his blade to go through without harming it, but it wasn’t able to react fast enough to thousands of slices from multiple spinning blades and it fared even worse once he burst into fire form and consumed it.

  He called out, “That was excellent teamwork. You should be proud. But I believe we need to change this up a bit. I’m gonna work on durability and you all just get to take free shots at me.”

  Jay would have been worried about Trina’s necrotic blasts since they could dissolve even his PSI shields given enough time, but since he gained her ability to absorb necrotic energy, he was willing to try anything. Many of the girls were hesitant at first but Amelia kicked it off by blasting him with a shadow bolt.

  One by one the others started unloading on him. Those without energy attacks might fling weapons or in some cases even the heavy metal containers that were in the area that now served as their training facility. Not that it mattered. Since the last fusion, his durability was nearly eight thousand. With the crown and with his Evolved Strength Forged Body skill over twenty-one hundred and maxxed out at the fifth boost he was practically made of metal.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t take damage. He was taking plenty of that. Some of the blasts, especially when the girls would combo their energy attacks ripped open his skin. One even laid his shoulder bare to the bone. But his regeneration level was so high with Bong Cha’s skill added in that the wounds closed as quickly as they were created.

  The blasts buffeted him around like a ping pong ball, but he still managed to maintain a PSI construct wall behind him to protect the ship and prevent stray blasts from ricocheting into anyone. It also served to help him practice maintaining as many skills as possible while being subjected to significant pain. Jay wasn’t naive enough to believe that the Forlorn and A’snkarnt wouldn’t have something to hurt him. He just needed to be able to withstand pain and still function.

  It gave him another reason to practice his Iron Will or rather the skill it was absorbed into and his Precognition. The trick came in attuning what he affectionately called his spidey sense. He didn’t need to know every time he was about to get blasted. That was just plain irritating, and he got a few stares from the girls as he shouted out, “Oh really, you think I’m about to get shot. Thanks for the warning,” into the air.

  What he really needed was to know if any attack were going to hit him that could cause him debilitating injury or especially anything that might one shot him. Once he set those mental conditions into place and trained the skill to respond accordingly, the number of precog warnings he got went to almost none. A few of the combo attacks still hit hard but then again, the purpose of this was for him to build up these skills while letting the girls blow off some steam.

  So, like a good trooper he took flames, acid, ice, electricity, shadow, sonic, concussive, compressed air, light, lasers, water, and pure telekinetic blasts to the face. When he wasn’t being used for target practice, he was being pounded on by girls with transformation powers that turned them into everything from enlarged versions of themselves to half monster hybrids or that presented with cold iron bodies or glittery diamond skin.


  He took it all in turn. Punches, kicks, being slammed with what looked like an I-beam and turned into a baseball, to claws and bites. It got worse when the girls with energy powers combo’d with the more physical girls. They were able to create energy auras or add elemental effects to their physical attack. Through all that he stood strong.

  Then he was suddenly hit with a warning of impending danger, but it was so vague he didn’t know which direction it was coming from. An instant later it made sense though as he felt like his head was going to explode from the insight. When external attacks weren’t working, they had finally shifted to trying a more internal approach. He knew he was still wreathed in flames from an attack but that wasn’t bothering him; it was the assault on his mind that was most dangerous.

  Jay knew it was more than one of the girls because he could feel different types of attacks. At first the girl dancing through his mind no matter how much his eyes were open didn’t seem to be a threat, but then he realized that her ability to induce daydreams in him was serious as a way to break his concentration. At the same time, he felt pain rocketing through his body. That had to be Emma.