by Gage Lee
>>>One...
Reintegration begun...
Physical vessel and advanced core at equilibrium. Ghostlight corrosion neutralized.
Reintegration complete.<<<
The pain vanished. My body didn’t just stop hurting, it felt better than I could ever remember. The agony I’d suffered was a distant memory, already faded into insignificance. The new power within me made me feel like I’d never really been alive before that moment.
>>>One discipline slot remains open. Progression on the Path of the Piercing Gaze is available.
Please select from among the following specialization auras to add to your current discipline: material, living, or occult.
If you select material, damage to weak points you identify in objects or structures will be doubled.
If you select living as your specialization aura, you will be able to identify weak points in living creatures within your line of sight.
The occult specialization aura identifies weak points in supernatural creatures or ghostlight constructs.
Alternatively, you may leave the discipline slot open until such time as you have learned the base discipline of another path from a codex or sutra.
Please make your selection before core solidification in thirty seconds...
Twenty-nine...<<<
I weighed my options and wished I had more time to make a decision. It would be nice to be able to identify weak points in living things or weirdo supernatural creatures. But to get home, the most important thing I could do was to gather as much ghostlight as I could get my hands on, as quickly as possible.
>>>Twenty-eight...<<<
“I choose the material specialization aura,” I said. It was the only one that made sense. If I could double the rate that I harvested ghostlight ore, we’d be out of here in a couple of days. There was no way the Fell Lord could reach us before then. He was on the other side of the city, and he hadn’t even gathered his forces. This was the right choice. It had to be.
>>>You have selected the material specialization aura. Is this correct?<<<
“Yes!” I practically shouted. As helpful as the interface was, it seemed needlessly difficult to use sometimes. Oh, well. I wouldn’t have to put up with it for much longer. Biz and I would be gone before we knew it.
>>>Advancement complete. Please relax and prepare for conscious release. You will need approximately thirty seconds to adjust to your new physical form. Do not attempt any sudden movements until sensory stabilization has completed.
All physical and stamina damage has been recovered.
Your Constitution has been increased from Neutral to Good. Strength and Wisdom remain at their current ranking of Good. All other attributes remain at their current ranking of Neutral.
Your Neophyte-level core provides a minor stamina upgrade.
Your Constitution upgrade provides a twenty percent increase in available stamina.
You have reached the second level of the Path of the Piercing Gaze and have access to the Material Gaze of Discernment discipline.
Your spinal meridian body cultivation investment has granted you Minor Physical Damage resistance.
You have zero reference points remaining.
Your next advancement requires twenty additional reference points.<<<
Well, that was a nice set of upgrades. The natural armor and strength would come in extra handy the next time I ran into some scrats.
My mind plunged through the darkness and slammed back into my body. A jolt of adrenaline blasted through my blood and sent me jumping to my feet. I stumbled across the stone platform. My entire body felt different, like a new pair of clothes that didn’t quite fit.
“Easy.” Biz reached out and steadied me with one hand on my shoulder. The fuzzball shifted its position to peer at me from around Biz’s head. “Advancement’s a rush, right?”
I crushed my sister against my chest in a bear hug. I was surprised by how she felt more solid somehow. More substantial.
“We did it,” I said.
Biz pushed back from me, freeing herself from the circle of my arms. She brushed her fingers through her hair and frowned at me.
“Yes, but that’s no reason to squeeze me to death,” she grumbled, and the fuzzball bared its teeth at me. “What’s your new prize?”
“I got the Material Gaze of Discernment,” I said. “I’ll be punching through walls in no time.”
“That’s pretty cool,” Biz said. “I got the Spear Fist of Light. You gotta see this.”
A golden corona of ghostlight surrounded my sister’s hands. The aura shifted until sharp points of energy jutted out in front of Biz’s fists. The aura looked like it could slice through armor or the kamarotz’s hide without slowing down. It was hard to reconcile the memories of my sick little sister with the ferocious warrior in front of me. I blinked away some dust that had drifted into my eye and shook my head.
“Try not to stab yourself in the brain while you’re picking your nose,” I said with a snicker. “How long was I out?”
Biz shrugged and looked up at the sky.
“It’s not like we got a sun to tell time by,” she said. “I’m not even sure how long I was out. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s been half an hour.”
If my sister was right, that gave us some time to kill. If she wasn’t, though, the Tribunal might already be waiting. The advancement ordeal had left me starving, but I’d have to put a meal off until after we checked on the rest of the Academy’s staff. With any luck, our meeting would be short.
“Let’s go check the great hall,” I said. “If we leave them waiting, they’ll whine and complain about everything. I don’t have time for that.”
“You should let me smack them,” Biz said. She threw a blinding flurry of punches, the ghostlight flashing around her hands like tongues of fire.
“I wish,” I said. “But that won’t get us very far. We still need all three of them. And their knowledge. Once they get the students up to speed, we’ll be out of here before you know it.”
“Sure,” Biz said, though the faraway look in her eyes and the tingle of dread across the back of my neck made me wonder what she was really thinking about.
The Tribunal was waiting for us. For once, they weren’t arguing. They weren’t talking, either, which told me they probably had been at each other’s throats up until a few moments before Biz and I appeared. As usual, Ylor and Reesa were parked on one side of the table, while Baylo hunkered down in a chair across from them. Monitor sat at the head, neutral as always. They all nodded tersely to us as we entered the great hall.
“Finally,” Ylor said. “We have a lot of work to do, and not much time to waste on meetings when the organizer can’t even be bothered to show up on time.”
I walked to the foot of the table, pulled out the chair, and dropped into it. Biz sat to my right and leaned forward with her elbows resting on the table.
“My sister and I were busy,” I said. “Advancing. Now that we have that out of the way—”
“Already?” Reesa asked, her eyes wide.
It was good to see the Tribunal surprised by my rapid progress. They needed to understand that Biz and I were not just a couple of kids. We were smarter and tougher than they knew. It was time we showed them that.
“Yes, already,” I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. I wanted them to think it had been no big deal. If they thought Biz and I just breezed through that ordeal, they’d know just how tough we were. “And you’re right, Ylor, we have a lot of work to do. The students need to be trained to harvest ghostlight ore immediately. Baylo and Reesa are in charge of that. Ylor, I need you to gather enough harvesters for all of us. When you’ve finished with that, pick the most promising ghostlight seams for the miners. We’re all in danger, and we have to pull together to claw our way out of it.”
The Tribunal glanced at one another uneasily. Baylo finally decided it was her turn to speak.
“This all seems rather sudden,” the emerald warrior sai
d in a strangely formal tone. “Monitor told us what you saw. And, while it is true that the Fell Lord is a threat we must take seriously, the Tribunal does not believe we are in immediate danger of attack. It will take our enemy time to gather his forces, and more time still to cross the ruins to reach us.”
Biz and I exchanged glances, and the fuzzball on her shoulder grimaced at the Tribunal, then went back to picking imaginary bugs out of my sister’s hair. What I wanted to do was march down to the end of the table and smack some sense into all three of them. I was beginning to suspect they didn’t know much more about the Fell Lord than I did.
“Convince me,” I said flatly. “I met Inphyr, I felt the hunger inside him. He won’t rest until he’s satisfied it. Tell me why you think he’ll sit in that tower twiddling his thumbs until he has all his ducks in a row.”
“Well,” Ylor said, “for starters, we have been here for years. And he has been in his tower almost as long. Why did he not attack before now?”
I’d been chewing on that puzzle since the bat tried to eat me. If Inphyr really had been in the ruins while the Academy had been floating around as a splinter world, why did he wait until an engineer arrived to attack? The answer had come to me deep in the night, almost like a dream.
“He was waiting,” I said. “Inphyr, or whoever he gets his orders from, didn’t attack the school because he didn’t need to. It was just the four of you here. You were no threat to him. He could roam the city as much as he wanted. He watched the Academy and waited to see what you’d do. For the longest time, the answer to that question was: nothing. But then, you finally had enough ghostlight to make your move. You called an engineer.”
The four of them had no response to my theory, and that was answer enough for me. Inphyr had only attacked when there’d been something for him to gain by it. The Fell Lord had made his move not against the school, but against me. Against an engineer. Inphyr didn’t care about the Ghostlight Academy. Attacking it would be difficult and time-consuming for him. What he did care about, though, was capturing someone who could mine ghostlight. Now that he knew there was an engineer loose on this splinter world, he finally had a reason to marshal all his forces and come after the Academy.
“Let’s say you’re right,” Baylo offered. “What’s your plan?”
“Stop interrupting him and he’ll tell you.” Biz blew out a frustrated sigh and banged her fist against the table. Golden flames danced in her eyes and flickered across her knuckles. Her expression was dangerous, unlike any I’d ever seen her wear before. Even the fuzzball looked cowed by her anger.
Baylo sensed something, too. She raised her hands and leaned back in her chair, eyes downcast.
“Thanks, sis,” I said. “Our plan is simple. We have a small window of opportunity before Batboy attacks. We’ll use that time to mine as much ghostlight ore as possible from the seams around the Academy.”
“And then?” Ylor asked before he could stop himself. When he saw Biz’s glare at his question, he sank down in his chair and clasped his hands meekly on the table in front of him.
“I’ll use our resources to restore a classroom and a dojo to train the students to fight. I’ll repair as much of the school as possible.” I cracked my knuckles. “And then, when Captain Evil shows up to party, we’ll destroy him and all of his little friends.”
Chapter Eighteen
AS MUCH AS I WANTED to get back out there to scrape up some ghostlight ore, we spent most of the day training the students to use harvesters and teaching the newbies enough English to understand orders from Biz and me. The Academy’s universal translator was taking longer than any of us would like to kick in. Fortunately, Monitor knew several languages, which helped bridge the language gap. Unfortunately, not even the soulforged understood more than a few scraps of the drem language. The little guys had such high-pitched voices that a good portion of their words weren’t even audible to human ears. We did learn their names, though, so that was nice. Ip, La, Gi, and Co were energetic and surprisingly friendly. They got along well with the fuzzball and even let him hold a harvester. On the downside, their enthusiasm far outstripped their skill, and the Academy’s walls and floors earned more than a few dings and nicks thanks to their antics.
The students who looked like miniature versions of Baylo belonged to a species known as the varm. They quickly picked up on basic English commands, though one of the males, Darok, kept trying to change words to ones he preferred. It took longer than I’d care to admit to convince him that the harvesters should not be called by the curse word he’d overheard Baylo snarl when a drem had tagged her knee on a backswing. Despite that, the varm were the kids I thought would be most productive on our next outing. They were strong, hard workers who followed orders without giving me a lot of grief. That was really all I could ask for.
The humans were an easygoing group. They joked around with one another as they swung their harvesters at the chunks of broken stone we’d gathered from the broken-down parts of the Academy. They seemed to understand my commands well enough, though they weren’t as quick to follow them as the varm.
That brought us to Xin. She’d picked up English quicker than any of the rest of them. She still preferred to refer to herself as girlfriend rather than by her name, which made Biz giggle every time, but the horned girl could form more or less complete sentences and listened attentively to everything we said. She even played nice with Biz, despite my sister’s constant teasing. As fierce as Xin looked, and as brusque as her attitude could be, she was the one student I would’ve trusted to guard my back. Or Biz’s.
By the time Biz and I had finished training the newbies and fed them their dinner, I was starving, and she was burned out.
“I’m going to take my plate to go.” She stifled a yawn. “I’ll eat in the room or something. If I don’t get some quiet time away from everyone, I’ll scream.”
“I’ll see you later tonight.” I handed her a sandwich and grabbed my own off the cutting board. “Don’t kill anyone until then.”
“No promises,” Biz said with a wink.
I took my food out to the great hall and flopped down in my usual chair at the big table. Since my advancement, I’d been hungry as a horse. It was like my core needed more fuel to keep its motor running. What I really wanted was a nice, rare steak the size of my head. Or, maybe, a dozen or so hamburgers.
Or a hundred tacos.
Man, I missed tacos.
“Do you think they’ll be ready to go outside the Academy tomorrow?” Ylor asked as he glided in while I was devouring my third sandwich.
“We’ll find out,” I said with a shrug. “I’m sure everyone will do fine. My biggest worry is language. If things go sideways out there, it will be hard to keep everyone in line.”
“I wish you the best,” Ylor said sincerely. “The Fell Lord’s activities have made long-distance scrying impossible. I was able to locate some nearby seams of ghostlight ore for you. Would you like to review my findings?”
I very much did. Ylor rolled out an old vellum map he’d marked up with fresh red ink circles. He tapped one of them with a long fingernail.
“This is the richest deposit,” he explained, “though it is also the farthest from the Academy. I recommend you instead try this location. It is nearby and is in a more sheltered location.”
“And how much ore can we pull out of the safer option compared to the richer one?” Safety was important, but getting the gate fixed and going home before Fell Lord Inphyr showed up was my first priority.
“That is difficult to say.” The eldwyr pursed his lips and considered the question. “By a rough estimate, there is twice as much ore in the larger seam. Keep in mind, however, that you only have a limited time to extract the ghostlight ore before its song will attract scrats and you will have to retreat.”
Ylor and I debated the pros and cons of his findings while I finished my sandwich and polished off a fourth. While I definitely wanted to tackle the larger concentrations of ghostlig
ht that were farther away from the school at some point, now was not that time. The students needed more experience and a better understanding of English before I dared take them so far from safety. I also wanted them to be much faster and more efficient so when we did finally take a riskier trip, it would be worth it.
I finalized our plan while I finished off a fifth sandwich. Monitor relayed the next day’s schedule to the rest of the Tribunal, and I hauled myself off to bed for a well-deserved night’s sleep.
In reality I tossed and turned for hours, snatching catnaps here and there, until I heard Baylo gathering the troops and Monitor’s mechanical voice explaining the plan in three different languages.
“Time to go,” I grumbled and dragged myself out of bed.
“No,” Biz groaned. “More sleep.”
“Don’t make me carry you.” A tear on my Chucks ripped open even wider as I pulled them on. Great.
“I’m coming,” my sister groaned and slithered out of her bed onto the floor. The fuzzball handed her the pair of ratty tennis shoes she had kicked off while getting ready for bed the night before. Her gear didn’t look like it was in any better shape than mine.
We headed off to the great hall and arrived just in time to watch Baylo distribute sacks and harvesters to the students. Backpacks would have been much, much better, but we didn’t have any in storage. The burlap sacks were leftovers from the Academy’s original food stores, before the Tribunal had eaten them all and had to resort to the emergency bead rations. The bags still smelled like flour and cornmeal and still coughed up small clouds of old food dust if you gave them a good slap.
“Be careful out there,” Baylo said as she handed the meager gear to Biz and me. “Keep track of your time. Once you start banging on that ghost rock, you only have a few minutes to get out of there before the scrats show up. With so many on the move, they’ll come in numbers you haven’t seen before.”
