To flail against infinit.., p.20
To Flail Against Infinity, page 20
part #1 of The Stargazer's War Series
And it was fun. It was good, genuine, fun. The kind I hadn’t had since I’d come here. Since roofie. Threads had I needed it.
But you know what they say about all good things.
The Three-Legged Pony had only just started to wind down as Arthur and I closed our tab, but even as we pushed to our feet and wound our way to the exit, newcomers pushed their way in to claim the smattering of open tables.
Officially, the fun well and truly came to an end as we stepped back out into the chaos of Droe Lane to find two of the absolutely widest individuals I’d ever seen standing in front of us.
“Excuse me, fellas, you’re in our way,” I slurred at them.
Arthur froze.
The goon on the left, in faded jeans and a stained T-shirt that clung to the altogether too many muscles on his upper body, flashed a toothy grin. “Well, Humphrey, would you look who it is.”
Goon two, presumably Humphrey, in a slightly less ragged version of the same gooniform, mirrored the smile. “Hello there, Arthur. Victor wants to talk to you.”
“For the last time, I don’t know where she went.” Arthur’s words came quick and pleading, a fearful color to them. Given the sheer mass of the duo in front of us, I understood where it came from.
“That’s not what Victor says,” goon one replied. “Victor says you helped her give him the slip.”
“Well you can tell Victor I don’t own my sister any more than he does,” Arthur insisted, his hands visibly shaking.
“What do you think, Dennis?” Humphrey asked, finally giving a name to his fellow goon. “Do you believe him?”
“I think Victor wants to ask for himself,” Dennis said.
I took that as my cue. “I think if Victor has a question he can come and ask it himself.” Already I cycled qi through my blood and kidneys to clear as much of the alcohol out of my system as I could.
“Stay out of this, Cal,” Arthur whispered sharply at me.
I ignored him. “Look, if meathead here and his partner…” I scrambled for a second scathing nickname. “…meatshoulders wanna talk, they can talk. If they want to stop us from going about our evening… that’s another matter entirely.”
Meatshoulders cracked his knuckles. “Looks like someone’s got a mouth on ‘em.”
I raised an eyebrow. “You’d prefer I didn’t have a mouth? How would I eat?”
As my mouth and I hurtled headlong into what I was pretty sure would be a losing fistfight, three thoughts crossed my head.
The first was that this was a really bad idea.
The second was that I couldn’t just stand by and let them take Arthur to some dark alley, not after what I’d already seen that night.
The third was that I dearly wished I’d brought my sword.
“You’ll be eating through a tube if you don’t step aside,” meathead—I mean Dennis—threatened.
“Wouldn’t that be drinking? That sounds more like drinking.”
Humphrey swung at me.
I was ready.
My skin went cold and deathly pale as I ran qi through my skin meridian, fortifying and solidifying it as I fell into one of the unarmed forms Instructor Davis had drilled into me again and again. Technically The Dragon’s Grasp was designed as a desperate ploy against an armed opponent, but it turns out, it works even better when your foe doesn’t have a weapon.
With my right palm I pushed his fist aside, lunging in to jam my elbow into his throat. He stumbled back, clutching his windpipe as he gasped for air. I didn’t give him a chance to recover.
I advanced again, delivering a left-handed jab backed by the momentum of my step directly into his stomach. Still fighting for breath, his abdomen wasn’t tensed for the blow.
He doubled over as I knocked the air out of him. With a hand to the back of his head, I slammed my knee into his nose. It broke with a sickening crack.
That’s when I learned you can’t just ignore one of your opponents.
Dennis’s fist crashed into the back of my skull, sending black spots racing across my vision but failing to otherwise damage the qi-enforced bone. I stumbled forward, past the now-kneeling Humphrey, to build a bit of distance between the still-standing combatant and myself.
I turned just in time to block his follow-up with my face.
A year ago, such a strike would’ve shattered my jaw, knocked loose at least a couple teeth, and sent me sprawling to the floor.
Today, my head simply twisted to the side as his fist continued past.
I grabbed his overextended arm, at first intending to yank him off balance before realizing my fingers couldn’t actually wrap far enough around his bicep to manage that.
So I shoved.
Dennis stumbled back, his right arm pinned to his chest as I pushed my advantage. With it out of position, he offered flimsy resistance as I stepped in for three quick jabs to the face. A black eye and a bleeding cheekbone later, I hooked my heel behind his ankle and kicked back, sending him onto his ass.
I exhaled.
I looked up at the crowd of onlookers, drinks and trays of greasy food in hand, as they stared at my corpselike appearance.
I turned to Dennis and Humphrey and uttered my final remark, loud enough for our audience to hear. “Arthur Kent is under sect protection. Do not approach him again.”
I didn’t get a chance to hear their replies before Arthur grabbed my wrist and pulled me into the night. At a near run he led me, further and further from the scene of the fight as I peppered him with questions.
“What was that all about?”
“My sister,” Arthur growled over his shoulder as we sped on. “She used to work at one of the restaurants that asshole Victor shakes down. He’s obsessed with her. She had to flee the city to get away. Now he thinks I can lead him to her.”
“Threads, Arthur. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t think it’d be a problem,” he said. “Last week I told him I didn’t know where she went, and I thought that was the end of it.”
“Clearly not.”
“Clearly,” he snapped.
Only as we reached the busy transport platform did he finally stop. “Are you okay?”
I spat out blood, but a quick probe with my tongue confirmed my teeth were all where they were supposed to be. “I’ll be fine. You?”
“Yeah. I just…” He shuddered. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did. Those dudes weren’t gonna take no for an answer.”
“You could’ve gotten yourself killed. You could’ve gotten me killed. Cal, you can’t just go picking fights with—”
“I know I’m a cultivator now, Arthur.” I cut him off. “But I didn’t grow up one. You don’t need to tell me how this works.”
Arthur opened his mouth as if to speak again, but after a pause, let out only a sigh instead. “You’re right. Thank you.”
“C’mon.” I patted him on the shoulder as I requested a pod with my holopad. Thankfully, one of the sect ones pulled up. It was empty. “Let’s get you home.”
We rode in silence, arriving within minutes.
I wanted to walk Arthur all the way to his door, but he steadfastly refused. He seemed confident enough that meathead and meatshoulders were the only goons at Victor’s disposal, so I let him go. Those two wouldn’t be coming after him again any time soon.
Still, I left Arthur with a message. “If any of them contact you again, you let me know. I’ll deal with them.”
Arthur gulped and hesitated for a moment, but did eventually nod. “I will. Thanks.”
I smiled, hoping I’d managed to get most of the blood out of my teeth. “That’s what friends are for.”
As the doors closed behind him and the transport pod whisked me back to housing D, I reflected on the evening’s revelations.
Droe Lane had certainly been… different, but in the end, none of it had been anything I hadn’t seen before.
Cultivator or mortal, on Fyrion or back home, there would always be people who thought they could take whatever they wanted. There would always be Lopezes and Longs and Victors.
There would always be assholes.
If nothing else, I’d learned a lesson.
I was a cultivator now. That came with power, that came with responsibility, and that came with danger. By the time the pod doors opened to reveal the neat and sterile housing D lobby, I’d made to myself a hard and fast commitment.
From now on out, no matter where I went or who I went there with, I carried a sword.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE NEXT FEW weeks blurred past as I threw myself into my studies. Each day I awoke to my holopad’s alarm at the crack of six—formerly five twenty-seven before I’d re-synced my circadian time to Fyrion’s schedule—and joined Nick on the way downstairs for the morning workout.
Approximately two hours of weightlifting, agility training, and boring old cardio later, the four of us—who I’d in secret begun to think of as my crew—went to breakfast. Charlotte daintily dined upon strictly measured portions of unsweetened oatmeal, berries, and artificial meat grown with such low fat I considered it an abomination against nature and flavor both.
Xavier, in contrast, piled his plate high with anything from scrambled eggs to chicken apple sausages depending on his mood, always including no fewer than two waffles drenched in the appropriate quantity of maple syrup. I tended to follow his approach, stacking my plate with whatever looked tastiest that morning, more so in an attempt to get myself to eat than for lack of nutritional care.
Fat seemed to shy away from my body, leaving my wiry muscles well-toned but without anything resembling Xavier’s bulk. More and more I found I had to force myself to eat, appetite staved off by the qi in my stomach meridian. Compared to the voraciousness I saw in the others, it made sense. Making sense, though, didn’t mean I liked it.
That wasn’t to say I didn’t grow stronger—I readily tracked my progress as I lifted heavier and heavier weights—but nobody, I repeat, nobody, lifts weights exclusively to get stronger. We all care a little about how we look.
Nick, similarly, failed to bulk up, though certainly not for lack of appetite. The boy ate as much as Xavier and I combined, a miraculous feat at half Xavier’s weight. It was never enough. A black hole seemed to reside within his belly, unceasingly hungry and unwilling to share its bounty with the rest of Nick’s body.
Charlotte balked, at first, at Nick’s absurd caloric intake, but Xavier simply slapped him on his back and concluded that even at sixteen, he was clearly still growing. I declined to weigh in, explaining it away as somewhere between being a growing boy and the cultivating prodigy his parents seemed to think him. All cultivators, bar myself, had supernatural appetites, after all. Why wouldn’t an especially promising cultivator have an especially large appetite?
After breakfast my friends left to shower and go about whatever it was they did all day while I hastened on to my nine o’clock meditation class.
Far and away the least interesting of the classes, meditation was the first to which Vihaan returned. After the ice cream day fiasco, my classmates had moved from suspicious neutrality to grudging respect, no longer outright scowling at me, but making no effort to interact or otherwise make friends. That changed the day Vihaan returned.
They all watched as their wounded peer rushed into the classroom to wrap me in a great hug, listened at lunch as he told and retold a rather exaggerated version of my actions that day, and heard in no uncertain terms that I’d saved his life.
Apparently, saving his life wasn’t enough to get him to call me anything but ‘Mister Caliban,’ but I’d take what I could get.
From then on I became an object of fascination for the children, unable to exist in their presence without answering a barrage of questions on everything from why I’d become a cultivator to my favorite dessert. I answered ice cream to both.
As for meditation itself, I made consistent progress as the days dragged on, maintaining my focus through more and more of the senior cadets’ abuse. At least, after my work with Lucy, my posture didn’t require correcting. I refused to cycle during class, feeling my qi’s numbing effects would cheapen the training, but I knew that had I tried, I could’ve advanced to meditation two then and there.
I didn’t.
Charlotte and I had already worked out a strict schedule for when I could reasonably pass out of each class without arousing suspicion. I had two months of meditation one to go.
After a lunch break filled to the brim with questions from curious classmates, Chrissy arrived to lead us in my favorite class of the day.
I realized, far later than I would’ve liked to admit, that many of her cycling exercises were designed to help improve a young cultivator’s qi sense and work towards maximizing the percentage of the ambient qi they could pull into their core. My qi sense was already so sensitive that it hurt, and even a minuscule percentage of the ocean outside overwhelmed me.
Charlotte had implied that an important step in forming your seed core was stretching out your center to fit as much qi as possible, but I was still three meridians shy of that part. All of my remaining unopened meridians weren’t taught until cycling three, a class I wouldn’t reach for another six months according to Charlotte’s schedule, so little of what Chrissy was allowed to teach actually applied to me.
I mostly ignored her instruction, keeping out of the way as I built up my resistance to the local qi’s migraine-inducing effects and practiced various illicitly obtained exercises targeting my spine meridian.
For all her talk about not trusting me, Charlotte hadn’t hesitated to break sect rules and offer instruction on things she was absolutely not authorized to teach. The spine meridian, according to a few documents she’d sent me, governed the lower nervous system, including but not limited to instinct, reflex, and pain. The latter of which made it the fucking worst to prepare for, as most exercises involved teaching yourself to ignore your instincts, your reflexes, or your pain in anticipation for all three to go haywire.
If anything was going to give my desperate crawl down roofie’s gangway into Lucy’s airlock a run for its money, it’d be opening my spine meridian.
Theoretically, with my skin, bone, kidney, and stomach meridians open, I could’ve advanced out of Chrissy’s class any day, but again, Charlotte’s schedule held me back. I was happy to oblige. Chrissy was nice, and while incessant, my classmates had finally started treating me as a friend rather than a threat.
For those first few days after he came back, Vihaan clung inseparably to my side as we walked from Chrissy’s classroom to the dojo. I made a point of hastening as we passed through that hallway.
Of them all, combat class proved both the most painful and the most challenging as I either sparred with or suffered under the instruction of one of the three senior cadets.
The void horde attack had firmly placed the class’s importance into my mind, so I bit back my glib impulses and took my lumps with an eye towards improvement. Some combination of my renewed diligence and Vihaan’s extolling of my virtues managed to earn some respect from Instructors Charleston and Davis, but Instructor Long maintained I’d done an underwhelming job of something any true cultivator could’ve achieved far more easily.
I didn’t like Instructor Long.
Of them all, combat class posed the biggest barrier to achieving Elder Lopez’s deadline of catching up to the other cadets by the year’s end. Rather than sandbagging my ability to hide my progress, I’d have to train hard to meet the necessary milestones. It didn’t help that I needed to convince Instructor Long of all people of my skills, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. In the meantime, I started drilling with my new sword.
They didn’t let me spar with it for obvious reasons, but I spent hours drawing and sheathing it over and over, until I could bring the blade to bear from its home on my back without conscious thought. The steel and silver’s difference to the weighted practice swords threw my balance off entirely, forcing me to relearn the minutia of the basic swings I’d spent weeks practicing. It came easier the second time.
Xavier had absolutely gushed over the weapon when I’d first shown it to him, insisting I run through some forms with him then and there. By his judgment, I’d performed miserably yet demonstrated ‘a hero’s resolve to accept failure.’ Threads that man had a confusing outlook.
On his advice, I carried the sword with me wherever I went, less for protection than to grow comfortable around the weapon. According to Xavier, true mastery required a cultivator’s weapon to act as an extension of his body, both as a tool for dealing death and a channel for his qi.
In addition to my combat class, he gave me a list of forms to work through each night, dominating yet another hour of my already packed schedule. At least the AI that judged my accuracy with the forms just beeped how badly I’d failed rather than smacking me with a stick to make corrections mid-motion. It made for a less productive lesson, but a significantly more pleasant one.
Dinner each night varied on the whims of housing D’s cooking staff, but it always included enough variety to keep everyone at least mostly happy. My only consistent dining behavior was to forego the salad in favor of something I’d actually enjoy eating, usually some kind of meat, starch, and roasted vegetable.
Only Charlotte and Nick partook of the nightly salad, the former as a part of a well portioned plate and the latter as the first course of four.
After dinner I had an hour to spend either sparring with Xavier, peppering Charlotte with questions and requests for more documents, or reading. Threads I did a lot of reading. I read about void beast classifications—they’re entirely based on size, by the way. Any link between type and threat level is completely arbitrary. I read about cycling techniques, fighting styles, and pre-meridian exercises. I read about anything and everything that caught my interest, staying up long into the night before I finally called Lucy for our evening update before bed.
