Prism Academy 5- Chapter 5 (Patreon)

Chapter 5- Temptation

I felt the dark power pierce into me. I started to struggle and prepared to blast Cara with everything I had, but then I felt her heart starting to beat in rhythm with mine. The power was pulsing out of her and into me. She was feeling all the same pain that I was.

It wasn’t just shadow energy but this perverse concentration of the dark power which was causing this effect. It hit me then. The shadow had been trying to tell me this before. There is no such thing as shadow or darkness, for that matter. They are only the absence of light. Shadow is what is created by the light when it strikes an object and is then blocked.

Shadow isn’t inherently bad, it is the blockage of that light. But when it became condensed like this, it was no longer simply the lack of hope but rather something which sought to destroy hope. My intuition had been right. A man couldn’t be complete with the shadowy side of himself, but he also became less than a man if he gave into this type of evil.

Cara groaned, “Must purify.”

Then I understood. The concentration of dark energy flowing into me was already less than it had been before. Cara wasn’t asking to do this alone, she was fighting tooth and nail to suppress all the dark desires this energy had to be bringing up in her.

What I wouldn’t have done for ANOP now. Blocking my emotions without my consent might have been abuse, but if the AI could help me stay focused to filter these dark emotions, then I would have become so much more efficient.

I reached out to her, to that spot which she always seemed to occupy in my mind. “ANOP, I need you.”

I felt more than heard, a static-like screeching sound in my head. ANOP was , but it was like something was interfering with her. I focused more, but still couldn’t penetrate the barrier. It looked like I was going to have to do this the hard way.

Light’s Judgment

Rather than directing the attack at Cara, I pushed the purifying progenitor energy down into the channels in my body through which the power flowed. Then I held it there as I let Cara push more and more of the shadow energy into me.

The two powers clashes inside of me and then the connection spread from me to her. My light leaked into her even as her shadow was leaking into me.

My mind was flung back to a day when I’d first arrived in the slums. I’d been so hungry. It was a pain I’d never known in my young life. The memories had been sanitized by ANOP before, so that all I remembered was meeting Cara and the way she had helped me find food.

I’d forgotten the deep fear which had been in me. Everything was so loud. People stared at me. I was sure some were just looking for a chance to kill me and fifteen-year-old me didn’t understand any of it. I ran. I hid. In desperation I had taken to scrounging for food in a dumpster, only to find that I was unable to force the rotten food down my throat.

My memory became more complete as I reached the point where Cara found me. She had shown me how to survive in the slums. It was her help that let me live. She didn’t take away my fear. My stomach still growled with hunger pangs more often than not, at least in those early days. What she did do though was add hope to my fear. She gave me someone to experience it all with. The night was never as dark when she was beside me. I’d forgotten those feelings, or rather I’d never been allowed to feel them.

Now I did in full measure.

Now my light and shone brighter than ever before. I was meant to be a beacon of hope for the world. My mere presence was supposed to drive back the darkness, and I’d done a decent job so far, but in order to take it further, I needed to own the darkness which was within me.

I hated the police for how they treated me after my parents were killed. There was no safety net for orphaned kids. The world was too hard for that sort of thing. I hated the people who made me fear for my life everyday back then. I hated the people who had killed my parents. I now had a much better understanding of who that was.

But more than anyone else, I hated myself. I hated that I hadn’t been there to save them. It was a stupid child’s dream. If’ I’d been there, I would have ended up dead myself, yet, I’d never been allowed to work through those feelings.

I did that now. It brought pain, but with that pain it also brought growth.

I came to understand myself better. I was a symbol of hope, but I could only be that because I had overcome so much in my life. I had experienced the helplessness and fear which were the reality of the day-to-day life of so many people now. I had been tested in the same ways they had.

Too many supers were perfect, people separated from those who they protected. They had come from rich families and even in this shitty world, they had never known hunger or a night so cold you were sure your fingers were going to fall off. I had. I just hadn’t been allowed to experience them before, but now they hit me in full force.

My body convulsed as my mind took it all in.

Then my mind filled with a garbled notification.

 q^)%&(*q!_%&@#*_&

ERROR. UNABLE TO PROCESS.

SEEKING CONNECTION WITH AI….

UNABLE TO CONNECT. INFUSION OF ALIEN ENERGY HAS SHUT DOWN ALL HIGHER AI FUNCTIONS ONLY BASIC SYSTEM IS OPERATIONAL.

I was baffled by that. The pain was fading, but Cara was still in my arms. We were wrapped in the cocoon and a balanced energy seemed to fill both of us. It was mostly light, but there were swirls of gray within it.

I focused and looked inward, pulling up my status sheet. At least those basic functions were still available. Or they mostly were. The section of my sheet which showed my connections with my bonds was cut off. Perhaps that was because the AI couldn’t communicate with anything outside of my body and even then could only perform basic assessments.

I did notice a change, though.

Capacity: 9,778 / 24,444

Hmm… my capacity had shot up. Quick math showed me that I’d gained twenty percent total capacity and had shot up for a few hundred points of available capacity to nearly being forty percent full.

I looked outward again. Cara wasn’t moving. Breathing had become easier. The cocoon now just felt warm and cozy. Looking at her core, it was clear that she had a completely blended core. Instead of the white center, grey ring, and black outer ring, she was just was swirl, like random swaths of white, gray, and black paint with the vast majority of it being gray.

“Cara, are you okay?”

There was no response. I could hear her heart still beating, although it was beating very slowly. I shifted against her and tried to wake her up. She didn’t react in any way, but a part of me reacted to the friction.

At first, I felt a level of embarrassment in physical proximity to a woman, which I hadn’t felt for months. Then I pushed it away. I had history with Cara. We’d been everything to each other for years and had been beyond intimate. It wasn’t wrong for my body to respond to her and truthfully with whatever this shadow energy had done to her, she was even more attractive than before. More than any normal woman, even if not quite up to the standard of perfection set by the Rays.

If she wasn’t going to wake up, I decided to look inside myself one more time to see if I could reconnect with ANOP. Then I’d get busy freeing us from this cocoon. As I looked inward, I saw the flow of energy but then activated Shadow Sense to see how it reacted.

The shadow permeated me now. I had never seen it like that before. Yet, it didn’t seem harmful. It was moving in conjunction with the progenitor energy within me. The two would mix and split again and again as I watched in a never-ending cycle.

Yet there was something else. Something that was right at the edge of my sight, which I couldn’t see. It wasn’t exactly like the energy I had detected inside of Krig, yet it was similar. Maybe like comparing a smear of oil to a barrel of oil. It was like he had left some sort of residue on me.

I strained trying to make out the parts of me where the energy was affecting me. At first I didn’t think it was working, but then I eventually got a very welcome notification.

Shadow Sense has evolved to Energy Sense

Attempting to quantify unknown energy. Equivalency to known physical properties does not exist. Energy type seems to convey the essence of intent.

Hmm… so whatever Krig was, he had a completely new type of energy in him and one which didn’t match up with anything physical or that used by either the light or the shadow. It was almost like magic, and I couldn’t think of any better way to describe it. Yet calling it mana or something like that felt lame, so I latched onto the description of it as the essence of intent.

I dubbed the new energy as essence.

For all the good that did me, though. I still needed to find out how to remove it from my body. It appeared to be mostly concentrated in my head, which was likely why it was interfering with ANOP’s high functions. Her nanites were spread throughout my body and supposedly with enough time and materials even two nanites could regrow her, but that much destruction would cost her essential memories. She’d told me before that she needed at least thirty-five percent of herself to maintain those core memories.

After a few more seconds, I decided I wouldn’t be able to break down this essence at the moment, but I knew some pretty smart people and I’d put them on it. So, that only left me with breaking out of the cocoon. My capacity was high enough to use now, but more importantly, I felt fully restored physically.

I could have teleported us out of the cocoon, but there was something far more gratifying about just ripping my way out. I moved my arms in rapid motion outward. The glowing fabric around us stretched and then finally ripped apart. Then just as quickly, I brought my hands back to catch Cara before she had fallen more than a fraction of an inch away from my chest.

When I stepped out, my three bonds were all clearly in states of panic. I felt an influx of their emotions. That was the first time that I realized I had been cut off from them inside there. Odd, I should have noticed that before. There was a lot happening now that I didn’t understand, but we needed to move now while we had the chance.

Before any of them could say anything, I threw Cara up over my shoulder and smiled, “Get close and I’ll teleport us to Amazo Corps.”

Jen stared at me for a second before she said, “Don’t think that gorgeous smile of yours is gonna get you out of this. I…”

Sybilla cut her off and said, “We.”

Jen nodded and continued, “Excuse me. We want to know what happened.”

“I’ll share everything with you, but we need to travel. Suffice it to say that I’ve got far more than enough capacity to teleport us. I don’t think we should leave Cara here while she’s unconscious. She’s already been turned into a weapon against us once. I don’t want that to happen again.”

Demis pushed past the other two and pressed right up against me. She pulled my head down to hers and gave me a deep, passionate kiss, which lingered on long enough that I could feel jealousy start to rise up in the other two of my bonds.

Finally, when she pulled away from me she said, “Yep, that’s Aden. I’d recognize that kiss anywhere.”

Sybilla shook her head and said, “A kiss isn’t a valid way to check him out.”

Demis grinned. “If you’d like, I could do a more in-depth physical. Maybe play a little game of doctor.”

Sybilla just groaned. Then Demis poked her finger into my chest. “Don’t think that means you get off explaining, but let’s get out of here.”