Chapter 41 -Training to Exhaustion (Patreon)

Tom looked down at the butterfly in his hand and thought about the ding. It had to be a new skill, one allowing him to extract precognition energy. He wished he had access to the ritual status screen to confirm the exact wording. But, unfortunately, here in the trial, that wasn’t an option. Or, perhaps, it was, and all he had to do was ask April. Specifics didn’t matter that much, anyway. He would ask her at his next break, but for now it wouldn’t hurt to try and feel the new ability out with experimentation.

On a whim, he released the captured butterfly, and it flew through the air, trying to separate from him as much as possible.

He ran at it.

When he re-entered its detection area, it burst forward speedily in order to escape him. Like always, it was too slow. Instinctively, he flexed his new skill as he swung his left hand at the fleeing construct. The butterfly’s wings were burnt into ash in moments, and its body imploded. His flailing arm hadn’t gotten close to it. He thought about what had just happened. That ding had definitely signified the acquisition of a skill, and it more than doubled the range he had managed with his method of creating the effect manually.

It was definitely a skill, and he smiled happily at the confirmation. It was the first skill he had developed personally in all of his lives, and he promised himself that there would be more coming. Now that he had done it once, future attempts would be easier. He could feel that deep in his soul.

Using the skill was easy, like it was with all the other skills he had ever possessed. It was like a muscle that he could flex to get the desired result. The formal skill allowed him to kill white butterflies at will, but that wasn’t the challenge April had given him; rather, it was only the first step. His job was to kill the orange ones, and that was far more challenging.

There were two approaches that made sense to him: either to store precognition energy, or stun a white butterfly and carry it around until he got closer to an orange one. He did not want to attempt the latter option, at least not until he had confirmed that the former, more complete approach wasn’t feasible. April was very deliberate in her actions. If he was doing something that was impossible and did nothing for his development, she would intercede. He wasn’t currently in combat, and the fact that he was still here meant his approach was what she wanted him to do.

With his decision made, he invested ten points, a full third of his remaining fate’s reserves, into the concept of storing the precognition energy. That was the only thing he wanted it to do: draw it into himself or nearby, then hold it there.

He saw a flash of white above and honed in on the light reflected off the fluttering wings. That was another victim to develop his abilities against. It moved more erratically than most, flying high with its speed supplemented by the stronger winds above him. The extra speed and the way it would bob upwards out of the range of his questing fingers was beyond frustrating. It seemed to have a sixth sense that let it know where his hands were. When he jumped, it just happened to fly higher and get out of range.

For about the sixth time, it reversed its direction. Annoyed, he spun to follow it, and then the butterfly smacked straight into his face. It was pressed against his nose and, instinctively, he flexed his new skill to destroy the annoying thing.

Its energy was sucked into his open mouth.

In surprise, he shut his lips, and then he froze.

The ball of precognition energy had not vanished immediately. It still existed, despite the butterfly having been turned to ash. Tom could feel it inside him, on top of his tongue, pressing against his shut lips as it attempted to escape. It hadn’t dissipated the way it did when it entered his fingers. It was still there, trapped and available for him to direct. Even as he registered that, his mind tracked the unlikely sequence of events leading up to this. The way the butterfly had avoided him and then ran smack bang into his mouth and surprised him into using his ability.

He had always known the power of fate, but he wondered how hard it would have been to discover this method for a non-human that didn’t have that convenient resource available to help them. He guessed their April equivalent would have needed to give them more hints. She would absolutely have known about this loophole, and the fact she hadn’t told him about this spoke to a deeper truth. Like many things about the orphanage’s set-up, everything implied that there were titles to be had, and he made another mental note not to ask questions.

Tom forced his mind away from the philosophical questions and stood unmoving, focusing on trapping the power inside him. It was a losing battle, as he sensed the density of the energy start to drop almost immediately. Holding it like this was inefficient: every breath sucked away twenty percent of the latent energy as it disappeared into his lungs or the surrounding air.

Still, this was a breakthrough. He figured the solution wasn’t linked to his mouth. Any internal air gap should be able to be used. Could he cup his hands tightly and hold it that way, he wondered?

A crystal, he intuited, would almost certainly work better than his mouth. At a minimum, it would remove the problem of breathing, as that was the main source of energy loss. What was next, he asked himself?

Should he go around headbutting the butterflies? Tom chuckled as he imagined how ridiculous that would look - a butterfly sitting on a flower and him flying headfirst at it to get close enough. It would be absolutely hilarious. April would have a field day with it for months. Tom also suspected it was not a valid solution. If it was, he would do it, even at the risk of being teased. What stopped him was that using his mouth felt like a dead end, but he still needed a space to store the energy. The experience of cupping his hands tightly to hold in water told him that any attempt like that was a losing battle.

Then a different idea occurred to him. There was nothing that said the space he used had to be natural, and his healing endeavours gave him the perfect spell for this situation.

Tom focused and then activated Skin Wall on his finger. Slowly, like a pouch of a kangaroo, a second skin grew over the nail of his index finger. It took him over half an hour to finish the design and it was bulbous, ugly, and only large enough to contain three or four rice grains of space. But it created a perfect reservoir of air within his body. 

When he approached the next butterfly, only his modified finger went near it. His new skill had a range of two feet, but he didn’t try to use it at that distance. Instead, he followed the butterfly’s flight until making physical contact with the creature. Only then did he draw the power into the cavity he had created.

The butterfly burned away into ash, and a small amount of energy was successfully stored in the newly shaped pouch. It wasn’t much, and only a fraction of what he had briefly held in his mouth, with most being lost as he had transitioned the power through the thin layer of skin.

It was a success, even if a minor one. Now he had to build it into something material.

Tom kept hunting, and focused on increasing the energy he could store. All of his fingers were now covered with the weird skin bulges to boost his volume. It was hideous, and if anyone saw the hands by themselves no one would think they belonged to a human.

He was in a trial and it was all temporary, so he didn’t care. The entirety of his focus was on improving his actions. He concentrated on increasing the density within each of the spaces, an approach that was met with mixed success. However, there were enough wins, and the amount he could store was steadily extended to allow him to shift his efforts towards hunting the orange ones.  

Every scrap of precognition energy he gained was used to kill them. He knew the pouch method he was using was both a cheat and not. No one reasonable would expect that solution, but it worked, so he kept persisting with a focus on efficiency. His fate pool drained away to zero as he boosted his efforts.

There was another ding. There had been a couple more before, but Tom had been in the zone and ignored them. Currently, he was resting against a tree, and he wasn’t sure if it the latest upgrade had been awarded for the success in moving, storing, or directly creating the energy. He was pretty certain it was the first, but it was hard to tell. His thoughts felt mushy, and he was losing track of what was happening.

Specifics were irrelevant. Every part of the capture, storage and killing process had improved.

Tom pressed on. 

The number of white butterflies in the environment dropped alarmingly. Annoyed at his over-hunting, he adjusted his strategy to push for even more efficiency. He stunned butterflies now and carried them for a while to limit the steady losses that occurred when the energy was trapped in his air pouches.

There was another ding.

He was exhausted.

Tom’s double vision that occurred when he was chasing a butterfly allowed it to escape. He was continuously out of breath, and his heart was beating harder than it should have been. Luckily, there were no monsters nearby, because Tom doubted he could fight effectively in his current state.

He wondered if he should continue or not. Then he saw a flicker of white. These were rare now, and this was not an opportunity he could afford to ignore.

Almost staggering, he ran the butterfly down, taking a zig-zagging path because of the tricks his mind was playing on him. In contrast to the difficulty of physical exertion, it was ridiculously easy to flex his skill and take its energy. Not that the use of his skill didn’t have side-effects.

The effort made his hands and feet tingle. Part of him knew he should call out to April and ask to stop. Something was very wrong: the double vision, the unexpected dizziness, the fact that he had vomited multiple times. If he was in the wild, he would be hunkering down, but he wasn’t. He was under a GOD’s shield, and he was making progress, and if whatever he was doing was truly dangerous, she would intercede. The fact she hadn’t meant it was safe to keep pushing.  

This was the only place he could safely push himself to extremes without a fear of consequences. 

There were so many orange butterflies and so few white ones that sometimes he would successfully tag an orange construct and then discover that he lacked the power to destroy them fully.

That made him rage inside and push harder.

Now that he knew what it felt like to move the energy, to shift it, turn it, hold, condense, use and create it, killing orange butterflies was becoming easier.

Physically, everything remained a struggle.

He spotted another orange butterfly and ran for it. His brain was barely functioning, but he gathered energy as he went, creating the precognition affinity in preparation to closing with his target.

All he had to do was to reach out and touch it and focus on sending the energy into it, and it would die. He flexed and discovered his pouches didn’t have enough in them. That sort of made sense, as he couldn’t remember when he had killed the last white butterfly.

That wasn’t acceptable.

He wasn’t about to allow another one to escape. He drew deeply on his inner self, flexing the muscle that was not connected to anything physical to create more energy to make sure it died.

There was a ding.

The world blurred, and he found himself in the cafe. He wanted to sleep, but there was no coffee in front of him, just two crystals. One was empty and the other full.

His stomach seethed, and he longed to vomit messily on the floor. Or, maybe, passing out was the better option.

“Hold it together, Tom,” April ordered perfunctorily and then reached over and pushed the filled crystal toward him. “Convert this.”

He was almost swaying on the spot. His brain was fuzzy, and at the same time it felt like it was clamped in a vice. His eyes felt tarred up, and every blink hurt. The crystal she had given him was in his hands, filled with normal mana.

“Convert it.” April ordered again.

Why? He thought, but it was too much effort to vocalise. He wanted to sleep.

“Tom,” she clicked her fingers. “Stay with me. Focus, convert the energy.”

Flexing the muscle was easy, even if it made bile rise up in his throat and caused his brain to feel like it was being pelted with shrapnel. It was easy to pull the energy out of the crystal to run along his skin, to adjust it as it went by, then push it back to where it came from.

Slowly, the mana in the crystal converted to have a precognition affinity.

There was a ding.

“Good.” April said. The precious stone vanished and she nodded at the empty one. “Now fill that.”

For a moment, he was confused, and he wondered how he was supposed to do that and why he was here.

He glanced around and found himself unable to focus on the other customers. Was that an indication that something was wrong with him? No, he had never been able to see them. It was how this cafe worked.  What was he doing again? His memory was playing tricks on him, and the hard floor looked like a comfortable bed.

“Fill it.” April repeated insistently.

He studied what she was talking about. It was an empty mana crystal. It only had a capacity of five, which was tiny. In other words, it was small enough that he could use his mana pool and regeneration to gather sufficient mana for it. It depended on the efficiency with which it accepted mana, but half an hour should be sufficient.

“With precognition affinity.”

“What?” he stared at the crystal. Then remembered all the training. “April…” he trailed off to silence for a moment. He wanted desperately to lean over and bring up everything in his stomach. “I don’t feel so well.”

“I know. Do you trust me?”

He looked at her. She was perfect, but too symmetrical to be real, her eyes a little too large, her skin too smooth. His instinct was to run screaming at how alien she was, but she had also sworn an oath, and that meant everything in Existentia. “Yes, I do.”

“Then fill it.”

He picked the stone up and then remembered the moments that passed before he was summoned here. If he could create precognition energy directly, then doing as she asked wouldn’t be that difficult.

He flexed his mind and spent the two points of fate that he had available without really thinking about it.

Then he focused everything he could on the task.

Minutes passed while Tom stayed in the trance. A point of attuned mana appeared in the crystal, which was great, but more significant was that his own mana pool hadn’t moved.  That didn’t make any sense, but he kept concentrating on the task. His eyes could no longer focus, and the crystal went from a blur to two to four, then back to indistinct blurs. The world was swaying in tune with his heartbeats.

Tom pushed the distractions aside and concentrated on the task. It ticked up another point. That was two out of five. He was almost halfway there, and he was under a GOD’s shield. He could do this.

There was another ding and a sound of trumpets.

April was beaming at him. She plucked the stone out of his hand.

The trumpets were good, but he hadn’t wanted to fail April. She had commanded him to fill it, and he had failed.

There were two Aprils. He stared down at his three hands… why were some of them fuzzy? The swaying was growing. The world flipped, and he crashed to the ground. For a moment, he looked at the underside of the table in disbelief. Was that old gum? It didn’t make any sense that she had included that detail.

“Tom, are you okay?” he heard the trial spirit yelling in sudden concern.

Then there was blackness.

AG. Posting tomorrows chapter today... because apparently skill reveals are nasty cliffs.