Epsilon Twilight
patreon
92. Slower Than Sound
🕑 Added 2025-11-29 12:58:09 +0000 UTCAgatha woke up sharing a bed with Christie. This simple, drowsy gaze sent her mind into overdrive because she recalled that they were still on the Valasela Estate. So great was her panic that she jumped out of the bed, rolled on the mattress, and fell on the ground on her ass.
All things considered, it could have gone worse.
“Mmm?” She heard her girlfriend mumble drowsily as she herself whimpered in pain. Christie pulled herself out of the blanket and crawled on all fours until she reached the edge of the mattress, then looked down at Agatha. “What are you doing, mock sapphire?”
Now, Agatha found herself incapable of answering that question. All of the reasons were embarrassment, yet the roads to that were all different. She was embarrassed because they were sharing a bed – which was rather… bad, as unlike in the academy, here she had a bed and room of her own – but she was also embarrassed because her gorgeous, beautiful, and especially bountiful girlfriend was wearing only a nightgown without a brassiere and she had first seats to those megalithic structures far more desirable than any vein of agate. Though stalactites maybe would have been a better description.
Crown in the heavens, the dirty-blond girl – emphasis on dirty – found herself hypnotized on the pendulums in front of her. I knew she had gotten tall. But when did she get this big? Agatha felt her sanity escape from her clutches, and only she was brought back to reality because her neck was suddenly very heavy.
“Ughhhhh!” Agatha groaned and chucked her sapphire to the ground.
“What was that grunt about?” Christie asked with a hint of wakefulness in her eyes.
“Just my hatred of lithorica as it loves to be the most anticlimactic of disciplines,” she brooded as she caressed her neck. She couldn’t look at it, but she felt the burn mark of her necklace strip in her flesh.
Agatha was well aware of why it had happened – Terráquea had already told her that stress affected the growth – but she hated that there wasn’t any drama. She had to be the shining knight of legend getting an increase of power midst battle, just like what had happened with the Fourth Stratum, and not because she had woken up relaxed and happy. Emphasis on happy. And seeing Christie unlocking lapiloquia and being proficient at it had removed a weight from the seamstress-in-training’s shoulders, even if it wasn’t her own achievement.
“And that means?” The redhead raised a brow.
“That I am a Fifth Stratum lithorist,” the dirty-blond girl revealed.
She could spot the exact instant in time that the drowsiness vanished from her girlfriend’s eyes as they shot wide open. “That is marvelous, Agatha!”
“It is,” she chuckled derisively. “But I would appreciate more theatricality. Like when you unlocked your lapiloquia.”
“How queer,” her girlfriend chuckled amusedly, “I prefer the exact opposite. Being stuck in a coma was not exactly pleasant, but even if I had not lost my consciousness, I would prefer my life a bit more laidback, if possible.”
“I guess there is virtue in that,” Agatha smiled at her. And then rubbed her neck a bit more.
“Was it that heavy?” Christie finally stepped out of the blankets and sat on the edge of the bed. Agatha reciprocated by standing up and sitting next to her.
“Yes,” she grunted. “As of late, I have decided to always keep my agate materialized with only Control Compact, so it is a mostly passive command that makes the weight not fall on me, and I do not need to have several summoned, but… I did not account for the sudden increase in weight.”
It had to be noted that the reason why the agate didn’t press her weight on her neck was because she had it hanging from the back of her neck, with the agate pressed against the mattress. She was fortunate enough that when her agate increased in Strata, the Control Compact series maintained the same desired volume, even if her agate weighed massively more now.
“So how much does it weigh now?” Her girlfriend asked with interest.
Agatha sighed and summoned her sapphire atop her hand. It was hefty, but not exactly heavy. “Considering it should be now six centimeters in radius from Terráquea’s discovery… it should weigh…”
“Two-point-four kilograms,” interjected Christie.
“How did you even calculate that fast?”
“It is an easy formula, and I have the density of agate memorized by now,” the redhead shrugged. “Though if we are being specific, the weight should be two-point-thirty-six-ninety-one kilograms.”
“I wish I had the same mental agility as you…” Agatha sighed as she heaved her agate up and down.
Christie looked at her with eyes as if commanded by Light and with a hand extended, which made her snort. She gently passed her girlfriend the perfect sphere, one that now looked more like a crystal ball with a sapphire incrusted in the dead center that looked like it was emitting blue lighting all over the glass. Agatha knew better, and it was – unfortunately – just the innate cracks inside the sphere. They did look cool, though.
“Oof,” Christie grunted once she took the ball in her arms. “Well, we definitely cannot call it little sapphire anymore. It is almost as big as your head!”
“What a shame that big sapphire does not roll out of the tongue as easily,” Agatha said theatrically.
“Truthfully!” Though her girlfriend did seem to be actually mortified by the change. “But…” she now softly raised her voice, “do you think now you are capable of making an air transport for long distances?”
“Well,” the Fifth Stratum lithorist found herself grinning enthusiastically, “there is only one way to know but try.”
***
As soon as they were done with breakfast, they went to the clearing Hasel had uprooted with lapiloquia, and then Christie had messed even more with lapiloquia.
“Huh,” her girlfriend hummed. “It is… oddly flat here.”
And indeed, it was flat. The previously jagged terrain with massive spikes had been flattened out and became an infertile expansion of bedrock of perfect levelling.
“Yes, your father mentioned that he was going to flatten the terrain as it was dangerous to have such uneven and porous ground. But… I must admit I did not expect it to flatten it that much.”
Agatha found a regained respect for lapiloquia after being able to achieve that unnatural perfection with a material as unruly as rock. This wasn’t anything new; she had seen René Dago create perfect hexagon pillars, and most of the homes in Knight’s Ascent were cubic boxes, but it was still an odd sight. Lapiloquia likes flat faces and perfect angles, noted.
“So, are you going to try your new Fifth Stratum agate?” Christie said with crossed arms.
“On it,” Agatha recalled all the plethora of agates scattered across her pockets and the one hanging on her neck and summoned it directly on the ground with already the platform shape she was used to, if far bigger now that she had almost twice the mass to work with. It still wasn’t big enough to fit a person lying on it, but at least she could sit down this time, which was an upgrade.
The single-agate lithorist sat on the translucent platform – after flattening her agate, it no longer looked quartz clear but gain a soft blue hue – and took it to the skies.
There was bound to be great commands for flight, but as she wanted to prioritize duration over speed or comfort, Agatha simply applied a ‘simple’ Amplify Speed Control Anchor to her big sapphire. This way, by only giving it four commands, she would leave a free command slot on the agate and greatly reducing the toll on her mind.
Instantly, Agatha felt the changes. Her mind felt lighter and clearer. As always, the increase of Stratum had retroactively made her mind more… expansive and free of mental fog. This was a phenomenon she wasn’t sure about, and after commenting about it with people, it seemed that it wasn’t the case with others, or at least, not as prevalent. To this, Terráquea said the following:
“Most people feel clarity upon increasing their Strata, but when you think about it, it is only a fraction of their agates. Most of the time, only ten percent of them. But you only have one of them, girl. You are increasing one hundred percent of your total Strata in each go each time. As you mentioned, curses are not without their blessings.”
And Agatha was compelled to agree.
This revelation wasn’t especially new as she was aware that most people couldn’t hold four commands in a single agate as long as her, whether it was because she had the making of a miner or because of the peculiarity of her lone agate.
Her agate platform moved her fast, as this time she was only carrying herself without a passenger or a very heavy mock turtle, but it still wasn’t unbelievably fast. At most, it was the speed of a galloping horse, which was fast but not as fast as she would have liked.
If Agatha of Malachite was something, it was greedy.
“How is it going?” Christie shouted from the ground at the top of her lungs after Agatha had been flying for fifteen minutes straight in a circle.
That in and of itself was a marvelous thing. If one had had in mind a cylindrical coordinate system instead of an orthogonal one, it was trivial to make turns and move in circles with Control Anchor. Otherwise, if she limited herself to the x, y, and z axes, she would have to give her agate tens of instructions per second to drive her agate in circles, and even then, it wouldn’t be a perfect circle as the one she was doing.
Agatha tried to respond to her girlfriend, but winds kept getting on her face. “It fucken wimdy!” She shouted.
“What?” The redhead shouted back, and the dirty-blond girl was thankful that she didn’t hear her. Honestly, Agatha didn’t know why she had cursed like that. Damn, these intrusive thoughts!
Knowing better than to try to engage in a contest of shouts, Agatha put an end to the experiment and flew her platform downwards. Fortunately for her, as she stepped down the platform, she wasn’t nauseated as she had flown in a circle with like a kilometer in radius, so in that quarter of an hour she hadn’t even completed three loops.
“All things considered, it was really cold up there with all that wind,” Agatha explained.
“Well, it is early in the morning, and you are only wearing your overalls, so if you had a more airborne-appropriate attire, it should not be that much of an issue,” Christie said. “But what about your head?”
“It has been only fifteen minutes, but if I compare it with the passive series I used to carry François, it does not feel as bad as it should for an active command. So maybe I could go eight hours on it before feeling a real headache.”
“Whoa,” her girlfriend exclaimed. “That is a lot of time.”
“It is…”
“I smell a but incoming,” she teased her.
Agatha giggled. “But~” she emphasized, “I do not think this speed is sufficient. A galloping horse is alone if I am alone, but if we add you to the question, then the speed will drop far below the halfway point.”
Christie arched a brow as if saying ‘Are you calling me fat?’ before the girl herself realized that it was Agatha who was really light. Half her weight, most likely.
“So are you going to give up on your dreams of a fast connection between the academy and the estate?” The redhead said that instead.
“I would not go as far as to call it a dream… but no. I have an idea on how to improve this.”
“Oh, and how that might be?”
“Easy,” Agatha smiled radiantly. “We ask the experts!”
***
“Yes, I must say it is an interesting concept to explore.” That was Hasel’s reaction to being told the plan to fly between the academy and the state. “Though I do not believe you are at that point quite yet, Agatha.” The patriarch set down his tea cup, which Agatha’s mother promptly refilled.
Depths, it’s so weird seeing Mom so… subservient? Agatha was well aware that Esmeralda was just working, but it sent shivers down her spine when considering her mother could be even more destructive than the seamstress-in-training if she pleased. Though she still had a bit of ‘defiance’ as she sat on the gazebo alongside him as she stuffed herself with Miss Diorite’s sweets. Perks of being friends with your employer, she guessed.
“I have reached the Fifth Stratum this morning,” Agatha added.
“Oh, I already knew that,” the lithe man commented casually as he sipped from his refilled cup.
“You… knew?”
“Your agate looks different than yesterday, Agatha,” he explained as a matter of fact.
I don’t personally think it does, but I guess this is one of his skills as a miner. Duplicate allowed her to somewhat select the mass that each duplicated agate could get, so she kept the sapphire section of her lone agate for her necklace, meaning that it should be exactly identical as yesterday. Yet the Valasela patriarch seemed to notice something else. She decided whether to use Duplicate or Control Compact to distribute the weight on her mood, or namely, her head. All things considered, Control Compact was still an active series, two commands or not.
“I see…” She didn’t. “So, your opinion is with that fact in mind?”
“Quite,” he smiled in a vulpine manner. “But do not get me wrong, I said you were not quite there yet, but we can fix that with a bit of work.”
“So I will be able to make it from Knight’s Ascent to here in one trip?” The dirty-blond girl inquired enthusiastically.
“Hold your agates, Agatha.” The man chuckled at his own words. Dad humor, ugh. “I believe I can make you… fly efficiently. But you are not quite there for a single trip just yet. Either you will need to practice a lot first, or you will need the Sixth Stratum.”
“Sixth?” She groaned in surprise and laziness. “But most soldiers are in the Fourth!”
“That they are,” Hasel nodded. “But they have ten times your agates on average, so that means you need to sacrifice some command slots in Duplicate first. But enough talking, we are losing time. Let us get practicing already.”
The exact second the man finished speaking, a massive Gate appeared next to the gazebo. What surprised Agatha wasn’t the sudden remote summoning of a massive agate, but the fact that it was connected to the barren clearing. When has he sent his agate away? Each time she saw these casual displays of power made her remember that the man in front of her wasn’t just Christie’s dearest father, but a miner. A legion of soldiers on its own.
“Are you coming?” He asked both his daughter and Esmeralda.
“I have been training with lapiloquia when I was with Agatha, so I would rather rest a bit, dearest father,” Christie announced accommodatingly.
“I will stay with Christina in case she needs something.”
“Then so be it,” Hasel closed the Gate as soon as Agatha stepped through, leaving both of them alone in the clearing. “So, I will say this from the very start: this is going to be rough.”
“I am used to rough,” Agatha snickered.
“Oh, I know,” the miner snorted. “If what Adrien told me about your feats of resilience, then yes, you are quite thickheaded and rough. So as a miner, it is my duty to polish that gem in the rough.”
Fractures, that was a good one. I wish I could just have prepared sentences like that. She was aware that speechcraft was one of her many weaknesses.
“Now, I actually have to give you a warning,” Hasel summoned his agates as he talked. “What I am going to show you could be classified as a state secret, as it is a series of command series that is taught to elite soldiers in the military.”
“So should you be teaching me that…?” Her smugness was gone and it was substituted by childish prudence.
“I can get away with a lot of stuff, especially after recent events.”
“Recent events?”
“Do not worry about it, statal stuff. Just some legal bindings on my loyalty to the state and whatnot. Nothing I was not already affiliated with, simple monster extermination, but still far away from any battlefield.”
“When you say it, extermination sounds…”
“Accurate?” The miner grinned. “It does happen from time to time that there needs to be a culling to the entrance of the depths, so that is where I come in. But could you please not tell anything of this to Christina?”
“Why have you told me so if you want to keep it hidden?”
“I do not want to keep it hidden, but I just do not want to needlessly worry my dearest daughter,” then he clapped powerfully. “But we have digressed too much,” and pointed at the agates he summoned.
There were two sets of several merged agates in two megalithic parts. One was a platform like the one Agatha used to fly, albeit far bigger, as the miner used several agates combined with Merge instead of half an agate. The other was more curious; it was a set of two blades angled to each other and connected to a nexus. Both parts were suspended in the air.
“Now, I am summoning my agates just to state a point,” Hasel explained as he slapped the top of the platform, “but the power should be similar to your agates or even less.”
“How is that?” The comment surprised Agatha; after all, he was a miner and she wasn’t even a soldier yet.
“The Merge command homogenizes the quality of all combined agates, and perhaps you are not aware of this with your lone agate, but the spectrum of quality of a lithorist can vary severely. None of my agates are of innate high-quality like yours; this quality has only been achieved through increases in Strata, and even then, my highest Strata is Seventh, and with only a handful of agates at that – not even all of them! – so we are mostly equal in quality.”
There was a non-spoken comment on how they weren’t equal in the slightest in quantity, but Agatha couldn’t bother to even think about that.
“Your highest agates are only Seventh Stratum?” She asked, dumbfounded.
“Of course,” he chuckled. “Your ‘sapphire’ – I think that is how I heard Esmeralda refer to it – has spoiled you a bit. Strata are hard to come by, and most people have to also increase the Strata of their other agates, so progress slows multiplicatively, if not outright exponentially, the further up you climb in Strata. In that case, you are unbound. Limited to a single agate, yet unmoored by the rules people usually have to play by. I am deeply vested in which Strata you might reach before your growth period is over, but yet again, we have digressed too much.”
Agatha recalled how soldiers only tended to increase their maximum Strata by one or two at most during the rest of their lifetime. Perhaps that didn’t hold true either with Agatha, as she didn’t have to split her attention to other agates once her growth period was over, but that was even an unknown for an experienced researcher like Terráquea.
“What you have before you are two virtual agates,” Hasel restarted his lecture. “By virtual agates I mean two agates able to receive commands, even if there are far more. Instead of merging like me, you will have to duplicate yours. Do so and hold them in the air like the shapes I have made.”
Agatha summoned her sapphire in the air, already split with Duplicate and also shaped. She thought she had done a good job with the instantaneous Summon Shape Duplicate, but the miner grimaced at her work, the agate set with the blades in specific.
“The blades need to be tilted more, and also be more curved,” he explained. “The shape needs to be as aerodynamic as possible but still shove air around efficiently.”
“I…” Agatha hesitated for a second as she was still talking to a miner and the father of her girlfriend, but quickly realized that there needed to be some back and forth for this lecture to be useful. “I can follow your instructions, but I do not think I will be able to shape anything if I do not even know its use.”
“That is a solid point,” Hasel nodded. “I think I should first let you see and experience what I want you to do.” The lithe man lowered the platform, while maintaining the part with the dual blades static, and stepped on it. “Sit in front of me, Agatha. You will need to be in the front to understand the lesson.”
Hesitatingly, the petite girl stepped on the platform, and after Hasel lifted it up again, they both sat with their legs dangling on the sides. Agatha couldn’t help but squirm a bit as the lithe man put his hands around her waist – this was the first time a man had touched her in a significant way – but then she relaxed as the feeling felt oddly familiar. He’s as big as Christie, if only a bit more muscular and less… bountiful. She giggled at her own thoughts.
“I would appreciate some seriousness,” the miner said behind her.
“Y-yes, sir!” The student tensed up.
“Grab onto the platform with dear life, we are going to take off.”
Take off? Agatha didn’t even have the time to put her thoughts into words as the lithic construct shot upwards and forward at breakneck speeds. Her body reacted with feline reflexes and latched onto the platform for dear life.
Then she noticed the noise.
When she had been flying on her platform this morning at maximum speed the wind had gotten loud, but not as bad as this. Before, she could shout and Christie could hear her tens of meters down on the ground, but now she couldn’t even hear her own thoughts. The noise was that loud.
She opened her eyes and looked forward to inspect the second set of agates with the dual blades spinning in front of them. That was the source of the noise.
Agatha turned her head backward to face Hasel as she had a myriad of questions, and the man opened his mouth to speak, but no words came as he grunted inaudibly.
A moment later, two agates far bigger than heads materialized next to him, and he shoved one of them to Agatha’s head.
“Ah!” She yelped as her head was stuffed into a glorified pot. “Eh?” Then she realized she could hear herself.
The dirty-blond girl looked downward and found that her sight wasn’t obstructed at all; if anything, it was as if her head wasn’t enclosed in stone. Her vision was unimpeded, yet she was free of the noise of the spinning blades.
“Can you hear me?” A voice whispered… all around her.
“Y-yes.” The sound jolted her. “How are you doing this?”
“A handful of tricks involving Watch, Sound, Listen. Nothing fancy.”
Agatha was inclined to believe that it was fancy, and that it also involved other commands, like Control – for starters – as she couldn’t feel the weight of the pot on her head.
“Can you see how the blades are spinning in front of us?” Hasel talked to her through the agate.
“Yes,” she said and nodded. “But what purpose does it serve?”
“Thrust,” the miner explained taciturnly.
“But the blades are not connected to the platform?” Agatha expressed her confusion. She knew about thrust from her physics classes – like how the Control and Anchor commands worked to just ignore the properties of lift and weight – but that had nothing to do with whatever was happening here, as the spinning blades were separated from the platform they were standing on by a solid two meters of open air.
“Ah, that is the Embed Range series. It can ‘embed’ something at a distance. The efficiency is not great at all; this is my greatest range without Amplify. But the series has a lot of usages on mechanics, like this one, as the rotor is able to spin freely without any friction.”
“So, what you are saying is that the blades are creating thrust and propelling us forward without the platform being connected to it?”
“Basically,” he affirmed.
“That is… so counterintuitive.”
“Such is the beauty of Agatecraft,” the miner said with a hint of pride. “Sometimes we limit ourselves to some elements we consider standard and logical, but the biggest advancements come from picking up the building blocks at our disposal and matching them in the oddest of ways to create new and original usages.”
Agatha had to give that to him; this was a very creative and novel use of Agatecraft.
“Now, you can stop focusing on the blades and pay attention to the landscape.”
Then, finally, she was able to appreciate the speed at which they were travelling. The terrain below them was a blur of green and brown. Agatha was only to see the trees in front of them, and even those ones quickly disappeared from her field of view.
“How fast are we going?” She asked half-amazed, half-terrified. She just didn’t feel the speed on her body, but also her sight and the wind.
Agatha could hear Hasel snicker all around her and he simply said. “Well, slower than sound.”
