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SOM - Chapter 24 - Test Drive
🕑 Added 2024-04-03 21:58:59 +0000 UTCIn the depths of an aether storm, a planet shrouded in protective frost threw skyscraper-sized icebergs at a fleet of veilcraft stationed in low geosynchronous orbit above. The vessels were thickly armoured by dense bone plating, and those that didn't move out of the way of the attacks simply absorbed the impacts.
Luke stood in an open hangar at the head of a small army of ten-foot-tall hulking figures in black and green plate. He felt cold, chilled to his core and the sensation wasn't just the [Ice] domain of the defending forces battering away the necrotic energies powering the fleet. There was no warmth in his heart, only hunger.
"Legion nine-seven-nine, prepare for assault. Wait for my signal. We will break this planet," Luke said in a voice he didn't recognise, the words feeling alien on his tongue.
When he tried to move his hand to his mouth, it didn't respond and Luke realised, with a rising panic, that he wasn't in control. For a moment, he fought to control the body he was inhabiting but got nothing but a wave of intense nausea for his trouble. It was bad enough that Luke would have doubled over had he been able. Realising the futility of his struggle, he reluctantly settled into the passenger seat.
Luke reached the hangar door and looked down. There was no apprehension in his body, even though it was inches from falling into the storm below. A gauntleted hand reached out into the air, and Luke circled his fingers around the handle of a bone flail. It was superficially similar to the nine-tailed [Swarmbreaker] Luke looted days ago, but to compare the two was practically sacrilegious. The flail was heavy in his hand, and the necrotic energies within had a mind of their own.
With a flex of aether, the flail snapped to attention and bent to his will. It grew, the segmented spine elongating in the air until it hung a dozen metres outside the hangar. The spiked ball on the end was as large as a house.
Then, Luke stepped outside.
Face first, he plummeted to the ground as the pure weight of his flail accelerated his descent. Encased in metal, Luke didn't feel the frigid wind roaring against his skin, but he heard it loud and clear, like he was in the heart of a blizzard. The sound was deafening, a constant roar that filled his ears.
If Luke's emotions had been his own, he might have felt his stomach clench as he accelerated downwards. Things only got more interesting as a sheet of ice solidified in the air beneath him. It was at least a foot thick, but Luke didn't even try to avoid it. He flew face-first into the block.
Ice shattered and Luke's downward momentum barely slowed, but already a dozen more ice blocks had formed in his path. Luke felt a twinge of annoyance. Much like the rest of his emotions it was a muted response, only the shadow of a real feeling.
A single ice barrier was no problem, but too many would slow him down too much. Luke reached into his soul, to where his inner world stored the ideation of [Gravity]. It was on the fourth step towards enlightenment. Oceans of aspected aether flooded his soul at his touch, and Luke became a black hole, falling through the sky. The sensation of power and density was incredible.
Hundreds of ice blocks formed in front of him, but Luke crushed them with his descent.
As Luke drew close to the great barrier below, he saw a volley of spears, arrows, bullets, and icicles fly towards him, so he split his mind and drew on [Bulwark] and [Bone] to create layer after layer of hardened ivory. He fell another ten miles in less than a second as the barrage battered him from all sides, but he was unyielding.
The diamond-encrusted white wall drew close, so Luke drew back his arm. His flail arced through the air in a perfect motion before whipping forwards to connect with the ice as Luke landed.
I am unstoppable, I am unbreakable.
Everything went white.
[Realignment Complete.]
When the pain faded Luke took an inward gasp. His heart raced in his chest, and he could feel a cold sweat. It was nothing compared to the frost storm, but it gave him chills nonetheless. He took a moment to reorient himself. The vision had been so vivid that he initially feared that he had failed to remove all of the necrotic aether from his soul. It was only a dream, Luke thought, though he recognised that the vision had been more substantial than that.
The aftermath was worse than any of his soul surgery sessions, so Luke could only be thankful that the system had knocked him out. Physically he was fine but felt a little dizzy as he stood up. He steadied himself before taking out his phone.
The old brick he looted off Patrick was finally running out of battery, but it still had a sliver of power before it died forever. Eleven hours had passed, even though the vision had lasted less than a minute. The warning about how long realignment would take had been a massive understatement. Luke had lost half a day.
Unlike his previous soul adjustments, the realignment left him feeling powerful, if a little sore. It was like a post-workout pump but for his soul and was very similar to how he felt after cultivation. Luke's heart beat faster in his chest as, with trepidation, he looked over the deluge of blue boxes.
Luke Evans: Level 10 Human
Class:
Indomitable Dreadnought (Initiate): +3 Endurance, +3 Strength, +3 Will per level, +3 Free points. Gravity as an additional domain.
Class Abilities:
Gravity: Epicentre - Magnifies your gravitational field.
Domain Abilities:
Bulwark: Brace - Magnifies your mass and creates an inertial field around you that stores momentum.
Warhammer: Kinetic strike - Amplifies momentum of, and transfers stored momentum to objects.
Attributes
Will: 24
Empathy: 16
Wisdom: 15
Intellect: 16
Agility: 17
Strength: 30
Endurance: 23
Recovery: 19
Free points: 1
Concepts:
Core Concepts:
Apex (Copper, 2%): +5 all attributes. +25% experience gained.
Warhammer (Gold, 29%): +3 Strength, augments hammers.
Bulwark (Gold 35%): +5 Endurance, augments shields and armour.
Gravity (Copper 1%): +1 Empathy.
Secondary Concepts:
Murderhobo (Platinum): +5 Will, +5 Strength, -1 Empathy. +50% loot.
Fire (Copper 87%): +1 Empathy.
The screens were getting rather cluttered, an issue that was only likely to get worse as numbers went up. His attributes were solidly in what Luke thought of as superhero territory. Each multiple of ten was roughly equal to a one hundred percent increase, but this was difficult to measure.
The numbers were ultimately all subdomains of the [System]. It was a known phenomenon that concepts and the frameworks that classified them behave unpredictably in the Deep Veil. At least while he was on Earth, they would mostly stay consistent, but if humanity triumphed over the invaders he wasn't going to stay on Earth forever. With solar dragons and city-sized spaceships, there was a whole cosmos to explore and loot.
The thought of solar dragons and city-sized spaceships awoke within him the desire to explore and see what riches awaited. In his old life, Luke had never had the time or money to travel. The most exotic place he had ever been was the south of Spain. Chrissy had paid for them both with her Christmas bonus money when Luke had been between jobs.
Even if measuring his gains was problematic, Luke still gave it a go. He loaded up his makeshift bench press with aeldrin ingots and did a few reps. At this point, he was using all of the available aeldrin, so he had to add a few other pieces of scrap to max out his weight.
In total, Luke estimated that he could lift over a thousand pounds of metal with his [Strength] alone. He could lift even more when using his [Brace] ability, so much so that the bench itself creaked ominously under the weight. It increased his mass and thus made his muscles denser. This made quantifying his gains even harder, and when he unlocked the potential of his [Gravity] domain, he might as well give up.
Numbers aside, what really mattered was what he could do with them, and he was keen to try out his new abilities. Luke picked up an anvil.
"Rurik, could you throw this at me?" Luke asked. From watching Rurik move things around the forge, he was confident that the aspect had the strength to do so.
The forgemaster paused what he was doing with the model train. He sighed as he looked up. "Why?" he asked.
"I want to try my new abilities out."
"So you managed to manifest?"
Luke thought for a moment and shifted the anvil in his grip. It wasn't so much that it was heavy, but the chunk of metal was shaped rather awkwardly to be held for extended lengths of time. "Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Let me just read you the descriptions," Luke said, and he proceeded to read out most of his blue boxes.
He had discussed the numbers with Rurik before but didn't routinely update him with every new development. Luke didn't want to bore the man by going on about numbers every time one of his attunements shifted.
"[Gravity], that's an interesting take on [Bulwark] and [Warhammer]. Similar paths sometimes reach for [Earth] to express those domains, but more often focus on refining the concepts in their pure forms," Rurik said.
"Why wouldn't they always grab an extra domain? The system put a limit on how many concepts I could have as a mortal, but that seems to be gone now."
"There is only so much time in the day, son, and the more concepts you have, the thinner you spread yourself. It's not unheard of for psions to go wide, but it's almost always more effective to truly refine a concept to its most potent form. That's kind of the whole point of a path. Cultivating lots of concepts slows integration, refinement and so on. A poorly balanced soul leads to bottlenecks." Rurik said, with a hint of concern in his voice.
All of this was very interesting and a little worrying, but Luke's arms were starting to hurt from holding the anvil. "Well, in that case, I better bring my gravity up to snuff. Are you going to throw this at me so I can practise the new version of my brace?" he said.
Rurik rolled his eyes. "Fine, but let's not break my home by throwing anvils around. Why don't you start with something lighter?"
A minute later, Luke stood out in the street, and Rurik stood just outside the door on the front step. As it happened, the spirit had slightly exaggerated what would happen if he stepped outside. He could manage a couple of steps with some discomfort, and it was only as he journeyed further that his aether started to corrode.
Despite what Rurik described as hooks in his skin pulling him back inside, he was smiling beneath his burning beard. The dwarf had an ingot in his hand and, after a moment looking down at the ingot, his hand glowed red, and the metal turned soft. A few seconds later, Rurik had shaped it into a ball the size of a bowling ball and was tossing it up and down like a baseball. Luke was glad to see a cheerier side of the man.
Though Rurik spoke with a cheerful demeanour, there was often an undercurrent of darkness to his words, and Luke had never really seen him smile whilst sober. He wasn't sure if the dwarf was enjoying his company or just looking forward to throwing something at him. Perhaps it was a bit of both.
"Ready," Luke said.
In response, Rurik lazily threw the metal ball at him. For all the lack of apparent effort Rurik put in, it shot forward like a well-pitched fastball. Luke caught it on his shield with [Brace] activated, and even absorbing most of the momentum, he was pushed back a step.
A feeling of heaviness swept through his body. The sensation wasn't unpleasant and was similar to going up in a lift. Luke took a step forward to pick up the ingot and almost fell over.
Without meaning to do so, he had directed the stored momentum towards his legs, taking him by surprise when it carried on without him. Only by reactivating [Brace] did he reabsorb the momentum and avoid falling on his arse.
After a few more throws and some fiery punches, Luke was starting to get the hang of playing with momentum. He couldn't store it for very long; by definition, it wanted to keep on moving. About five seconds was the longest he could store an impact, and the more momentum he stored the faster he ran out of aether. As it was he could store two to three solid blows every couple of minutes.
Luke soon discovered that releasing stored momentum in combination with a [Kinetic Strike] was a potent combination. After storing one of Rurik's harder throws, he smashed down hard enough with Fenn on the cobblestones to create an impact zone. The force of the blow sent a shockwave through the ground, making the nearby buildings tremble.
The attack sounded like a small explosion, and Luke had a moment of worry that he would draw attention. However, he then remembered that he was only a few feet away from Rurik, and the dwarf could handle pretty much anything the city threw at them. There was nothing to worry about.
Or, so he thought.
Then, a scream filled the air. Luke's head snapped towards the sound, his body tensing.
It was coming from inside the forge.
I guess our sleeping beauty finally woke up.
