"Six months," Brandt said.
"Give or take."
Brandt put his pen down. He'd been halfway through signing some requisition sheet, and he didn't bother picking it back up. "You realize how this sounds when command asks me where you went and I have to tell them you're camping?"
"Tell them I'm training."
"That's worse. If I say training, they ask what for, and then I have to invent something, and I'm bad at lying to the brass. You know I am." He leaned back, rubbing his thumb over the edge of the desk. "The sector's fine, by the way. They dropped our baseline down to one standing L5 after the ruling went through. We can cover the rotation without you."
"Then nobody's dying while I'm gone."
"Didn't say they were. I said I hate doing your paperwork." Brandt dragged the page back toward himself. "Go on, then. Try not to come back looking like a hermit."
Ren didn't argue with him, which was good and bad.
She just helped him pack. It was an absurd gesture, considering he had a spatial pocket and could have packed half a field hospital, since he bought the expansion, if he felt like it, but she treated the whole thing like an ordinary trip.
He took a kettle, a tarp, some line, a couple of utility knives, a folding chair with a torn armrest, four kilos of black tea, and a pair of field boots he hadn't broken in yet.
Six months in the dirt, and I brought a porch chair.
"You'll call," Ren said. It wasn't a question.
"I said no distractions."
"Right, I heard you say it the first time." She shook out the tarp and folded it again, correctly this time, smoothing the creases with the flat of her hand. "You'll still call."
He headed north past Halden, walked until the gravel road gave out into packed dirt, and kept walking for another four days until the horizon was empty behind him.
The first two weeks were mostly just boring.
He sat on a flat rock beside a cold river and tried meditating. Back at the sector, Sage had pointed out that keeping his aura clamped down was the wrong way, and that sitting still might teach him how to stop fighting his own skin. He had nodded at the time, filed the thought away, and ignored it because there were more important things.
Out here, there was just nature and no reason to hurry.
He wasn't cold, he wasn't starving, and his joints didn't ache, so he didn't even have physical misery to pass the hours. He was just a guy sitting on a boulder with his eyes shut, listening to the sound of river currents.
On the ninth day he caught a river trout, burned the skin black over a small fire, and ate it anyway.
On the fourteenth day, something clicked.
He had been holding the clamp down for six hours straight.
It wasn't a single pressure he was wrestling with. He'd always pictured it like a lid over a boiling pot, one heavy weight pressed down on a single surface. But sitting there without anything to pull his attention, he realized it wasn't one thing at all. It felt like trying to hold down a dozen separate objects under a blanket, and the real strain wasn't the mass, it was the barriers where they pressed against each other.
He sat by the water and turned the idea over.
Sage.
[ Yes. ]
When you told me I was carrying double what the structure could tolerate, what were you actually counting?
A short silence followed. Not hesitation, just processing.
[ I tallied distinct techniques. Seventeen active signatures. ]
Count these connections instead.
A much longer pause.
[ ...Host. ]
Yeah.
[ Allow me some time. ]
He gave her four days.
[ My initial assessment was measuring the wrong variable. ]
She spoke up on the morning of the fifth day without any warning. For her, that was practically raising her voice.
[ The abilities share a single power source now, as established. However, they remain distinct habits. Each one demands that your energy move according to an isolated pattern. Where one ends and another begins, an edge forms. Seventeen abilities create far more barriers than that. Every barrier causes friction, and that internal drag was what I registered as structural overload. ]
So the sheer number of abilities isn't the problem.
[ You are carrying too many... walls would be the right word. ]
Adam looked down at his right arm.
The faint black lines ran under his skin. He'd stopped noticing them months ago, the same way you stop noticing an old scar. But turning his wrist now in the morning light, he saw three of them running dead parallel from the base of his palm toward the crook of his elbow before veering off.
Parallel lines.
They're channels.
[ That is an accurate interpretation. ]
And if two channels are running toward the exact same place, having a divider between them is just wasted effort.
[ Host, consider the risk before attempting anything. ]
Go on.
[ I cannot guarantee such an alteration is reversible. ]
Understood.
[ Acknowledgment is not the same as caution. ]
He tried it four days later on the two skills he relied on the most.
It seemed reasonable to test at that time. Shadowstep and New Order were his default answers to almost every bad situation, and if he was going to save effort anywhere, it should be there.
He lasted maybe two seconds.
The only way he could describe it afterward was that the two instincts violently refused to face the same way. They had different influences. Forcing them into the same line was like ramming two trucks head-on and expecting them to roll forward together.
Then the backlash hit.
He woke up face down on the bank, his nose bleeding steadily into the moss, his skull pounding like someone was hitting the base of his neck with a dull axe. The kettle had been kicked into the river during the spasm. He watched it bob in the shallows for a minute before dragging himself up to fish it out.
[ Are you functional? ]
Working on it.
[ You were unconscious for nineteen minutes. Internal diagnostics were unresponsive for eleven. ]
Did I break anything permanent?
[ No. The structure rejected the merge before any fundamental change could take hold. It simply snapped back. ]
Adam sat in the cold water with the dented kettle resting on his knees, breathing slowly through his mouth.
So it won't kill me to test some more.
[ It can cause considerable trauma. It simply will not permanently ruin your foundation. Do not conflate the two. ]
He spent the next month learning where the give was.
It was quiet, tedious work. He'd sit on the stone, trace two patterns in his head, nudge them together, and feel whether they pushed back or slid alongside each other. Most combinations were like iron hitting iron. A couple yielded slightly. He bled from his nose every few days, wiped his sleeve across his face, and kept going.
In the sixth week, he brought the Veil and Veil-Bind alongside Shadowstep.
They didn't clash. It felt, more than anything, like two weights tipping toward each other.
He sat up so fast his chair tipped over backward into the dirt.
Sage.
[ I detected the shift. Do not force it today. ]
I'm not doing it today.
[ You are visibly considering doing it today. ]
He waited. He brought the Stalker's Shadow into the mix, spent eleven days sitting by the water with the four patterns lined up, and asked himself every morning if he was willing to lose them. Every morning gave him the same answer.
There was no trial run. That was the reality of it. He couldn't test the merge and back out if he didn't like the flavor; once the barriers burned out, the four separate abilities were gone.
On the twelfth morning, he committed.
The merge took most of the day, but it didn't tear at him like the first failure.
It was slow and heavy, like air leaking out of a sealed chamber, hours of steady decompression. When the pull finally stopped, the sun was low and he was flat on his back on the gravel, staring up at pale gray clouds with no real sense of how much time had passed.
He raised his arm.
Four thin lines had fused into one wide channel. It ran straight from his wrist up to the crook of his elbow, clean and dark, moving naturally with the tendons when he flexed his fingers.
He tried to trigger Shadowstep.
Nothing.
He tried again, reaching for the old reflex, and nothing moved. He lay his head back down against the rock and let out a dry, tired laugh. Of course. The four separate abilities were gone. Whatever was sitting in him only answered to the combined whole. He'd known that going in, but part of him had still hoped the old tricks would stick around anyway.
Sage.
[ The individual activations are gone. ]
No more short-range jumps when someone takes a swing at me.
[ Not until the field exists. ]
Setting the boundary wasn't an active technique, either.
He spent two days standing in the center of the valley trying to project it like a barrier, pushing out with his will, and got absolutely nothing.
So he stopped forcing it and just went about his day.
He had already been out here five weeks. He sat on his rock in the morning, threw a line in the water when he got hungry, and walked around the trees before sundown just to stretch his legs. And gradually, without him doing anything, the valley started settling into his head.
It didn't snap on; it seeped in like water soaking into dry ground.
By the end of that week, he knew every foot of the area without opening his eyes. The bend where the river slowed. The loose gravel bank. The dead pine split down the middle by lightning. It wasn't the sharp, crowded input of Observation; it was just the quiet certainty of knowing your own hallway in the dark.
Within that space, he could step from one place to another without making a sound, completely unseen.
Mine, the thought surfaced, simple and unadorned.
[ A label is required for logging purposes. ]
Pick one.
[ Vacancy. ]
Why that?
[ By itself, it remains an empty room. It produces no effect until another element enters the space. ]
Adam looked across the space of cold stone and scrub grass that now belonged to him in a way he couldn't have explained to anyone back home.
Vacancy works.
The local wildlife cleared out almost immediately.
He realized it after a full day of quiet. The birds took wide arcs around the valley walls instead of flying over, and nothing came down to drink at the bank. It made sense. His aura had a natural, rotten quality to it that unsettled people, and spreading that across his territory made the whole place feel like an open grave to anything with instincts.
It felt lonely for an afternoon, but he didn't dwell on it.
Then the fox showed up.
It was scrawny and rough-coated, trotting down to the water on the fourth evening. It lapped at the current, sat back on its haunches, and scratched behind one ear. No trembling, no frantic glances around. Everything else had fled the valley, but this thing was acting like it was just another Thursday.
Adam watched it from across the stream, keeping his hands still on his knees.
Sage, why isn't it running?
[ You are not rejecting it. ]
I'm not doing anything at all.
[ It crossed into the field three nights ago while you were asleep. You registered its presence, found no threat, and took no action. Within the logic of Vacancy, that constitutes permission. ]
Across the river, the fox finished scratching, curled its tail over its paws, and lay down in the grass.
So I let it stay.
[ Effectively, yes. ]
Can I do that deliberately?
[ That is the logical assumption. ]
You could've just said yes.
Ren's radio call came through eleven days later.
"You sound terrible," she said through the static.
"I'm fine."
"Right. Terrible and fine, the usual." She moved something away from the receiver on her end. "Are you actually eating?"
"Biologically, I don't really have to."
"Didn't ask if your organs required it." Her voice had that flat, stubborn edge she used when she wasn't letting an argument drop. "So?"
"I caught some fish."
"Aha," she muttered.
He leaned back against the stone. On the far bank, the fox was tearing apart a clump of dried roots with single-minded focus.
"How's the base?"
"Boring, which means nothing is happening, so don't complain. Adeyemi's running the north gate. Iliescu came back off leave acting like he owns the sector, but that's normal." She paused, the static hissing softly between them. "Brandt asked about you twice this week. He's a tsundere, so he won't call you directly."
"Tell him I am fine."
"Sure, sure. It's a bit lonely without you." A chair scraped, and the background noise faded slightly. "Did you get what you wanted? Is your training working at all?"
Adam looked out across the valley.
He could feel the entire span of it, the water, stones, the cold air pooling in the low ground, without turning his head. And across the bank, a scrawny animal was gnawing on a root without a care in the world.
"Yeah," he said. "It's working."
"Good." She let out a short, quiet breath. "Don't get yourself killed doing something stupid."
After the line went dead, he set the kettle over the small fire pit.
The side was dented from its tumble down the river rocks, so it sat unevenly on the stones, tilted just enough that the boiling water threatened to spit over the rim if he didn't pull it off in time. He'd been meaning to hammer the metal flat for the better part of a month.
He watched the steam rise into the gray afternoon.
When it whistled, he lifted the crooked kettle, poured the tea into his mug, and left the dent right where it was.
AUTHOR'S NOTE — ABILITY RECORD
VACANCY Merged cluster. Formed from Veil, Veil-Bind, Shadowstep and Stalker's Shadow. The four no longer exist as separate abilities and cannot be recovered.
FORM A sphere of 100 metres, centred on the host. It is always active. It is not placed, laid or switched on, and it does not stay behind when he walks away. Wherever he is, it is.
MOVEMENT Free translocation to any point inside the sphere. No shadow is required and no line of sight is required. A minimum interval applies between jumps and it cannot be chained. Current interval: roughly three seconds.
CONCEALMENT Inside the sphere he is unseen, unheard and unnoticed, by eyes, by instruments and by most mystical detection.
AWARENESS He knows the whole of the space without looking at it. This is not Observation and does not replace it. It is the flat certainty of knowing your own house in the dark.
EFFECT ON OTHERS Anyone inside the sphere who has not been admitted feels weak, watched and unwelcome, and does not want to be there. From outside the space does not want to be looked at. This is a feeling only. It applies no actual weakness, no penalty and no damage.
GUESTS Anyone the host admits is exempt from the discomfort and is concealed as he is. Admission does not require ceremony or even attention. Registering a presence and choosing not to object is enough.
COST A small constant drain to exist. Everything done inside it is paid for separately.
LIMITS The radius is the ceiling on everything he owns. Every other ability he possesses is bound to this space and stops at its edge. Beyond 100 metres he has his body, his mind and nothing else.
Permanent. Irreversible.
AN: If we get to 100 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 300, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123