12 Miles Below

Petty bullying usually involves an extended foot tripping a casual passerby and then snickering about it. That's what people think when asked. Winterscars, on the other hand... Well, we poisoned each other instead. Was this normal? Oh, absolutely not. People would be appalled if a story of someone getting bed sick from a practical joke got out. Add in the word 'Winterscar' and the people's reactions would shift from 'Oh!' to 'Oh...'

No surprise that the bastards all brought a dozen different poisons and anti-poisons on the way to the new clan home. All these old memorabilia had survived the trip, even if their original owners hadn’t. I suspect Father had planned for these to be sold to keep the wheels of the estate running, in case of emergency. After all, medicine of any kind is rather valuable up here. Interesting thing about poisons is that they can often be used as a cure depending on the situation.

Majority of the sabotage Winterscars did to one another involved ailments that would incapacitate the target or produce fevers and nausea. Mild things that never lasted longer than a few hours and never caused any permanent damage. Not because a lack of willpower to see the escalation on all this, oh no.

Hallucinations and toxins that could permanently cripple or even kill a man were outright banned by order of Atius.

And, yes, he did have to get involved according to our family histories.

The original generation of Winterscars were escalating their antics quickly until the clan lord arrived at their doorsteps once he got wind of the issue. This was not seen favorably and cost the House a lot of clout.

Houses were given full freedom to police themselves as per tradition, and having the clan lord show up to do the job for misbehaving troublemakers was a massive loss of face. The Winterscars got a lot more cordial about their political backstabbing and power squabbles after that. They made sure none of it ever got too out of hand such that it would affect anyone outside the House. The unspoken rules of clan culture were still firm - if it could harm the clan as a whole, it was everyone's responsibility to band together to curb the rogue elements out.

So there was an upper limit to how potent these poisons were, thankfully.

The branch families each had their own little signature traps, but the one I wanted the most right now was the paralytic agent my cousins were fond of using. Slipped into food, the agent would act quickly and cause lethargy, enough to force the victim into bed for a few hours.

Ergo, it was an excellent ploy to use when that person had to be somewhere important and would lose face if they didn’t show up. Yes, I had experience with this firsthand early on when I was still a potential threat on people’s minds. At least while grandmother was still alive and training me to be her next pawn. Once she kicked the snow, I was on nobody's radar and never had to worry about poisons in my meal again.

That same little toxin now lay available for my use in a small pillbox filled with the powder. Actually standing before it, remembering all the history around this little powder, made me take a step back to mentally re-evaluate my actions.

"Journey." I said. "Somehow I find myself about to ingest literal poison in order to sneak a possible shortcut to hard work. Emphasis on possible shortcut, it's not even a guaranteed thing either. Something about this picture feels off."

"Off? Seems all perfectly in character for you." Cathida said. "I find it hilariously endearing, personally.”

“Endearing?”

“Sometimes, the squires I trained only learned when they got their hands burned. Each generation there’d always be at least one that took every leap they saw. Every single time."

I fiddled with the poison in hand, considering exactly how much of this plan had been fueled by excitement compared to sound logic. “What usually happens to those squires?”

“You’re young. If this were actually dangerous, I’d yell at you about it. Go on now, eat the poison."

I pointedly noticed how Cathida hadn’t actually answered my question here at all. My danger senses were now blaring wide alerts. Maybe this was how she handled those squires of hers. If they didn’t listen to her warnings... actively encouraging instead with a malicious smile certainly shoveled some snow in the boots.

Sighing, now fully snapped out of whatever had possessed me, I put the box back on the shelf. “Never thought I’d hear an armor actually asking their user to chew on poison.”

"Oh no dear, Journey is furious about it. Or at least the armor version of furious.” Cathida cackled. “A shame it's not in charge. Now, go on, eat up. You didn't come all this way just to put the box back on the shelf, don't be boring.”

I shook my head. “On second thought, maybe I am a little hasty. And come to think of it, I only have limited amounts of this. Even if it does work, it’s a solution that would run dry if I abused it.”

Winterscars were good at brewing poison, and they were also good at hiding the ingredient lists to create their signature specials. While Father had recovered whole stashes of poison leftover in the airspeeders, the Winterscars took the cooking directions to the grave with them. I build tech, I don't brew poisons.

“Oh, and it wouldn’t have worked either.” Cathida added, almost as if on whim.

Somehow, it seemed perfectly in character for her to avoid telling me that up until now. Still made me snort air out and roll my eyes. “Couldn’t have told me that sooner?”

“What? And spoil the fun?” Cathida chuckled.

I put the pillbox away, back into the pantry for storage. “Out of curiosity, why wouldn’t it have worked?”

“Journey's returning a bunch of medical jibberish to that question, I wish you hadn't asked. It's giving a headache to process. Do you know what Acetylcholine is?"

"Uh, sounds like a chemical of some kind." I answered. "I think. Probably."

Cathida scoffed. "I could have guessed that. Shining some sun on it, Journey says this little poison of yours only blocks signals at the neuromuscular junctures. Translating to human, you're too late to trick the armor. Though you might be on the right path, only unlucky with the tools available."

"You think there's promise to this?" Well, maybe I should expand my horizons after all. Learning how to brew poisons is a healthy and normal hobby anyone could be proud of after all.

"It was known that Imperators were masters of the iron-body technique, even using improvised movements outside the imperial style. Cathida always assumed they were simply picked from child savants and trained sixteen hours a day or some nonsense like that. Imperators were the zealots among zealots, even the old bat didn't want to mess with them. Now thinking about it, could it be some kind of venom they used? Nasty business.”

I brought out the other bits of poisons I had on hand, "Anything I can cobble together with what I've got here? If it's possible to get this to work, I should give it a go."

"You want to start mixing compounds we hardly know about and then eat them? How desperate are you, exactly?" She asked dryly.

"... point taken." Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, I really need to stop thinking with my monkey brain here, jumping at the first solutions available. This compulsion of mine to leap first and ask questions never is going to get me killed someday, and I don't mean that as just a figure of speech.

All right. Let's slow down and be more logical about the whole thing.

From the drugs angle, this particular poison was the best Winterscars had. They might have come up with something more potent if there hadn't been a ban on the brewing arms race, but unfortunately we lived in more civilized times. So, if there was a trick to learning this technique without the grind, I’d have to work with the advantages I uniquely had available. The Winterscars had poisons, and I had technology.

“Is there anything I can do with the administrator access I have in order to make it easier to do the iron-body technique? Some kind of preference tweaks? Settings?”

“You could turn off the safeties and up the sensitivity. Only option I can think of.”

“Would that work?” I pointedly asked.

Cathida laughed. “Oh by the sun no it wouldn’t. The armor would break your bones with the whiplash if you put the settings too high. They need administrator permissions to tinker on for a reason. They weren’t made to be messed with by rank and file soldiers.”

All right. Administrator direction was off the list. What else did I have access to that other people before me didn’t have?

The Occult. Only the warlocks knew that one, so if they’d discovered any armor secrets, they’d likely kept it locked up for themselves. Talen’s book was a compilation of general fractals, all of them basic concepts. None were for speed.

However, there was one fractal that could possibly let me shortcut the iron-body technique. I closed my eyes, breathed out and felt for the soul fractal I’d inscribed on the inside chestplate. I’d gotten used to having a small finger dipped into it at all times, giving me access to the soul-sight. Now, I dove further into it, keeping a trailing bit of connection to my body.

My sight receded. Feelings from my body dimmed until they were only a distant memory. Only concepts surrounded me and several dozen glowing fractals within Journey’s armor. I could see through the soul sight as my body began to slump forward.

With the last bit of connection to my body left, I commanded my hand up as fast as I could think.

As I’d expected, I had slunk too deep into the soul fractal and my commands to move hadn’t gone through. So I began to test how much of my essence I needed to leave in my body in order to get results. Took a bit of fenangling.

The hand shot up, finally. Or at least, I think it did. Hard to tell with only my soul-sight. I drew back into my body, taking full control again.

My world reawakened to Cathida speaking midsentense. “-do that? What sort of violet devilry is this?”

The hand I had commanded up was raised, palm out to the ceiling. “Did it work?” I asked, curious.

“Work? It did more than that, Journey picked up command signals to move without any signals detected anywhere past the spine. You went from a complete novice to a grandmaster, what in the sun’s name did you do?”

“Hocus pokus stuff.” I grinned. “And trying to squeeze out every bit of value that I can out of what I have to work with.”

Looks like I’m on the right track with this. Only issue is that I had been almost completely submerged into the soul fractal, which seriously limited the way I could perceive the world around me. That wasn’t viable in a combat situation.

There’s promise here, only I needed to fine-tune it. The trick would be to find a way to keep my senses connected, while disconnecting my ability to move just enough.

I wandered out of the medical wing and returned to my room to train. I didn’t want anyone to watch me raise my arm up and down a few times randomly. People might talk.

It took three hours to find the right spot. I nearly gave up a few times out of sheer frustration.

While my essense felt like a blob that could be moved around, it could also be ‘shaped’ in a way as well. In this case, the shape I ended up making was that of a plant’s roots where my head would be, while the rest of me was sitting inside a new soul fractal I had inscribed on the inside of my helmet.

I had to keep a steady discipline to maintain the ‘shape’ so that my soul touched the right parts of my body but avoided other parts. Felt like I was balancing on one foot while keeping my arms in weird shapes and my other leg bent. Awkward, but not impossible.

With this configuration, I could keep my senses with exception to smell, and feelings from my right toes. I had no idea which root had accidentally brushed up the right way so that my left foot’s toes were fine. At this point, I’d given up trying. I could live without smells and moving my right toes.

All in all, I had hobbled together an extremely rickety workaround to using an imperial technique which itself was a workaround to exploit an edge case in the relic armors. Well. A great man in my life once said the most profound words of wisdom: If it’s stupid but it works, then it’s not stupid. And boy does it work.

I moved my hands, in awe at the sheer speed of it. They moved fast enough there was an air current trailing behind for a short second. I could even feel the skin and bone squeezed a bit each time the hand came to a stop from sheer inertia.

Everyone using armor naturally ended up to a point where they moved faster than human speed. Past that point, improvements became scarce from what I learned. Didn’t matter if the technique was used to train or if it had been a natural development. The imperial teaching certainly trained people to reach that point faster and with more focus, but the end result was the same.

My technique, on the other hand, blew past that limit.

All the parts that willed my muscles to move worked. Only the part of the brain that actually sent those signals down didn’t and registered more like a coma. As a result, I was technically performing the perfect iron-body technique.

Outside on the courtyard, time had passed by. The guards had all left to begin the day, and besides one servant passing by, the courtyard was empty.

Moving felt slightly odd, even walking out here had a strange dreamlike-sense. The motions were a little too crisp and quick until I slowed down and took each step deliberately. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with spending a day or two moving around in the armor.

I took the stance once more and tested the movements of Cathida’s top strike. Once I felt comfortable with the moveset, I decided to execute it full speed and see what that looked like.

To do this I had to go through every step as fast as I could think while keeping it accurate.

I took my stance, sword moving to position. Closed my eyes and breathed in deep.

Journey moved.

The sword cut through the air with a high pitched whistle. Just as quick as the motions had been, they came to a stop. I could feel the whiplash even on my limp body, my chest felt like it had been crushed lightly both ways. A small gust of air passed over after me, fading a few feet ahead.

“Wind resistance would be cut down significantly if you powered the sword so that it cuts through the air. Right now, only the metal edge is cutting and that’s got imperfections.”

“Can the blade get warped?"

She cackled at that. “Oh no dear, you don’t have to worry about the metal breaking apart. Tensile strength against the inertia is largely within spec at the speed the tip is reaching. Not enough mass for it to get dangerous. Similarly, you won’t have to worry about the blade heating up. Journey’s already crunched all the numbers and returned deep green.”

I blinked. “One second, heating up? How would swinging a sword heat it up?”

“Air friction.” She said as if it were the most natural thing ever. “Well, can’t expect you lot to know that obscure bit of trivia. The old bat sure didn’t. Only something to worry about if the speed breaks past the sound barrier. Journey’s powerful but not that powerful.”

“All right, fair.” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Uhh, going back to the topic, mechanics wise, how was that swing?”

“Imperfect stance, yet paired with the speed of an Imperator. Never seen that combination. Very odd to see.”

"You think they managed to reach this level with the venom path?”

“Cathida never knew the answer to that. Whatever techniques they used to reach those speeds, it’s a well kept secret.” The armor gave an almost verbal shrug. “Result is the same, you’re moving as fast as an Imperator. Don’t know how you’re doing it, don’t know how they did it either.”

“Wasn’t she a high ranking Crusader? I’d have thought she’d know.”

“Too brash and unruly. Certainly had the skills, but lacked the sheer single minded faith."

I paused for a moment, curious. “Does Journey know?”

She cackled at that “Armors talk with each other only to assist their users in some way. Journey had no reason to ask, none of the armors are born gossips. Even if it had sent a request, answers would be encrypted anyhow. Indagator Mortis do that with everything they touch. After adding gold to it somewhere, of course. Priorities dear.”

I could have all the theories in the world, but for now I had something tangible that gave me an advantage. Sure, it wasn’t unique in the world - but it was good enough to get me an edge up here.

My stance shifted back to the traditional one surface dwellers used, and then I engaged in my favorite kata. The movements blurred around me, even faster than Father’s strikes had been. With the sword active, I was now the center of the whirlwind.

There were errors everywhere in my strikes. The speed blurred it all together. Even if they weren’t perfect, I had a feeling I could stand toe to toe with some of the better knights in the colony now simply because speed would overcome most mistakes.

Atius had fought with this speed.

And the sobering thought was that his opponent, To’Aacar, had still been twice as fast. I needed more wins before I could handle the circus happening a mile under me, let alone more than one level down. I couldn’t go back down there without being stronger.

I had the Occult, a perfected iron-body technique and an armor with the full unlocked memories of an elite crusader. There was so much that I could accomplish with what I had, the good I could create for the clan as a whole, and the possible weapons I could forge to fight the coming tide. I needed just a little more time to refine everything into usable strategies.

There was the sound of movement behind me, someone running and sliding to a stop. One of our new soldiers. I paused my movements, turning around.

Panting, hair windswept backwards. He’d been sprinting to get to me. “Terribly sorry to interrupt your training, master Keith.” He said, taking a quick bow while struggling to keep his breathing under control. “Lady Winterscar has sent a summon for you, effective immediately. It’s urgent.”

I nodded, turning off the weapon in hand and sheathing it. “Know what it’s about?”

He gulped, raising back up, eyes fixed past the courtyard as if seeing through the walls in the direction of the gate.

“Aye sir,” He said. “Clan Lord Atius has arrived at our gates and is requesting an audience.”

Next chapter: Interlude - Atius

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