Chapter 39: The Beginning
Ash stretched his arms and legs when he finally woke up. He was back in his room, which was now cleaner than it had been when he moved into it. It smelt fresh.
He glanced over at his desk to find a note.
You fell asleep in the laundry room.
Ash checked the time. He was already late for his first class of the day, but he didn’t feel rushed. He looked inside his closet to see Phoebe had folded all of his clothes, not just the ones she had washed.
"I need to thank her," Ash said as he dressed himself.
He entered his lecture and quietly took a seat before the professor called him out. During the lecture, Ash continued to struggle to keep himself awake. The drawback of extracting two Shades still affecting him. His void had overeaten, and now he felt he could go without extracting another Shade for a long time.
Deep down, his hunger knew it had bitten off more than it could digest as well.
Leaving the lecture, he bumped into Seth who was exiting his own several doors to the left.
"Hey," Seth said.
"Do you want to tell me why you were giving out my phone number? Or why you spoke so much about me to Lucia?"
"Can you thank me first before you start your questions?"
"For what?"
"How do you think you got into your room. Phoebe was calling everyone she knew. She didn’t want you to be in trouble for sleeping in a common space."
"Fine," Ash said. "Thanks for saving me. Now can you explain how everyone seems to know you?"
"Expanding your social circle is valuable, Ash. Did any of them treat you badly?"
"No, but—"
Seth raised an eyebrow. "Midterms are next week. Take it easy, yeah?" He put a hand on Ash’s shoulder. "Don’t go looking for anything."
"Yeah. I’ve had my plate full of meals recently. I think I’ll be fine if nothing happens between now and next week."
The two left in opposite directions. Ash was halfway to his next class when his name cut through the corridor noise.
"Ash," was all the person said.
No one recognizable in either direction. He kept walking.
"Ash, I’ve been looking for you," the same voice continued.
Ash stopped.
He was leaning against the corridor wall with his hands shoved in his pockets. A dark, structured coat hung on his frame, with a thick white fur collar and gold buttons gleaming at the chest. It was left open, revealing a gray shirt underneath and the silver chain resting at the base of his throat. He looked about Ash’s age. He should have looked like a student, but the pink hair and coat said otherwise. It wasn’t tattered, just worn in that lived-in way that told you he wouldn’t mind if it got damaged in a fight.
He wasn’t watching the corridor. He was watching Ash.
"Sorry, but... Do I know you?" Ash responded.
"Let’s take a walk outside. I’d rather not do this in front of innocent people."
"Do wh—" Ash couldn’t finish the sentence. Remembering each word he wanted to say felt like being stabbed with a sword a thousand times.
"Good, you understand now," he merely said, leading them the way out the academy corridors.
The corridor let out into the courtyard. He stopped in the center of the open space and turned around. Up close, the coat was more worn than it had looked inside. The silver chain at his throat caught the midmorning light.
"How much of it got through?" He asked.
"Enough."
"Interesting." He tilted his head slightly. "Tzarshi said flat affect was a partial counter. I wanted to see how partial."
"Whose Tzarshi?"
"My master," he said.
"And you’re?"
"Kasz," he finally said. "The Class Three incursion report. The Gate happened in this courtyard, did it not? It went up a chain and eventually landed with someone who gave me your name."
The hunger read him from across the courtyard. Not the enormous compressed architecture of the Agent. His Shade was younger and more contingent than the Agent’s, a Shade that hadn’t been accumulating in one direction for years but had been shaped deliberately toward a fixed purpose.
Kasz closed the distance.
The courtyard snapped into slow motion as Ash’s perception compressed to triple speed. He was faster, faster than every human opponent he’d fought. Ash’s overclocked cognitive senses barely put him on even ground with him.
Kasz didn’t move until Ash’s knuckles were an inch from his jaw. His forearm snapped up and met Ash’s strike with enough force required to negate the momentum entirely. No impact tremor, no struggle. Just the sound of two surfaces meeting, followed by the violent hiss of displaced air venting sideways from the contact point.
The deflection redirected Ash’s momentum sideways and the follow-through sent him stumbling two steps before he caught his footing. Kasz was already repositioning.
Ash slammed a gravity lock onto Kasz’s new position. In the microsecond before it consolidated, Kasz shifted. A singular, measured glide that left an afterimage for the field to feast on. The gravity well collapsed violently onto empty space. The courtyard didn’t just crack; it pulverized. Paving stones shrieked as they were ground into powder, a spherical distortion wave warped the light around the impact zone, and the windows of the ground-floor classrooms behind the blast radius shattered inward.
"You have three extracted abilities," Kasz said, circling. His voice carried the register of someone reading aloud from a document they had memorized.
Ash’s perception compressed to triple speed again.
At triple time he could read Kasz’s movement patterns. The technique was trained, not instinctive. Each strike arrived from the shoulder with the mechanical precision of a form from an experts own methodology. Ash could see the preparation in every approach.
His elbow met Kasz’s forearm at the block point, the force of the deflection distributed through both of them, and Ash drove forward off the contact toward the open flank.
Kasz’s hand caught his collar.
The courtyard upended.
Not physically. Ash’s feet were on the ground. But a certainty arrived and this time it had a face. Phoebe. When he saw her face, it was on a detached head, her body mutilated and slashed to the point where the only other recognizable part of her were her reading glasses.
Ash’s body convulsed, puking blood at what he was seeing inside him.
"Phoebe..." He said choking, "What happened to her."
When Ash said this, Kasz struck across his left shoulder while Ash was still trying to make sense of what he was feeling. The force drove Ash back three steps, the impact conducting through the joint with the hollow looseness of a body that hadn’t been fully present to absorb it.
"More context for this one," Kasz said, observing. "The processing delay is longer when the target has stronger relational investment."
Ash aimed his next gravity field at the ground beneath Kasz. The differential was immediate. Kasz’s heavy coat sloughed downward, the gold buttons tearing from their threads under sudden immense weight. He went down, his knee struck the pavement with the sound of a structural support beam snapping, driving through the stone and burying itself in the raw dirt beneath. His blood splattered against the crater, and was immediately flattened against the rock by the field’s sustained pressure.
Kasz was up before the last chunk landed.
The next certainty arrived before Ash had finished repositioning.
This was a distributed attack. Seth. Azure. Evelyn. Each one had suffered a different catastrophic fate in Ash’s mind. Seth, drowning in a vat of water. Azure, fried alive in oil. Evelyn, frozen into a block of ice and then chiseled into individual ice cubes.
More blood came gushing out from his mouth, with his eyes looking red from the blood spooling behind them.
"This has to be fake," Ash tried to assure himself. But it felt real, his mind was telling them they had all died from that.
Kasz stood across the courtyard and watched him rise with the patient attention of someone gathering data that would still be useful later.
"Flat affect is a better counter than Tzarshi predicted," Kasz said. "He will probably want to know that."
The courtyard snapped back to triple speed and Ash crossed the distance.
Kasz deflected with the same preset response as the first exchange, the same shoulder angle, the same redirect point. Ash had seen it twice now. He let the deflect land and drove into it rather than absorbing it, using the redirect momentum to pull past Kasz’s guard instead of being pushed off. His forearm caught Kasz across the chest. Force delivered. Kasz stumbled back one step.
One step.
Ash drove forward to close the gap.
Kasz’s elbow came across and caught him under the jaw from below.
Ash’s vision strobed. He found the ground, found his hands on it, found that the hands were shaking. The courtyard tilted in his perception.
He pushed back up to feel the overclock crash arriving as he stood.
This one went behind the eyes, the triple processing speed cutting out and the world snapping back to single time, the deceleration like stepping off a moving train. He lost two seconds. He was standing when they came back, which meant he hadn’t gone down again, but the gap in continuity was there.
Kasz hadn’t closed for a finishing exchange.
He was standing at a distance, watching Ash return from the crash with the same collected attention he had brought to every exchange. Not conserving energy. Continuing to collect.
"The others," Kasz said. "I’m going to need to see those other abilities of yours eventually."
