Book 8 – Chapter 61 – Friends in high places

Power in this world was a ladder.

At the very bottom, mankind first fought each other with hand and fist. Then came swords, which made hand and fist obsolete. And then came guns which made swords obsolete. And so on up the ladder until we hit the occult, which oddly enough cycled back to making swords the word of the land.

What I had in my hand here was a weapon used at the very top of that ladder, beyond combat schools using occult blades.

Urs was at that level. He hardly knew how to swing a blade, but his power with the occult was on a league above the need of an occult blade like what Father mastered.

Conviction had swiped his blade across the air, and all of us fighting him had been thrown off our feet and slammed into the side of the walls. What could he have done if he’d actually been trying to kill us?

This was the kind of combat that was waiting for me further down the line. Against Talen.

And I wouldn’t get years of practice and training to fight at that level. I had to work with what I had now and pick every bit of advantage I could.

Which meant taking this blade that was made to be wielded by someone seven feet tall, and learn how to make my own use of it. Not by swinging it like a barbarian, or stabbing people like I was famous for. But actually figure out what it was used for and reverse engineer something out of it by the time I had to fight against Talen.

And what I’d learned so far is that putting an occult trained by Grandmaster Hexis with all the processing power of a golden age AI, led to unpredictable results.

First: Conviction’s blade was dense, and as I studied it with the Icon, we discovered another interesting quirk to it: It was a replica. Not the actual blade A01 used, but a shallow copy of it, which was then modified by Conviction into his own proper weapon.

And second, using this blade as an actual occult blade was like using a rifle like a bat. Technically possible, and it would deal some good damage if I whacked someone without armor. But an absolute waste of its true potential.

The occult was truly spooky. The more I meditated in that terminal, using the occult sight to examine the blade before me, the more I found oddities within the very concept of it.

History was a factor for example. As in how people thought of this blade over the years had an actual genuine effect upon the concept of this blade.

I could tell it was feared. By people who had long since died off from old age, sure. But it had been feared once and that was enough for the occult to keep a memory of it.

That fear was a shadow lurking in the blade. Not quite to the same level as the original blade had, it felt more like an echo of that was present within this sword.

Wrath had told me weapons the protofeathers used were more a platform to cast occult spells from. Their base concept of a weapon facilitating that aspect. But as machines, they had limits in how they could see the world. They lacked the occult sight I was using this very moment to study these weapons. Which means there were entire aspects to these weapons they couldn’t have understood.

Hexis had explained far more on the occult itself and what an entire history of studying the occult had come down to. But no man had ever been able to take one of these weapons and study them this close. Or if they had, they’d been unable or unwilling to pass that knowledge down in places the warlocks could find them again.

My own contribution to all this was in mathematics instead of anything more conventional.

Of which one branch of mathematics was far closer to the occult in my mind than even chaos theory – Quantum physics.

In which even just the act of measuring or observing something changed the result of it according to the golden age humans who had access to every lab and experiment techniques that none of us in the modern day had.

Reachers were divided on the subject. The dumb ones said it was spooky, strange logic that made little sense. The larger Reacher community had faith that good reasoning and mathematics would explain everything, old humanity simply hadn’t had the time to dig out the true answers. And the most brilliant Reachers I knew, like Anarii, said it was spooky, strange logic that made little sense.

And the occult followed that pattern oddly enough. Knowing something existed would affect that thing in very faint ways. Even separated thousands of miles away.

It was faint, but I could pick up a very tiny sense of myself within the concept of this blade. I couldn’t see further, as it was like picking apart a single strand from a million others, but there was some recognition that parts of this blade’s history had me attached to it before I’d even encountered it.

Which sounds very spooky until I considered it further under the lens of the occult.

Hexis had taught me many different paths that considered the occult itself, but my current favorite interpretation was to see it as a gestalt entity. Something that saw everything all at once, and was influenced by everyone’s thoughts to equal amounts. It existed before humanity did, and it would have continued existing after of course. But humanity and living beings in general still had an effect on it, in the same way I could grab a rock and move it. Exerting a change in the world that would never have happened if I hadn’t existed to move the rock.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

I knew A01 had used a blade.
I knew A01 was incredibly powerful, and so his sword must be equally powerful.
Which meant the replica of his sword would also have a shadow of that thought attached to it.
That train of logic had affected Conviction’s blade, thousands of miles away, without me even knowing he existed.

Not by huge amounts to be clear, my influence on the occult was a tiny dot on the map. Everyone’s was.

Even an entire city wouldn’t be enough presence to have any kind of true impact on the occult. But an idea like combat was reinforced across not just a single city, but an entire civilization over the centuries. So many people knew and thought about combat, it had a gravity of its own now.

This kind of conceptual reinforcement was more like rope. Stands that were so faint they could be snapped with a mere thought, except if there were millions of them put together, the rope they made became incredibly sturdy.

That’s how these weapons functioned, building on the original rope behind combat and danger. An alternate branch within that concept, solely for this one thing.

This was the next level of occult mastery. One went from using and discovering fractals, to using the occult directly and commanding concepts that had already been built up within the world. Like groves of power, tapped into.

These weapons had at first been actual weapons of conventional war, and the longer the protofeathers used them, the more their legends grew. Which the protofeathers seemed to either know how to tap into, or did so by accident.

“I am receiving a transmission.” The Icon said, interrupting my meditation. “Your prior broadcast has been accepted and a return data package has arrived.”

“Oh? Show me the return package.”

That would be plan B.

I had some hope that I’d be able to power Conviction’s blade back to at least a usable shape, but I was well aware I needed some alternative plans in case this didn’t pan out.