35. The Nth End of Phase Three

The group finished their meal in the mess hall, ending the second day at the exhibition. We all headed back to the bunks for a night of rest. I really needed it. My body ached, creaked, and screamed in protest with every movement. I hadn’t taken into account the individual attrition that the proximity of the rounds to each other would cause.

Tomorrow will be a test of will as much as individual power.

I pulled up my interface to take a proper look at where I was.

Three sub-objectives complete? That’s not bad. I think that the more I complete, the better the reward. But not knowing how to complete each objective is killing me.

The physical stats had climbed. Strength 28, Agility 31, Vitality 33, Perception 21. The improvements were clear. In just the few weeks I had access to the system, my ability to fight was improving rapidly. A single point, while not an obvious increase, gave a bonus of around three per cent, which in a fight was non-negligible.

But the Ether stats sat at the bottom of the screen like a locked door.

Capacity: 1. Sensitivity: 1. Control: locked entirely.

I’d been ignoring them since the True-Noosphere first appeared. Every stat point I’d earned had gone into Body or Mind because those were the stats that kept me alive in the gauntlet and the arena.

Ether was different. I had no active deviation. Though the True-Noosphere was doing something with the Ether — the connection threshold ticking upward when I cultivated suggested that much — but I had no framework for directing it. As such, putting points into Ether stats would likely be dumping resources into a system I had no way of using.

Rachel had been the opposite. Her shield deviation was pure ether application — reactive shielding that pulsed on contact, redistributing force through a mechanism that had nothing to do with physical stats. She’d built around it. Her Vitality was high enough to absorb sustained engagement, and her Ether capacity was clearly invested in because the shield pulsed consistently throughout the fight without fading. She’d stacked Vitality and Capacity together, creating a fighter who could absorb punishment physically and redirect it through ether. Her Strength and Agility were secondary — she was built to stand there, take hits, and make each hit cost the attacker more than the defender.

That was a stat build with a plan, every point allocated toward a specific combat identity. Her speciality in Rotation Three supported it. The constant cycling back into a defensive stance gave her time to reset the shield between activations, and the high guard protected the areas the shield couldn’t cover during its recharge window.

I pulled up the Ether section.

Capacity: 1. What would increasing it do? In theory, capacity determined how much ether your body could hold and channel. For someone with an active deviation, more capacity meant more usage — longer shield durations, stronger bursts, and more powerful techniques before exhaustion. For me, with no active skills and a passive deviation that I couldn’t consciously trigger, increasing capacity would be storing fuel in a tank with no engine attached.

Sensitivity: 1. Sensitivity governed how finely you could perceive and interact with ether in the environment. High sensitivity meant detecting ether-reactive materials, sensing deviations in use, and reading the ether signatures of other awakened individuals. For me, it would mean… what? Being able to feel skills more clearly? Detecting Rachel’s shield pulse a fraction earlier? The combat application was there, but situational at best when compared to something like perception, especially when people are unable to make proper use of active skills.

Control: locked. The individual’s ability to channel and manipulate Ether. A pretty self-explanatory attribute. Usually, it doesn’t become useful until after a framework has been implanted. It directly influences the amount of Ether required to use skills and also the speed at which Ether skills are both activated and travel.

I considered putting my next stat point into Capacity, just to see what happened. If capacity affected how much ether the True-Noosphere could process, increasing it might accelerate whatever the system was building toward.

But that was speculation built on speculation. The physical stats were certain. One point in Agility meant measurably faster footwork, while one point in Capacity meant a possibility of faster growth in connection. But only if the theory I’d constructed from zero information happened to be correct.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

I closed the interface and drifted off to sleep.

Day three of the exhibition opened with individual combat, and the bracket didn’t waste time.