Chapter 29: Exhaustion Training

I felt my second presence disappear as soon as the Art triggered, but I wasn’t ready for the wave of exhaustion that hit. I just wanted to go to sleep, but I knew I wasn’t physically tired. It was just a mental hurdle to cross, which I promised myself I would.

Blinking to keep myself awake, I relied on my Focus. I cautiously stepped toward my field of enhanced gravity, and for a second, I contemplated stepping into it, but when I saw the remains of the grass still quivering, I thought better of it. I didn’t have a death wish. The field was still active.

I searched the field until I found a clump of stone, then lobbed it into the field.

As soon as the stone passed the boundary, it dropped, plummeting into the soil with a thud. It created a small crater, but the force of enhanced gravity flattened the ground out within seconds.

After about thirty seconds, the field relented. A few blades of grass—those that hadn’t been turned into green sludge—popped back up. I stuck my hand into the field hesitantly, and nothing happened.

“That was double, nay, triple the original gravity,” Elf said. “Maybe even quadruple.”

“Definitely quadruple,” Romance said.

“So…wait a minute, you guys know about gravity?” I tilted my head. My brain was still processing words as if we were speaking English, but we were speaking a different language, and they probably had a different word for it here. The concept was the same though.

“What else makes things fall?” Romance asked.

“I—” I cut myself off. “I suppose it makes sense that you would have a word for that concept. Wait, do you know why it works?” I remembered on the few nights I got to hang out with Dad (which had been the best nights, no matter how few they were) pestering him about how things worked. That included gravity. He never had a proper answer. No one I asked really did—not for sure. There were theories about warping spacetime and such, but no one could really explain the ‘why’ in a satisfying way.

Shave shrugged. “All things have a natural place, according to the Path. That place is sometimes down.”

A natural place, determined by the laws of the universe?

“All things have a destiny,” Elf said. “At least, that was the reasoning the philosophers of the old empire came up with.”

I tilted my head, trying to wrap my head around their reasoning. They weren’t necessarily correct about the nature of gravity, either. It reminded me of what I’d read about the ancient Greeks’ beliefs about gravity—and well, we knew they weren’t right about everything.

But the people of this world seemed to at least be partially correct about souls, so maybe they knew something about how gravity worked.

“You could say that gravity is caused by a ‘natural place’,” Shave said, responding to my earlier question. “Same as with men. Some are made to be lords, some are made to be soldiers.”

“I don’t buy that,” I replied.

“You’re a Dupe.” Shave shrugged. “We all are. What else would you have been made for?”

“You said we have a choice of how we behave, because we have souls. That means we should be able to make our own destinies.”

“I didn’t think about it at all!” Romance said with a cackle.

“You were too busy reading fiction,” Ticks muttered.

“For the record, I’m in Romance’s boat,” Elf replied. “Though I put more of a focus into history.”

“How much education did you guys get?” I asked.

“At Homecamp, we all received a basic education in the sciences and history,” Shave answered.”

“Most of us were Coppers when we were sent out, too,” Shave added. “If we’d made it to Iron that quickly, I’m sure we would’ve been sent to a better battalion—better as in more opportunities for combat, which means more opportunities to gain Skills and Presences. If we were really good, we would’ve been sent to the sappers.”

“Now, I’ve got another question,” I said. “The Art seemed to work with my Focus. It’s hard to explain. It was like it was leveraging the attribute to accomplish something.”

“Some Arts are like that,” Shave said. “Some only work if you’ve reached a certain attribute level, like with your Focus, and if you don’t meet the attribute prerequisite, you won’t be able to merge the right Art you want.”

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“That…kinda makes sense. But it also makes it just a little bit more complex.” I paused. “Well, I’m going to pack it up for the day. I’m probably starving, though I can’t really feel it at the moment. I’m too exhausted.”

“You are most definitely starving, kid,” Romance said. “After I first learned to use my resonance Skill, I could’ve eaten an entire cow.”

“And you only had one Presence,” Elf said. “Levi’s used two in a row.”