Chapter 41: Synchronicity (Patreon)

Elliot handed the grimoire to Breka and scooped up the golden coin. Immediately he felt the rush of energy, quickly coalescing into a clear shard. The soft, white light from the far-distant Beacon washed over him, as it did every time he brought his attention to his inner world, and he felt a faint sense of warmth.

There were only three colors to choose from this time: brown, white, and gray. The white skill, called [Coin Tracker], he dismissed out of hand. The gray, [Inventory Assessment], he spent a brief second inspecting—an ability to better assess a group of items at a glance—before moving on. The brown was the prize. He grinned. “I got [Combative Bartering].”

“Excellent. Take it, unless you see something potentially magnificent.”

“The other two are [Coin Tracker] and [Inventory Assessment].”

“Then you know what to do.”

Selecting [Combative Bartering], Elliot let the full details of the skill wash over him as it formed the characteristic band of an internalized ability. In essence, it allowed him to draw another being into an enforced state of exchange. Something must be given up, and something must be gained, for both parties. Beyond that, it was almost entirely a matter of will and expertise.

The description was far more vague than Elliot had come to expect. “It’s not completely clear to me what happens when you activate the ability.”

Breka chuckled. “A phenomenon that will become more and more common as the quality of what you are offered improves.”

“How am I already getting such good abilities? I mean I know the theory, I’m way ahead of the curve compared to all the other children in the first circle, but shouldn’t advanced skills like this be more for the later circles? And if it’s an advanced ability, does that mean I could use it successfully against someone, like, in the third circle?”

Breka’s snort was loud enough Elliot actually jerked back slightly.

“I wouldn’t advise trying it, boy. You’re conflating two different things. The color of a skill indicates its relative value, not its absolute value. A second-circle [Fighter] with something like [Heavy Blow], a gray ability, would lose handily to a second-circle [Fighter] who somehow received a gold striking ability like [Stellar Descent]. But a fourth-circle [Fighter] with [Heavy Blow] would destroy the second-circle [Fighter] with [Stellar Descent], in fact they’d destroy the second-circle fighter even if they had no striking ability at all.”

“So it doesn’t matter that much then? Better abilities give you the edge if your strength is similar, but otherwise it just goes to whoever has the most power.”

“There is no substitute for absolute power, yes. But even though there’s no easy way to cross the crushing gap of a two-circle or even one-circle advantage, better abilities are exactly that, better. [Combative Bartering] is already tuned for strife. It will be easier to force engagements, easier to overwhelm mental defenses. Perhaps you could do much of that with [Barter] alone, with enough training, but you’ll find the stronger skills have greater depths to tap.”

“What color is [Detailed Appraisal]? I had it when I arrived here, so I never actually saw what it looked like before becoming part of my core.”

“It’s a gray ability. Now, do you want to talk all afternoon, or do you want to try out your new toy?”

Elliot pushed his awareness towards his core, trying to get a feel for the new ability. “Okay. Should I just use it on you? Are you ready?”

“I would love to see you take me by surprise.”

He activated [Combative Bartering], and immediately felt like he’d smacked his forehead into a brick wall. “Ow! What the hell, Breka?”

“It’s important to know your limitations. And to know what it feels like for a skill like this to fail spectacularly.” She settled back in the well-stuffed armchair, pulling a flask from her pocket and taking a sip of whatever liquid was inside. “Try again.”

The next ten minutes were an exercise in frustration. He tried force, he tried subtlety, he tried steady pressure, but even as Breka lowered her defenses further and further, nothing he did felt even remotely close to passing through her block. Admittedly it was giving him a much better handle on the various methods of approaching another person’s defenses, but it was still annoying.

“Alright, that’s enough,” she said after a particularly headache-inducing failure. “Try it now.”

He narrowed his eyes, but obeyed. This time, it felt like a door had been opened. Her…self, for lack of a better word, was right in front of him, and it was waiting for him to act.

“I will trade you one clip for the flask that you're drinking from.” As soon as the last word left his mouth there was a sense of constriction, and his hand began to reach into his pocket before he even realized what it was doing. Producing the coin and tossing it to Breka, he let out a gasp as the pressure suddenly released.

Her sense of self was still there, hanging in front of him, and as the seconds ticked by the sense of constriction mounted. He knew his skill was trying to force her to honor the bargain, but it was like a mouse trying to bend a bar of iron.

“Interesting,” she said. “Strong pressure, for your first time wielding it. My own [Barter] took a different path.” She tossed Elliot her flask and the ability ended abruptly, leaving him feeling off-balance and shaken.

“You have work to do, but this will at least make our practice sessions more interesting. I’ll admit, I’d begun to tire of simply smashing your mental defenses out of the way day after day. A little reciprocity will do us good. And give me back that flask.”

“Am I always going to feel the same sense of pressure?” he asked, tossing the flask back over. “It felt like I was practically as much of a puppet as when you do it to me.”

“That will always be present to some degree, as at least some equivalence is inherent to the skill. You’ll learn to control it better, though. That’s part of what our training is for. At the end of the day, that’s this ability’s greatest strength. The fact that it affects both you and its target increases the overall power, as it's building from both cores involved. You’ll be ready for it, and they won’t.”

For the next four hours, they practiced. Pushing against defenses, smashing through weak blocks, sitting with the pressure, succumbing to the pressure, changing the wording, implying a bargain without words, offering little in exchange for much and vice versa, it amazed him how varied and yet monotonous it became to work with a single ability for so long. His normal training was intense but varied.

A breath of fresh air came when Breka had him try out the information-gathering side of the skill. As she’d once explained about her own ability, [Barter] and its variants were all fundamentally [Merchant] skills. Part of their potential lay in feeling out the person on the other side of the deal and determining their wants and needs, as well as the lines they would or wouldn’t cross. Like any ability, that function could be adapted, to the point where it functioned as a powerful inspection skill for the unassuming Fury. Elliot couldn’t make it work, though. There wasn’t even a faint pull of information for him to latch on to with the vortex.

“It’s fine,” Breka said, waving at him to desist. “It would have been shocking if you’d managed it. Your uniqueness aside, using it this way is really for after you have an excellent grasp of the basics. You’ll get there soon enough.”

After wringing him out to the point of complete exhaustion, Breka whisked off to handle something she wouldn’t explain and Elliot began to jot down notes about what he’d learned. 

First, the compulsion was more powerful the better the deal became. If he offered several gold coins for Breka to snap her fingers once, it was an exponentially more powerful pressure than when he offered a clip in exchange for all the money in her pouch. Second, he could control the force of the ability to some extent through focus alone. Even if it was a bad deal, applying the full weight of his will made it considerably more likely to succeed. Third, the best way he’d found to make it past a solid mental defense was to distract the opponent while putting every ounce of determination he possessed into one solid spike of an attempt, rather than a repeated-hammering style of approach. Fourth…

Later, exhausted, he collapsed into bed after getting the bare outline of his thoughts down onto paper. The mental warfare had left his mind feeling like a useless blob.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the dream.

A rocky plain stretched around him in all directions, with thick black clouds tumbling slowly at the farthest reaches of his sight. Ahead the figurine sat carved from purple crystal, its three heads and long, thin horns all pointed directly at Elliot’s face. It was standing on a simple stone plinth. The creature seemed like it could fit in his hands, just like in the warren, and yet it simultaneously seemed large enough to crush the world under a single hoof. Nothing moved, except for occasional flashes of light in the black fog on the horizon.

Elliot shivered, reaching down to wrap himself in his blanket, only to realize he was standing fully clothed and blanketless. The figurine’s eyes seemed to bore into him, despite lacking anything like a spark of awareness.

Forcing himself to turn away, he gazed off into the distance, slowly clenching and unclenching his hands. Every time he had this dream, it went the same way. The statue just sat there, on its stone column, and he wandered around looking at the black clouds in the distance until he woke up. The first time had terrified him, but by the third it had become more of an annoyance.

He started walking in slow circles around the figurine, eyeing it suspiciously, trying to not even think the name that had almost gotten him killed. Why was it haunting him? It had been months since he’d touched the real statue, since he’d even seen it. Breka could have sent it to the bottom of the ocean for all he knew. Why did this keep happening?

The purple mark on his right hand itched, and he scowled. “Whatever is happening here, I’m not interested.”

Nothing changed. The clouds moved, and the figurine stared. Elliot sighed and resumed pacing, trying to think of other things. Tomorrow, once he finished his training, he’d head back to the Overlook and do some landscape sketching. He’d have some tea, maybe a pastry, and turn his brain off for an hour or two. Maybe after he’d go and do some real bartering in the market to get in the right frame of mind for his new ability. His mouth twisted. The idea was nearly as unpalatable as mental combat with Breka. It really was silly he’d ended up as a merchant.

As he crossed in front of the figurine again, something made him pause. There was a glittering somewhere deep inside its chest, right over where a living creature would have had a heart. 

Without even thinking, Elliot used [Detailed Appraisal]. It had become second nature when he saw something that caught his interest, like squinting to see better in harsh light. The ability activated immediately.

Information began to flow, but far more fragmented than usual. There was a picture of a world…this world? As if he was hanging above it. A feeling came through, of something sharp and vast impaling his side, and a terrifying agony. An urge to run, to retreat, a shame. Fleeing something important.

Then the back of his head practically exploded with pain, like someone had lit his skull on fire. It was throbbing, burning, stabbing, the sensations blending together in a horrifying medley of discomfort. He tried to spin the vortex, desperate to make something change, but the normally stable feeling of it sitting quietly in his mind was completely absent, overwhelmed by the cascading misery.

Something was threading its way through his body, a thin cord of energy connecting the mark in his hand to the back of his head. It pulsed, something passing back and forth, and then twisted sharply. Everything spun, like the whole world of stone and black clouds had been tossed violently up in the air.

Then his eyes shot open, and he realized he was screaming. 

Hadrian leapt to his feet from where he’d been lying on a bedroll by the door, his spear somehow already in his hands, its point zipping back and forth in an attempt to find the threat. “What is it? What did you see?”

Elliot sat up in bed, gasping. The mark on his hand was throbbing dully—a slow, repetitive pulse. That would have already worried him, but far more concerningly the back of his head, where his vortex sat, throbbed to the same rhythm, like they’d somehow been locked in sync. 

Well, shit.