Wormhole Cultivation [Book 2] - Chapter 34: Pain and Ideas (Patreon)

"He'll either meddle in the project to eat up our time gathering dirt on us, or, worse, try to sabotage it the moment we're not looking," I told Pascal, once we got a spare minute alone.

"You think he'd actually go that far, after how things turned out last time?"

"Absolutely!" I answered, surprised. "You don't?"

"I think he'll just get on our nerves."

"He'll be snitching."

"So let him. We're not doing anything against the rules. Sure, we've drifted from the main task, but a portal gun isn't a toy, it's a perfectly respectable, I'd even say unique, invention."

"I know what he's capable of," I said flatly. "If snitching doesn't work, he'll pull something."

"So what do you suggest?"

"We go to Delgado and complain about him interfering with the project. Separately, not together. I'll complain about the personal vendetta, you complain about him distracting everyone and killing morale."

Pascal got in to see Delgado that same day. I didn't get an appointment. The boss was too busy to talk to rank-and-file technicians. The loss of my perks was already making itself felt, but I was persistent, sent her a few personal messages threatening to walk off the project, and it worked. I might not have had status anymore, but I still had a rare qualification. Delgado was forced to see me the following afternoon.

"I don't tolerate blackmail," she said the moment I stepped into her office. Her stony expression showed nothing beyond mild irritation. "If you want to leave the project, maybe that's for the best, for everyone."

I froze on the spot and raised an eyebrow in surprise.

"Should I remind you how you tried to manipulate me two meetings ago?"

"Manipulation and blackmail are different things."

"Not that different," I disagreed, then decided to risk a bit of manipulation of my own. "Do you need my resignation letter, or are you kicking me out yourself?"

Delgado didn't answer.

I spread my hands, waiting for a reply. None came, so I decided to see it through and nodded. "I'll send it in five minutes."

I turned toward the door, and that's when she finally spoke. "Do you know you've got a reputation as someone impossible to deal with?"

"I've got a reputation as someone you'd better not fuck around with," I said, turning back. "You can deal with me just fine. I'm entirely capable of striking a deal, and I keep my word."

"Has he done anything specific?" Delgado asked.

Her face had stopped being stony, and there was a lot more irritation on it now.

"So far he's just been getting on my nerves," I admitted. "But the potential danger outweighs every last perk."

"You're scared?" she asked, surprised.

"I haven't been cultivating all that long, but I've already fought in battles where Fives died. And I'm still alive. My poor arse senses danger better than a xeltar's third eye sees qi.

"Jonson joined the project to wreck my work and my nerves. Sooner or later he'll play himself too far and do something stupid."

"Well, to be honest," Delgado said, sceptically, "not that much work's actually been done on the evac portals. And Jonson's already reported that the two of you have been working on something you shouldn't."

"But it's something that'll definitely come in useful for Earth!"

Delgado pressed her lower lip.

"Has to agree," she admitted. "But I'm not removing Jonson from a project on your suspicions and personal dislike. He's got the standing and the experience. If Jonson's genuinely sabotaging the work, and not just irritating you with his presence, bring me proof. Concrete facts I can actually take further up the chain.

"Catch him red-handed. I won't take the black jumpsuit off him, but I'll throw him off the project and drop him to your level."

"Wait! Are you seriously using me for the exact same thing Jonson was going to do to the praxi?" I asked, indignant.

Delgado looked a touch surprised, but she didn't deny it. "Looks that way… In my own defence, I'll say the second fastest way to end a war is to fight it."

"What's the first?"

"Surrender. If you..." she smiled and tilted her head.

I raised a finger, irritated. "No manipulation!"

"That's not in your nature, or in his. Neither is reconciliation. So either way, I'm expecting a clash. Preferably sooner rather than later, so it stops getting on my nerves."

I left her office with an odd feeling. I clearly hadn't got what I'd come for, but the overall situation didn't feel quite so bleak anymore. I now had, effectively, permission to sink Jonson the moment I had proof.

I wondered if Delgado had given Jonson the exact same permission regarding me. That would be textbook divide and rule.

Besides, how in hell was I supposed to catch Jonson red-handed?

That occupied my head for the rest of the working day. I didn't feel like doing calculations, so Jonson got yet more confirmation that I wasn't working, just twiddling my thumbs.

For now, he seemed entirely satisfied with snitching, and that would keep him going for a while yet, so he wouldn't be moving on to anything more active just yet. But I needed to be ready.

Which got me running old clashes back through my head, and how I'd wriggled out of them. Fundamentally, what had pulled me out of Jonson's vine grip was Misty Step. Not that I could surprise him with that again now, but I definitely needed to keep working on the technique, maybe push its boundaries further. That idea of materialising my body in the middle of a sandstorm was still turning over in my head.

That was dangerous, and I wasn't about to jump straight to it without staged training, but training itself was unquestionably better than sitting around, racking my brain for nothing and ruining my own mood.

Breaking the training down to its smallest, safest element proved easier than any clever scheme against Jonson. I pulled a small bottle of water out of my spatial pocket, from my emergency stash, and drank it. I blew air through the bottle to dry it out, then ducked into the nearest sand hall and filled it with sand.

After that, I still had to go buy a big plastic bowl, so I wouldn't scatter sand all over my flat. The plan was this: pour sand onto my left pinky, which wasn't tied up in any technique, dissolve it into interdimensional mist, and reassemble it under the falling stream of sand.

Obviously I couldn't reassemble it into solid flesh under a full stream. I had to pour carefully, two or three grains at a time. And on my first attempts, I simply missed. My two or three grains fell past my finger, or I just couldn't catch the right moment, and they flew straight through the dissolved finger, which defeated the whole point of the exercise.

What I actually needed to learn was how to deflect solid objects off the ‘mist’ that was my finger. I needed a storm, where grains moved chaotically, or zero gravity. Portalling to some station just to train would be expensive, and nobody would let me scatter sand around in zero gravity anyway. People could breathe it in.

Locally generated zero gravity wasn't cheap either, but I could show up at the Air Garden, where the wind blew constantly, and the air was thick with dust. I wasn't ready for an environment that aggressive just yet, though I could try applying Sky in the Fist, the technique I used to gather dust in the Air Garden. I could try catching a few grains of sand inside the air-ball the technique formed.

I lifted the bottle of sand with my left hand and started pouring a thin trickle into the bowl, while my right hand performed the technique, catching and spinning up the air somewhere in the middle of the stream.

It worked! A miniature sandstorm spun up inside a ball of air. There was even a bit too much sand, but I decided I just wouldn't shove my whole finger into it.

I held the ball steady in front of me, dissolved my left pinky, and pushed the first knuckle inside. The air started tearing at its precise shape, stretching it along the spinning current, and I had to put in real effort just to hold the shape in its dissolved state. The sand passing through it was a whole different level of strain.

I activated Thousand Sparks and Parallelisation, handing Sky in the Fist off to one stream and Misty Step to everything else. It got more controlled.

I traced out the spatial boundaries of the finger, without fully solidifying it. The sand started battering against the unformed nail.

Seemed to be working.

There was no point dragging it out any further, so I solidified the finger.

Felt like the nail had just been ripped off.

"Son of a bitch!" I barked and flinched from the pain, but Sky in the Fist held.

The sand and the nail had actually fused together into one piece. Still, that was keratin tissue, so any poisoning shouldn't be able to reach my bloodstream. I quickly and carefully dispersed the Air technique, tipped the sand into the bowl, and pulled a knife out of my spatial pocket.

The finger throbbed with pain, so more than just the horn plate had been affected.

I lined up on the joint, but I didn't want to cut off the whole phalanx. For all the wonders of regeneration, it still took time, and I wanted to keep the bone, so I gritted my teeth, held my finger out over the bowl with sand, and sliced off the sand-crusted nail, generously catching some of the flesh around it too.

Blood splattered into the bowl.

I tucked the knife back into my pocket and summoned it again, but I couldn't work out what exactly was causing the pain in my finger. What mattered was that the pain wasn't getting worse, and the throbbing stayed steady, so poisoning shouldn't be an issue.

I pulled a canister of hard foam out of my pocket and sprayed it onto the wound. The white foam quickly turned pink with blood, but as it built up around the finger, the bleeding stopped, and the foam itself hardened fast.

I tossed the canister back into my pocket and headed for the infirmary.

I had to wait at the infirmary. There was a huge queue of first-years, two Twos, and everyone kept eyeing my finger sideways, so I had time to think.

Ordinary sand had managed to injure me under fairly controlled conditions. At least this time I didn't have to cut off my whole hand, and the poisoning was minimal. In an actual fight, I couldn't count on that kind of luck. But in an actual fight, the main thing was survival. Patching up could wait for later.

Although, with demons on the doorstep, there was no telling whether that kind of opportunity would even exist. There ought to be some field procedures, but if something like this happened to me inside my fancy Federation bioarmour, it wouldn't get fixed that easily.

If I lost a piece of it, I'd need to go back to the Federation for repairs. I doubted the demons would allow that.

I needed a backup set, homemade. Something tried and tested, something I could patch up right here on the spot. Wrap it in duct tape and it'd still work. I needed a new set from Alan. He'd built my first armour, my second, and handled almost all the repairs and modifications.

Not all of them, of course. Artem made the physical compartments for the miniature beetle drones himself.

I could use those drones to keep an eye on Jonson. Though the image quality on them was pretty grim.

Still, those were old drones. I hadn't crossed paths with Artem since I'd got back, but Kate ought to still be working in his department. I'd need to check in with her about newer options for covert surveillance.

And I needed to ask Delgado whether Jonson had kept his access to the security systems. Because it would be very bad if he saw me watching him.

The idea hadn't fully taken shape yet, but it was already starting to come together.