B3Ch60-Josh (Patreon)

Josh woke to a heel in the kidney and lay still a moment, taking stock, before he concluded that his unborn child had a real future in soccer.

Beth was flat on her back beside him, one hand resting on the great swell of her belly, still under, her mouth open a little, a line of drool at the corner of it. Six months along and she announced herself around corners. He loved every ridiculous inch of her. He wouldn't say the word "enormous" out loud, though; he was an engineer and limits had to be pushed, then respected.

He slid out from under the blanket one careful inch at a time, and he hissed when he touched the cold floor.

Their rooms ran along a stretch of the keep's second floor; the guard had bunked here, but they had left when Harold had left. It was the best gift anyone had given them that hadn't come wrapped from Harold. Actual privacy and a space they could make their own until they built their own home.

He pulled on trousers and a shirt, tugged the blanket back up over Beth's shoulder, and eased the door shut behind him. The stairs were cold enough to swear about. Somewhere below him the kitchen was already awake — he could smell the bread rising up the stairwell, and his stomach made the executive decision before his brain got a vote. He went down to steal his wife some breakfast.

The kitchens were already roaring when he hit the bottom of the stairs, and three people said his name before he cleared the doorway.

"Councilor Josh." Marion didn't look up from the board she was scraping. "You're early. She kick you out?"

"She kicked me awake. Different thing." Josh leaned on the end of the long table, out of the traffic. "Tell me you've got the flaky ones today, Marion."

"I've got two flaky ones set aside for Beth." She slid a cloth-wrapped bundle down the table without being asked, and a second, heavier one behind it. "Those are her pastries, and that's a boiled egg and the good ham; a growing girl needs her protein. You get whatever's still on the tray when you leave."

"So I get the sad ones."

"You get the loved ones," Marion said. "They're just a little lumpy."

Bo cackled from the ovens. Josh pointed a finger at her without turning around. "Bo. How's your knee?"

"Terrible. Thanks for asking, sweetheart."

"You put the salve on it?"

"I put it on my husband; he complains less, and he's the one out there helping with the animals." She shoved a tray of rolls into the heat. "Take some of these up; they're too ugly to give to the Caldwells."

He was reaching for the ugly rolls when Perla caught his sleeve. She was at the far end with a towel wrung into a rope between her hands, and she'd been working herself up to something since he walked in.

"Councilor. Can I — it's stupid, it's nothing—"

"Perla. What's up?" He turned towards her, trying to ignore the growing plates of food, and the noise of the kitchen kept going around them.

"It's Emil. He's near sixteen; it's his choosing week, and he keeps—" Her hands twisted the towel. "He keeps hanging around the adventurer boards. Reading the postings. I'm scared he's going to pick adventurer when he turns sixteen."

Josh crouched a little to get level with her. "Hey. Look at me. First — whatever he picks, he's not the kid who left Earth. None of them are. They train them now. All the new adventurers get a lot of training before Evan and Mark let them leave. Garrick's people drill them until coming home alive is the boring option — that's the whole point. If he does pick it, it will be years before he is allowed out on real quests, and we will join an established team or Order when he does leave."

Perla's mouth wobbled. "And if he picks it anyway?"

"Then he'll be good at it, and I'll be terrified for you, and we'll have to talk about it over a pint of Harold's beer." He softened. "But hey — what's he actually good with? Like what is he passionate about?"

"His hands. Always his hands. He likes making things. Woodworking."

"Then send him to me before he picks anything. We are always short on people and the work's real. Nobody's ever gotten eaten by a foundation." He grinned. "I can take him around and show him some of the more exciting parts of being a crafter. Besides. Having a mother like you should be exciting enough for him." He took a quick bite of one of the pastries. "Especially with food like this."

Perla laughed, wet and grateful, and let go of his sleeve. "You're a good man, Councilor."

"Don't tell anyone, I've got a reputation." He gathered up the bundles and the ugly rolls, kissed the top of Bo's head on the way past just to hear her swear at him, and headed back up the stairs with breakfast for two. The rolls were still warm through the cloth, and he took the steps two at a time, cold breakfast was a crime, and he intended to die innocent.

Beth was up and behind the screen at the chamber pot when he came in, and she didn't bother lowering her voice.

"How's the staff in the kitchen?"

"I only talked to some of the kitchen." He set the tray down and started the tea, warming the pot first; she liked the tea piping hot lately. "Perla's kid is choosing. She's worried he will pick adventurer. Also, Marion gave you two of these fantastic pastries of hers."

"Those women scare half the keep; how you ever got them to talk to you, I'll never know. You're a golden retriever that files paperwork, god bless that woman." Beth came around the screen with a hand pressed to the small of her back, lowered herself into the chair with the care of a woman parking a wagon, and accepted the tea he put in her hands. She breathed it in and closed her eyes. "Okay. That's the one good thing about you. Keep making tea."

"I make several good things," he said, waggling his eyebrows and pointing at her belly.

"You make tea and a baby, and we'll see about the baby." She unwrapped the pastries, took a bite of the flaky one, and pointed the rest of it at him. "Sit. What's your day?"

He dropped into the other chair and tore into a roll. "Couple site checks — the creek retaining walls, the concrete. Some paperwork. Anil's going to cry if I don't sign. Then it's mostly clear. I want to get out and work the path."

Beth chewed, watching him. "How's the storm thing?"

Josh let his head drop back against the chair and groaned at the ceiling. "Bad. It's bad, Beth." He flicked his hand and pulled the panel up, then turned it so it hung in the air between them.

True Path of the Stormcrafter 

1. Understand Water. Manipulate flowing water using no perk bound to another element. Earn water's affinity on its own terms. — IN PROGRESS

2. Force the Differential. Build a funnel that drops the pressure and drives a wind through its throat. — locked

3. Turn a Flow. Redirect running water off its natural grade by affinity. — locked

4. Wring the Air. Condense standing moisture into liquid. — locked

5. Raise a Wind. Call a directed wind over open ground, with nothing to lean on. — locked

6. Seed a Rain. Force local condensation and a true downpour in a bounded space. — locked

7. Spin the Column. Set a rotating pressure cell turning — dust-devil, waterspout. — locked

8. First Spark. Gather static charge from air, ice, and water into one controlled discharge. — locked

9. Hurl the Bolt. Channel and aim a lightning discharge on command. — locked

10. Call the Storm. Pull water, wind, and charge into one storm and place its lightning where you will. — locked

"Number ten, I straight-up become Thor. God of thunder, cape, the whole thing, and nobody gets to tell me otherwise." He jabbed a finger at the top of the list. "And I am stuck. On. One. The tutorial level. I can't even get in the door."

Beth read it over the rim of her tea, unbothered. "You have the real one, though."

"I know—"

"No, listen to me, because you're being stubborn about it." She set the cup down. "You've got the true path. The System's holding your hand, step by step, telling you exactly what to earn. You know that paths are getting around now with those grail quests, and they’re all over the forum. Guess how many are actually real. You know what a guy in some other town has? A rumor of the path that somebody swore they overheard. Third-hand. Wrong in six places, and he will never earn a path like that. He'd give a limb for what you're whining about." She smirked. "And when you finish it, you'll be twice what any of them are. So. Cry harder, I guess."Josh gaped at her as she continued.

"I might take the path after the baby," Beth said, and bit her pastry. "Might just beat you to task two while you're still sulking in a creek somewhere."

"That's — okay, first of all, it's not a competition." He pointed a roll at her. "Second of all, it absolutely is, and you will lose, and I'll be extremely gracious about it."

"Sure, babe." She rubbed a slow circle on her belly and looked out the window at the town waking up. "After she's born—"

"Or he."

"—after it is born and I can see my own feet again, we go west. I want to see the estate Harold gave us. Start pulling people for the estate — builders, a steward who won't rob us." She glanced back at him. "I want to build a home for our family before we get any older and dumber."

"Beth. We're eating breakfast arguing about retaining walls."

"Yeah." She smiled into her tea. "But we're hot."

He leaned over the arm of the chair and kissed her, tasting butter and sugar, and she let him for three seconds before pushing his face away.

"Go to work. Bring me lunch. Don't die."

"As you wish," Josh said with a wink.

Beth looked up from her pastry. She'd grown up on The Princess Bride same as he had, and she knew exactly what that meant. "Dork," she said.

He grinned the whole way down the stairs and out into the yard, headed for the creek and the day's first argument with a retaining wall.

Down at the creek — the river, really, now — the earth-crew was setting the next run of retaining wall, and Josh stood on the bank a minute just to watch the water go by before anyone noticed him.

Harold had spent a terrain token on the mana spring, and what was left of it had gone into this creek. The thing had grown from a wide creek you could wade across to a channel six to eight feet deep down the middle. They were building the walls along the banks wherever it cut through the Landing, and come spring they'd build it up to the lake they were going to make at Lira's first mine. Josh watched the current twist and fold over a sunken stone, looking for inspiration and coming up empty.

The water declined to explain itself.

"Councilor." Dann waved him down off the bank. "You want to look at this seam?"

"Show me." Josh crouched at the footing trench, dug two fingers into the crushed stone, rubbed it between them. Fine and even stone, almost like coarse flour. "Yeah. That's — that's really good, actually. Where's Gower?"

Gower turned out to be a wide, sheepish man leaning on a maul three sizes past reasonable. "Councilor. I know it's not much use for the walls. I keep telling Dann—"

"Whoa, whoa, no. Walk me through your perk again."

"Stonebreaker." Gower shrugged one huge shoulder. "I hit a rock really hard. Split a boulder the size of a cart with one swing when I got it. Real handy for, uh. Making big rocks into little rocks." He looked at his own hands. "I thought it'd be good for building. Turns out breaking things and building things are pretty far apart."

"See, that's the whole trick, though, and nobody tells you." Josh stood, wiping his fingers on his trousers, already lit up. "Everybody got their perks easy — you kill a thing, you crack a rock, the System hands you a little power. The hard part is figuring out what a weird-shaped power is for. I didn't know either, for the first six months. I had a perk that packed loose soil, and I thought it was garbage until I realized it made me the best road builder on the continent." He tapped the fine crushed stone. "You're not a wall guy. You're a concrete guy. Crush me rock this fine and this even, all day, and I can pour footings that'll outlive the grandkids. Leave the walls to the slackers." He grinned. "You just got promoted, congratulations; it's louder, and you get to hit things. And we can get you other earth perks to make you more well-rounded."

Gower blinked at him, then at his maul, then broke into a grin of his own. "...I can do that."

"I know you can. Go break me a mountain, little at a time." Josh clapped him on the shoulder, helped Dann heave two wall stones into their seats just to keep his hands busy while his eyes stayed on the water, and moved on no closer to figuring it out. He climbed up off the bank and cut back through town toward the wall, taking the long way on purpose.

The town he walked through was not the little village they started with.

People called his name off porches and out of doorways, and he answered them all — a wave, a name back, a "how's the arm," a "let me know if you need help fixing that." A pair of tatanka came shouldering up the main street with panniers strapped across their humps, and a kid on the lead one grinned and yelled "COUNCILOR JOSH" at a volume usually reserved for house fires, and Josh yelled the kid's name right back.

Evan was at the guild steps with a couple of his teams kitting up, and he lifted a hand across the square. "Josh! You seen the quest board for the northeast?"

"Not yet — good?"

"Oh yeah." Evan flashed a thumbs-up and went back to his people, and Josh made a note to go read the board later; a happy Evan usually meant money and good perks. Probably some kind of rare monster sighting they were headed out to hunt. Monsters were getting more common within the Basin after the mana had gotten thicker here. He knew the Legion was worried about it.

Rimi went by pushing a barrow stacked with wrapped panes of glass, headed for the potion hall, and swore at a cobble that nearly tipped the lot. Josh caught the barrow's corner without breaking stride, steadied it, and let him keep cussing. The old man was cantankerous. The potion hall behind him had a line out the door, same as always; Elia was in the doorway with a slate, sending three students to the herb beds and pulling a fourth back inside for some reason.

He smelled the meat skewers halfway across the market. Charred and smoky, fat hitting coals and some kind of flatbread was wrapped around the skewer with a little cheese — he was defenseless against it.

"Two," he told Milo at the coals. "No, three. It's a three-day."

"Every day's a three-day with you, Councilor." Milo was already turning skewers. "You keep me in business single-handedly."

"That's the dream. You, me, an exclusive contract, we cut out the whole rest of the town." Josh took the first skewer and bit into it immediately. "Oh — oh, that's the good. You changed something."

"New pepper. Came up on a caravan from the south — out of that Indian lord's town."

"I might have to buy some myself. Beth would love it."

"Beth would take the pepper in the divorce," Milo said, smirking, "and she'd be right to. Have a good day, Councilor."

"Watch it, or I'll revoke your license," Josh said with a smile, paid him double, and didn't listen to the argument about it, already working on the second wrap as he walked toward the edge of town, where the real work was going up.

The wall was going up slowly, and everyone knew why: the blocks.

They were multi-ton and quarried out of the eastern peaks, then hauled down on tatanka sleds a handful at a time. You couldn't rush stone that big without losing a hand or a week. A third of the perimeter stood finished, and the rest was staked line, footing trench, and the big gatehouse going up in the gap where the east road came in.

Devon was up on the gatehouse scaffold with a plumb line, and he saw Josh coming and cupped his hands. "YOU SHALL NOT PASS."

"I own this gate, man, I can pass whenever I want."

"Not till the lintel's set, you can't. Come up here and hold a line, if you're just gonna eat and heckle."

Josh went up the ladder, took the plumb line, and the two of them fell into the work. Devon had been in the first wave and was one of the people he had reached out to recruit back in Caldwell's warehouse.

"It's a hair off on the north corner," Devon said. "I keep telling them, level or nothing, but they hear 'close enough' in their heads."

"Yeah, well, close enough is how you get a gatehouse that leans like it's had a few." Josh sighted down the line. "It's a little more than a hair off, though. That'll need to be fixed."

"That's what I said."

"You said it worse, though." Josh handed the line back and looked out from the height, and it caught him for a second — the sprawl of the place, roofs and smoke and streets full of people, the pastures and the new houses spreading south, and past all of it the mountains standing white and enormous in the cold morning. He let out a fogged breath. "It's stupid how nice it is here."

"Told you. Built my place out past the pastures — Mera's got a garden, the kids have got room to be idiots in." Devon knocked a knuckle on the stone. "I wouldn't go back to Earth even if we could. This is home." He shrugged.

"Who woulda guessed we’d be saying that when we arrived. Those early days sleeping outside were rough." Josh clapped him on the arm. "I gotta go fail at magic in the woods for a few hours. Fix that north corner, will you?"

Devon slapped him on the back in reply. "At least look cool while you do it. Give Beth my love. Us lowly contractors don't get to sleep in a big fancy castle."

He climbed down off the scaffold, traded one last insult with Devon about the north corner, and left the town behind him. Then he followed the river south, past the last of the houses and out under the trees, until the noise of the Landing dropped behind him and it was just water and cold and his own footsteps.

Then he tried to figure out task one, and it kicked his ass, same as it had every day for a month.

The thing was, earth made sense. Earth held still. It had properties you could name and count on — density, cohesion, angle of repose, load and support coefficients. When Josh reached for stone or soil, he knew what he was doing.

Water was the opposite. It moved, always, and it gave him nothing to hold onto.

"Okay," he said out loud, to the river. "You carry stuff. Silt, salt, whatever. You flow and are always moving. I guess you're wet. So inspirational." He muttered to himself. He knelt on the bank, sank his awareness toward the current — and got nothing back. He couldn't sense it as he could stone. The water just moved through his reach and kept going.

He knew maybe four people with water perks, and none of them well. Reverse-engineering somebody else's power wasn't how the true path worked anyway. He had to walk it himself and figure out the perk the path wanted him to get. Supposedly it was suited for him, but he had a hard time believing that right now.

Josh sat back on his heels and watched a leaf spin down the current and vanish under the bank. He felt thoroughly stupid for about a minute, which was probably good for him. Harold would've said something insufferable about how being stuck was exactly where the learning lived, and then drunk his coffee and been right about it.

"Yeah, yeah," Josh told the river. He got up and went downstream. Moving beats sitting, and maybe the water would say something to a man on his feet that it wouldn't say to one on his knees.

He walked a long time. He drifted through the trees, stepping around the last dirty clumps of snow, and let the water lead him — stopping wherever it did something, where it folded over a stone or stalled out in a hollow under the bank, crouching down to watch what it did. A few hours in, the trees thinned out ahead of him, and he came out onto open ground and saw the patrol.

Ten legionaries and an optio, working a wide sweep of the grass a few hundred yards off. The Captain, Colonel Hale, had left in charge of the garrison, and he ran his patrols like a religion. Hale himself was away with the legion, weeks up the winter roads and still marching for the summit, and the man he'd left behind looked at you a beat too long every time you passed him and had never seen him smile. Weird guy. But his squads moved clean, and Josh lifted a hand to wave, half sure it was one of the files he knew.

The birds had stopped. The woods at his back had gone dead quiet. Out on the grass, one of the legionaries stopped walking, then the man beside him, heads coming up, and the loose sweep of the patrol drew in tight without anyone giving an order. Under Josh's boots, the ground shuddered, a low hum rising through the soles of his feet. He knew that feeling, and dread rose within him. 

"Shit," Josh said, to nobody. "No, no, no—"

The ground blew open under the patrol.

It came up in a spray of black dirt and torn sod, and then they were pouring out of the hole, dozens of them, ants the size of big dogs boiling up into the daylight. Their shells were dark as iron, and their heads were mostly mandibles — paired shears as long as a man's forearm, opening and closing on air, on grass, on each other in the crush. They stank of vinegar and carrion, and the reek rolled out ahead of them across the grass.

Josh was already running before he'd decided to.

"SHIELDS — ON ME, ON ME!" The optio hauled his people into a knot even as the first wave broke over them, shields coming down and locking edge to edge into a tight ring, spears jutting out over the top from the second rank. A legionary on the near side went down under two of them, screaming, dragged out by the leg — and three shields flexed sideways, two spears punched down, and they hauled him back inside by his harness before the ants could open him up. The ring closed over the gap and held. Whatever else that stone-faced captain was, he'd drilled these men until the ring was reflex, and it was the only reason any of them were still on their feet.

The optio got a hand back to his belt, came up with a short tube, and snapped a thread of mana into it. A flare shrieked up into the sky trailing red — one of Harold's designs, no flame and no powder to it, just light screaming a mile straight up to bring every other patrol in the sector in at a run. He threw the tube down and dove back into the line. "HOLD THE RING! Swords, KILL!"

Josh hit the edge of the fight at a dead sprint and threw out his hand, and the earth answered — a stack of earth perks all bracing each other. The quality of mana was impressive for a crafter thanks to the World First perks Harold had guided him to get, and it showed when he flexed his mana. The ground in front of the ring turned to grabbing mud and clamped down on a cluster of the things mid-charge, bogging them to the leg-joint, and it bought the patrol a breath.

And then he made himself stop and look. He needed a plan. There were too many of them that spilled from that hole.

A legionary hacked down two-handed at an ant clawing at the shields. The blade lit pale blue, bit into the shell — and skidded off it in a shriek of sparks, barely a scratch left in the plate. Another blow. Another skid. The men were tier one, most of them, fresh out of basic, and these things were at least a full tier over that; every stroke that landed on the shell just skated off. They couldn't cut the armor. Josh's stomach dropped, because somebody was going to die in the next thirty seconds while he stood here —

Then he watched one of the ants gather itself to lunge, and its legs flexed, and he saw it.

The shell was armor. The joints, the leg-joints, flexing naked every time it took a step. You couldn't armor a hinge. He knew that. 

"THEIR LEGS!" Josh bellowed in the voice that carried across a work site. "FORGET the shell — you'll snap your arm on the shell! The LEGS aren't armored — cut the LEGS, they drop!"

The optio caught it in a single heartbeat. "You heard the Councilor — LEGS, take the LEGS! Front rank PUSH!" And the ring turned from a wall into a mill. Josh slammed both hands down, and the mud went to a fist, seizing ant after ant by the legs and holding them pinned and thrashing while the front rank dropped their blades low and went to work on the joints and the second rank's spears kept the shells off them. An ant lost two legs on one side and slewed over onto its belly, useless, mandibles still snapping at nothing. Then another. Then the whole front of the swarm went down in a row. The ring had the rhythm now — pin, cut, cover, next. 

It was almost over. That was when the spike went through his shoulder.

It punched out the front of him in a spray of red. A smaller ant, no bigger than a pug, one he never heard coming, had come up silently behind him and driven a barbed foreleg clean through the meat of his shoulder. Josh spun into it, stone sheathing his skin as he moved, a rind of earth armor climbing his arm and closing over his fist, and he brought that fist down and cracked the little ant's head to paste.

Then the ground tilted under him, and he was distantly, stupidly aware that he was very woozy.

A notification flared across his vision, and he almost laughed, because the timing was obscene.

Stormcrafter — Task 1: Understand Water

The text under it flickered, letters crawling, rewriting themselves in front of him:

There is poison carried in your blood. Draw it out using only the water's flow. Separate what does not belong. Cleanse it.

"Oh, you have GOT to be—" Josh bit it off and got moving, one hand clamped over the hole in his shoulder, staggering toward the sound of the river. The poison was already a cold burn spreading out from the wound, walking up his neck and down his arm.

"Councilor!" The optio was there, catching him under the good arm, and with his free hand he cracked a healing potion and dumped it straight over the wound. It bubbled where it hit — and the cold burn slowed, just slowed, and kept coming. "It's not — sir, it's not working. We need to—"

"Get me to the creek." Josh's tongue felt thick. "The water. I need the water, right now, go."

The optio didn't ask a single question. "UP — get him up, all of you, MOVE!" Four of them got hands under Josh, mana flaring off their bodies as they poured strength into their legs, and they ran him the last forty yards and put him down in the shallows of the river, right into the cold, moving water.

His mind was going very fast. He could feel the poison traveling, a slow rot pushing out through him, dissolving him from the wound outward. He reached into the earth and pulled it up through himself, fortifying his body the way he'd once fortified his soul while Harold let his aura off the leash. It didn't stop the poison, but it bought him minutes.

The river closed around the wound and the burning eased where the water touched it.

He had to clean the wound with the moving water. But he could not move water. How could he get the water into his wound without manipulating it?

He dragged his hand off the wound and let it bleed, let it pour, freely, into the current — and his blood came out dark and discolored where the poison had gotten into it. Unspooling in ribbons downstream. If he couldn't pull the poison out with the water, maybe he could wash it out with volume, thin it, dilute the potency, mix the poison into more water than it could ever hope to rot. Flush it like how they would do in hospitals, except the flush this time was the river's pressure.

"Shit," Josh breathed. "This is really gonna hurt." He held a shaking hand up to the optio crouched beside him in the shallows. "Knife. Give me your knife."

The optio put the hilt in his palm without a word.

Josh set the point at the edge of the wound and pushed it in, opening the channel wider, and held one single picture in his head with everything he had left — the water coming in, into the wound, finding the poison, carrying it away. He carved, and he forced himself to believe it. A thread of the cold current sipped into the widened wound, found the bad blood, and mingled with it. He dug deeper, chasing the rot up under his collarbone, and a raw sound tore out of him — but his mind did not move off the picture.

"Councilor — Councilor, stop, you're gonna—" The optio dragged his belt off, folded it, and jammed it between Josh's teeth. "Bite. Bite down on it." He reached for the knife. "Give me that, let me—"

Josh shook his head hard around the leather. No. It had to be him. Only he could hold the picture and cut at the same time, and if he let go of either one, this wouldn't work.

He thought about Beth.

He thought about the first time he'd talked to her, back on Earth, how he'd been easy and stupid and sure of himself with everybody — and then she'd looked at him unimpressed. Something in him had fallen over, and he'd stammered like a kid. He'd been chasing that feeling ever since. Her. The baby he hadn't met. The whole rest of the life he was supposed to get.

And holding that, he did a thing he'd never tried — fortified his mind the way he was fortifying his body. The pain was miserable, and he couldn't hold the image for much longer. He felt the stubbornness of stone take over his mind; the pain faded, and the image he had formed grew stronger. The water kept washing over his wound, cooling his flesh as it dragged the poisoned blood away. But he needed more. He set his teeth in the belt, drove the knife deeper with a grunt torn out of the bottom of him, and the river poured into the new cut, blessed and cold.

"COUNCILOR, that's enough, we have to get you back to the Landing!" The optio had two more healing potions open, pouring them down Josh's throat one after another, stacking toxicity on toxicity just to keep his heart going. "Get him UP, get him out of the water—"

Hands closed on him and hauled, dragging him up out of the river, and Josh fought them — thrashed, tried to twist back down into the current, but they were too strong as they carried him away and rushed him back to the Landing.