Sage put the number up on the morning of the eleventh day.
[ Sequence 6 digestion: 70%, approximately. ]
Seventy? Since when.
[ Since the year you spent on the other world, Host. I have gone back over it. Every time you did something the locals would have called wrong, it moved. You were not trying. That appears to be the point. ]
Adam sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees and thought about that for a while.
Certainly a good surprise, soon I can move to Sequence 5.
And the heart?
[ Worse. The two are not separate. The Sequence deepens and the corruption deepens with it, and you are currently carrying eighteen sealed abilities that the pathway sees as contamination. Every one of them is weight. ]
So I put some down.
[ Not some, Host. Most. ]
He called a meeting right after morning practice, and he kept it to the sixty going out plus Brandt.
They came in expecting a briefing about the newly gained sector. He let them sit down and then he told them the truth instead, or as much of it as they needed to know, which was that the abilities he had brought back from one of his deployments could be moved from him to another person, permanently, and that he was giving away twelve.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Marchand said, "Sorry, giving us abilities? Like a loan?"
"No. Like it's yours and I don't have it any more."
"And you're just giving them away."
"I'm not being noble about it, if that's what you're asking. Carrying them costs me something and I'd rather they were doing work than sitting in me doing damage." He put the list up on the wall. "So no, this isn't a gift. It's me offloading a problem onto people I trust with it, and I want that said out loud before anybody puts a hand up. It's not fully free, it uses your merits or NP."
"Listen people, I could have just sold these on the market. They should be worth a lot, but I believe in our guild and its strength. These abilities come in form of quirks. You probably heard about them. The good thing is that they are compatible with pretty much anything you already have, and I already gave one ability without any problems."
Somebody down the front asked what happened to the person who took one, whether it hurt, whether it could be given back.
"It doesn't hurt. It takes about six seconds. And no, you can't give it back, so if you take one you're taking it for the rest of your life." Adam looked round at them. "Some of these quirks are dangerous so I won't give them to just anyone and we will have to make special arrangements."
Brandt, from the wall, said, "Contract."
"Yes. Same one you all signed for the other thing. Lifetime, Bazaar-bound, and it doesn't care that you're a friend of mine."
He traded seven of them that evening and the rest across the week.
Marchand got the blue fire, which anybody in the room could have predicted, and which she took with an expression that made Brandt quietly write supervision on his pad. She spent forty minutes afterwards in the sparring hall making a noise nobody could describe and burning the training dummies over and over.
Korva got the super regeneration. She said "good" and left.
Adeyemi got the warp gate, because she is the only medic going and Adam wanted the wounded off that wall in seconds rather than minutes. She sat down very hard when she understood what he had just handed her.
Lyra Quist got the shock absorption and immediately started working out how it stacked with her other abilities.
Holst got Turbo. Venn got the one that changes a face. Okonkwo got High Specs, and Adam watched her go very quiet. When you gain all that thinking power the world looks different.
By Friday he only had seven, and one of those he was keeping back for a man who wasn't home yet.
He noticed the change. He had spent so long getting used to the weight that it had become a new normal and only now realized how much it truly burdened him.
[ Corruption load down. Digestion unaffected. The transfers earned 45,000 in NP, most of it in merit. 10,000 went to the vault as you asked. ]
Yeah, I can feel it, Sage. It's like putting down a boulder you never knew you were carrying.
They left the guild on the eighteenth day.
The bone gate put them into Zone Zero, and Zone Zero was something else this time around. Where there had been prefab walls and mud there was now a landing field with lights sunk into it, three hospital blocks in a row, and a rail line, an actual rail line, running out towards the eastern sectors on ground that had been open desert two months ago.
Sixty Eclipse members came through and stopped where they stood, because the thing on the far side of the field was a four-hundred-metre-long ship.
"That's ours?" somebody said.
"Well, yeah. Let's say it was a thank you from the IEC," Adam added, also marvelling at the ship in front of them. It truly was otherworldly.
The crew chief was happy to tell them all about it. This model was a stolen dreadnought retrofitted by human engineers. The lift plates in the belly were reverse-engineered off a Yhwcha dropship. The heat sinks were a Kessho redesign of the cooling lattice out of an android torso, which turned out to work about nine times better once human engineers and scientists started modifying it. The shield emitters along the spine were also a new type of tech inspired by the alien designs.
"Where'd the engines come from?" one of the rookies asked.
"Zone Five," the chief said. "Some guild worked with us on taking apart five of these huge foundries, man those things had some insane tech in them. Best stuff this yard's ever had. The engines are the result of that collaboration."
Marchand turned round very slowly and looked at Adam.
"Don't," Adam said.
"That was us."
"I know."
"That was us, and we're standing here being given a tour of our own—"
"Marchand."
She got on the ship. She told everybody about it for the entire flight.
The flight to Sector Nine took four hours at cruise speed, and most of them slept through it.
Adam stood at the rail on the observation deck for the last hour with the Tyranitar sitting behind him taking up most of the deck, watching a rust-coloured desert go past underneath at Mach 2.
Ren came up with two cups of coffee and handed him one.
"Lyra's still explaining her gauntlets to people."
"Is anyone listening?"
"Adeyemi was, for about an hour, and now she's pretending to be asleep." Ren leaned on the rail next to him. "You feel different."
"Lighter."
"Yeah."
Ahead of them, a long way ahead, there was a line on the horizon where a massive spire was piercing the sky.
The Tyranitar stood up to look at it, and the whole deck creaked, and somewhere below them a crewman started shouting.
AN: If we get to 200 power stones, I will release an extra chapter on 400, another one. If you wish to support the story and read ahead, visit [email protected]/skeri123