He definitely needed to level up; he needed a little less than 50k quints to do so. He needed his custom agent back, the one that he’d lost saving Korakis, and his System had said it would be refreshed when he leveled up again. He had enough quints, more than enough: he needed a little less than fifty thousand for power level seven. Anything to raise his power, combat effectiveness, or whatever it would take to make him successful with Crows was also a must.
Did he need to save his quints for anything else?
Thorn looked around at the boxes scattered around his room and decided to start unpacking while he thought through things.
He had new gear, including weapons and ammo. He had tech to play with, to try and figure out how to copy with Concentrate. He didn’t need much for living expenses, not if he was with the Crows. He didn’t know how his first few missions would go, though, and there might be something he was missing, so he shouldn’t spend them all right now. Then there was always the long-term dream of a new System, one with Skills that he liked, that he would need to save up for.
He sorted through his new gear, packing and repacking it into his bag. Extras he placed in cupboards, and all of the pieces of tech went on top of his desk. He started unfolding the blankets for his bed, and Korakis flapped over to land on the bed, getting in the way.
Thorn had an urgent, blindingly obvious realization. What would happen to Korakis if he changed his System? He assumed that the System splinter he’d inserted into the command module within Korakis would keep on doing what it did… but what if it didn’t? He wasn’t sure he could ever know for certain.
He wouldn’t be alive without Korakis’s help in the dead zone. He hadn’t even thought of ditching the raven afterwards, or of doing anything less than help him survive. The question had never even entered his mind, until now.
While Thorn was distracted, Korakis pecked at a corner of his blanket. He ripped off a corner of the blanket, then carried it back over to his nest in the corner.
“Damn it,” Thorn muttered. Korakis had already stolen his sheets, now bits and pieces of his blankets. He threw the rest of the blanket on top of Korakis, who squawked indignantly before ripping it into shreds. Thorn grabbed the tablet off his desk and used it to order another set of sheets and blankets, and then, on a whim, a couple of pitons and a new hammock.
He gave up on his interior decorating for the moment. He needed to level up, then he’d meet with Sergeant Lee, talk about the mission tomorrow and whatever expectations she had for him. Go on the mission. Figure out if he was missing anything in his kit or System, and fix it.
Longer term, he’d find another mission, go on that one. Keep Korakis from eating all of his hard-earned bonuses. Reach out to old contacts within Aba for leads on Grif and the glitter farm conspirators and figure out a plan for how to deal with Smithson when the time came.
Thorn reviewed his choices for upgrades one more time, even though he felt the best option was very clear. It would’ve been nice if he could have asked someone about his System prior to making choices on level ups, but that door was firmly closed. He snorted as he imagined walking into the CES branch in Aba and asking the leader, Jake, for help. The man probably would help him, actually. If he gave him a large enough bribe.
His toolkit was currently hobbled by the fact that he could deploy no custom agents. It had screwed up his simulation combat performance when competing against Kels on the firing range. While in the dead zone, custom agents had helped him use all of his other Skills more effectively. They were the closest thing his System had to a force multiplier. There might be benefits to upgrading Meditate and Concentrate, or even the new Skill, Record, but increasing the number of custom agents he had access to was simple, clean, and immediately useful.
He laid down on his bed, bare of all sheets and blankets courtesy of Korakis, and made himself comfortable.
The feelings of burning and cold flashed over his body, and then he lost consciousness. When he woke, he had been unconscious for less than a minute, and he had a notification.
Mostly as expected, but there were several things to parse. First was the error: that was expected. It had been the same in the last level up, and his bodily attribute hadn’t changed. Gammon had told him not to worry about it, so he decided not to.
His Skill had upgraded, and thankfully, he had gotten his “old” custom agent back as well. He could now deploy two custom agents at any given time, as well as archive up to four. The one that he had currently archived was “Agent Boom,” the one that he used to help him make explosions with Concentrate.
The comment on “additional capabilities unlocked” by his System itself, though, was throwing him for a loop, so he asked his System for clarification. He didn’t know that Systems could also level up, or maybe it was just his System, or the way that his System described it?
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The possibility of more powerful upgrades was tantalizing. He quickly checked his status page: the next level up was a doozy. 78,456 quints to be precise. He’d think about his next level up when he finished dealing with this first one. That System message had also mentioned a library.
Thorn’s hands clenched together, his fingernails digging into his palms. He’d never been so tempted to go online, if only for a minute. Just to see what was there. The possibilities were amazing. Defensive AND offensive? What if he could form kinetic shields without the use of machine tech, just like that? Shoot energy beams without a weapon? He’d done two things with Concentrate so far: make explosions, and the inverted loops that kept the void at bay. Both had been very helpful; he killed beasts and survived a dead zone by figuring those two things out. Well, maybe three things: he’d also lit a campfire with the Skill.
There was a chime at the door. Thorn sat up and opened it; a set of packages lay on the floor. The drone that had delivered them had already shot off down the hallway.
Thorn carried the packages inside and set them on his bed.
“Korakis, if you shred my new blankets, you’re sleeping in the hallway,” Thorn said. Korakis ignored him.
He threw the sheets on the bed, giving Korakis a wary eye the whole time, then took the pitons and hammered them into the stone wall, stretching his new hammock between them. He’d slept on a hammock in the back of his truck for years, and he felt more comfortable on one than in a bed.
When Thorn heard voices outside in the hallway, he realized that his door was open. He’d also made a racket hammering those pitons into the walls of his room; had some of his neighbors heard the noise and come to investigate? He quickly shut the door and went back to reviewing his System.
He wasn’t close to having enough quints for his next level up, but he couldn’t help but start thinking about his options. He still had the upgrade for Meditate and the two choices for Concentrate, as well as a few new ones.
His System was designed with multiple viable paths in mind. Four choices at level 7 had been a lot. Seven choices at level 8? That was insanity; and he had the feeling that his choices weren’t going to narrow as he leveled up further. How was he supposed to pick? He had a limited number of levels. He couldn’t go back and undo an upgrade. Some upgrade paths precluded others. Some Skills or upgrades were locked behind other upgrades. It was all really complicated.
Korakis shifted in his nest, preening a feather before tucking his head back under his wing. Thorn could still hear people in the hallway, chatting. He felt like taking a walk to clear his head, but he didn’t feel like running the risk of meeting neighbors eager to ask him about the loud noises coming from his room.
He checked the time. He still had several hours until he’d agreed to meet with Sergeant Lee. He eyed a stack of cheap, quint-powered devices on the floor: visual spectrum sensors, infrared emitters and sensors; tracking equipment; a collapsible digging tool; his old personal shield, or pumpkin.
He picked up the visual spectrum sensors and turned them on before entering Meditate. He did the same for the infrared emitters, and each of the other tech pieces besides the pumpkin. He’d already tried with that one, and would get back to it later, but for now, he wanted to see what these new devices looked like.
At first, he was disappointed. “Quint-powered” appeared to be precisely that: quintessence was used as a power source only, converted to electricity and then used to power the tech. The sensors and infrared devices used quint batteries, instead of quint patterns, to generate their effects. He’d had higher hopes, especially for the infrared emitter: if he’d been able to figure out a pattern for creating an infrared laser, he would have been able to jack up the power input and then use it to fry beasts on a hunt with invisible heat beams.
Then Thorn realized that producing electricity could also be an attack. Depending on the intensity, maybe only enough to stun, but having a non-lethal attack option could be valuable. He redoubled his efforts, focusing again and again on the small patterns that formed from quintessence into electricity.
Unfortunately, the quintessence threads in each device were too thin, and too complicated for him to make out with good definition. He wondered if he took the Record Skill on his next upgrade, if it would also record his sensations within Meditate. It would make this type of work a lot easier.
He did learn a few things, however. All of the patterns for electricity used a different number of threads, and it was always more than two. The larger the amount of energy required, the greater number of individual threads and the more complicated the pattern.
He also figured out that the tracker worked by emitting quintessence signals that a receiver would pick up, similar to the way that comms worked. Thorn thought it wouldn’t take much of a Skill to sense these trackers; their presence was quite obvious from his sensations in Meditate. The digging tool had pleasantly surprised him. On the surface, it was a simple device. The handle collapsed and folded tight for easy storage, and the blade was small and flat for a shovel, large for a trowel. A trigger on the handle would activate stored quintessence within the device, although Thorn discovered he could power the edge of the blade by using Concentrate and pouring pure quintessence into it.
When activated, a thin, yellow band formed on the edge of the blade, and according to the instruction manual, would make it incredibly sharp. Unfortunately, “incredibly sharp” did not provide the same level of cutting power that Lief’s Imbue Skill had done on the snake beast’s head. With the blade activated Thorn could chip the stone floor of his barracks room. Barely.
The good news was that while the initial pattern was complex, Thorn felt that with practice and a custom agent, he could learn to shape it himself. The bad news was that it required four different threads of quintessence, and with no upgrades to Concentrate, he could only issue two threads at once, one from each hand.
He’d also felt like there were stages to the pattern formation. As in, part of the pattern was formed, then it transformed, and then was added to again, before it took on its final effect. Thorn hypothesized his issue in replicating the pattern from the pumpkin was related to this multi-step approach. Forming a pattern wasn’t as simple as drawing the threads; there was a time-based element, or an intermediary transformation element to the process.
The voices in the hallway had faded away, and Thorn was too mentally tired to continue with his experiments. He gathered up Korakis and slipped out, down the hallway and out into the courtyard.
Thorn waved to Gammon, working security at the gate, as he walked up the stairs to the top of the wall. He gazed down at Aba in the distance, then turned back to look inside the base. It was more interesting to watch Crows walking around inside the nest, even though it was a bit slow at this time of the afternoon.
One Crow wearing a jumpsuit hustled towards the armory. Thorn imagined he was going to practice using tech armor on the firing range. Another small group walked down from the landing pads, covered in gore and guts from a (hopefully) successful beast hunt. Two others, each wearing different versions of dress uniforms, walked towards each other from different admin buildings, staring into the middle distance and answering comms while they walked. They ran into each other, the cup of caf one of them was holding splashing all over the other.
Thorn wondered what these people would do in his situation. What would a Crow choose? What would make them more successful? He could upgrade Concentrate to generate more threads simultaneously, and try to make the patterns he was deciphering to make electric shocks, shields, or sharp edges. He could take Record, hoping it would record his sensations of the quantum threads while in Meditate, and make it far easier to pick up new patterns. Or he could pick a different path.
He gave up thinking about it; he didn’t have the quints for it yet, so he had time to make a decision on his next level up. But he was running out of time to grab a real shower before sitting in a small, enclosed room with his new commanding officer.
“Let’s go get ready to see Sergeant Lee,” Thorn said. “Are you going to be a good raven this time?”
Korakis cawed softly in short, staccato bursts, mimicking the sound of human laughter.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”