Laurence looked at the purple night sky as he practiced his combat routines alone. He was a social butterfly, but sometimes he just liked spending time without anyone around to distract him, to let himself be alone with his own thoughts, and the voice inside him. He still remembered the first time he heard it, back on Rosie’s Demise, back with Sleepy, over half a decade earlier. It was something he had lived with, and something that had grown with him. Most of the time he ignored it, but he found as he grew older, that there was a good side to listening to it, to converse with it. It knew him more intimately than a lover, but was something truly separate from him. At first he thought he was going mad, and perhaps he was, but he had to believe that this voice was something else, it was something more.
You’re doing it wrong, the voice echoed. The strike is supposed to be a culmination of your momentum. Put your weight behind it. It was bossy when it wasn’t urging him to murder everything in his sight. It’s comments were constructive, and it demanded perfection from him, so Laurence thought it was a net positive to keep around. He just didn’t let it out when he was doing anything other than training on his own.
“You think I don’t know that?” Laurence snapped, “I can feel that I am close to achieving something with this, I’m only a hair’s breadth away from it, but there’s some sort of barrier to my entry. I’m still not quite there”.
Then practice, idiot. Make your fourth form to the Kabballah and be proud of your little achievements. I don’t mind, because the bloodshed to make this set of skills fuels me.
Laurence slammed the bottom of his hammer into the ground and began again, spinning his weapon overhead before making figure eight movements. With each completed rotation above, below or to the side, his speed picked up, until finally he slammed it into the ground, creating a crack that spread several meters from the impact point. It joined with several similar cracks that surrounded Laurence, until a web of cracks surrounded the young man.
Better, but still not quite right. You’re not using all the strengths of Jormugand to the maximum. You know that you can change the shape, size and weight, so why don’t you use it? You don’t even trueform when you fight? By the tower, what I would do with your combat potential. You should just give me your body and let me commit the greatest massacre since your father’s. Like father like son, remember that. You were born to this, to the kill.
“Shut up!” Laurence shouted, slamming his hammer into the ground again. Sometimes the voice got too much, or stepped over Laurence’s bottom line and he would suppress it vehemently. “I don’t care! I don’t care, I don’t care, I do not care!” Finally there was silence all around Laurence, inside and out.
As his heart settled he began to relax and absorb all the progress he had made on his martial skills. His prize set of techniques, the Kabballah, was still being formed but his work each day was making great steps towards completion, or at least partial completion. As he assessed his progress he could not help but feel that whenever he tried something recently, it was always a hairline away from being complete. His cultivation was stymied through his lack of a Manifestation, and now even his martial skills were beginning to fall short because he simply could not get a handle on completing the fourth form. It had been something that he had been stuck at for almost four years. He knew what he had to do in theory, which was use momentum to complete an earth shattering strike, but for whatever reason could never quite pick up enough force to deal the damage he was expecting. It was like there was a peak to the force he was accruing and that peak was just shy of the height Laurence needed to reach. His hope was that through repeated fights and practice with a variety of enemies he would somehow break through that limit and master a new skill with it. Each skill he had mastered seemed to gain a magical quality to it after he had completely mastered the skill, but without taking that final step he would never be able to progress. He needed inspiration now more than anything.
As he finished up his training, he wiped off the sweat that had accrued on his skin and changed from his training uniform to his more casual clothes. He had picked up the style that was popular in Spirit amongst the younger men when he had left, consisting of breeches, chaps, and a simple long-sleeved top. It was an odd combination of practical and fancy that had drawn Laurence’s eye when he first came across it. The key point of it was that it hid his hands, which was key for him in combat, even if he did have to roll his sleeves up when he was doing anything more meticulous than eating.
Once he was dressed, and not covered in sweat and grime from hard work, he moved out of the quiet valley that Yun had made for him and began his way back up to the rest of the group. He and Yun had begun constructing a tower out of the top of the great mountain. The outer shell and living quarters for the group were long since complete, but other than that there was nothing else that had really been completed. They had been too busy with other things. Everyone was too busy with solidifying their power base or attempting to achieve Heaven rank to really populate the building, but they still had a single room where they would congregate, and a gateway that allowed the person traversing the world to swap when they were tired. It was a streamlined way of travelling for them, but Laurence missed the time they spent out in the open, walking together and sleeping out in the wild. He was beginning to feel that the relative safety of Yun’s major realm, or even his minor realm that he was letting grow naturally, was stifling his growth. He needed more, he needed to feel the risk that went hand in hand with travelling through unknown lands.
“Is anyone around?” He shouted at the top of his lungs through the tower. “I was thinking we could make a group excursion out into the twelfth floor. Most of us have barely actually seen the place, and it might be interesting if we joined Winoa rather than just left her outside on her own”. Listening to his voice echo, he waited for a few moments before sitting down on the ground. The echo of footsteps littered the walls while he waited, and finally Cleo ran over to him and wrapped her arms round him.
“I’m in,” she said as she planted a kiss on Laurence’s face, before laying down and putting her head in his lap. She wrinkled her nose slightly after a moment. “You’ve not bathed after exercise have you?”
“No? Does it matter?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “You stink of sweat. Go and wash, and by the time you get back the rest of us should have arrived. It was a good idea, and I think everyone will agree with me”.
“Fine,” Laurence got up, forcing Cleo to sit up on her own, and walked up the long set of stairs that wound round the inside of the tower like a great snake. Near the top, he walked into his room and stepped through the mess of half finished objects, raw materials and piles of beautiful, vibrant creations to get to a simple bathroom. All there was was a drain, a single gem of Nereidite and a waste disposal unit that voided substance through a bend in space. With a hand movement, Laurence activated the Nereidite, and after removing his clothes, stepped under the flow of water that perfectly adjusted to cool him down without making him cold. It had taken him hours to get the water temperature just right; for whatever reason the temperature gauge idea he had started with would never work properly, so instead he had made the array work depending on one of three symbols that he could make with his hands.
The whole concept of a proximity reader for array activation was revolutionary for both Laurence and Yun, and so they inserted the array into every single activatable object within the tower. From lights that flicked on with a clap to ovens that turned off when you put your food on plates, they managed to make the tower a comparative haven to the rest of the world.
After Laurence had dried off and put his clothes back on, he walked back downstairs and found the rest of his friends waiting for him. He smiled and patted his friends on the back before asking, “Is everyone ready? Yun can pop us back here if we need anything, but it still inconveniences him. Make sure you all have what you need else we will be stopping for five minutes at a time so Yun can pop you back in at the gate”.
“Wasted words, my friend,” Jim said. “Yun already gave us the speech while you were cleaning yourself. Are you ready?”
“I was born ready”. Laurence stepped towards the gate and popped through before anyone had a chance to stop him. He appeared outside next to Winoa, who had just landed her giant falcon, Garuda, and was waiting for people to pop out to join her. She had her legs crossed, and her long purple hair had wrapped around her hand in a braided ponytail. She was picking at the end while she waited, and occasionally fidgeting in her well worn leather armour.
“Finally,” she said as Laurence popped out. “How long until everyone else is out?”
“They should be just along. How has the journey been so far?”
“Tiresome. The floor seems to be rather feudal, with the dukes of the region controlling everything in their little dutchies through force of arms and a relatively rigid caste system. They have a lot more Saints than in Biqiril, to the point where each duke will have one or two ‘grand knights’ by their side”. Winoa stopped. “Sorry, let me backtrack a second. Grand knights are what the people of this place call your average Saint. They call Heaven rankers heavenly heroes, but they do not often get those. The heavenly heroes of theirs seem to disappear after one or two years, I assume because the call of the Tower becomes simply too much for them to bear”.
“Wow. You've learned a lot about this place,” Laurence replied, slightly shocked at Winoa’s breadth of knowledge on the region.
“Not really, I just encountered a cute bard who was travelling the local region a few days back. He was going a different way to me, but was extremely helpful in telling me about the dutchies. I don't think I was the first Saint he had met, so there was very little shock factor there, but he did say he would write a ballad about me”. She blushed as she said the last sentence, but Laurence ignored it. He was happy with not stepping on the toes of the feelings of his friends. He did not always understand the reactions of people he was around, but he knew definitively that he should avoid mentioning people who caused Winoa to react that way. She became oddly defensive when it came to people who made her blush like that, and Laurence had learned that the hard way, when she had fallen for a target they were trying to break into the house of back in Spirit. She verbally bit Laurence’s head off and he had not tried to do it again. He knew that with Winoa at least, there were some buttons that should not be pressed.
He sat down next to her and smiled, letting her wax lyrically about the bard until everyone else came out of Yun’s world. They did not have to wait long, and soon enough the group was on their way to explore the oddities that were rife within the twelfth floor.
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