Chương 13: Chapter 12: Rule Number One

"I believe I was entirely clear regarding the parameters of your existence here," Sable said, her distorted voice carrying across the empty dunes.

"You are Elma Altheris. If you somehow failed to process the instruction, it means you do not antagonize your host, and you do not jeopardize your cover." Elma dissolved the compressed air, letting the pressure equalize with a sharp gust that whipped her hair.

"Christa has harbored doubts since the moment of my birth. Her instability is uncontrollable. I cannot overwrite her paranoia." Sable closed the distance between them with a single, fluid step, her leather armor creaking softly.

"Her dead child. Was that how you lower her suspicion?" She let that sit.

"Careful, D-66. I don't repeat myself a third time." Elma didn't answer. Her jaw set, she subtly extended the boundary of her field. The resulting metric sent a rare jolt of surprise through Elma's mind. Sable's Total Resonance Output was functionally identical to Christa's. Before Elma could process her results, the air shattered. Sable's hand blurred. The back of her leather glove struck Elma across the face with the concussive force of a swinging hammer.

Elma was thrown sideways, her small body hitting the dirt floor hard. The impact rattled her teeth so violently that a high-pitched ring instantly dominated her left ear. Pushing herself up on her hands and knees, Elma tasted hot, sharp copper. She spat a dark glob of blood onto the earth and slowly raised her head, locking an intense, unblinking glare on the mask.

"Rule number one. Never weigh someone without being ready to fight them," Sable said.

"You'd know that if you'd bothered to protect your identity." Elma wiped the blood from her chin with the back of her hand. She filed the cultural rule away, alongside a new, overriding objective. Sable's death was the first priority. Sable looked down at her, the faint glow of the sun reflecting in the dark slits of her mask.

"You are adapting to your Resonance quickly. That is good. I imagine you are pushing yourself because you think that enough power will eventually allow you to slip our leash." Sable crouched down, bringing her distorted voice level with Elma's ear.

"You have no idea what they would do to you if they knew what you actually are. People like to believe they've evolved past their instincts. Strip away the manners, the prayers, the pendants—" a faint, cold amusement colored her words "—and you'd find something far older and far less forgiving underneath. Your life depends on you never letting them find that out." Elma remained entirely silent. Sable held her gaze for a long second, then stood up.

The place vanished in a blinding flash of emerald light, the sickening, cold pulse of the green Veins ripping Elma upward through the void, dragging her back to the gilded cage.

The cold compress stung against the swelling on her left cheekbone. Elma sat still on the edge of her bed, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall while Leta dabbed at the dark, purple contusion blooming across her skin.

"I misjudged the edge of the mattress in the dark," Elma stated.

"I fell." Leta paused, her plump face pinched in a mixture of concern and deep skepticism. She wrung the wet cloth over a silver basin.

"You don't get a mark shaped like that from tumbling onto a rug, my little lady," the maid muttered under her breath, her eyes darting away.

"You're trying to hide it, but I know a strike when I see one." She dabbed at it again, gentler this time, then glanced toward the door.

"Did your mother do this?" she asked, her voice dropping lower.

"No," Elma said.

"It's all right if she did," Leta said quietly.

"You can trust me. I won't say a word to anyone."

"No," Elma repeated. Leta sighed, shaking her head.

"Stubborn as a Solarvine, you are." Elma noted the careful way Leta had asked, the way her eyes had gone to the door before she'd dared say it at all. Even the maid didn't trust Christa. After all these years.

"Where is she?" Elma asked. Leta took a deep breath, the concern shifting into a tight, nervous frown.

"In the solar. Locked inside, burning incense and praying for a forgotten god." She shook her head, lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper.

"If Lord Valerius were to return and catch her speaking those forbidden prayers, he wouldn't like it one bit." Elma tilted her head, locking onto the new variable.

"A forgotten god?" The question seemed to break Leta's trance. The maid visibly paled, suddenly remembering who she was talking to. She snatched the damp cloth back and took a hurried step away from the bed.

"Oh, it's nothing, my lady. Just old nursery tales and servant gossip. Nothing for you to worry your beautiful head about." Leta then turned, leaving the room without another word. The silver basin sat forgotten behind her. Elma navigated the quiet, sunlit corridors of the manor until she reached the heavy, gilded doors of the solar. She stopped just shy of the threshold. Through the thick wood, the faint, frantic rhythm of Christa's whispering bled into the hallway.

The moment the sound reached Elma's ears, the physiological anomaly returned. The restrictive, dull ache bloomed instantly in the center of her chest, wrapping around her small lungs like an invisible vice. Confronting Christa while still experiencing this ache would inevitably lead to another emotional outburst. Elma turned sharply away from the gilded doors. She needed empty space. Christa could wait. Surely, Sable wouldn't like another outburst.

Forcing her small legs into a quick, rigid march, she headed straight for the eastern doors, seeking the cold air of the gardens. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.

The crisp air of the gardens finally began to clear the suffocating fog from Elma's mind. She sat beneath the sweeping branches of the weeping willow, her notebook resting on her knees as she reviewed her equations. Above her, the leaves stirred faintly, swaying to the same breeze that had no source she could find. A faint rustle of grass broke her concentration. Elma didn't flinch. She had already felt the microscopic distortion in the surrounding threads.

Jorm stood a few feet away, still nervously twisting the hem of her apron.

"It's... it's tomorrow now," the girl whispered, her eyes darting around the garden to ensure they were alone. Elma closed her notebook and stood up.

"Can you feel your boundary?" Jorm closed her eyes, her small face scrunching in concentration for a few seconds before she opened them, looking defeated.

"I don't feel anything. It's just... out there." Elma hadn't expected her to. Without a structured understanding of her own field, the girl was blind.

"Stay exactly where you are," Elma ordered. She gathered a handful of smooth, fist-sized stones from the edge of the nearby flowerbeds. Starting from where Jorm stood, Elma walked outward in a straight line, placing a single stone on the grass every few feet until she had created a long dotted line extending away from the girl. Elma returned and pointed to the closest stone.

"Move it." Jorm stared at it, her brow furrowing. The stone trembled, then slid a few inches across the dirt.

"Next one," Elma commanded. Jorm shifted her focus. The second stone moved. Then the third. As the distance increased, the girl's breathing grew heavier, her face flushing with the effort. By the time she reached the seventeenth stone, roughly fifty meters away, she strained for a full minute, but the rock remained perfectly still.

"I can't," Jorm panted.

"I can't feel it." Elma picked up a fallen willow branch. Pacing exactly fifty meters away from Jorm, she dragged the stick through the dirt, drawing a wide half-circle around the girl.

"This is your limit," Elma instructed, tossing the stick aside.

"This line is where your field ends and the rest of the world begins. Close your eyes and focus on that perimeter. Try to feel the edge." Jorm obeyed, her small hands clenched at her sides. Ten minutes passed in silence. Then twenty. Elma continued to watch, analyzing the microscopic shifts in the air pressure around the girl. After an hour, Jorm's eyes snapped open, a flicker of awe crossing her face.

"I think... I think I feel it. It feels like a thin wall of water."

"Good," Elma said.

"Now, pull it in. Compress the wall toward your body." The process was agonizingly slow. Jorm gritted her teeth, her entire body shaking as she fought through the process. It took another grueling hour, but finally, the girl managed to compress her field into a tight, dense sphere with a radius of barely two meters.

"Now, lift the stones." Elma commanded. Jorm turned her focus to the heavy rocks sitting within her compressed perimeter. Instead of sliding an inch through the dirt, three of the heavy stones instantly jerked upward, hovering effortlessly in the air around her. Jorm gasped, her eyes widening in pure, unadulterated shock. She laughed—a bright, breathless sound—as she made the rocks spin in a slow orbit around her waist. Now Elma needed to be sure of something.

"Drop them," Elma ordered. The rocks hit the dirt with a heavy thud.

"Now, expand your field back to its maximum limit. I want you to expend every ounce of force you have, all at once. Push against the earth until you have nothing left." Jorm hesitated, but nodded. She threw her arms out, expanding her field back to 50 meters radius. Then pushed. Elma pulled a pocket watch from her dress, her eyes fixed on the sweeping second hand. Ten seconds. Fifty. At exactly one-hundred seconds, the distortion in the air vanished completely.

Jorm's field died—the same duration it had taken her own to deplete. Elma clicked the watch shut, her mind already racing as she began timing the regeneration. Five minutes. Fast, but not nearly as fast as she had expected. Considering the massive gap between their TRO, Jorm's full recovery should have taken only a fraction of that time. She pulled out her notebook, the quill scratching rapidly across the parchment as a massive flaw in her previous logic revealed itself.

I treated Lattice Reserve (LR) as a percentage. That is fundamentally incorrect. It wasn't equal for all Resonants. If the drainage time is a universal constant for all Resonants, then its calculation should be easy. Elma formalized the new metric, dragging her quill across the paper. LR = TRO × Time of depletion. She calculated her own true reserve first. By multiplying her Total Resonance Output 1, 000, 000 Wills by the universal burn time 100 seconds, she found her Lattice Reserve. Her true LR was 100, 000, 000.

She then calculated Jorm's. A TRO of roughly 2, 000 Wills, multiplied by 100 seconds. Jorm's LR was 200, 000. Elma immediately converted the figures into raw regeneration values. 100, 000, 000 LR recovered over 20 minutes. That translated to roughly 83, 333 LR restored every second. Lattice recharge rate: 83, 333 Will per second. Jorm's reserves, by comparison, fully recovered in just 5 minutes. Jorm's recharge rate: 667 Will per second. Elma stared silently at the numbers. The difference was staggering.

Stronger Resonants did not merely possess larger reserves, they regenerated vastly larger quantities of LR every second while operating within nearly the same recovery window. It was a brutal, unforgiving reality. Weaker Resonants possessed absolutely no hidden efficiency advantage.

"I'm tired..." The weak voice pulled Elma from her mathematics. Jorm swayed on her feet for a second before her knees buckled. She collapsed flat onto her back in the grass, her chest heaving as she stared up at the willow branches. Elma closed her notebook and sat down in the grass beside the exhausted girl.

"That is enough for today." Jorm let out a long, shuddering breath, a wide smile breaking across her dirt-smudged face.

"Thank you," she panted, looking over at Elma.

"I can already feel it. How strong it is. From just one day." She propped herself up on her elbows, her gaze bright and clear.

"I just know it. One day, we're both going to be the most famous Resonants in the whole world. I can feel it." Elma studied the girl's face. The nervous, debilitating stutter was entirely gone. The hesitation that had crippled Jorm's speech earlier had merely been a byproduct of intimidation—the natural, ingrained fear a servant held for nobility, not a lack of inherent confidence.

"Jorm!" A sharp, panicked voice echoed across the manicured gardens. A maid was sprinting down the stone path, her skirts hiked up as she desperately scanned the flowerbeds.

"Shoot, it's Rita," Jorm gasped. She scrambled to her feet, her physical exhaustion momentarily overridden by the threat of a scolding.

"Thank you again for the lesson!" she whispered fiercely, before turning and bolting in the opposite direction, disappearing behind a thick row of hedges. The maid—Rita—skidded to a halt a few yards away. She closed the distance cautiously, stopping in front of Elma and dropping into a series of frantic, panicked bows.

"My lady! A thousand apologies, my lady!" Rita stammered, her voice trembling violently.

"If that girl was bothering you, I swear she would be severely punished! Please, forgive the intrusion!" She didn't wait for a response. The maid spun around and fled, casting one last glance over her shoulder. Elma watched the woman's retreating back, filing the reaction away. Servants usually fled from her questions, not before she'd even spoken. Elma leaned back against the rough bark of the willow tree and reopened her notebook. The data from today was invaluable.

She flipped to a fresh page, deciding to document the various capabilities of Resonance. She would create formal combat profiles—starting with herself, Jorm, Sable, and every other Resonant she encountered. Profile 01: Elma Altheris. Profile 02: Jorm— A faint, unnatural rustle from the canopy directly above her severed her train of thought. It lacked the organic, chaotic rhythm of the wind or the erratic movement of a bird. The displacement of the leaves was tightly controlled. Deliberate. Artificial.

Instincts forged in the fighting pits took over before her conscious mind could even process the threat. Elma violently expanded her field, compressing a dense pocket of air between her back and the tree trunk. The sudden, concussive burst of pressure launched her small body sideways across the grass. A split second later, a figure clad entirely in dark green dropped from the branches.

A heavy, serrated blade drove flawlessly into the roots of the willow, burying itself to the hilt in the exact patch of dirt Elma had occupied a millisecond prior. The sharp, acidic scent of neurotoxins instantly bled from the steel into the air. Elma hit the grass and rolled into a crouch, her eyes locking onto the assassin. She recognized the intruder's build and the sickeningly familiar scent of the venom immediately.

The figure ripped the serrated blade from the earth and launched toward her with no hesitation, lethal speed closing the gap in an instant.