Chương 56: Bring it on

Two beings that have bled together are no longer two separate beings. The closest word is 'one,' but that is not quite right either. It is more like having two bodies and one mind." - From "Bonds and Their Meaning," a field study by a PfP naturalist, Area 8 Dawn was the same as last time - the settlement quiet, the macaques already on the rooflines, the kitchen cold. Kara and Ren had fallen into the rhythm of early mornings without quite discussing it. Hana was at the water system as usual.

Ren fell into step beside Kara on the upper trail, Kohaku in her travelling position, the cedar forest dark around them.

"He timed it," Ren commented.

"The flood?" Kara asked.

"He checked the snowmelt conditions on the upper ridge. He knows what this valley does and when." Ren looked ahead at the path.

"We just do not know exactly when."

"Which means it could already be running," Kara said. They walked. They heard it before they reached the second ridge. The sound carried up from the valley below, the full ongoing voice of water already in motion, filling the valley floor. They stood at the ridge top and looked down. The valley was already covered across its full width, the stream's banks irrelevant, the water moving with the consistent directional push that Kara had learned was hard to work against.

The bamboo grove at the far end was visible, the stalks rising from the moving water. The limestone gorge walls were dry above the current water line. The crevices sat in shadow, undisturbed. Ren looked at Kara.

"We could wait it out, you know."

"We could indeed." They looked at each other, a wry smile running across both their faces. They descended. The water reached them at the valley floor and Kara felt his Water Resistance skill engage - the negotiation with the current, the distribution of weight, the footwork finding purchase on a surface that was trying to become unreliable. It was working, as it had worked the first time.

The current found him less than it found Ren, who was applying good technique with grim determination to a problem good technique only partly solved. It would have to do. The water was shin-deep and moving with the full commitment of snowmelt that had the high ridge behind it, and the skill's negotiation with the current had limits that the current was testing consistently. His footing was better than Ren's. It was still costing him concentration that he needed elsewhere.

Waggy moved into the water beside him and the difference was immediately visible. The current caught him less, the pores doing what they did, his movement carrying the quality of something in its correct environment. He did not slow for the water. He moved through it the way he moved through the cedar forest, almost like it wasn't even there. Kohaku ascended the moment they got to the water, climbing and circling, positioned exactly where she was most useful. They moved toward the bamboo grove.

The grove took thirty minutes to reach, every step a constant battle between the current and their footing, and by the time they arrived, Kara's legs knew about the crossing in a way that had nothing to do with distance. Ren was even worse off than Kara, breathing with more effort. Waggy was neither. They took a moment.

"Now," Ren said, looking up. Kohaku broke from her circle above and descended toward the limestone wall on the valley's right side. This was the plan they had discussed the previous evening. They did not want to be surprised, identifying the crevices before the crevices identified them. She drove her claws into the rock face beside the first crevice with a sharp crack and investigated. Nothing. Second crevice. Nothing.

She worked along the wall methodically, the sharp contact and the investigation and the absence of result repeating. Kara kept one eye on her and one on the bamboo selection, moving through the grove with the cutting tool ready. The water was just below knee level and the sound of it was constant. Third crevice. Fourth. Nothing. Ren looked at Kara. Kara looked at Ren and raised an eyebrow. Fifth crevice. Sixth. Kohaku tried the seventh crevice on the opposite wall.

The dry rattling came from below her, from a crevice she had not touched, and then from two more simultaneously further along, and Kara turned from the bamboo he had been about to cut and opened his umbrella in the same movement. Four centipedes came down the walls. He ran them through the interface quickly, having missed doing this the last time and learned from it - two at G2 on his side of the valley, their bodies the familiar dark segmented length.

Two at G3 on both sides - slightly larger, the armour plating along their segments visibly denser. The Tier 3s moved with the same fluid speed as the Tier 2s and none of the hurry, having survived long enough to develop preferences about how they engaged. The water was at knee level now, Waggy having to stretch his neck to keep above water level, but otherwise looking unbothered. Waggy looked up at him once, the brief check, and back at the approaching centipedes. Kara planted his rear foot. Weight first.

Canopy follows. The nearest Tier 2 came across the valley floor and the current complicated its movement in a way it did not complicate Waggy's - the legs finding purchase but losing it between steps, the body compensating with the extra pairs of legs in a pattern that Sixth Sense mapped for Kara before his conscious mind had processed it. The trajectory was there. He moved the canopy to meet it. This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

The centipede redirected toward Waggy. Kara's ferrule was already moving to the segment gap the redirect had opened. The centipede reared. Waggy cut sideways out of the ferrule's line, the contortion taking him clear, and came back in from the left along the centipede's flank while Kara drove the ferrule down on the exposed underside of the rearing section. The centipede dropped, Waggy pounced on the injured segment, lashing and bounding away. Kara drove the ferrule further in while shielding Waggy with the canopy.

Its movement became the directionless kind. One down. The Tier 3 on his side had been watching. It came from a different angle than the Tier 2 had - upflow, using the current's push to add momentum to its approach. Sixth Sense gave him the signals - the antennae orienting, the shoulder segments shifting, the weight moving forward with the full commitment of an approach rather than a feint. He moved the canopy. The strike met deflection and skimmed along the fabric.

He stepped back to reset his footing and the current found his rear foot at the moment of the step, the ankle turning slightly on the uneven valley floor beneath the water. His weight shifted wrong. The canopy angle was off by the time it needed to be right. The centipede's second strike was already coming. He adjusted too late for the angle he wanted, and the ferrule skimmed the side of the centipede's head rather than finding the gap between segments. Contact, but not the contact he intended.

The centipede barely slowed. Waggy was not in position to help. He was circling the Tier 3's rear section, looking for the angle the current and the centipede's attention were both denying him. Kara reset his footing properly this time, taking the extra half-second to find the valley floor beneath the water before committing weight. The current pushed at his shin.

The skill was running and the current was finding the edges of it, and the gap between what the skill could do and what the water demanded was narrowing in a direction he did not want. Third exchange. He read the approach correctly - the whole body - and the canopy met the strike at the correct angle, the force distributed across the surface, and his weight was behind the counter before the deflection had finished. The ferrule found the segment gap. The centipede reared.

Waggy came in from behind, low and fast, the contortion taking him along the centipede's flank before the rear legs could reorient toward him. He got his teeth into the junction between segments near the rear, pulling backward while Kara drove forward from the front, and the centipede's body could not accommodate the force from both directions simultaneously. It went still. The moment it stilled, something shifted in Kara's interface.

Water Resistance: Rookie >> Amateur This was different from a tier up, there was no internal sensation. His feet were on the valley floor and the current was pushing at his shins and the skill was suddenly running at a depth it had not been running at before. He took a step. The current pushed. He did not move. He looked at Waggy, who looked back, alert, having registered the change without knowing what it was exactly. Two down on his side. He looked toward Ren.

Ren had finished the Tier 2 already - it was on the valley floor, the current moving around it, Kohaku pulling her claws back from the rear section. The Tier 3 on his side was circling him with the same patience Kara's had shown, the same upflow approach being tested. Ren's Tier 3 had registered Kohaku as the variable and was tracking her position as carefully as it was tracking Ren's, which meant it was dividing its attention in a way Kara's had not needed to. Ren read this.

He moved the canopy to draw the centipede's attention fully to himself, a controlled provocation, the ferrule visible and threatening. The centipede committed toward him. Kohaku came down from above. She hit the rear section with both sets of claws and drove it sideways into the current, the water adding to the force of her impact, the centipede's legs scrambling for purchase on a valley floor that the flood had made unreliable.

Ren's ferrule arrived twice at the segment junction while the legs were occupied with the current. Clean strikes, the weight in the right place, the form correct. The centipede went still. Kara stood in the now shin-deep water with his umbrella open and his arms reporting back about the last few minutes. The water was dropping - had been dropping since the peak of the flood passed while they were fighting, the valley floor slowly returning to itself.

Ren stood over the last centipede, Kohaku on his shoulder, both of them panting. Waggy sat in the shallowing water, task complete, entirely satisfied with how it had gone. Wet, but unhurt. Kara looked at him. Then at Ren. Then at the valley around them, the water dropping, the limestone walls quiet, the bamboo grove at their backs with the stalks they still needed to cut. He laughed, the body letting go of something it had been holding through the whole fight.

Ren heard it and something in his face released as well, and he laughed too, and Kohaku made a sound from his shoulder that was her own version of the same thing. Waggy looked at them and titled his head, which made Kara laugh even harder. They stood in the shallowing water and just let it out for a while. Then they cut the bamboo. The walk back was the same as the first time in its physical demands and entirely different in its quality. The bamboo was tied and secured properly without instruction.

The ridge climbs were harder with the stalks but managed. They came over the second ridge in the afternoon and the settlement appeared below through the trees, and Kara felt the deep tiredness of a man who had spent everything he had and had found it was worth it. Isamu was in the square. He looked at the stalks. He looked at both of them - at Waggy, at Kohaku, at the absence of injuries and the presence of complete exhaustion. He examined the cuts at the base of the stalks, the cord work, the straightness.

He set them down. The corners of his mouth moved. A small thing, brief. Ren looked at Kara afterward with the wide eyes of a man who had trained under Isamu for years and knew exactly what had just happened.

"He smiled!" Ren exclaimed, disbelief evident in his voice.

"I saw it. I'd say we earned it," Kara said. The third week absorbed what the valley had given them and built on it the way good training absorbs experience - deepening it. The stream sessions shifted from a problem of prediction to a problem of calibration. The errors became smaller. The children tried harder, moving positions, coordinating their waves, young people handed an interesting problem and fully intending to solve it.

By the end of the week Kara and Waggy were almost entirely dry through full sessions, the last few drops finding gaps that were closing but had not yet closed. The sparring shifted as well. Reading body language had been a conscious effort before the valley. After it, the signals arrived without effort, which freed concentration for what came after the signal. By the middle of the week they were lasting longer against Isamu.

By the end of it, on the last morning, Kara found himself in an exchange that did not resolve. Isamu planted his left foot. He did not move it for the next eight exchanges - the right foot adjusting minimally, everything else working from the waist up, decades of practice having reduced the problem to its smallest necessary parts. Kara had to move more. But the ferrule did not arrive. Stalemate. Isamu stepped back and looked between them both - Ren had reached the same result from his own exchange minutes earlier.

They were not supposed to feel proud about reaching a stalemate with an old man whose knees had opinions about stairs. They both knew this. They both felt it anyway. That evening, Isamu called them to the communal building after dinner. He sat across from them with his tea and looked between them.

"There is another mission," he said. Both of them looked at each other.

"Not the valley, you will be going further this time," Isamu said. He let them absorb this.

"Above the snowline," he continued.

"The upper mountain. A proper war umbrella requires three materials that cannot be found below. The canopy fabric requires thread from the Yamaarashi quills - the mountain porcupines at high altitude, where the cold has made the quills dense enough to be worth processing. The fittings require ore from the iron deposits near the peak, where the cold has done what heat cannot.

The shaft requires wood from the slow-growth cedar above the snowline, where the grain compresses over decades into something the lower-altitude wood cannot match." He looked at his own umbrella, leaning against the wall.

"You have five days. The terrain is steep and the conditions are unlike what you have trained in. The Yamaarashi at that altitude are not solitary. They travel in groups." Kara thought about Waggy in the flood, entirely at home. He thought about snow, and what he assumed was his snow leopard heritage.

"Tomorrow you rest and prepare," Isamu said.

"The day after, you leave at dawn." He picked up his tea.