Chương 442: Chapter 428 - Understanding of Space

Alonso sat in the corner of the small room he shared with Ayu, both of them quiet, each working on their own path. After sharing what Houston had told him with Chiara and the rest, that there were no miracle solutions for mental defense and each had simply to find their own way, everyone had quietly gone to work. EM, Will, new Skills, whatever each of them could push forward in the time they had. For those who couldn't develop something solid on that front, appropriate gear affixes would have to fill the gap later.

The days had blurred together after that, and a week slipped by in the blink of an eye. With nothing else demanding his attention, Alonso had poured everything into the push toward his Fourth State. The conversation with Houston hadn't changed anything on the practical side, as he had said it wouldn't. But it had settled something. Grounded him in a way that was hard to put into words, like finally looking down and understanding the foundation beneath your feet.

So he had taken his time to rethink everything, and after countless routes that led nowhere, he understood that the answer would never come from within the framework. He had to step outside of it. That had brought him back to two things. Two aspects of his path that put him on a level of his own compared to his peers. One was combat understanding. The other… was Will. And what was Will, stripped to its core? A force that bent reality to belief.

A declaration made so completely that existence had no choice but to answer. So why not turn it inward? Why not use the thing that reshaped the world… to reshape himself? To reach into his own foundation and do something that defied every framework, every precedent, every logical next step. Something that should not be possible… but could. And so he tried. The first few times had been brutal.

Not the clean, focused pain of pushing past a physical limit, but something deeper and more unpredictable, the kind that came from introducing a force that did not belong into structures never designed to receive it. The first time it went wrong, it went very wrong.

Will applied at a molecular level with insufficient control had triggered a cascading breakdown of cellular membrane integrity across most of his body, the lipid bilayers destabilizing faster than his regeneration could compensate, pressure building inside tissue until it had nowhere to go. The result was about as elegant as it sounded.

Nearly everything from the neck down had essentially detonated outward in a wet, catastrophic wave that covered most of the room in a layer of blood and assorted biological material he preferred not to think about in too much detail. Ayu had been sitting across the room. She stared at the walls for a long moment, then at what remained of him, then back at the walls.

Then she shook her head slowly and asked, with a smile and the calm composure of someone inquiring about dinner plans, whether this was going to be a regular thing. He couldn't really answer at the time, given the state of his jaw. But the general sentiment was no. He scaled back considerably after that. He contained the work to a much smaller zone, with less ambitious changes, something damage-controllable where the worst outcome was localised and manageable.

His Set's regeneration took care of the damage, and he kept going. It was gruelling in a way that was hard to compare to anything else. The push toward his Fourth Combat Realm had demanded everything from him over weeks of near-death exchanges. This was different. This was quieter, more precise, and somehow harder, because the enemy was not in front of him. It was inside him, at a level he could not fully see or predict, and every attempt was a step taken blind. But he kept stepping regardless.

After a week of attempts pushing into the hundreds of millions, he hadn't quite broken through. But the journey itself had given him something real. His Will control had improved significantly. Something he had always wielded at a large, macroscopic scale, he had learned to tune down to something far smaller and more precise, capable of delicate changes at a microscopic level. It still felt nowhere near as natural as EM, but the gap had closed in a way he could actually feel.

The second thing the week had given him was direction. It was about flow, yes, but not flow in the sense of building more Fusion-level pathways. Flow in a deeper sense. Making his entire body a lattice for his own path, a canvas he could build upon without resistance. In practical terms, that meant creating a biological grid with a defined axis, a coordinate system through which each of his internal microcapacitors could be embedded and interconnected beyond the limits of isolated neural pathways.

In terms of the Stellar Expanse, it meant the next step was not gravity, nor time, as he had once assumed the analogy of flow would demand. It was about creating the spatial lattice itself. The space upon which the stars, the planets, and the galaxies existed. To give the expanse coordinates. Meaning beyond abstraction. And with that, he had finally settled on a name for his Fourth Combat Realm. Understanding of Space. Realm and State would coexist in meaning.

A Domain on the outside where he was the axis, and a Domain on the inside where his body was the axis for Path of Shards, his microcapacitors becoming the equivalent of celestial bodies within it. And with it, he would transcend, just as the Fourth Combat Realm had transcended beyond the actors of the fight; his Fourth State would transcend beyond its elements, the celestial bodies, to the story itself: the spatial lattice that held it all. It had clicked so completely, so cleanly, that he felt no doubt at all.

This was the way. However, setting the plan was one thing. Executing it was another. How exactly did you turn your own body into a spatial lattice at a molecular level? He had rough ideas, many of them still limited by where his Will control currently sat. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation. But he knew, just as Houston had said. There were no shortcuts. If he wanted to get better, he had to grind. However painful the process. And so he committed to it.

Alonso opened his eyes and exhaled slowly, rolling his shoulders as he pushed himself up from the floor. The room was dim and warm, the faint hum of the core filtering through the walls. His gaze drifted to Ayu. She sat comfortably across from him, perfectly still, an unusual heat radiating from her skin in slow, steady waves, the air around her carrying that faint shimmer it got when she was deep in focus. He left her to it, stepping out without a sound. The corridor was quiet.

He made his way toward the core room, where Pablo sat on a bench beside the Miridium cradle, one hand resting loosely on his knee, his waves keeping the ship on course with the kind of effortless attention that came from running several minds at once.

"Want a shift?" Alonso said, dropping onto the bench beside him. Pablo blinked, coming back to the surface.

"Eh… sure, but honestly it's no trouble. With Chorus of Thoughts I keep all minds on the core for the output, and one free to think. Barely notice it."

"Smart," Alonso said, still taking over the feed with a steady pulse. The core hummed faintly in response.

"Any progress?"

"Some," Pablo said, leaning back.

"Chorus of Thoughts is pushing further, even if the sixth partition hasn't fully stabilized yet. And I have been working on Field of Echoes, trying to use it as a foundation for a neural defense system." Alonso glanced at him.

"Field of Echoes. You've mentioned it a couple of times. What does it actually do?"

"Shared neural network between myself and my summons," Pablo said.

"I got the idea from the Xok'al's own swarm-based system back then. At the start I was using it to generate large-scale interference fields, but that felt like wasting what it could actually be." He paused, turning it over.

"If I can tap into the equivalent of a Pillar from my summons, I should be able to redistribute the load of a mental attack directed at me across the network, diluting it. And flip it the other way, use it as a focused offensive to push into an opponent's mind." Alonso nodded slowly. Pablo had clearly been putting real work into his.

"I'm sure you will get there sooner or later," Alonso remarked, leaning back against the wall beside the cradle.

"Which makes me think, you and I are quite similar aren't we? Two Skills of our own creation. Should be time for a third at some point."

"Hmm," Pablo mused, tilting his head slightly.

"I have some ideas already, quite ambitious ones," he chuckled.

"But it would take time. It's Will-based, which is something having many parallel minds doesn't really help with."

"Fair enough," Alonso replied.

"I have a similar problem pressing me before I can even think about a new Skill."

"Your Fourth State?"

"Yep." Pablo turned to look at him properly, eyes widening slightly.

"You're going to use Will for it!?"

"Absolutely," Alonso grinned. Pablo stared at him for a long moment, then let out a slow breath.

"You really are something else."

"We both are, my friend," Alonso replied. He glanced toward the screen on the far wall.

"Speaking of other matters, there's only a couple of minutes left by the way."

"Minutes…" Pablo frowned, then caught it.

"The Third Ascent?"

"Yeah." Alonso smiled.

"I imagine Jack is staring at the timer right about now."

"Oh, absolutely," Pablo laughed quietly.

"Funny though, back then he was completely obsessed with getting in, training every single day, while I…" he paused, "I wasn't exactly thrilled about the idea of being selected. And yet fate had other plans." Alonso stayed quiet for a moment before glancing at him.

"Do you regret it?" Pablo was quiet for a long moment, his gaze drifting toward the Miridium core, the soft blue glow of it reflecting in his eyes.

"No," he said finally. He exhaled slowly.

"I think about it sometimes though. What my life would look like if there had never been a Tower in the first place." He paused, a faint smile crossing his face.

"Probably stuck in some lab, running the same experiment for the hundredth time because the sample size wasn't statistically significant, writing a paper that three people would read, two of which would be the reviewers, and one of those would reject it on principle." Alonso chuckled.

"And now look at you," he said.

"Commanding mutated stone golems, summoning entities that would have woken you up from a nightmare back then, and casually flying across an ocean in a homemade jet at Mach 30." Pablo smiled.

"Yes." A quiet settled between them, softer than the ones before it.

"You know what gets me sometimes," Pablo said after a while, his voice dropping just slightly.

"It's not the power, or the Skills, or any of that. It's the scale of it." He looked at the core.

"We are basically the vanguard of the entire human civilization. Like, every person on Earth, every person who will ever live on it, whether they know it or not… what happens to us matters to all of them." Alonso said nothing, letting him finish.

"And I get to be part of that," Pablo continued.

"Me. A PhD student who had never held a weapon in his entire life." He exhaled a quiet laugh, but there was something heavier underneath it.

"Standing here, flying toward the Far North, shoulder to shoulder with…" he glanced at Alonso, "well. You know." Alonso raised an eyebrow slightly.

"The greatest, most awesome Climber there will ever be," Pablo said with a genuine smile. Alonso stared at him for a second.

"I'm not really into guys, but… you wanna take me out to dinner first, or…?" Pablo smiled.

"Fuck off." They both laughed for a long moment, easy and warm, just like old times.

"Think he will join us one day?" Alonso asked after a while. Pablo was quiet for a moment.

"Yeah," he said.

"I know he will." Alonso nodded as he stared at the screens showing the vast ocean beyond. While he wanted to see Jack again, to have the gang reunited once more, he also knew how hard it would be for someone to reach their level. The chances of Jack reaching anywhere near the vanguard, as Chiara had said, were statistically zero. And yet… he found himself smiling anyway. Who knows…

Jack stood before his computer, fist clenched, his heart rate through the roof as he stared at the timer, now down to the final seconds. He had made sure he was well fed and in perfect condition, and he hadn't moved an inch for the last fifteen minutes. He swallowed, his hands trembling just a bit. After all he knew, this was it. After all this time being nothing but an observer behind the screen, he was finally going in. He was going… to become a Climber. Yet he felt the weight of it too.

The fact that, while inside, he could not afford a mistake. One wrong move, and he would lose it all. One wrong move, and it would not be very different from truly dying. Alonso had done his part. Now it was up to him to show his friend what he was capable of. No matter what it took, no matter what he had to give up, whatever stood in his way… 3… 2… 1… — he would make it. 0