The resonance hit like a brick to the head before the shuttle door opened this time. Hector was ready for the distraction and made it to the ground with some help from Isabel. His realm felt like it was scraped raw from enduring the tug-of-war at the previous city.

  On impulse, Hector pushed cosmic energy into the fibers of his realm and held it there. It felt remarkably like clenching a sphincter in his body, creating an awkward pressure. The upside showed itself immediately. His sensitivity to the miasma’s resonance declined drastically. The resonance was still locked in, he could tell, but packing his realm with cosmic energy dampened the vibrations that shook his entire soul.

  He didn’t announce his discovery to the group. There was no evidence this trick would be robust enough to hold up through a protracted mission. If a large enough monster appeared, he might go back to tripping over his own feet. Besides, this gave him an opportunity to observe his retinue in action.

  Conrad arranged the group around Hector and Isabel. He placed Captain Devin – with a very polite request – at the point position. Then he flanked the cyborg with Darius and Piercing on either side. That was smart. Those two tended not to snipe at each other when the captain was around. Esther took the flank behind Piercing while Conrad stationed himself behind Darius. Ajax, Riley, and Conflagration were placed as rear guard. Conrad told the Sage of Conflagration to roam at will, an acknowledgment that Conflagration would do as Conflagration wished. Conrad instructed Isabel to perform periodic checks in all directions, making her the backup for everyone.

  They advanced at a cautious pace, destroying anything that came their way as they navigated closer to the heart of the invasion. Plasma rifles fired, chaos bolts thundered, Piercing’s sword extended to stab through enemies, and Conflagration flicked tiny sparks to drift around the battlefield and explode targets into ash. Hector’s retinue steamrolled the invasion. It was clear that they were overpowered for the situation before them.

  Meanwhile, Hector held energy within his realm, reducing the wild reverberations of resonance to a gentle – if insistent – buzzing. Packing his realm didn’t seem to help its functioning other than reducing the distractions. As Conflagration told him, his realm was both effective and weak. That those things seemed like they should be mutually exclusive just went to show how little he understood Sage business.

  Over time, the protective effect diminished. Hector began losing seconds of time once more as his realm distracted him. He went to add more cosmic energy to his realm and discovered that it was almost empty. Had it leaked free somehow? Uncertain what was going on, Hector refilled his realm and sealed it off. Immediately he began to feel better.

  They reached the rift an hour later and Hector found himself thrust into a conceptual wrestling match. Conflagration complicated the attempt by bringing his own realm to bear, trying to burn the rift out of existence. Though their insights didn’t overlap, their target most definitely did.

  Hector felt the immense force Conflagration brought to bear. The Sage was quite obviously doing something contrary to how reality worked. A tear in space couldn’t catch fire and burn away. That simply was not how things worked. Yet under the influence of a Sage’s will, reality got a bit confused about its own rules. The edges of the rift were consumed by flames.

  At the same time that was happening, Hector’s transformations caused the rift to tear back open. Miasma within the primordial exploded into cosmic energy plus some residual ‘other’ that manifested as a combination of visual radiation and something reminiscent of spatial energy. The expanding space ripped the rift wider while the edges burned.

  Conflagration’s involvement annoyed Hector to a degree that he wouldn’t have imagined. The effort of tearing apart the miasma was enough by itself. He didn’t need to fight the will of an ally on top of that. What should have been done in ten minutes instead took twenty.

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  Though Hector had to admit that, even through his considerable frustration, he learned something from his incidental contact with the tyrannical will of Conflagration. Hector approached his conceptual battle with miasma as building an airtight argument, where every component fit seamlessly into the whole. It was the vast improvement he’d made when he expanded his insight. Before that, he’d occasionally contested the will of tiny motes of miasma with brute force. That exercise had been a disjointed battlefield, where he willfully denied every assertion contrary to his existence.

  What he sensed from Conflagration was an approach that split the difference. It wasn’t a meticulous argument. Nor was it a sloppy refutation. The Sage strategically dug in on the most essential concepts for his purposes, putting his full might behind them, and then let the other bits drift however they would. With a framework in place, the drifting tended to go in the direction Conflagration preferred. The analogy that suggested itself was felling a tree with strategic cuts.

  Hector wasn’t sure quite how he could adopt the method. At the moment the rift finally closed, he wasn’t in the mood to consider such things. He turned to Conrad and instructed him to get them home. The cyborg special operator immediately turned Hector’s whim into reality by settling everyone into formation and picking a direction.

  Back on Cruiser Erin, Hector ate dinner before returning to his bunk for some alone time. His soul felt like it had been bruised, making it hard for him to be patient. Evelyn once complained to him about her soul aching constantly. Based on his current condition, he could sympathize.

  When he eventually stopped pinching his realm aperture closed, he discovered it was once more empty of cosmic energy. There was only one conclusion he could make about what was happening. His ‘technique’ for training his realm would be to pump it full of energy and then use it to battle miasma. If that ever stopped being effective, he’d need to innovate something else.

  For now, though, improving his realm had to be his top priority. There was no need to rush forward with all of his apertures if he would never ascend to Lord. He needed to be strategic with his investments of time and energy. The thing that made him unique in this existential war was the insight embedded within his realm. Swinging a cable could be done by any Xian.

  Still… he had nothing else to do in his room during the downtime. For hours, he held the Shuttle Technique active, pushing for incremental improvements to his aura and domain. Despite working on that for what was essentially a full shift of a job back on Earth, he never tired. Having his domain and aura above the peak of eight seemed to give him limitless stamina.

  When he finally stopped working that technique, it was because he’d grown bored by the tedium. Hector briefly considered doing some mental strengthening before roundly rejecting the idea. He could get a hundred times the benefit from cultivating miasma on the mental band.

  Hector assessed his soul reserves before emerging from his room. He needed more energy. His soul was still saturating, his overnight domain and aura training had been expensive, and his realm devoured whatever he put into it. He hadn’t replenished at all during his missions the previous day. The alternative would be to sit around and cultivate with his externality, but that felt too limiting.

  Besides, he had a new trick he wanted to try.

  Once Hector clipped his earpiece on for the day, he made a request to Cruiser Erin. “Can you find us a remote area for some cultivation?”

  He grabbed a plain bagel from the serving line and sat across from Darius. “Do you remember what happened with your chaos bolt yesterday?”

  The man’s eyes lit up. “Of course I remember. As annoying as your sabotage was, it opens up some interesting possibilities.”

  “Today’s agenda involves lots of cultivation. I want you and Riley to take turns firing a chaos bolt at the rest of us. If it works like I expect, we won’t even have to pump our auras to restore.”

  Darius rubbed his hands together. “Just swallow energy as it comes at us. I like this plan.”

  The other Xian became enthusiastic as they learned of the idea. Piercing attempted to convince Persuasion to make them famous worldwide so that Arahant restoration rates would skyrocket as well. The request was denied on the basis that the technology level was far too low for them to become media sensations.

  Conrad frowned mightily. “Are we ignoring the third rift? It may not be located near a human population, but it is releasing monsters onto the world.”

  “We’ll get to it tomorrow,” Hector promised.

  “Miasma,” Conflagration mused. “No. Too ominous. Not in the good way either.”