Misbegotten Memories

Their bunker was assigned to the ominously named Rage Patrol for this rotation. Fortunately, they wouldn't have to trust their lives to Lieutenant Ringo. There were experienced leaders who ran operations on the patrols. Bunker G-B-22 received a patrol leader named George; an elderly Jinn cyborg who lived up to his designation far more than Conrad ever had.

Hector couldn't help but compare George to RoboCop. The man appeared to be mostly machine, though that was hard to verify given the thick armor. George the Jinn removed the lower half of his mask to address the troops, revealing he had a biological face at the very least. Based on the pauses in his speech patterns, the man had lungs as well. And the vocal chords had to be natural as well, otherwise this mechanical monstrosity would not sound like an old man.

His morbid fascination caused Hector to miss most of the content of what sounded like a rousing speech about taking the fight to the monsters. 'Rah rah go humans' type stuff. The Titans went with it, hyping themselves up. If there was one thing he'd learned about these soldiers in the past week, it was that they yearned for vengeance on the creatures who had destroyed their world.

Their group was about two-thirds Titans, one-fourth Jinn, and the remainder mixed between Arahants and the three Xian. The Arahant staff sergeant Hector found himself assigned to carried a cudgel that he twirled in an absentminded display of masterful dexterity. "My rules are simple," the Arahant announced to their platoon. "No heroics. No dying. No grab-ass. Everyone comes home."

Esther raised her hand. "Sergeant? Can I ride my sword on patrol?"

The Staff Sergeant squinted at her. "You're one of those types. Permission granted. Don't get ahead of the main body. We stick together out there."

Then, to Hector's surprise, Esther summoned a sword as tall as her and almost as wide as her hips. It grew into existence within her hand, floating under the influence of her domain, then lowered to hover at ground level. Esther stepped onto her weapon and it rose to about knee height.

"What the fuck?"

Esther grinned and blew a kiss at him. "I've got some good tricks."

"Everyone else might as well summon your weapons now," the cudgel wielder said.

Mick manifested a spear. Everyone turned to look at Hector and he had to shrug dramatically to communicate that no weapon would be forthcoming. Judging by the expressions of expectation, they got the wrong idea. They probably assumed he was going to be firing chaos bolts. Before he could correct the miscommunication, they were commanded to move to the gate.

That proved interesting. A section of steel and concrete had to be raised by a crane to let them pass through. It lowered back down once the entire patrol team exited. Hector studied the wall above him, admiring the sheer solidity of it. The runes he had noticed from up top were actually made of steel rods bent into various shapes. And the tall wall itself loomed. He couldn't even see the people up top, though the weapon-mounted towers were hard to miss.

Cyborg George whistled to get everyone's attention and then circled his robotic finger above his head before pointing out their direction of travel. The entire group set out in the late morning sunlight, eyes peeled for both monsters and miasma clouds.

The cudgel-wielding Arahant staff sergeant strode close to Hector. "What's your externality?"

"Transit sphere."

"That's not what I was expecting."

Hector smiled. "Not what you were hoping for, either."

"I guess you are able to evacuate us back to base in an emergency." The Arahant man scratched the stubble on his chin. "How many passengers can you carry?"

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"Maybe ten if we ignore the concept of personal space."

"That is impressive." The staff sergeant squinted at Hector with a fierce intensity. "Your soul is a fucking fortress, soldier. Are you a dreamer? I thought so. It's a shame you didn't get Arahant memories. I imagine someone with such sturdy walls would make for an exceptional Sage."

Hector resisted the urge to laugh at the sergeant's assumption of Arahant superiority. "I think the thickness of my soul is due to the fact that I inherited a useful insight."

"I'm not talking about thickness," the sergeant snapped. "Sturdiness is a different characteristic. The geometry of souls isn't as simple as the cube analogy suggests. There are six apertures, but they aren't equidistant from each other like you'd assume. There are some obvious examples if you think about it. The mind and body overlap in the brain. The body and aura meet at the skin. The aura and domain operate in the same area on occasion.

"Human souls have a lot of variation in the sizes of their various apertures and the arrangement of supporting elements. Some people are inherently built different than others. You have about as ideal of a build as I've ever seen. Your apertures are all about equal in size, there is abundant structural material, and all of the joins are at desirable angles.

"You're sturdy, soldier. I don't know what that means for a Xian, but such a thing is a huge advantage to Arahant Sages. It's also not a trait you can inherit or influence with the type of energy you absorb. A soul forms and grows by means no one understands. We just have to do the best we can with what we have. A lot of otherwise talented people walk around with a handicap that isn't their fault. Meanwhile you've got a gift you never even knew about."

Hector blinked as he absorbed the new knowledge. Learning that souls were real had never made a huge impression on him. He just accepted the fact and made practical use of the avenues it opened up to him. But apparently he had a good one. Was that why he was so much more talented than Volithur? "What about my mental aperture? Is there anything wrong with it?"

The sergeant snorted. "Fishing for compliments, are we? No, you don't have any flaws that I can see. Other than the fact that your potential is wasted as a Xian. One who doesn't even use a chaos bolt."

Hector elaborated. "I ask because my mental sense isn't very good."

"Well… I guess that might be related to how solid your apertures are. It's going to be a little harder to detect feedback if your sturdiness limits how much your environment impacts you. My mental aperture is a bit thin, so my mental sense is more sensitive than usual. That's on top of every Arahant having a more sensitive mental sense than the Xian. Your kind are only really good at sensing cosmic energy."

He was learning all sorts of information from the sergeant. "What about sensing Sage power?"

The man swung his cudgel through the air suddenly and reality shivered. A happy giggle followed. "That's resonance you're feeling. Anyone with an insight and a strong enough soul can detect influences on reality. You're only level six, so you probably can only feel manipulations that are related to your own insight. Keep growing and you'll feel it all. That includes the synthetic version of resonance the Jinn do. If you think the schism beam is disturbing now, just wait until you start feeling how its gunner rewrites reality in a way incompatible with higher order reality. It's a real mind fuck, let me tell you."

A sudden rat-a-tat-tat ended their conversation. The Jinn were firing guns at a charging monitor lizard that had the massive talons of a bird of prey tipping its every digit. The sergeant disappeared, running towards the action with his cudgel already weaving around him in an impressive display.

The approaching monster ignored the bullets as if they didn't exist. It could not ignore the cudgel that clipped the lower left side of its jaw, rising up in a horizontal slash that caused the entire head to snap to one side. Hector felt the strength of the blow. "Impact," he whispered, identifying the man's insight to himself. It wasn't something he could ever replicate, he knew, but it was straightforward enough in its application that he could understand it from an outside perspective. It was obvious and utterly foreign all at once.

Another monster fell from the sky. They only noticed the approach of the gargantuan butterfly because of the huge shadow it cast. Hector flinched as he noticed that in place of feet it had spears. Miasmic dust floated free with every flap of diaphanous wings, tainting the air.

Hector readied a cable for when it came within range. His domain was still a little sore, but he was finally able to fight again. He need not have bothered. Esther jumped free of her sword and it shot straight up into the sky to pierce one of the wing membranes. It returned from the other direction and pierced the same wing again. Several times it burst through the silken membrane and then the butterfly was falling in an out of control spiral.

A tossed grenade ended the butterfly right as it landed.

Then a screeching swarm of the rat deviants arrived. They were about twenty pounds of squirming rat with fleshy wings on their backs and razor sharp tusks emerging from their lower jaw. Hector formed four cables and became a whirlwind of destruction. Exploding rat corpses painted the ground red and black.