I found myself back in the archives of the White Banner, buried in documents and web files as I delved into my research on Skills.

  My goal was to alter or upgrade my [Auric Vision] to suit me better, or at least be more useful. Right now, it was completely overshadowed by the senses that came with [Aura Manipulation]. I'd failed dozens of times to do anything with the Skill so far. Every combination I tried fell apart and was rejected. As if something wasn't right, or was missing altogether. I groaned in frustration, sagging back in the chair, my head hanging off the back as lines of text danced behind my closed eyelids.

  I’d been at this for hours now and was no closer to a solution to my problem. As I sat there, my mind wandering, a thought struck me. What if I was approaching this all wrong? Instead of trying to alter [Auric Vision] directly, maybe I needed to combine it with something else. My eyes snapped open, and I straightened in my chair, fingers flying across the keyboard as I searched for information on skill synergies.

  Hours passed in a blur of research and experimentation. I tried combining [Auric Vision] with every other Skill I currently possessed, but nothing seemed to work. Every combination was either rejected, like trying to ramp two impossibly strong magnets together, or it felt off, weak. Not a result that I wanted. As I scrolled through the White Banner's Skill database, I wondered for the millionth time if I was going about this wrong, what was I missing to make this work? I'd made some small progress, to be sure. I was certain that modifying the Skill directly was not something that was going to happen, for what reason I wasn't sure, but I was certain that it was something I couldn't do right now. On the other hand, I was more certain than ever that I needed to combine it with something else. Was that the issue? Was everything I had incompatible?

  My fingers flew across the keyboard as I filtered down the entire database to only visual and eye based Skills. I had an idea of what I wanted, so I simply had to find the missing piece that would make it work.

  ——-

  Doctor Elara Voss watched the man from her office. Aiden was an odd one, truly. He spent long hours here in the archive, seemingly drifting from euphoria to despair, to irritation and frustration and back again as he found and tested new solutions only for them to be failures. He seemed as flighty as anything, jumping from idea to idea, but when one grabbed his attention, he seized it with a tenacity that would have put many of her coworkers to shame. She wasn't even quite certain what exactly he was experimenting with. She could make an educated guess based on the access history logs that were tied to his profile in the archive system, but that was it.

  He was still an enigma. A Soul Sheer survivor, an independent ranker who by all accounts refused to be tied to any of the major factions, someone who refused to reveal what his Class was, which in her mind meant it was something unusual. And finally, he was someone who was rapidly growing powerful. Very powerful.

  Whether he would be boon or bane to the White Banner in the end, she didn't know, but she would be watching.

  ——-

  My gaze settled on one entry on the page.

  That, that’s the one.

  Instantly, I was checking through the archives logs to see if there were any available Skill books for [Sensor Eye] or if there was any information available on how one could acquire the Skill naturally. Strangely, it seemed that the Skill wasn't very popular, and thus, there hadn't been much work done to understand it or how it was acquired. There was, however, buried in the notes section for the Skill, a single entry on an acquisition method.

  Set the training room to produce various phenomena, from areas with increased UV density to temperature differentials. The more phenomena, the better. Then flex your Perception stat while observing the phenomena. Try to identify each area and the magnitude of the effect.

  “What the hell does it mean flex my Perception Stat…” I muttered to myself as I read over the short entry. There wasn’t terribly much to go off of there, but at least it pointed him in the right direction.

  The sound of a door opening drew his attention away from the terminal screen. I turned to see Dr. Voss coming out of her office and heading in my direction. "Any luck with your search? You seemed to be getting rather frustrated for some time." She asked as she approached.

  "I've made some progress, I think I've found what I'm looking for, but I have no idea what this means," I said, directing her attention to the terminal screen. To the entry that mentioned 'Flexing my Perception'. "I can understand setting up the training room the way it mentions, but I have no idea what it means to 'Flex' any of my stats."

  Doctor Voss let out a little snort, shaking her head, seemingly bemused by the whole situation. "I'm sorry, it's so easy to forget that you really haven't been a Ranker long, or even taught any of the things we take as basic knowledge." She said, waving away the slight scowl that had formed on my face. "Rankers are capable of much more than a normal person, yes? Much of that capability is due to Stats, as you well know."

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  I nodded my understanding. I was well aware of that; I had just spent a day educating my siblings on that particular concept.

  "It would be completely impractical to be walking around with over a hundred points in Strength using that all the time, though. You would break most anything you picked up that wasn't System enhanced. You might try to hug a friend and snap their spine. Over time, your mind adapts to having that much more Strength." She explained, in full-on lecturer mode now. "So as far as we can tell, a combination of the System and our own minds limits our use of our attributes, primarily when we aren't under any sort of stressors, so that we aren't accidentally crushing things or running at fifty miles per hour."

  “That makes sense. So does that mean that ‘Flexing‘ an attribute is like focusing on it to use more of it than you would normally?”

  “Exactly that, I’m sure you’ve done it by instinct in battle by now, leaning into your Strength to hit harder, or throw something farther? Dexterity to avoid an attack or something similar.”

  I nodded. I could think of many instances where I had done exactly what she said, I just hadn't realized I was doing it at the time.

  "Thank you, Dr. Voss. That's incredibly helpful," I said, a new sense of determination filling me. "I think I know what I need to do now."

  She nodded, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "I'm glad I could assist. Good luck with your endeavours, Aiden. I'll be curious to see what you achieve."

  As Dr. Voss walked away, I turned back to the terminal, quickly printing out a copy of the excerpt on the page and logging myself out of the terminal. Thankfully, I had no need to reserve a training room as there was still one set aside for me at the moment. I gathered a printout from the printer nearby and made my way to the training room, my mind already racing with possibilities.

  The training room was exactly as it had been the last time I was here, a large open space lined with dense concrete walls. To the naked eye, they looked like black stone walls, but I could feel the emanation of the powerful wards that lined the walls. The wards were meant to help keep anything destructive contained to the training room. I headed directly for the small room at the back of the training room that was indicated by both a heavy metal door and a one way mirror set into the wall. I knew that behind that door was the control center for the room. Hopefully, the controls to operate the room would be simple enough that I would not have to call someone to set it up for me.

  Making my way into the control room, I went directly to the large terminal mounted to the wall in front of the two way mirror. It seemed to be set up that way so that whoever was running the terminal could watch the room itself while they were doing it. Tapping at the keys, the screen flickered to life. It took a few minutes of flipping back and forth between various menus, but I got the hang of it. I set various vents to pump the room full of hot and cold air, changing intermittently, and for several lights to emit various different things across the light spectrum. I figured that was enough for the moment. I stepped out of the control room and headed for the center of the training room.

  I took a deep breath, centring myself in the middle of the room. Closing my eyes, I focused on my Perception stat, trying to feel it within me. At first, nothing happened. I stood there, feeling foolish, but I pushed the feeling aside and concentrated harder. Slowly, I began to sense something – a sort of internal pressure building behind my eyes, and in my ears. I leaned into that sensation, willing it to grow stronger. Suddenly, it was as if a switch had been flipped. My eyes snapped open, and the world around me had changed.

  No, it’s me. I changed, or at least my perception of the world around me did.

  I could hear my heart pounding away steadily, and every breath that left me. I could see the tiniest imperfections that marked the walls and floor of the training room. I could feel the air shifting against my skin in a way that I never had before, I could discern the direction of the softest currents of wind in the room by feel alone. After a single moment, it was overwhelming, it was information overload, and I clutched at my head with a groan as a spear of pain lanced through my brain. It reminded me of when I had first started testing my [Aura Manipulation]; there was too much information that my mind wasn't used to processing. I pushed everything away, and my senses returned to normal.

  "That was intense." I ground out, letting out a shaky breath. I took a few minutes to recenter myself before trying again. "Maybe just one sense at a time for now." It took a moment for everything to normalize and the pain to fade from my mind.

  This time, when I tried to flex my Perception stat, the feeling built up only in my eyes rather than all over my body, and it was much easier to handle as my vision sharpened. Once again, every flaw and imperfection was revealed to me. I turned my focus away from the walls, looking to the vents and lights that were scattered around the room.

  For several moments, there was nothing unusual, though looking at the events in Ranker High definition made me not want to look too closely at anything that hadn't been cleaned recently. I had a feeling I'd find something that would send a shiver up my spine and Vicky running for the cleaning supplies, little neat freak that she was sometimes. I snerked at the thought before shaking myself. This wasn't the end goal, just the barest of first steps.

  I recalled the scrap of information I gleaned from the database; it was the only guide I had here.

  Set the training room to produce various phenomena, from areas with increased UV density to temperature differentials. The more phenomena, the better. Then flex your Perception stat while observing the phenomena. Try to identify each area and the magnitude of the effect.

  Flexing my perception again, I focused first on the vents, which were meant to be pumping out hot and cold air into the room. I'd set them randomly when I'd adjusted the room's settings, so I wouldn't be able to rely on my memory to help. I watched the air closely, noting slight distortions in the air around the mouth of each vent, but they meant nothing to me; there was nothing to go off, no way to translate what I was seeing into information I could make use of. A grunt of annoyance escaped me as I turned to the ceiling lights. Some of them were putting out normal white light, others were putting out different colours, and one was even behaving like a black light, pumping out UV rays into the room. They were easy to identify at a glance. Still, I focused on them, trying to find something beyond the obvious. Something that could move me just a little further along towards the end goal I wanted.

  I stared up at the lights for several minutes. My eyes began to water from the strain of staring at the lights, but I refused to give up. Suddenly, I noticed something peculiar. Around each light, there was a faint aura, barely perceptible. The aura around the UV light seemed to pulsate slightly, different from the steady glow surrounding the others.

  Spurred on by this discovery, I shifted my focus back to the vents. This time, I noticed subtle differences in the air distortions. The hot air vents produced a shimmering effect, while the cold air vents created a barely visible, denser haze; it was slower, more ponderous than the flicker of the heat haze.

  "I'm getting somewhere," I muttered to myself, a grin spreading across my face.

  I spent the next few hours honing this newfound perception, pushing myself to distinguish between different temperatures and light spectrums with increasing accuracy. During a brief break, I'd even found a setting I hadn't noticed previously as I looked over the room's controls. When I returned, some pillars had risen up from below the floor bearing what looked like Tesla coils. The new additions would put out varying electromagnetic fields. Another stimulus for me to test. As I worked, I felt something shifting within me, as if a new pathway was forming in my mind.

  Suddenly, a notification popped up in my field of vision:

  "Yes!" I shouted, pumping my fist in triumph.

  I wasn't done yet, though. This was just the stepping stone to get where I really wanted to go.

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