Of course, it’s a lot easier to have these philosophical breakthroughs when your new armor’s HUD is reading ‘3300’ and purified energy is flowing through your newly-opened channels like a liberated river after a dam break. I felt strong. Actually strong. Not ‘I-can-lift-a-car’ strong, but ‘I-could-probably-have-a-fair-fight-with-a-grizzly-and-only-lose-one-or-two-limbs’ strong.

  The newly installed synthetic myofibril myocytes in my suit provided resistance to my movements, converting the strain into a usable energy charge, the levels of which were now displayed on my Mark I control panel in sensible numbers, not the hexadecimal code a normal human would need a cipher and a physics degree to read.

  It was progress, measured in watts and joules instead of total life failures. Baby steps toward not being a complete waste of skin.

  I wasn’t dumb enough to try to turn this into full power armor. That way lies madness, crushed civilians, and the inevitable lawsuit from when you accidentally backhand your teammate through a building because you sneezed. The control systems were a nightmare I didn’t need. For now, the myocytes were a purely defensive measure—a last-ditch system to rigidify and absorb a hit that would otherwise turn my internal organs into external decorations.

  Why did every other tinker feel the need to add enough strength to pulp a human being? Overcompensation, probably. I’d stick with keeping my insides inside, thank you very much.

  Let the other guys play at being gods; I was just trying to survive their collateral damage. My ambition peaked at ‘not dying horribly.’ It was a modest goal, but it kept me busy.

  My post-match downtime had been productive, in a ‘rebuilding from total annihilation’ kind of way. Before our catastrophic duel, Abigail had been wrestling a dumbed-down version of Ubuntu onto the suit’s hardware, creating a clunky but functional interface that could finally access the quantum comms.

  It was still rudimentary—basically six walkie-talkies with delusions of grandeur and a side of existential entanglement. But it was a foundation. Voice modulation, squelch, and recording. The holy trinity of comms. Someday, we might even get text. A guy can dream.

  For now, it was one less thing I had to hold in my head, which was a relief because my mental real estate was currently an overcrowded tenement building on the verge of structural collapse and a rat infestation.

  After I’d apported a moaning, snuggling Frost Phoenix to the clinic and gotten us both into less revealing scrubs—a process that involved a lot of apologetic nodding to the medical staff and trying to ignore their knowing, judgmental looks that screamed ‘again, Doyle?’—I’d thrown myself into testing my new limits.

  My microkinetic range, the sphere within which I could directly manipulate matter, had exploded from a pathetic three feet to a staggering five. Five feet. I could reach across a room and disassemble an opponent’s weapon without getting out of my chair.

  The overall mass I could affect was still a mystery, but one I was eagerly looking forward to solving, preferably on something that deserved it. Maybe I’d start with a vending machine that stole my dollar. You have to begin your reign of terror somewhere.

  “So what did I do, exactly?” I asked Sabrina between panting breaths, flowing through a particularly intricate Daoist form that was supposed to balance the fiery energy of my spleen or some other metaphysical nonsense. She was watching me with the intense focus of a biologist studying a bizarre new insect that might be venomous or might just be really, really stupid.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Sabrina, my resident multi-dimensional alchemist and font of terrifying cosmic knowledge, was the closest thing I had to an expert on… well, everything that wasn’t blowing up or making money. She’d been invaluable in helping me translate the Serenoid technical manuals I’d acquired.

  The more I studied them, the more convinced I became that they were intentionally left behind. The energy flow patterns for six-armed, three-fingered aliens were suspiciously easy to adapt to a two-armed, five-fingered human. Almost like a gift. Or a trap. With my life, it was usually a trap. A very well-designed, multi-layered trap with complimentary snacks and a free toe-tag.

  “Did you drain her energy?” Sabrina asked, tapping a perfectly manicured fingernail against her teeth. On anyone else, I’d assume it was a calculated move to be seductive. With Sabrina, it was just her thinking. She oozed a kind of innocent, otherworldly sexuality without even trying, which was somehow more distracting than if she’d been trying. It was like watching a kitten try to solve a calculus problem; the juxtaposition was utterly captivating and made it impossible to focus on anything else, like not making a fool of myself.

  I shook my head, not breaking the flow of my movement. It was all about the momentum. “No. Our energy patterns were just… really compatible. The second she stopped actively pulling kinetic energy from the environment, her refinement process crashed, but her personal energy pressure spiked like a rocket. She basically reclaimed all the energy she’d been bleeding out before my own soul-space could turn into confetti.”

  “This was after you healed her? You were in close physical contact?”

  “You could say that,” I grunted, shifting into a lightweight boxing combo, testing how the soft energy flow integrated with a hard-style strike. The transition was smoother than I expected, the Dao of Momentum making everything flow together.

  “My microkinesis was having a seizure from her energy spillage. I picked her up to keep her from interacting with the ground—didn’t have enough mass control to stop a feedback loop that big. The energy discharge vaporized most of my armor."

  I was technically still wearing the crotch plate and part of my pants, thanks to the density of my ‘special protection’ layer, but she’d been baked down to her birthday suit. It was a very one-sided strip show. I got to keep my dignity. She got a full-body tan.

  She nodded, her dark hair bouncing. “So you traded energy on a similar wavelength, but it was symbiotic, not parasitic. A mutualistic energy event. A cultivation resonance.”

  I sighed, dropping the stance and grabbing a towel. The sweat was real, but so was the energy humming under my skin. “I think if this had happened a few weeks ago, she would have drained me dry. Her soul-space is smaller, but her energy density was way higher because of her direct ether link. It actually helped liquefy my chaotic mess and stabilize both of us. We were two unstable compounds that, when mixed, somehow created something temporarily stable before nearly blowing up the lab.”

  “Did you kiss her?” she asked, her head tilting with academic curiosity. She might as well have been asking about the chemical composition of a rock.

  “Not until after we’d avoided mutual annihilation, spontaneous combustion, and a messy public death. I think. The timeline is fuzzy. The kissing was probably part of the reboot sequence.”

  Sabrina’s expression was one of dawning realization. “I think what you experienced was a lesser form of dual cultivation.”

  I froze, the towel halfway to my face. “I thought you said dual cultivation was sex. Specifically, the spiritual rape kind where one person gets turned into a withered husk. The kind that gives decent people nightmares and makes me want to take a shower in industrial disinfectant.”

  She shook her head. “Sex is the most common medium for it. It uses intimacy and sexuality as a conduit. It also irrevocably entwines the participants' energy signatures. Like it or not, Frost Phoenix is now tied to you. You will both be drawn together, and you will both cultivate more efficiently in each other’s presence. You need to be careful, though. She is accustomed to pulling vast amounts of raw, unrefined kinetic energy. You must ensure she does not begin to use you as her cultivation vessel by mistake.”

  A cold dread washed over me. It was the same feeling I got when I realized my bank account was overdrawn and the rent was due. “Is that… possible?”