PSTH: Chapter Forty-Eight

Alright, now let’s end this battle in one blast! Charge up your Sunlight Ray and unleash it on your enemy!

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Line from a children's cartoon on Primals and tamers, demonstrating the importance of learning to communicate via the spell link with your Primal, rather than verbally, 418 Modern-Era

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Working on the three long form videos took me a lot longer than I had expected. Sure, they were going over my own experiences, but at times I found myself struggling to explain the way I thought, or why I knew certain Primals would react in certain ways. It wasn’t that I didn’t know, but verbalizing it in a way that would make sense to someone without any knowledge of Primals and Tamers was hard. I was tempted to go back and re-do my video on the fight with Miguel Cruz, since I could see several spots where I’d made assumptions based on knowledge I had, but not stuff that everyone would know. 

Of course, even though getting three videos out did take time, I also spent a lot of time working on other things. I trained with Scales, Hex, and Zale nearly every day, and after a week, Zale was at the very peak of level eighteen. A few hours of cultivation later, and he had broken into level nineteen. Hex continued to work on improving her ousia weave with me for a few hours each day, as the brief time I’d spent before fighting Lisa Ruth didn’t quite get us where we wanted to be. Scales, on the other hand, was working on something else entirely – pushing for his second form. While he could probably just cultivate, and he did spend some of his time drinking in the rich essence of the region, the little shark Primal got it in his head that he was having trouble pushing forward because of a lack of sufficient skill. For all I knew, he was right, so I let him rush around after the brown leaves, hopping and trying to catch them out of the air. It was close enough to playing that he was fine. 

During that week, I met with Lisa Ruth and she handed over the imprint disk. I immediately placed the disk onto Scales’ head, and watched as the pattern contained within the disk broke down, dissolving and flowing through his essence. I felt it wrap itself around his spiritual organ, and unlike when I’d given him Frosted Bite, there was no blank space. Instead, the pattern seemed to touch on the pattern for Boost Scales, and like an ink blot dropped in water, the new pattern seemed to flow through the old one, shifting and changing it. A few moments later, the new spell clicked into place, the combat spell integrating seamlessly with him. 

Sure, as a combat spell, it technically did require more power for Scales to cast than it would for a combat Primal, but that was true of both Anima Bubble and Boost Scales, which were Arcane and Null respectively. In fact, without a water spell, Scales was already paying that higher cost for all of his spells anyways. Some prices were worth paying. 

“I did a bit of research into the Primals you’ve got,” Lisa said, nodding to Hex. “You should look into potentially getting the Anima Toxin spell for her. She’ll naturally learn Pnuema Toxin at level thirty-six, but despite being compatible with the anima version, it’s not stored in her natural weave.” 

I glanced at her and nodded. I really needed to do a deep dive into all the known spells that each of my Primals learned naturally, as well as spells that their weave and ousia-based organs could integrate without issue, even if they didn’t naturally learn them. I knew Scales’, and I’d looked at Hex’s, but I didn’t know much about Zale’s and not enough about Hex’s. 

Still, the idea of Hex being able to hit someone with a spell that continually destroyed their pneuma, another to poison their anima, Weakening Smog to cause any physical hit to deal more damage, and then trapping them in a cloud of shadows to stop them from being able to hit anything. It was an impressive mental image, and was likely a decent endpoint for where Hex might end up. I didn’t love that it meant she had no spells that could be used to actually hurt someone else, but being able to tie them down with oodles and oodles of ailments was useful in its own way. 

“Got any recommendations for Zale? He’s the Apaturegius.” 

“Yes, actually: Pnuema Crunch. It’s a slightly higher cost to cast than Pneuma Bite, but it’s got nearly double the power, and it’s not one that he learns naturally either. Maybe also the Bonded Bite, which channels the strength of the bond, but it’s a spell entirely developed by people, not a natural one, and there’s no record of if it’s compatible with an Apaturegius. Might be worth seeing if a lab is willing to run the test and fill out the paperwork to test. It’s a null spell, so I don’t see any reason the essence should conflict, but you never know with these things.” 

She held up her hand before I could respond to her comment, and continued her spiel about the moves for Zale.

“Now I don’t want you to think that your Apaturegius is a bad Primal in terms of movesets. He does have several upgrades he’ll gain naturally to all of his spells, and some new options that will open up as you both increase in power. I’ve just always sort of held the opinion that it's usually better to be patient and learn naturally than force everything early.” 

“That’s kind of funny, given the Imprint Disk that you gave me is for a move Scales gets naturally at level fifty-something.” 

Lisa Ruth gave me the kind of stern look that I typically associated with elderly schoolteachers. 

“Hon, I’m fairly sure that one of the laws of the universe is that every rule we humans come up with that ain’t got hard math backing it has got its exceptions. I recommended it because it was the right move at the time for your team.” 

I nodded my acknowledgement to her point, then thanked her once again for the disk, before taking all of my Primals out to one of the rings and practiced with it. Just like Lisa Ruth had said, the cost was almost three times as much anima as it would have normally taken to apply Boost Scales. Only, instead of just making his pneuma more resilient, it also strengthened his resistance to the more magical spells out there, just like Anima Bubble did.  

It wasn’t the only new move that Scales got either, though the other move he got was actually something closer to an accident. A few days after I’d finally finished wrapping up and getting out all three of the videos, there was some snowfall. Almost as if the world itself was celebrating the fact that autumn was nearing its end, and winter was ready to move in. The bricks and stones of the small town were covered in a thin layer of white, the mountains all around us slowly turning a mixture of grays, browns, and white. The colors didn’t sound appealing when just stated like that, but the towering mountains capped in snow, the bare trees, and the thundering gray sky overhead were a good reminder of why so many ancient cultures had gods of the sky. 

The snow wasn’t incredibly thick, but it was rare enough in Oceanseed that the trains were delayed until the tracks could be cleared. There had once been a time where snow wasn’t as rare in Arkose, happening a few times every year, but with the rise in sea levels and the damage that the Pre-Arrival people had done, it wasn’t uncommon for the towns at the foothills of Arkose to go a year or two without seeing a single flake. 

With that delay, and with the cold spiking upwards, Laurel, River, and I were all mostly cooped up inside, so my Primals and I spent an unusually large amount of time cultivating. Occasionally we would make a quick trip to the town’s lone indoor ring, but there were enough magians and tamers in the town that we typically could only get one time slot a day for training. One of the days that we fought, River came along and used a telekensis spell to lift our Augpads into the air, recording the visuals of our fight. 

Between the training against Laurel and the week and a half of excessive cultivation in an environment that was brimming with essence, even down in the foothills, Hex and Scales both made breakthroughs to level seventeen. That meant that Scales finally got access to a water element spell in Aqua Fin, replacing the old Anima Bubble spell. While testing the spell in sparring matches with Laurel, we learned that the spell had two uses. The first allowed him to fire off thin, compressed, fin-shaped blasts of water from his fins or tail, launching them a few feet in the air before the anima started to dissipate. That was useful, but with Scales being so focused on pneuma and toughness, it wasn’t amazing. 

The other was to gather the power, but instead of launching the power outward, strike someone with the limb where the power was gathered. That had a lot more power, since the strength of his pneuma was also integrated into the attack, but it sacrificed range and increased the anima cost some. Either way, it was a massive jump forward in utility, and I didn’t know why the research articles on Sharmonds and their spells hadn’t mentioned it. I’d actually only discovered the second function because I knew there was a higher level spell, River Strike, that Scales would learn at level thirty-five that would operate nearly identically, but at a steeper anima cost and much more potent output. I definitely wasn’t the only person to discover this, so I submitted a ticket to one of the compilation sites to let them know this was lacking. 

It was also strange to advance this quickly. I knew that my home had a lower level of ambient essence due to the relative lack of nearby essence hearts, but it was still strange to see it demonstrated in such an obvious way. I didn’t think less of my home for its lower level of essence, but it was certainly a rough place for someone who had the specific aspirations that I’d had.

While waiting for the snow to clear up, I spent some time editing a new video of the spar that River had helped record, tagging Laurel in it and doing my usual short and long-form video. By the time I’d finally finished up, the snow had melted, so Laurel, River, and I all purchased some tickets on the lightning railway out to Galena Town. As we headed in together, I pulled up the concert that Gawain had talked about, sending the link to Rane, and then purchasing some tickets for myself. It was about another week away, shortly after, there would be the fight between the Regent and Councillor, and I’d also be signing up to take the Councillor’s challenge. As the landscape began to blitz by, I smiled.