Bastion 2 - Chapter 12

The first week of school dragged on with Ko-nah’s unending complaints, but despite his behavior, he hadn’t ratted us out to Tae-do—or at least, Tae-do hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary. Il-sung had become distant, speaking less and avoiding us more than seemed normal. I’d questioned him about dinner the first night and he’d written it off as nothing at all, then scurried away with an excuse.

I couldn’t keep reading into things, though, and had to keep my head clear for the important tasks, like fixing Mae’s secondary device. As it turned out, there was no secret method for ma repair, and Pa-ne was making a grand show about nothing at all. His ma control was excellent, and his techniques were too, but they were no different from my own.

“Visualize the solutions, draw them on paper if you must,” he had said the second night of class. “Then, you can iron out design flaws before you implement them.”

That sentiment was the basic principle of ma repair. Even in outer-cities I’d been taught this. Never blaze forward with a machina change without visualization. A misstep of how that change may interact with other components could lead to injury in the arborum, or even death. If one of the saw-machina malfunctioned, it could take out the operator and everyone else nearby.

The only value I gained in his class was interacting with the other machina. Sneaking a peek at the inner workings of the machines that hung above us in class had given me valuable insight into some of the simple technology of the ancients. Simple didn’t mean it they weren’t sophisticated, though. They were very good at performing their small roles, and that was just the insight I’d needed.

I was overthinking things! Criss-crossing highways and super interconnectivity… I was trying to do too much to get Mae’s second device working. I thought because she was so complex, of course she would need a complex device to work inside. Despite Mae’s sophistication, she hadn’t known any better, either. She had limited space in me, and the device burned into my chest, and none of the data about her construction had been included in that piece. She was a wizard with munje, but a dunce with her own technology.

On the morning of the second rest day, I gave everyone a break from training and snatched Mae’s secondary device, pocketing it before Il-sung or Ko-nah could notice. I made my way to the main pagoda, up to Woong-ji’s office, and knocked on her door.

“Come in,” the old master called from the other side.

I opened the door a crack before it was met with resistance from the other side, along with the sound of scrapes and clanks. I peered in to see a pile of spare parts blocking my entry. I gave the door another good shove, and opened it just wide enough to squeeze through. The parts weren’t just any parts, they went to something huge, and they were scattered all throughout her office.

“What’s all this?” I asked as I turned to find my master. The door to her workshop was open at the other end of the room, and I saw white sparks flying as her shadow bounced against the wall. She was welding.

I carefully navigated the space until I made it back to her. I shielded my eyes and felt around for a pair of the blackened goggles hanging above the desk.

Woong-ji’s hair was pulled back and covered with a bonnet, and she didn’t wear her normal robes of purple and golden cogs, but a plain black dobok. She had a brown, leather apron tied around her waist that had been burned many times, and she wore a thick leather glove on one hand. Her other hand sported several red burns, and the tip of her index finger was blackened from soot and smoke.

“So, what is all this, anyway?” I asked as I gestured to the parts strewn about her office.

She cut off her stream of en munje after a moment and sighed, then wiped her sweaty brow and pulled up her goggles. “It’s a new project, something big.”

I glanced around at the pieces of metal casing, large cogs, and hydraulic pumps. It looked like it might be a battle bot… I smirked and asked, “Going to crush little Tuko this time?”

She raised a brow, a playful smile on her lips. “You’ve missed the mark.”

I made my way to an open—but still cluttered—workbench. “If you need any help, I am your apprentice,” I reminded her.

She hummed and said, “Yes, I was considering it. But I’m having so much fun, I couldn’t bring myself to part with any of the work.”

“I hope I have your passion when I reach your age,” I said as I cleared a space to work.

Woong-ji belly-laughed, then said, “Your passion seems to grow with every passing day. I have no doubt your love of machina will weather every storm of life.”

I set about getting my mind in the right space to work as Woong-ji returned to her welding. I breathed shallow and consistently as I kept a steady trickle of ma munje directed toward Mae’s device. I disconnected the many highways in a neat fashion, ensuring that only the primary power flow and a single memory node were hooked up.

‘Ready to try this?’ I asked Mae in my head.

“Ready,” she replied with excitement.

I powered the device with ma and watched it spark to life in my mind’s eye. The memory node blinked and then lit up with gold brilliance.

‘Okay, get in there.’

She made a sound like blowing out all the air in her lungs, then said, “Here goes nothing.”

Mae’s consciousness tickled just below the surface of my skin as I felt her using my munje to broadcast herself. The hairs on my arms stood on end, and the air around me pulsed with static.

In my mind’s eye, I saw purple-blue light flood into the device. It roved over the broken connections, then followed the power highway straight to the active node. The gold of the node light bled through with blue, little by little, until my ma munje was pushed out.

Little blue fireworks burst across my vision and Mae shouted aloud, “It worked!”

I jumped from my seat with a whooping, “Yes!” as I looked down at the softly glowing metal. The casing had gone from solid silver to translucent with its activation. It thrummed with blue and purple light—like Mae—and gave off a faint buzzing.

My hands trembled and a levity filled my chest. I breathed a deep sigh. Finally, after months of hard work, we’d done it. We had to undo nearly everything we’d already done, but with the new, simple design, we’d make quick work of enabling the whole device.

“Congratulations, Jiyong,” Woong-ji said as she patted my back. “This calls for a celebration drink.”

Woong-ji stepped into her office and a moment later, I heard her rummaging around in one of her desk drawers. “Where did I put it?” she asked herself as the drawer opening and closing continued.

“So, what’s it like to have some extra room?” I asked Mae aloud.

“Quiet,” she said with awe. “It’s not very big, mind you, but it’s a peaceful little corner.”

I smiled and said, “Let’s turn that corner into your own house, shall we?”

“Ah! Found you!” Woong-je shouted with delight. She returned to the workshop with a dusty bottle of amber liquid in one hand and two clean teacups in the other.

She set the ornate glasses on the burnt work bench. The bottle thupped as she pulled the cork from the top. With a swirl of blue en munje, she pulled appropriate portions from the bottle with a flourish and dropped them in the cups. I smirked. Woong-ji didn’t often show off her other skills, but I knew she had them—unlike Pa-ne.

Woong-ji scowled at me. “What’s this?”

I shrugged. “My ma repair and design class isn’t as expected.”

“Well,” she sighed as she corked the bottle once more. “Things get better as the classes get smaller. The first two years are just to weed out the weak. You won’t be behind in every subject, especially one you’re passionate about.”

She held the amber-filled cup out and I accepted it.

“I suppose not. His methods for tracing the designs on paper did help us come up with the more simplistic solution that led to success… so perhaps that is something to be happy about.”

Woong-ji grinned and clinked her cup against mine. “Geonbae!”

“Geonbae!” I replied and smiled back. I put the cup to my lips and felt instant regret at the smell of the liquid.

This.

Was.

Foul.

I drank it anyway. The liquid burned my mouth, all the way down my throat, and simmered like bubbling magma in my stomach. The burn swam through my veins until it filled up my entire being with heat. I used my core to cycle the warmth away into ma munje, and noticed that the input of heat converted into a far greater output of munje than it should’ve. What was this foul elixir?

Woong-ji whooped and shook her head, loosing the bonnet and setting her wild salt and pepper hair free. “More?” she asked as she held the bottle out to me.

“What is it?” I asked with a scowl, accepting a second pour.

“Sung-ki makes it special for me. It amplifies ma creation. Now I can stay up all night working without breaking to eat,” she grinned so wide it wrinkled her nose. We both laughed and sipped the nasty beverage.

“Master?” I asked as I set my empty cup down. She hummed and filled her cup again. “I’m concerned about something. I don’t know who to talk to.”

She raised a brow. “There’s many things I can tell are weighing on you heavily.”

I nodded. “There are far too many. Where do I begin…”

I told Woong-ji everything. My mother, Ko-nah, Tae-do, the prank potions and the druggie I’d seen in Pi-Ki, the signal coming from all of them—everything.

At the end of it, she nodded and said, “It seems like you’ve entangled yourself in quite a lot this semester.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

She blew her lips out in a raspberry, the smell of liquor traveling on the air. “I could tell you all kinds of things I would do, but none of them would be what you need to do.”

“But you’re my mentor, my master. Don’t you have any advice?” I asked, outraged.

She nodded again, deeply. “I do, but I don’t think you need any of it. Mae has the right idea. Your mother is a priority. The sungchal are investigating the drugs, and Min-hwan is already onto the prank scheme in the school. Sung-ki will be making a statement and locking down the alchemy lab tomorrow.”

I sighed in defeat, having wished there was some magical solution she could’ve given me.

She stepped closer and touched my arm. “You will always have someone trying to cheat off you. There will always be someone looking for the fast, cheap, and easy solution. It does not exist. The answer lies in the determination of the human spirit. You have that in spades.

“If Ko-nah knows about Mae, and he is the person you tell me he is, the information will come out no matter what you do to prevent it. You need to shift your thinking—now before it’s too late. Either you’re in this to help shape him into the man he can be, or you’re in this to save your own hide. The latter is a waste of time for a Bastion. You do not learn when you’re protecting your fear. Change your fate, erase the fear, believe in your path forward and reshape your destiny!”

She was practically glowing, her fist clenched in determination as she looked off into the distance. There was something heroic about her, despite her small stature and wild hair. The fervor in her eyes faded as she looked back to me.

She cleared her throat, then finished her drink and poured us both another. “Do you understand?”

I nodded. “Completely.”

There was a warmth in my chest that verified the truth of her words. She was one hundred percent right. I needed to go all in or cut ties. Bastions didn’t do anything if it wasn’t to their highest capabilities.

Shin-soo flashed in my mind’s eye for the briefest of seconds and with it came a flood of fear. “You don’t mess with the Wong family,” his voice repeated in my head with uncanny clarity. If I did this, and failed, I would be doing exactly that. But if I succeeded, Ko-nah would be a powerful ally.

I was going all in.