Web of Knowledge - Chapter 25: Ethics of Combat

Akari practically skipped into her Theoretical Aspects classroom the next day. Her teacher sat behind a wooden desk at the front, leafing through a stack of papers as she settled in. A thirty-ounce Jumpstart mug sat in one corner, along with the half-eaten remains of a chocolate muffin. Various equations filled the whiteboard to her left, but they seemed far less relevant than they had a few days before.

Despite the class’s name, everything she’d learned had applied to yesterday’s ritual. Now, she’d finally completed her goal and aspected her mana. Everything else really would be theoretical after this.

Akari unzipped the top of her backpack and pulled out her midterm paper.

The gray-haired woman finally glanced up, eying Akari with those judgemental blue eyes.

“Good morning, Master Seathorn,” Akari said in her most polite voice. Then she set down her paper on the desk.

The woman’s gaze settled on the front page, then she frowned as she took in the title. “I’m disappointed, Miss Zeller. I specifically told you this ritual would never work.”

“I know,” Akari said. “But I disagreed.”

“You disagreed,” she deadpanned. “You think you know better than the experts now?”

Akari shrugged.

Seathorn picked up the paper and began leafing through it. “This is the same thing you showed me before. You even left in the hacking mana. Hacking mana has absolutely nothing to do with spacetime.”

Akari kept her face diplomatically blank. “I wrote my reasoning on the next page.”

“Yes ... I’m sure you did.” Her frown deepened even further when she reached the section with the proposed artifacts. “There’s no such thing as a Master Key. Where’d you even hear a rumor like that?”

“Irina Darklight,” she replied. Irina had bought the key on the black market, but Akari kept that part to herself.

Seathorn ignored that. “You know I can’t give you a passing grade for this.”

“What if I can prove it works?” Akari asked.

“No,” Seathorn said. “It would be unethical of me to encourage such a test.”

Akari stretched out her open palms and released a cloud of her aspected mana.

“What is that?” the older woman asked.

Akari kept the same innocent expression as before. “Spacetime mana.”

They stared at each other for several long seconds with Seathorn’s eyes occasionally darting to her outstretched palms. Akari could feel half the class watching her, too.

“With a touch of hacking mana,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“You didn’t have this aspect on Kelsday,” Seathorn said. Her tone came out more like an accusation than a question.

“It was a weekend experiment.”

Another pause, far longer than the first.

“So ... “ Akari shifted from foot to foot, biting her lip to hide her smirk. “Does this mean I pass?”

~~~

“Try it again,” Irina told Kalden for the tenth time that day. “But even slower.”

He stretched out his hand and sent another crimson Missile across the table. Three weeks had passed since he’d gotten his aspect, and winter had arrived in earnest. A thin blanket of snow covered the backyard, and rows of icicles hung from the covered porch beyond the dining room.His Missile floated across the table, grazing the surface of the pebble Irina had placed in the center. As always, his new mana was the color of blood, and this particular Missile had a transparent quality, as if he’d painted it with watercolor.

No sooner had the mana grazed the pebble than Kalden pulled it back to his outstretched hand. Irina called this a Circuit, and it was the basis for most knowledge techniques. Essentially, you sent out a Missile, retrieved some information, and then brought the Missile back into your body.

Movies always made this process look effortless. You'd see a detective hurl a dozen Missiles around a crime scene, then he’d draw immediate conclusions before his mana faded to mist. The reality was far more complicated. First, you had to catch the Missiles and cycle them back through your channels and into your brain. Only then could you glean something about your target.

What’s more, human brains weren’t built to understand knowledge mana the way they understood language, sounds, or pictures. This was raw and nonsensical—half database and half sandstorm. Kalden tried to make sense of it by focusing harder, but that was like watching a single grain in the storm. Not only would you lose the grain, but your tunnel vision would cause you to lose sight of the storm itself.

“Are these headaches normal?” Kalden asked as he rubbed his temples.

“They’re common for beginners,” Irina said from across the table. “But you can’t blame the mana. Focus on your body first. Keep it loose and relaxed.

He followed her advice, tensing and relaxing his muscles the way he would before a duel. His mana flowed slower through his channels, and his thoughts followed.

“Now,” Irina said. “Release the mana as slowly as possible. Pretend you’re forming a Construct.

Kalden nodded, balancing his forward pressure until the Missile slid across the table like a snail. Once again, it grazed the pebble’s surface and returned to his hand.

“Good,” she said. “Now maintain that speed as you cycle.”

And here came the frustrating part. Most Mana Artists trained to cycle faster, not slower. That was the only way to form a proper Missile in the lower ranks. Even as an Apprentice, faster Missiles were harder for your opponents to dodge, and they hit harder when they struck. That all started with more speed in your channels. But this felt downright unnatural, like giving a speech in slow motion when you knew every line by heart.

At first, he’d been excited to train with a new aspect. It was easy to look back on your life and see the early days as one long series of dramatic breakthroughs, with a new technique mastered every other week.

But it wasn’t so fun in the moment. At least he’d known where he stood as a Blade Artist. He could feel when a technique worked and when it didn’t. He could feel his mistakes and adjust accordingly. But Kalden had no idea how knowledge mana was supposed to feel, much less what he was doing wrong. He might as well have been learning to play a song based on Irina’s descriptions.

“Don’t rush it,” she said. “Embrace the boredom. You have all the time in the world.”

That wasn’t true, of course. The qualifying rounds could start any day, and … but no, Kalden drew in another long breath and cleared his thoughts. Mana Arts was a series of small moments, and worrying about the future wouldn’t help him now.

His brain absorbed the mana, but the same rush of information overwhelmed him, like watching a hundred televisions at double speed. He could tell the information related to the pebble, but that was the extent of it.

“How’s the headache?” Irina asked.

“Better that time,” he admitted.

“Processing the information comes next,” she said. “Your prefrontal cortex will try to interpret everything, but it’s not suited to dealing with knowledge mana. You’ll only exhaust yourself if you try.”

“No argument there,” Kalden muttered. Five minutes of this was easily worth an hour of regular studying.

“This will sound counterintuitive,” she said, “but you need to let the sensations pass by. Pretend you’re meditating, and the knowledge mana is a distraction. You recognize it, but you don’t dwell on it. Do this for a few more weeks, and your prefrontal cortex will stop trying to interpret it.”

Kalden frowned. “Then how do I use the information? Besides advancing to Master, or building a Second Brain.”

“Think of it like catching a ball. Your brain knows what to do, even if you can’t put the specifics into words. Knowledge mana will be the same way. You’ll make correct conclusions, and the real challenge will be showing your work.”

This continued over the next few days. Kalden gradually wove his intention into the Missiles, focused on retrieving just a single parameter from the pebble. For example, how hard could he throw it? His aspect seemed to like anything involving motion—probably because it tied into combat.

His intention was still weak as an Apprentice, but the effort made a difference. If he expected to get less information from the pebble, he would. That gave his brain less to process, but more useful information to work with.

“I’m beginning to see why Knowledge Arts isn’t more popular,” Kalden said to Irina during another session. Before, he’d wondered why more people didn’t choose this aspect. Even if it ranked among the most difficult in terms of raw shaping skills, the benefits should have made it more widespread.

But training with your body had a certain simplicity. You could drink potions, build mana, and watch your numbers increase. Humans had been doing that for thousands of years; they were wired that way.

Meditation was a far more challenging game. Still, no serious Mana Artist could escape this, especially toward the peak of the Artisan realm. Meditation would help you reflect on your weaknesses and see your goals. Meditation would give you the revelations you’d need to climb the ranks of Masters and Mystics.

~~~

Akari exhaled as she pushed the two-hundred-pound barbell above her chest. Three weeks ago, she could barely manage to press her own body weight, even with her mana flowing. Now, she was approaching twice that number without it.

She could triple the number if she Cloaked the right muscles, but everyone had warned her against that. Apparently, the month after advancement was the most common time for injuries. People got too confident, thought they were invincible, or just wanted to push themselves. Then those injuries set them back several months.

Either way, being an Apprentice was awesome.

If she’d struggled with something before her advancement, her body had noted that weakness and adjusted accordingly. This was why she’d spent so much time in the Darklight’s gym, not to mention all those broken bones with Relia.

This was also why her vision hadn’t fixed itself. She normally wore her glasses while training, so her body didn’t see a problem. Eyes were also a lot more complicated than muscles, bones, or skin. You couldn’t just pump them full of mana and make them stronger.

Irina had mentioned surgeries that could fix her vision, but only Grandmasters could perform those safely. And of course, she'd have to get in line behind a thousand other people. She’d worn contacts back in Last Haven, but even that was lower on her priority list now that her new glasses were practically unbreakable.

“Need a spotter?” Kalden asked as he stepped into the gym.

“I’m good.” Akari let out a long breath as she put the barbell back on the stand. She lay there for a second, her chest rising and falling with heavy breaths.

Kalden reached the end of the bench and offered her a hand. She accepted it, and he pulled her up into a kiss.

Akari melted into it, feeling the sensation of his lips, and the stubble on his chin. Then she grinned when they apart. “I’m all sweaty.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Kalden said with a shrug. “You look good when you’re lifting weights.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong about that. Akari still wasn’t as fit as Relia, but her muscles definitely popped more after reaching Apprentice. Especially her shoulders, biceps, and abs. She gave Kalden a longer kiss, then sauntered over to a pair of waiting dumbbells.

She stretched out her hands toward the dumbbells, creating portals on the floor beneath them. Then she raised her hands skyward and formed another set of portals on the ceiling. The weights fell through the portals and into her waiting hands.

Kalden took a seat on the nearby bench. “I see your aspect’s going well.”

“Yeah.” Akari closed her eyes as she curled the weights up toward her shoulders. “Took a few weeks, but I got the hang of it.”

So far, all her parents’ theories about spacetime mana had come true. Ordinary space mana had been ridiculously expensive. Even a freshly minted Apprentice couldn’t manage more than three or four portals.

But all techniques got more expensive as you climbed Salvatore’s Scale of Abstraction. Space and time mana were both high on that scale, so expensive techniques were expected. People had considered this normal for decades.

Then her parents did the math and realized the numbers didn’t add up. Space and time mana had more than twice the loss of other aspects on the same tier.

“When I move an object through space,” Mazren had said, “I’m also altering its position in time. It’s impossible to change one parameter without the other. In other words, I’m rewriting things my aspect isn’t suited to. That’s like having one hand tied behind my back.”

Now, Akari could form anywhere between five to ten portals, depending on their size. And this was just the beginning. She still had to dive into Circuit swapping, time dilation, pocket dimensions, and advanced Cloaks. But that would all take years of study and training. For now, she was just lucky to learn one technique before the qualifying rounds.

“How about you?” she asked as she lowered the dumbbells to her sides.

“The combat part’s going well. The knowledge part …” Kalden waggled a hand from side to side. “Let’s just say I’m glad we last fought before we aspected our mana.”

“Still haven’t seen the new blades yet,” Akari said. Then again, they hadn’t done much fighting since midterms. Even Raizen had shifted his class to more of a tactical focus. Apparently, that had been everyone’s biggest weakness during the exam.

Raizen had praised her use of portals during their one-on-one meeting, but he’d given her a long lecture about how she’d engaged Kalden’s team.

“If you wanted to fight someone,” he’d said in his office. “You could have picked a random enemy squad on the street. Your team had an advantage, and you wasted it. You’ve been careful in your duels all semester, but reaching Apprentice has made you stupid.”

That stung, but he wasn’t wrong. She’d realized the same thing after she’d eliminated Tori. That was why she’d run for the control room rather than engage Kalden.

And then Raizen had told Nico, “Use your brain next time. Don’t follow Zeller into battle just because she wants to be a badass.”

Kalden had obviously been a bad leader too, but he’d done it on purpose to prevent Blood Army from doing too well. Raizen seemed to understand that, but he’d still lectured Kalden on how he could have achieved his goal through better communication.

“Are you doing anything after this?” Kalden asked.

“Taking a shower.” She raised her eyebrows at him. “Wanna come?”

“Sure,” he said without missing a beat. “I’ll go see if Relia’s free to join us, too.”

Her eyes narrowed. It had been far easier to make him blush and stammer two weeks ago. But of course—in typical Kalden fashion—he’d adapted to her tactics and started calling her bluff.

They’d already had their first date, but things had moved slowly beyond that. Sure, they’d had their share of make-out sessions in the pool house, but nothing too serious. She was actually fine with that in hindsight.

Kalden had said they needed to take their time and discuss what they were comfortable with. That had seemed silly at first, and she’d accused him of overthinking things. But then he’d started using combat metaphors, and things slowly made more sense. You didn’t just rush into a fight without a plan. And you definitely didn’t rush in without any combat experience.

As nice as that first night had been, Akari had actually been a bad kisser. She’d asked Kalden about it, and he’d hesitated for several seconds before saying, “You were good.” Which was code for “terrible.” If they’d gone any further, Akari probably would have gotten stumped and not known what to do.

“Seriously,” Kalden said. “What are you really doing tonight? Besides showering, I mean.”

Her frown deepened. “Meeting my group in Old Town. Supposed to work on that stupid Ethics project.”

He nodded. “I was supposed to meet my group tonight, but Tori just texted me and said her mom’s back in the hospital.” He paused. “Want to do something tomorrow, then?”

“Sure,” Akari said as she lowered the weights on the mat. Tomorrow was Talekday, and her Artegium classes had been suspiciously light in terms of homework. Finally, things were looking up for both of them. Despite their crazy training schedules, their lives had actually started to feel somewhat normal.

~~~

Two hours later, Akari sat with her group in a tiny Old Town cafe. All five of them sat nestled in a corner booth between a brick wall and a tall glass window. Old-fashioned lightbulbs cast a soft glow over their table, and the scent of freshly ground coffee beans wafted through the air.

Akari sipped her own coffee, staring out the front window while Nico and Sadie argued over the last problem.

Outside, a massive Midwinter tree filled the town square, covered in various lights and ornaments. Dozens of stalls surrounded the tree in a loose circle, all part of Koreldon City’s famous Midwinter Market. More lights decorated the buildings, along with ornamented archways where the cobblestone paths led back to the main roads.

Akari had never liked Midwinter on Arkala. People always spent that time with their families, but she hadn’t had one of those. Yes, she’d technically been living with her father, but Mazren hadn’t remembered her. She didn’t blame him, though. He’d been a Grandmaster, lowered to a mere Foundation. Then some algorithm had stuck him with Noella, a woman he didn’t love.

Now, the lights and snow brought back happier memories—memories of Last Haven with her parents. But then her thoughts took a darker turn when she remembered that she’d lost that life forever. Even a Spacetime Mystic couldn’t undo the mistakes she’d made.

“Akari?” Nico’s voice pulled her from her reverie.

“Yeah?” She snapped her attention back to the table as if she hadn’t been daydreaming for the past five minutes.

“You’ve been quiet,” he said. “Who’s side are you on?”

Akari suppressed a groan as she glanced back at her textbook. This project was for Ethics of Combat—an Artegium class with Grandmaster Truewater—and they had to work through various moral dilemmas. This last question was a variation of the classic train track problem, except it had a fresh coat of pain to confuse them.

“Neither,” she said. “It’s a bullshit question meant to make us argue.” That was, of course, the real point of these group projects. Her whole team knew the game by now, but they still kept playing it.

“But what if you were the Mana Artist in this situation?” Nico pressed. “You can’t just do nothing.”

“Sure I can.” Akari jabbed a finger at her textbook. “That’s one of the choices.”

“So you’d let ten innocent people die?”

“Potentially,” Sadie said for the fifth time that night. “Better than having one innocent person die from your own Missile.”

Akari sipped her coffee and considered the problem. “I’d flip a coin.”

The others stared at her as if she’d suggested killing an Angel. Even Nimble looked surprised, and he’d lost interest in this problem ten minutes ago.

“Yeah …” Akari took another sip and nodded to herself. “If the coin flip felt right, I’d go with it. If it felt wrong, I’d do the opposite.”

Sadie blinked at her. “So you’re saying you don’t care?”

Akari shrugged. “I’m saying I’d do what felt right in the moment. That’s all you guys are doing, anyway. You’re just thinking up fancy reasons to justify it.”

“Unfortunately,” Nico said. “We can’t write that down as our answer.”

“Why not?” Akari asked.

“We need at least three paragraphs,” Sadie said.

That was another bullshit rule. A choice wasn’t more “right” just because you could explain it with a bunch of words. Then again, could she write three paragraphs explaining how most moral reasoning happened retroactively?

Akari slid her coffee cup aside and reached out her hands. “Pass me the laptop. I’ll write it.”

Nico slid the laptop across the table’s wooden surface, and she was done ten minutes later.

“Your grammar needs work,” he said when he took the computer back. “But this is actually good stuff.”

Nine o’clock finally rolled around, and Akari slid out of the booth to head home. She was probably the only college student in town who went to bed before ten, but her summer schedule had stuck with her all throughout the semester. Others might be able to sleep in the next morning, but not future Mystics.

As she left, Akari conjured a portal underneath the table, no bigger than the palm of her hand. She formed the second half of the portal on her cell phone, and she pressed the device to her ear as she stepped outside.

The portal was one-way, so it let her listen in without them hearing any sounds from her side. If any of them got under the table, they might see a faint rippling of spacetime mana, but that was unlikely.

Akari had started this habit a few weeks ago when she first got her aspect. Was it paranoid? Maybe. But you couldn’t be too careful before the qualifying rounds. Even ignoring that factor, she couldn’t resist knowing what people said behind her back.

“You have your sound suppressor?” Nico asked.

“Yep,” Jax replied.

“Put it up.”

A brief silence followed as Jax unzipped and rummaged through his backpack. They’d never bothered putting up a sound suppressor before.

“What’s this about?” Sadie asked a few seconds later.

“I don’t know if I want to go through with this,” Nico said.

“With what?” Nimble asked.

Another silence fell over the table—probably some exchange of facial expressions she couldn’t see. Akari pressed the phone harder against her ear, but she couldn’t hear anything but the cafe’s soft background music.

“This whole thing was your idea,” Nimble said. “Moonfire will be pissed if we back out now.”

“He’s right,” Sadie said. “I didn’t wanna play the backstabbing game either, but we’re already in too deep.”

“Elise will have her own problems,” Nico said.

“Don’t underestimate her,” Sadie said. “She’s like the most dangerous person in our year.”

“Akari’s dangerous too,” Nico countered. “She beat me before she was an Apprentice. Then she killed all of Blood Army’s leaders without a real aspect. Now she has both things. Why would we make an enemy of her?”

“Because Moonfire is even worse,” Jax muttered in his usual quiet voice.

“We should stick to the plan,” Nimble said. “Take her out with a surprise attack. Quick and quiet. She’ll never see it coming.”

Nico let out a long sigh. “This doesn’t feel wrong to anyone else? We’ve been in a group together this whole semester. Isn’t Akari more of a friend than a teammate by now?”

“It’s part of the game,” Nimble said.

“And Akari’s shady,” Jax cut in.

“How?”

“She says she lived in Vaslana for years, but she doesn’t speak any Cadrian.”

“So what? Maybe she trained with some hidden Master and didn’t get out much.”

“Then there’s the space mana stuff,” Sadie said. “Do you know how hard it is to use liquid space mana without the aspect?”

“Hard?” Nico guessed.

“More like unprecedented,” Sadie said. “About as unprecedented as Kalden Trengsen’s pure blade mana tricks. Just one more connection that she’ll deny if you ask her.”

“Okay,” Nico said, “So she’s a good Mana Artist. So is everyone here.”

“If she’s so good,” Nimble said, “then why wasn’t she an Apprentice yet? And why did she rush to get into this program when she’s only sixteen? We’ve tried asking her all this, but she dodges the questions every time.”

“This still proves nothing,” Nico said.

“It proves she’s not our friend,” Sadie said. “She’s using us. She probably plans to betray us when the qualifying rounds start. Better to get this over with and join up with Moon Army. It’s our best chance forward.”

More arguments followed as Nico questioned Elise Moonfire’s motives, and whether they’d actually get farther as her ally. But that didn’t matter. They eventually put it to a vote, and they all agreed to betray Akari once the qualifier rounds started.

Talek. This team had always been a means to an end, but it still stung. Especially since Akari hadn’t planned to betray any of them. Why would she? Kalden and Relia were her true allies, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t have more. Unlike the bigger factions, she didn’t care about controlling the spots for the interschool battlegrounds.

Nico had defended her, but what had Nimble said earlier? “This whole thing was your idea?” How long had they been planning this?

Akari broke her portals and shoved her phone into her coat pocket as she walked another block toward the train station. At least she knew what to expect once the qualifying rounds started. She’d just have to—

Akari froze when she saw another figure on the snow-covered train platform. He looked like a young Shokenese man, wearing a long black trench coat. He turned to face her as she crested the staircase, revealing his face in the light.

Kalden’s brother. She’d met Sozen a few times now, and he was easy to recognize with his angled face and thin black beard. Akari confirmed this a second later when she activated her Silver Sight and saw his Artisan’s soul.

“Good evening, Miss Zeller.” He took a few steps toward her, snowflakes dancing around him with every step.

Akari’s instincts screamed at her to run, but she couldn’t say why. He wasn’t cycling his mana, and even his posture looked calm and relaxed.

Then Sozen swept his coat aside, revealing a steel Missile rod.

What the hell? They were standing on a train platform with security cameras everywhere. Did he seriously think he could attack her?

Akari cycled her own mana and readied an escape portal. She’d already fought one Artisan, and she didn’t feel like going back for seconds.

But Sozen was quicker. He raised the Missile rod at her and pulled the trigger. The Missile closed in, too quick to block or dodge.

Akari felt no pain when the Missile struck her chest. Instead, her mana stopped cycling, and her muscles went numb. Her vision blurred after that, and even her thoughts went blank as paper.

Her legs buckled, and the concrete platform rose up to meet her. Sozen rushed forward and caught her before the darkness closed in.