บท 1: CH1: Coming Storm
A North wind swept through, tripping Geiger counters and delicate systems, preventing radiation from infiltrating the soil. Hardy cows did their business as electrical shocks lit up from fleeing mutants attempting to get in through our fence. Normally, I would shoot them as a mercy, but my mind was elsewhere. A rare blood bat found its way into our fence, beaten by our technology despite its flight and powerful senses. When it gave up on getting our cattle, I flipped off the fence momentarily, letting the bat fly back into the forest before flipping the fence back on.
Blood bats hunted many of the most harmful insect-type mutants with a better chance of sneaking past our fence and infecting our cattle with diseases or killing them outright. Father taught my brother Jason and me to care for the ecosystem around us when possible. While the old man had many problems, he taught us what we needed.
My father didn't like the official terms set aside by the government. Mana and the eastern chi were terms for the same thing, in the old man's opinion. Father stressed simple and reliable techniques over flashy spells or body improvement alone when we trained. He always argued that it's more important to sense energy and figure things out than to blast and forget. The old man was Ra on his wanted posters and named me Atom while he kept a god's name.
Only after he left and my brother and I ransacked his journals did we gain any kind of understanding. The old man liked to travel the world, learning new techniques from mages everywhere. Anyone who knew anything about using energy had a student in my father. Once he learned what he wanted, the old man vanished shortly before the vampires caught up to the poor bastard teaching him.
Those government-hunting dogs with their energy-breeching relics were the bane of a source user's existence, well, them and the occasional Cyborg. But the latter doesn't often leave the megacities. Not that it mattered; the old man wasn't scared of them. Father taught us two things in all the time he raised us.
"Three," Jason said.
"Shut up. I'm trying to get my thoughts together." I said.
"Energy sensing, energy manipulation, and seals are the three foundational teachings of our father Ra," Jason said.
I gave Jason the stink eye while he hammered a replacement post in the array. Some mutant managed to bypass our detection and warding seals and fried itself on our fence. The poor thing was burnt to a crisp and still smoking. I saw two heads on one blackened scaley body with pigmy wings.
Magic creatures often mutated; sometimes, they survived and continued growing stronger; other times, our fence got them.
"When will you get a girlfriend and leave our father's house?" Jason said.
"Why don't you?" I asked.
"I'm the oldest; the house is mine by right," Jason said.
"Then maybe I should just mooch off you and stop helping with fence repairs. You'll need some practice when you're doing it alone." I said.
"So it will be no different than usual," Jason said.
I rolled my eyes and gripped one of the posts. My energy ran along it carefully in an application of energy control. Seals quickly covered the log, and Jason handed me our bucket of hog blood. Energy wanted to attach to life, and blood was one of the symbolic ingredients that worked with it since we had yet to graduate to the construct technique.
After an hour of carving and spilling blood, we pounded the new post into the ground and activated the fence. Red energy mixed with blue before a solid purple field took effect.
Colors didn't mean much where energy was concerned. Father would say mages were lazy and didn't want to practice the basics, only throwing themselves into elementalism. In practice, I could throw a mean fireball, and Jason was missing out on being a snow cone salesman.
"I can sense the waves of energy needed to record. And we both know you would be unemployed. Who needs fire in this heat?" Jason said.
"What do you eat your food raw?" I asked.
After pounding the post into the ground aligned with our laser grid, it was time for our morning training. We made our way to a square of dirt where the grass was pounded down from our daily spars. At first, it had been a small circle, but as we grew more powerful and skilled, the circle expanded until Jason froze sections to turn it into a square.
Father always had us train against each other. That was mostly no-holds-barred combat. Jason and I moved, trading blows, testing each other's barrier for weak points while trying to trick each other into committing. Jason liked to play the defensive until he could attack decisively.
I caught Jason's thrown fist and tackled him. We fought in the dirt under the protection of the barrier; blows rained between us, blocked by energy shielding. Anytime we gained an advantage in technique, the other quickly copied it. While it helped us grow little by little, it felt like I had already hit a wall on the farm.
Jason slammed his fist down, cracking the ground and throwing a powerful hook my way. I felt the blow crack my jaw. My brother's eyes blazed as he threw a flurry of blows I struggled to counter. It wasn't like him to attack recklessly. His flurry allowed me to recover and guard until he tired himself out. My fist returned a heavy blow to his jaw when he slowed. We traded blows until he lowered his hands.
His energy emerged as a blue freezing aura while mine countered his in the form of a blazing inferno. Our power clashed in pseudo evocations of our will brought into existence from the energy in our bodies. The ground around of burned into slag and froze over as we traded ever heavier blows. Jason increased his energy by growing his aura then he condensed it tightly around himself, forming a shell of power.
My expanded aura crashed against his new shell, breaking apart long before it affected him. Jason stepped in my guard and swept through my aura as if it wasn't there.
Jason had a pleased smirk on his face.
"It seems you're behind again, little brother. Maybe you should train more instead of exploring the woods at night." Jason said.
I pulled my aura tight, condensing it, forming a red shell similar to Jason's. Mine had a slightly fiery flare but otherwise looked the same.
The sun had already sunk beneath the tree line, painting the world in shades of orange. If not for our fence containing our power, the government would have sent vampires to take our heads or take us to their reeducation camps.
"When did you learn how to do this? I've been working on it for weeks." Jason said.
An energy shell wasn't quite like a barrier or flaring aura. It was more advanced, a technique we both knew about and obviously practiced. Jason seemed to think he was the only one going for it.
"We live together, eat together, and train together. Is it weird? I thought practicing this would give me an edge, too." I rubbed the back of my head. "Do you think maybe it's time we fought other people?" I said.
"You're breaking up with me," I said
I wanted to laugh; even covered in a blue aura shell, my brother looked as stoic and unamused as ever.
"I'm going to beat the stupid out of you," Jason said.
We clashed, and the fence hiding our power vibrated. The intricate seals flashed once before sputtering out. I cut off my shell immediately, and Jason did the same.
"Do you think we were detected?" I asked.
"We need to get the fence back up before mutants try to rush inside," Jason said.
The sun was already down, the chickens were roosting, and I could already hear the howls of wolves. We were far enough from the nearest mega city or vampire stronghold that we were probably too much trouble to come after.
Jason went to work carving runes by hand while I removed the posts from the fence that shorted. I wore an enchanted earpiece that let me talk to Jason no matter where we were on the farm, among other things. It was the energy manipulator's answer to many old pieces of technology.
The vampire hunters called it magitech, but Father thought the hunters were strange people. Technology was technology, whether it ran on electricity or mana. One of the few times my old man used such a dirty word. To this day, I've never used the word around my brother.
"Terms used by those ignorant savages don't bother me. If they want to call their elementalists mages, that is their prerogative. I have no issue with them wearing bright-colored bathrobes; it makes them easier to shoot." Jason said.
His words were a mask he wore to keep up appearances. Jason was the one who filled our bathroom with mage tomes. My brother waxed his mustache and bleached the ends to attract the attention of the Vampire Hunter Association's young miss. The daughter of the Grand Inquisitory Emily.
"It's great that you've learned to compromise." I rolled my eyes and yanked a still-burning post out of the ground. A whistling sound tipped me off in time to catch one of the new posts after Jason threw it. "These are my thoughts and observations. Could you stop interrupting me?" I asked.
"No," Jason said.
We fixed the fence in silence for a time.
"We had the same idea. What does that mean?" Jason asked.
The shell was a step in the concealment branch of aura manipulation or pseudo-evocation. While attached to the body, aura still physically affects the outside world. The shell contained the aura restraining it to keep energy from spilling out. By reabsorbing the energy, stamina loss was greatly diminished. However, the idea of the concealment branch of aura manipulation was to eventually hide energy from observers, either technological or organic. If I wanted to travel without a legion of vampires on my heels, then concealment was the branch to master above even enhancement or pure evocation.
"You wanted to leave like Father. This is our home." Jason said.
Jason wasn't the only one who could break into another's cube documents. My brother wanted to go to Egypt mage college with his girlfriend and leave me behind.
"He left us to be free because we were holding him back. If we want to catch up and see him again, we must master concealment." I said.
I grabbed my T98 rifle from the shed. While mostly wood with a short barrel and energy-infused steel for the barrel, it could handle the depleted uranium rounds like a dream. Seals were used in the construction and after for a variety of effects. The seals glowed a fiery orange, invisible to anyone who couldn't sense energy. It was compact for wooded areas with a nice fat 50-round magazine. The weapon weighed 9lbs with the ammunition, and most of all, it was quiet. The rounds had a full metal jacket to punch through mutant hide, energy shields, and vampire armor. I kept my eyes away from all the failed attempts collecting rust on the floor and grabbed a knife.
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