12 Miles Below

Book 4. Chapter 11: Min/maxing

Wrath had gotten a good haul of information from our archive spelunking. About seven petabytes of video, image and audio media all lumped together in no particular order. Mostly video footage hogging up the bill. Some of which must contain some footage of the human emperor in action, hopefully. Gods, we could have brought back even more had we kept the connection up for longer. The seven petabytes were only a fraction of all the video footage left molding inside that archive.

Even as a machine, it would take her some time to go through all of that and organize what we got.

Not to mention the twenty-two gigabytes of text data we recovered, which sounds a lot less compared to the video footage - until you realized just how much text takes up a single gigabyte. About two million words per each one. As Wrath explained to me, it would be roughly 2064888.1 minutes to read a single full gigabyte of simple averaged text. And at the typical human reading speed of a hundred thirty words per minute, that returns forty seven months of non-stop reading, rounded down. Just about four years of no sleep, no breaks or pauses.

A gigabyte of text is massive. As for why we’d brought back so much, that’s because of the machine archive spanned more than the imperial era. A lot of the data was redundant too, likely other archives held similar information, as a matter of keeping backups. Given the state of the archives, seemed like a good idea. I’d accidentally dug out files from the older eras as well, before the empire. Files buried further under the silt and debris that had overshadowed the broken bottom. Maybe all the way back to the start of the war itself.

Wrath was going to take some time to digest her meal and filter out the junk from the useful.

If there was an answer on how to hide from the pale lady, it had to be somewhere within that hoard. The protofeathers had managed it somehow. We could too.

On my end, I returned right back to my workshop to continue where I’d left off on my project. Until I got a different visitor.

“Master Keith, VIP at the doorsteps.” One of my knights called out over the comms.

I took a pause from the welding process of my touchup. “Who’s knocking?”

Had to be someone high up the chain of command for Captain Sagrius to allow passage. I’d told the knights to turn away anyone else.

“Clan lord Atius, sir,” the knight answered. That would do it, yes. That got me setting down the shield project and off my seat, going to open the door.

The old Deathless in question loomed on the other side, armored with his usual great cloak and caffeine starved eyes. I opened the door wider, and he gave a polite nod, walking in. “I’ve heard from the other Winterscar whelp that you’ve been working on that shield project again. Any progress with the overlapping occult edges, lad?” He asked, glancing at the worktable. Eyes lingering on his old relic blade, now broken ever since the last fight with To’Aacar. I’d left it on the bench, as a future project. Inside that hilt was a different fractal of division, the same kind used to power occult edges. On my ever growing to-do list, something I planned on getting Wrath to help out with.

I noticed grimly that his own belt still carried the white machine blade that To’Aacar had forged to murder him with. There was a kind of poetry that I was certain Lord Atius was enjoying.

“Solution was to set up a waffle pattern in three dimensions, and keep the whole thing stabilized together with struts. Not super sturdy against blunt force, but if that ever happens, the shield isn’t being used the right way.”

He came up to the third iteration prototype directly, picking it up and observing the results. By itself it served as a pretty piss poor occult weapon. That’s fine, I didn’t make it to be used like a sword.

“First few prototypes didn’t go so well,” I said, glancing at the dormant shield. I wasn’t skilled enough to fully use it like how I imagined, and even if I were, the tool itself isn’t complete. “But the theory is sound. Did you want a demonstration or… ?”

The shield had been my attempt to craft a brand new kind of weapon. Not as deadly as the knightbreaker rounds, but far more reusable. Something that relied on the edge cases of the Occult itself. I’d proven the initial plan, but getting a product that worked was a little harder. Not to mention this weapon required a perfect wielder of the mirror fractal. Someone like Atius could abuse this shield like nothing anyone had ever seen. Whenever I got this done and working, he’d be the one to put it through the paces first.

I’d come as a close second, in the sort of pale low-budget version. Still good enough to break a few bones with, and hopefully enough to let me live a few seconds more against whatever enemies I’ll face.

Lord Atius waved a hand. “Not quite. I came to fetch you specifically this time. To’Wrathh explained to me you plan to follow her on her mission.”

Oh. Oh. I hadn’t thought to tell Atius I was planning on leaving with To’Wrathh underground. On second thought, I could see how that would be a problem. I’d gone from being worth a box of snow as a scavenger to something far more unique, at least from a clan logistics point of view. I could pass down my knowledge of the Occult, but only my administrator access to Journey gave me what basically was a fully unlocked walking factory printer. The clan’s own 3D printers would have a difficult time getting tiny occult fractals scribbled out, limiting what sort of thing they could do.

Me packing up shop and going downstairs would be a net loss to the clan’s potential. No more knightbreaker rounds would be the most obvious loss.

“Is that… an issue?” I asked, hesitantly.

He laughed from the belly out, “No, no, lad. I admit I’m saddened to hear that you’ll be leaving our ranks to forge out into the white on your own mission, but I am hardly someone that stands between history. Before I was a clan lord, I am a Deathless.” His eyes twinkled lightly, and both hands dropped over my shoulders. “I haven’t come here to convince you to stay. You have a greater calling than our clan, something more akin to what Deathless strive for. No doubt to that, lad. What I’ve come here to do is help sharpen your fangs further, while I still can.”

“Training?” And if it’s with the Clan Lord… there could only be one subject to train at that only he could teach. “The Occult.”

He nodded, “Aye. Have you been diligent in your practice?”

I gave him a shaky hand. “Sort of. I’ve gotten better. Enough that I can manifest a full version of myself with the mirror fractal in battle and a few more when I’m left in a corner to scheme. What you saw in the general training sessions with the knights is just about current. Still a little hopeless with the dome shield fractal, that one’s just not something I’m good at.”

That one doesn’t seem to improve no matter how much I try to train it. It’s brute force, has nothing to do with imagination or math.

He waved a hand off. “No matter, it's better to focus on learning one skill to the extreme first, than to attempt to multi-branch outwards. That comes later. Your project relies more on the mirror fractal, anyway. Sharpen your teeth before you groom your fur.” Atius said. “Speaking of, you’ll need more than what you're currently able, to survive the underground. And you still haven't yet left the clan, so I'll weigh you with some orders while I still can. We’ll be leaving the city to train one on one until you reach mastery, someplace where we won't have to worry about keeping secrecy. If you are to leave with To’Wrathh, I’ll maximize your chance of success. Call it selfish on my part, I have vested interests that you come back to the surface in one piece when you've completed your mission. And down there, you can always continue to forge your weapons wherever you go, however you won’t always have a proper teacher to train you in the Occult arts.”

“What sort of training are we going to do?” I asked.

“My favorite type of training, little whelping. Discovery.” He said with a grin. "It's time we dove further into the Occult, together."

We packed up a few rations to go, two sleeping bags, and a few other camping tools. Lord Atius wasn’t going to simply train me for a few hours. We were going to train for days until Wrath contacted us with new information, or Kidra came to yank us back.

Keeping everyone in the city was putting all our crickets in the same bin. One bad fungal infection and the entire colony gets wiped out. If the machines came, Wrath at least wanted some of us to survive. So this mixed well together.

The other was for secrecy. The moment our techniques and abilities were revealed to the Undersiders, it was almost certain the knowledge would spread out. They might not know how we can use the Occult, but they will know that we can. And eventually it would fall into the hands of the Othersiders, the ones who straddled both sides of the world. By then, the machines would likely get upset and probably have several opinions about it too.

So we hiked out past the lightning blasted fields of the Undercity, and found shelter within another pillar hours away. Inside this pillar, it housed a massive jungle with a few flat meadows and some artistically crafted caves. One of which Lord Atius and I were using as our training grounds and camping site.

“I’ll begin the lesson with a hypothetical.” Atius said, folding his legs into a meditation pose after we’d set up camp and taken the first meal. “Give me uses of an occult blade that do not involve combat.” He asked, drawing out the machine blade and patting the unlit edge.

Non-combat uses for an occult weapon?

I could think of a dozen, Kidra had used her knife out on expeditions more than a general utility tool than an actual weapon. Up there, her rifle was the actual weapon she used. The knife was a status symbol. “Removing debris, bypassing locks, gardening sheers, a much better bolt cutter, cooking if you’re brave enough, a backup light, wall decoration, paperweight, doorstopper, threatening someone - technically not combat, so it counts.” I said, counting them off my hands. “I could keep going, but there are probably hundreds of different ways to make use of an edge that can cut through everything just from an engineering perspective. There’s plenty of times when I wanted a few quick cuts on some metal sheets.”

Lord Atius smiled. “Well said, lad. That will be the first discussion. Any tool has multiple ways to use it. Now for the second key point, if you asked one of our elite surface knights, say your Father or Shadowsong prime, would their answer be as detailed as your own?”

I frowned and thought about that for a moment. “Knights probably wouldn’t consider some of the more day-to-day life aspects, like gardening or as a trade good. They’d probably be insulted by the idea of using a relic knife as a doorstopper or paperweight. A means to bypass doors would be something Father would suggest. Light source too.”

He nodded. “I asked your sister the same question prior. Care to guess what the lass had to say?”josei

Kidra? I gave a shrug. Could be anything.

“The little Winterscar gave most of the same potential uses as you did, except she’d included more tailoring uses for specific cuts, as well as using the weapon for diplomacy, and as a trade good. Wealth to be lent out and recover passive income. Interesting, isn’t it? Same tool, and yet I am certain if we asked an agrifarmer, they would give us another list of possible uses neither of us can imagine as of now.”

“So, the second lesson is that we are not all-knowing?”

“That’s a more general life-lesson we could all stand to remember more often. Some more than others.” He said, dryly. Likely thinking of a few names already. “No, in this case, the second lesson is simple: As we specialize, we narrow our vision. An expert swordsman begins to see his blade married only with techniques and schools of combat. Other ways to use the blade begin to fade off from thought. The sharper we become in one aspect, the duller in others. I am no exception to this bias, as I’ve come to find out recently.”

“Makes sense to me.” I shrugged. “There’s a potential flip-side to that. As they specialize, they can spot new ways to use the sword that rookies couldn’t have even thought of. ”

“I agree lad, but I didn’t bring you all the way out here to discuss only superficial philosophy. I came to teach you more about the Occult. Can you guess how these two lessons come into play with the spells we have?”

Atius was saying someone who mastered a tool would lose sight of other types of masteries to that tool, other ways to think and use that tool. And he wanted to teach me something to do with the Occult. Adding it together, “There’s more than one way to use the Occult?”

He nodded. “The mirror fractal. My own teacher taught it to me, and drilled it down as an addition into combat. Another means of creating new openings where the enemy cannot counter. After having spent a few decades training the skill to perform like a third and fourth hand, I forgot that it could be used in alternate ways. So I’m going to make sure you do not follow my footsteps.”

“You discovered new things about the fractal?” I asked, intrigued.

He nodded and got back up on his feet, “I have. And I suspect by the time we both return home, we’ll have discovered more uses for it than when we set out. After all, the two of us think differently. That is a strength we need to leverage. I've lived for a very long time Keith, and while I consider myself learned in many different subjects, there are still fields of knowledge I simply lack understanding, or talent.”

The Deathless walked over to a good clear spot. “Let’s begin with basic drills here. These drills were what my mentor taught me once, and they were likely how he learned them as well. The rules are simple. Neither of us may use our physical bodies to spar. Instead, all of it will be done by the mirror fractal. Score a hit that triggers shields and we’ll count a point. Your feet must remain where you plant them, the only defense will be your mirrors.”

I drew out a blade of my own, taking a stance. This was a typical Undersider longsword, what would have been a treasure on the surface - only a number on a spreadsheet down here. Kind of irked me a little that I only needed to ask General Zaang for one and he had his men get one from the armory for me. As if I were asking for a spare rifle.

Suppose that’s our lot up there.

Lord Atius took his own stance, eyes sharp. Occult misted around him, crackling like lighting.

Inside the soul sight, Atius appeared as he did in real life - a human. I couldn’t spot where his fractals were, unlike Feathers. Instead, all I could see was muscle and tissue. He really was human, or I didn’t know the concepts of what he really was well enough to recognize it. Maybe a doctor would have noticed differences immediately, but I wasn’t one. The occult appeared more like a haze around him, a cloak wrapping him in a loose hug.

“Begin.” He said, and an image of him formed from that blur, sprinting forward with a quick left-to-right slash. Standard, nondescript, and not part of any school of combat. I sent out my mirror image, blocking the hit and striking out with a lunge forward, tip seeking his chest plate.

A ghost hand and blade moved from his position, slowly catching my image's attack and easily cutting through it. The image faded out. “The first limit is that once you generate an image and send it out, it will be committed to the act.” He said. “As you can see, a simple cut was all I needed. A slow, easily dealt with counter, but your image couldn't react to it at all. Now, how would you bypass this limit?”

“That’s an option?” I asked, thinking.

“It is. Remember the first two lessons earlier, lad. Stop thinking like a warrior. Draw out your mind for this.”

Another image of the clan lord struck out, this time using a well-known gap-closing technique. Nagareru form, lunging tide. Father’s favorite opening gambit.

I countered it by sending two mirror images back. The first would parry the strike with the proper method, and then pincer strike against Atius while the second image would follow behind, as if to pair with the first image.

That wouldn’t have been enough to score a hit, of course. This was Clan Lord Atius, a true master of the Occult. I fully expected him to counter both images with a few spares running cartwheels around me. So I’d instructed the second image to feint, duck and leap. I knew he couldn’t move his footing, so that means there wasn’t any dodging backwards from this.

Lord Atius countered with only a single image, moving to block off my first attack I'd sent, and then move to handle the second. That part worked exactly as I'd hoped. His image swiped a blade through the air, missing my own image mid-duck through the feint. Occult pulsed, and from Atius’s image, a third image emerged, this one stabbing straight down into my own ducked image, poking it out of existence.

Occult faded away into mist as all the images returned to air.

“What was that?” I asked, watching him.

“The first limit isn’t a limit at all. We only thought of it as a limit.” He said. “My mentor taught me that there was no way around that limit, instead the drill was supposed to slowly increase in speed and number of images, with the aim to overwhelm the other's defense by brute force. After I learned the occult works with fractals and patterns, I dove further into the techniques I’d learned, reexamining them with fresh eyes. And I discovered quite a few different ways to use them. The mirror fractal copies your body and equipment, yes?"

I nodded, curious to where he was going with this.

"Whatever extra-dimensional energy or law that lets me use this power must have been equally copied whatever allowed me to cast the spell in the first place. Fractals are patterns, regardless of what they're forged into. And everything we’ve learned about the Occult so far points out that this pattern must exist in some way, perhaps in a way we simply can’t visualize when it comes to Deathless.”

“And so you triggered it again. Mid combat. Or was it the mirror that triggered it for you? Do those things even have a mirror soul or conscious?”

He laughed. “I hadn’t thought of a mirror soul, exactly my point with the second lesson, lad. In this case, no, I was still the one who paid the price for both. You won’t conserve energy or mental fortitude by using a second mirror within the first. No free crickets here, two mirrors, two uses, two payments. The advantage, however…” He snapped his finger, a mirror of him raced off to the side, rushing forward for a few dozen seconds.

Just when it was about to fade off, occult pulsed around it, and it generated another image, continuing the sprint forward. “Reach.” He said, then snapped his fingers again. The running image puffed away into mist, dismissed. However, a moment before, three other images superimposed within the mist, each leaping out to strike at a singular target from three different directions. “And adaptability.” He finished, letting the three mirror images each flow through motions, dividing further until there were nine images all attacking an invisible enemy.

“That’s going to take some training to get right.” I said, already thinking about the applications. It would pair extremely well with my shield project. “You really came up with these new tricks recently?”

“I should have discovered these tricks years ago, and yet I remained too rigid to my skill set. I grew complacent. Habits are easy to follow, and even a century passes in a blink of an eye, if every day is spent the same. It doesn’t end there either. As I saw in your own combat logs against the drake that chased you, you could use other occult spells with your mirror image. So I attempted to see if I could do the same.”

Another snap of fingers and once more another image of him raced out, leaping high in the air. Occult surged across the blade and the image cut across the air with it, launching an electric blue arc into the ground where it shattered the stone. The image landed on the ground, and split into three more images, each holding a hand out, overlapping a dome shield that easily survived the rain of rocks falling back down. He did all of this so effortlessly; it reminded me of just how skilled he really was at wielding the Occult. I had years to go before I got anywhere near his level.

“This is what we will train until you leave.” He said. “Do you have questions?”

I thought about it for a moment, then raised a hand. “Do the occult images have mass or inertia?”

The grin grew wider. “Now that, lad, is the right question.”

Next chapter - Dead legends (T)