The Branch Leader's office was a large, spacious room on the top floor of the base. A wide-windowed modern suite, it might have been the office of a CEO or president in the olden days, and trophy cases were appropriately placed alongside the entrance. They'd likely been home to plaques and little paper commendations — whatever awards its previous owner had amassed throughout their corporate lifetime.

  Now, though, they shone with immense Resonance.

  The moment they entered the room, Tyler was bombarded by powerful Resilience coming from every direction. From broken shields and armor to chunks of rock or precious metal, the shelves and cases around the room had been full of treasures shimmering with enough Resilience to match any of his magic bananas.

  And the ones that shone the brightest were a handful of items spread over the large mahogany desk at the end of the room, placed directly on top of reports detailing skeletal outbreak sightings or letters addressed to the Main Branch: two scales of what his Analysis called a Drake of Heaven, a glass bottle swirling with metallic fluid, and a broken shielding artifact — apparently once used to protect an immortal king in an ancient desert world.

  Alberta sat cross-legged in the plush chair behind her desk, eyes closed and hands resting palm-down, with a finger on each of the powerful scales. Her aura filled the room, a voluminous presence expanding and contracting with each breath.

  She's cultivating, Tyler realized.

  As Alberta inhaled, he saw the Resilience in the artifacts draw slightly toward her. And as she did so, her aura contracted back, taking with it some amount of the Resonance within the artifacts. And in that brief moment where her lungs were completely full, he sensed the Resilience within her grow just a tiny bit. Then she exhaled, her aura relaxing, and the Resonance within the artifacts returned to their natural state. But now the artifacts were just slightly weaker.

  Incredible.

  He'd understood the traditional way of cultivating from the ancestors’ cave — a methodical process for drawing in Resonance from the world to build up your own soul — but he'd never seen it in practice before. And this was with a Journeyman. She wasn't even cultivating Resonance, but it still felt like such a noticeable difference.

  What would it look like if he were able to do that? How much easier would advancing be if he could just sit down and let a powerful treasure do all the resonating for him?

  He felt a twinge of jealousy at that thought, but at the same time, he reminded himself that if he'd been incentivized to cultivate normally, he might never have reached Peak-Novice on the island. It was only his enormous mana pool and sheer amount of training he'd done that had allowed him to generate so much Resonance in an environment that was relatively lacking. As Cursed as he was, it was also a blessing.

  And that wasn't even considering the latest revelation.

  The skeletons are all gone. The Main Branch is saying that you’re the one that did it.

  The door closed behind them and Alberta sat up with a jolt, her eyelids fluttering open and fixing on them in an instant.

  "Oh, my apologies. Thank you for coming, Tyler. Thank you for bringing him, Lisa, Brandon."

  Tyler walked up toward her, passing the plush chairs on either side of the middle of the room, and shook her hand with a smile. As he'd seen the last night, she was absolutely teeming with Resilience — middle-aged approximately, and with a dozen different markers of stress along her face, from the bags under her eyes to the gray hairs that seemed to have appeared just a tad too soon, and the redness ringing her pupils. He could tell that the last couple of weeks had been tough on her.

  "First thing — I apologize profusely for the incident today."

  Tyler’s mouth opened and he looked back at the siblings. Lisa gave him a thumbs up.

  "Of course, that idiot Rhett came in trying to say that you accosted him and his little posse.” Alberta scowled. “But even without our witness here, he's done his bullshit far too many times for me to believe that. He just was minding his own business when you — who are not only recovering from your fight with the general but also the coma that you just woke up from — suddenly decided to attack him? I can't imagine how frustrating that might be, waking up in this new place and then having to deal with the attacks of not only these monsters, but our own members as well."

  "Well former members, now,” she said with a satisfied huff. “I've convinced Emery to remove him from the Stormchasers entirely. As of five minutes ago, Rhett does not have access to our magical healing, or any of our other services. He can stay around as a neutral refugee, but I've heard from the two behind you that there seems to be some… heavy pressure coming from some of our members that might disincentivize that. Emery is usually pretty resistant to the notion, but she was very compliant this time for whatever reason. I was planning on waiting to make the case until after the skeleton threat was taken care of, but —"

  She smiled. "I have recently learned that that's no longer an issue. "

  Lisa snorted, and Brandon put a hand over his mouth to try and hide the satisfied grin creeping up his face.

  "I feel ashamed that this has been your first introduction to our Branch, Tyler,” the Branch Leader said. “But I hope that this reward will in some ways make up for it."

  She reached under her desk, withdrawing two letters with the lightning bolt insignia that he had learned was the official symbol of the Stormchasers. One went in front of Tyler and the other in front of Lisa.

  Tyler opened his own with a curious frown.

  Mr. Tyler Thorn,

  We hope that this message finds you well.

  It is with great appreciation that we acknowledge your successful completion of a high-priority bounty assignment. Your diligence, accomplishment, and unwavering commitment to our organization exemplify the level of excellence we strive to uphold…

  It went on for a while longer like that, spouting corporate-ese at him like he was a 10-year employee of a Fortune 500 company and not a member of a post-apocalyptic faction who hadn’t even known of its existence before yesterday. But at the bottom was the important bit:

  We are pleased to extend a formal invitation to visit our Main Branch headquarters, to be personally presented with your reward by your Sector President. Please expect an escort to arrive within seven days.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  Should you have any immediate questions or concerns, please reach out to your Branch Leader, or to the Eye overseeing your Branch’s operations.

  Warm regards,

  The Stormchasers, Distribution Division

  Tyler set the letter down, looking at Alberta with a sheepish expression on his face.

  "I appreciate it — I really do. But I don't know if I actually did it. I mean, Lisa and Brandon were there with me. I just took down that one that was attacking you guys. I don't know how I could have affected any of the other ones."

  Alberta bobbed her head. "Yes, I was also perplexed, but I asked Emery to double and triple check with the truth mages at the Main Branch, and they’re adamant it’s you. Do you have any idea what it could be?"

  Tyler paused, thinking back to how it felt gripping onto the back of the bat's oversized skull. To pummeling the bone bit by bit until he'd broken inside, and then that magic substance that he'd instinctually grasped like a thousand different strings. He'd assumed that they'd all been reaching towards the underlings that the general was connected to, but could it be that it was also reaching out to some superior?

  And if so, would destroying that in the way he did destroy all the magic?

  He looked down at his open palms, wondering just how much power was in there still undiscovered.

  "Well… when I was fighting the thing, I broke into its skull, and then when I reached inside, I just instinctually tore apart the magic?" he asked the half-question.

  Brandon nodded. "He still didn't have the thing fully beat when he broke open the skull — at least compared to the ones we'd fought before. You should have needed him to crack it open more completely before the magic diffused away. Instead, it just… dropped. You said you tore at the magic?"

  “Yeah. Or at least, that’s the best way I can phrase it right now.”

  Alberta stared at him, squinting, and he thought perhaps she was engaging in her spiritual sense.

  "And you’re truly awakened the Aspect of Resilience? Not something like the Aspect of Death? Or perhaps Bone? That would explain your resonance with Shielding… but no," she muttered. "Even Bone wouldn't be close enough."

  “Yeah? It’s just Resilience.”

  She stroked her chin. "I'm perplexed. Resilience shouldn't have any similarity to the Aspects we've detected within that animating magic."

  "What do you mean?" Tyler asked.

  Alberta looked at him. "How knowledgeable are you about the interactions of mana and Resilience? These two have told me that you've learned most of your techniques on an island from cave carvings?"

  "Yeah,” he chuckled. “Just assume I don't know anything and explain it all to me?"

  "Of course."

  The Branch Leader wrapped her knuckle against the table. "As we all know, physical items can all interact with one another, no matter what Resonance might be within them. I detect a small amount of the Aspect of Shielding within this table and almost none at all within the paper laying atop it, but they still touch, just like anything else."

  “Right.”

  "The spiritual plane is far different."

  Foundational Barrier

  The woman conjured a small square shield out of thin air — a translucent blue thing that shone with Resilience in Tyler's spiritual sense. "Mana can affect the physical in line with the Aspect it resonates with, but very rarely can the physical affect the mana itself."

  She picked up a pen and rapped against the shield.

  "It can interact with the physical effects of the mana, of course, but if you look closely at this technique — or at any of your own — you may see that the mana is not quite the same as the physical effect it has generated."

  Tyler inched closer to the shield, engaging his Journeyman soul’s senses to the fullest of their capabilities, and eventually he spotted how the Resilience within the shield wasn’t laid out perfectly flat nor still. Instead, at a scale so small that he could barely see it, the Resilience curved and twisted in on itself in a multidimensional pattern — the same as how his techniques twisted through his mana channels.

  Alberta flicked her wrist, and the shield vanished. "The shape of the mana as it exits your channels is preserved as your spirit pushes it out to establish a technique. And while mana in motion will stay in motion — allowing you to focus on simply holding the technique there rather than continuing to control the intricate motions of the mana without the guidance of your channels to help it — its motion can be disrupted by mana of similar Resonance."

  She drew a line down the air with a finger and grimaced a tiny bit, as if she weren’t used to the movement.

  "Can you see that?" she asked. “At least the Resilience that comes with my Shielding Resonance?”

  "Yeah."

  In the middle of the air, there was now a line of Resilience without any sort of physical component to it. Still mana, just sitting there. If he got close enough, he wondered if he’d be able to feel any spiritual pressure.

  "This is the first time I'm trying to demonstrate this to someone else," she chuckled, "but now if I do this—"

  She conjured another square shield and sent it flying through the line of mana that she'd drawn out. The shield impacted the raw mana, and the Resilience dissipated from the line. But the shield also cracked and blurred along the middle where it had impacted the line, the mana behind the technique dispersed and out of sync.

  Alberta concentrated, grasping her hand at the shield as if trying to grab at it inside.

  "Aspected mana can only ‘touch’" — she said in air quotes — "mana resonating along similar Aspects. And souls resonating with an Aspect can only control mana of similar Aspects, and with even greater difficulty. This is why we all fight along the physical plane, rather than hurling mana at each other that will simply pass through each others’ bodies. However, in a battle between cultivators of the same Aspect, disrupting — and even taking control of — the other's techniques is an option."

  She shook her head as she glanced at the still broken shield. "I could very easily conjure back the part of the shield that has been disrupted, but in the technique manual that I study, the author states that it's possible to even take control of mana that has already been sent out of one's channels — whether that be your own channels or even someone else's. Of course, in the latter case, you up the difficulty of this already extraordinarily difficult task by having to contend with another's soul fighting to keep the technique under control.”

  “But it's apparently a sign of mastery to be able to do such a thing," she chuckled.

  "Very impractical in battle of course, even for these wizened alien races who've been doing this magic for far longer than us. More applicably, I suspect that I could try and send raw Shielding mana to disrupt a technique you had — to conjure some physical effect via Resilience — but it would likely have to be specifically a conjured shield for me to have any chance of even trying what I tried with my own technique."

  Alberta straightened, and Tyler got the impression that she was repeating a quote from her technique manual. “The more distant the Resonances, the more dense the mana or the more powerful the soul needs to be in order to affect it.”

  Dense, he realized.

  He certainly wasn’t doing the taking-control thing, but with his soul and channels completely confined to his body, could it be the density of his mana?

  Tyler gazed into his soul, feeling at the vastness of it — at the veritable ocean sitting in his core, despite the spiritual organ somehow being restricted within his relatively small form.

  At Journeyman, his mana had gotten much denser, but it was still fluid, liquid, and vast. Certainly not that much denser than the techniques from Alberta, especially given that he suspected the Resilience he was seeing was still not quite a full indication of how much Resonance with the actual Aspect of Shielding was held within her techniques.

  To have such a large amount of mana, practically an infinite amount, yet bound to such a finite space…

  He internally chuckled. He did remember his Analysis saying something about his Curse being bound in paradox.