It didn’t explode this time. Alyx had figured it out. She figured out exactly why Cadmi was so obsessed with the idea of juvenile Enthipid carapaces.

  Her hair was in a mess and bags presented itself in unspectacular fashion across her face. She’s been at this for a while now. Days passed without her realizing and if not for the small clock sitting in the corner of her desk, an antique from earlier times, she could not have known what time it was.

  “It really does adapt as I thought,” Alyx mumbled to herself, checking the results of her experiment under the glow of dim fluorescent lighting.

  Shifting the perspective from testing the Bastion metal to testing the Johrei itself, she thought she had the right idea originally. She chose to subject individual shards to high-intensity heat, freezing colds, and blunt pressure tests, which all caused the shards to explode in her face during her early tests. Doing so to the Bastion metal yielded even less fruitful results.

  Now, instead of trying to push the shards to their breaking point, she instead tried to use her stores of Johrei vials to replenish the Johrei stores within the shards each time before they reached that point. By doing so, though costly, she found that juvenile shards were surprisingly quick to adapt, as if surviving certain natural phenomena allowed it to mutate accordingly to resist such stimuli next time.

  When individual Johrei shards were placed back onto the carapaces of juvenile Enthipids whose Johrei have been stripped from, the results were unexpected.

  And so the hypothesis began to be more and more plausible in her mind. Johrei shards naturally regenerated in-full across the carapace body of a Enthipid given time, regardless of whether the Enthipids were alive or not, so long as there were stored reserves of Johrei to draw from, and you didn’t try to push the Johrei uses too far to the point of “burnout”. This was the strange property of Bastion metal that allowed hunters to adopt armor made from Enthipids. So long as the hunter was given time and had stores of the strange white liquid which formed into shards when applied through the Bastion metal like a conduit, their defenses would eventally recover. It was an unusual property of Bastion metal led scholars to theorize initially that the metal itself produced Johrei, though Alyx saw it as inconclusive.

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  Rather, she and a few of her fellow Onyx Technicians, were of the school of thought that the Johrei itself was what had affected the metal, something inspired with the way Johrei was used by Inners. With each new test, she becomes more and more sure of this hypothesis.

  Regarding Inners, burnout and wasting Johrei stores are seldom a problem, as the cores of Enthipids provided a seemingly limitless source of Johrei, though how long it takes to recover those shards across armor and other gear may still require Inners to bring a few vials with them just in case they need a quick replenishing.

  But all this left Alyx wondering originally – where did all these abilities of the Enthipids come from, and why are these abilities retained, in some variant forms, in the armor and weapons donned by everyday hunters? Not including Augmentors and Supplementors, even regular hunters could utilize the speed and perception boosts, amongst other general abilities, granted through wearing such armor and donning weapons powered by Johrei.

  And so she tested the juvenile shards, scorched and frozen and beaten, but fully recovered each time before it shattered. When she finally reattached the shards onto the carapace of a juvenile, she found that each of the different hides of the creatures began to emit similar properties to that of the the stimuli she used to test it.

  With the scorched Johrei, the metal began to exude high amounts of searing heat when activated, which resulted in more than a few bandages for Alyx.

  With the Johrei subject to the freezing cold temperatures, the Johrei began to emit frost.

  And with the Johrei subject to constant blunt force and pressure, the metal itself became flexible when activated, hardening into different shapes upon deactivation.

  This could be the key to understanding the abilities of these wasteland creatures, though it sparked a few questions in Alyx’s mind.

  Some of the abilities of the Elites still elude human comprehension. For things that weren’t part of the physical word, such as the ability of some Enthipids to enhance an ally’s speed or strength, what stimuli did the juveniles receive that allowed them such abilities?

  A question for another time, Alyx thought, but one that helped her glimpse to an age-old problem that hasn’t been solved by humanity since its initial discovery all those decades ago.