Jose looked down at his cuirass. The material was good, but the equipment was poorly made, considering his skill level. Another weakness he would need to shore up before facing that she-devil again.

  Unsure of how long he’d been out, he studied the sky and land about him. If he’d have to guess, it might have been at least a day. The sun had barely risen now, and it had been early noon when he’d fought the Harbinger.

  He rose to his feet, unsticking himself from the pool of blood that had coagulated around him. Jose was healed but far from feeling better. He’d lost a ton of blood and used up a lot of energy in the fight, not to mention he was running low on ether from all of the healing he must have been doing while he was out.

  Standing at an impasse, he pondered what the right move would be here. Should he forge forward into the desert or retreat, find a safe haven, and recuperate?

  It would be at least a half hour before he recovered all of his ether, but he needed to use Volt-Gen at least once more in that time, extending his recovery by whatever amount of ether he used. Plus, looking at the tracks around him, it was clear that the woman and her group had headed into the desert. Likely, to the same place he was originally headed.

  Jose found the nearest building that seemed safe enough and hunkered down to recuperate. He grabbed the duffle he’d dropped when he first arrived and found a nice place to lay low, eat, and rest.

  ***

  Once rested, he scoured the buildings at the edge of town, replenishing his supplies, and used what extra water he could get to cleanse the blood from his body. His armor was also doused in blood, which proved to be more stubborn to clean.

  Since becoming galvanized, Jose had wondered what would happen if someone got a mind control skill, or rather, what would happen if the wrong person got a mind control skill. Guess he didn’t have to wonder anymore.

  The woman who’d betrayed him had used the skill exactly as he’d feared. Not to help others or to, at least keep herself safe, but to subjugate others. It was a shame that controlling other humans was exactly what most people would likely do with such a skill, that it would be the only use they would see for it.

  How could he protect himself against that?… He came up blank, but he had time to think about it, another thought struck him as he rested.

  Why did he have different colored lightning effects for his skills? It was time to delve deeper into the meditation exercises he’d been doing and become more intimately familiar with his ether, maybe that would provide an answer to his current issue.

  Jose sat in the lotus pose and delved into that inner place where he could see his dynamo and nucleus. His domain, he began calling it. He watched the gray particles flow in from the darkness surrounding the dynamo. Then watched as the dynamo churned and turned them into different colored lightning, then fed it to the nucleus.

  The nucleus was a dense ball of lightning, red, black, and white writhing and arcing over each other. He got closer to the nucleus trying to get a feel for the lightning, then reached out to touch an arc.

  A ghostly hand reached out and made contact with a red lighting arc. It burned his finger as it entered his ethereal body. Anger and adrenaline coursed through his veins, consuming his very being.

  He trembled with unreserved hostility toward nothing and everything at the same time. Jose fell back and stiffened, muscles taught, breathing heavily as he struggled to calm down. It took a few long minutes where several growls escaped his mouth as he slowly regained control of himself.

  Jose opened his eyes and looked down at his hand the lightning had left no mark. Of course, he’d touched it with a metaphysical hand, not a physical one, so he hadn’t really expected to see anything even though he could still feel where the arc had touched.

  He closed his eyes, concentrating on how he’d felt, how anger and aggression had flooded through him in an instant. All of his offensive skills seemed to use red lightning, the implication was that it was an offensive lightning, but he needed to get a feel for the other two colors to get a better picture.

  Into his meditation he went again; he’d been meditating every night since the first time, but those were surface level; he’d been doing it to get a feel for the flow of ether in his body. Now, he was going deeper, almost into a trance state where his physical body felt basically non-existent.

  He prepared for a shock to the system as he floated up to his core, ready to feel what the rest of his ether was like. Reaching out, he touched a white arc this time. The feeling of overwhelming vitality flooded his system. This also fell in with the theme, red for offense, white for healing. What would his black lightning feel like, he wondered.

  He reached out and touched a black arc. Jose hadn’t been prepared for the devastation that hit him. His body shivered from the sheer terror it elicited in him; he fell back and balled into a fetal position on the ground.

  The black lightning felt like emptiness. Like he’d fallen into a dark pit at the bottom of a mile-long well. Like depression, anxiety, and despair had combined with the empty, hot, and cold burning he’d felt when he was shot. As if death itself was embracing him.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Jose lay there shivering and gasping for air, he’d been wholly unprepared for such a visceral and overpowering effect. If this was what his enemies would feel when attacked with the new skill he felt pity for them. Such a feeling would drive anyone mad or cause them to despair so much they would simply lay down and die. It was terrifying.

  He’d been sitting and meditating most of the morning, but he was exhausted. One intense feeling after another had utterly drained him. But even so, he prepared to delve back in. He needed to understand his power at a deeper level. Learn to control it in such a way that skills themselves would mean nothing. To the point where he could bend it to his will and call it forward on command.

  The first order of business was to flood his system with the ether. He wasn’t sure what that would do to him, but considering that using individual skills hadn’t evoked any particular pain or emotion, he didn’t think just allowing his ether to run the length of his body would either.

  Jose methodically opened each vortex surrounding his core and let the ether roam. He was correct in that it didn’t evoke any particular emotion. However, at first, he felt as if he was in overdrive, as if he’d overloaded his system. In addition, the vortices were fighting against his control, the pressure in each building as they tried to close and re-contain the ether.

  One minute, that is how long he could hold the vortices open for on the first attempt. Afterward, he laid flat on his back in intense pain, the type of pain that lived in the bones. It began at the joints and radiated out, enveloping every muscle, every bone and organ, every inch of his body, rendering him near comatose.

  An entire half an hour, he lay there staring up at the ceiling of the place he’d commandeered for himself. The pain slowly faded away in that time, allowing him to move once again. After drinking some water and using the facilities, he reset and began anew.

  For days he sat, not doing much else. For every minute he added to keeping the vortices open, a second of pain was subtracted. Jose thought he’d been cultivating his ether, and to some extent, he was correct, but something remained missing from the process. When he was able to keep the vortices open indefinitely and no longer felt pain, another surprise awaited.

  [You have learned a new skill, Flux-Bod.

  Flux-Bod - Through the crucible of pain, your body has been strengthened and optimized. You have gained some immunity to the electromagnetic spectrum. Your physical stats have been permanently boosted by 5%.

  Note: This skill is passive and is always active.]

  Happy as he was about the achievement, his mind was stuck on finding the missing piece to his ether cultivation. ‘What could I be missing?’ He thought as he took a break to eat some lunch.

  Noticing he was running low on supplies, he was forced to extend his break while he scavenged the area for foodstuff and liquids.

  In his travels, something had caught his eye. It was an electric meter box with a shutoff switch, the big lever types that one would use to cut the power on the side of a building. Not a monumental discovery by any means, in fact, Jose wasn’t even entirely sure what about it had drawn his attention.

  On the way back to his apartment, he’d noticed more and more of these on the sides of buildings. He was aware that electric meters ran to every building and house before the blackout, of course, but like most other people, he’d come to take it for granted, and with time, they’d become invisible. Just another cog in the machine called life, a background process that he barely understood and, like most others, didn’t really need to at the time.

  By the time he’d made it back to the apartment, he was aware of what about it had drawn his attention. It wasn’t about the meter, or the switch, or any particular part of it, at least, not directly. It was more about the function of it in its entirety. The switch was used to complete or break a path for the electricity to move, a circuit.

  Could that be what he was missing? Did he need to complete a circuit somewhere in his body?

  “Tunnel vision” was a term he’d heard frequently in his life. He would too often find himself pursuing an interest with single-minded determination. It made him seem aloof and unapproachable many a times.

  Not that he minded it. He would often categorize himself as “not a people person” or “a loner” even. These days people were more apt to label him “too self-aware” or “too critical of others,” also known as an asshole.

  All descriptions that he was fine with. Other people unnerved him, especially stupid ones, and he found too many people to be ignorant of the real world around them, whether by choice or learned ignorance.

  In any case, he felt that tunnel vision was indeed a term that applied to the current situation. Had he not taken the time to rest and scavenge the area, he might not have ever been able to see a possible solution to the problem. Not that he was sure the solution would work just yet, but it was as viable as any, and had the biggest potential to work, considering his ether seemed to be lighting-based.

  Diving back into his domain, Jose scoured his dynamo, nucleus, and the grid across his body. He backed up until he could see the entire system in one snapshot. There was the dynamo churning the particles of ether into lightning and shooting them down into the nucleus. From there, it flooded out into the grid passing through each node and reaching his extremities.

  The only thing not fully optimized were his nodes. A braided black, red, and white ether cord ran straight through each but did not propagate beyond that. It was essentially passing through each node without feeding the rest of it. Consequently, they remained mostly empty and inactive.

  He reached out to his neck node and tried to fill it with ether. It was an exercise in futility; he was able to pull strands of lightning across the node but not fill it like he’d seen his skills do. Maybe he didn’t need to flood the node for what he wanted. Maybe just unbraiding the ether and letting the lighting expand within them was the solution, Jose pondered.

  At first, that was exactly what he tried to do. He pulled strands of lighting loose, one at a time, and allowed them to wander the empty space in the node. It felt like he was on the right path, but what he’d done just was not enough. There was still something missing.

  Changing his approach, he decided to try and mimic the nucleus. He would make each node into a smaller version of the nucleus and hope that it would work in the same way. Taking hold of the ether passing through the node, he forced it into a dense sphere in the middle.

  The ether seemed to come alive part way through finishing the process itself. He was left with a small braid of ether entering from both directions, forming a small sphere in the middle of the node with lighting shooting out and caressing the rest of the node. It was like he’d made a plasma lamp in his node.

  Instantly, he felt something click, and the process repeated itself in every node across his body.

  [You have learned a new skill, Ether-Cell.

  Ether-Cell - Optimizes your ether, providing a more intimate bonding with it. Continuously boosts your ether control and regeneration by 10%.

  Note: This skill is passive and is always active.]