Point Zero by Aer-ki Jyr (christmas read aloud TXT) 📕

be so massive a Ju’en’xa like me could not even move, let alone flee through the strands connecting systems before it was too late. Without anchors to hold onto, all the Saiolum in those areas would disintegrate in an outflow that we cannot live in, but I felt it from afar many times. Even across the galaxies. And those Ju’en’xa inside were not heard from again, presumed dead, but I still hope a few managed to see what was coming and leave before it was too late.”

“How did they know?”

“They should not have,” Azoro said, referencing the Hadarak. “They cannot perceive the Saiolum, and we did not make its secrets public knowledge beyond our race, and within it knowledge was restricted in tiers of accomplishment. It is possible the Hadarak took this knowledge from us, but I do not believe that is what happened.”

“Someone else told them?”

“No. I think the Hadarak were engineered specifically to counter us. Weaken us to the point others could take us down, and above all else, force us into death dealers in order to survive.”

“Which was the Natural Order they wished all to adhere to?”

“Exactly. How do you manage it? You have killed so many, yet you still cling to the idea that not a single individual can be sacrificed to save lives. I see it in your mind but I cannot comprehend.”

“You are mistaking the Saiolum for the lightside. They are not the same thing.”

“Both are life.”

“No. The Lightside protects life, but it is not life. It is…honor…more than anything.”

“Curious. You never thought that way before.”

“I don’t have to think it, I can feel it. I am it now, and always had an inkling for it in my early days.”

“The mind cannot reveal all. I will be more diligent in my observations. I apologize for the brevity, but I have exhausted you thoroughly.”

“I am glad I have advanced enough for you to do so.”

“A minor stepping stone, but all are significant and necessary in order to get you to where you need to go. Rest now. No more will I teach you today.”

Paul smiled as the Zen’zat disappeared. He rather liked it when he quoted Yoda.

A crick in his neck caused him to twist around oddly, which then elicited a wave of bad across his body. He really had gotten fried by that.

“Force vision session over,” he declared as he painfully climbed to his feet and headed out the hatch with a telepathic signal for the door to open. “Time for a nap.”

7

Master Trainer Wilson was in over his head. He’d personally outlined, and in some cases detailed, thousands of different races’ training programs ranging from general fitness, to injury recovery, to specific skill progression. He’d even figured out Essence training, though to date his biggest accomplishment was the first…the training of the Archons, and specifically the first class of trailblazers.

That should have made this easier, not harder, because he knew them better than anyone else…yet they were different now, though also the same, and he couldn’t get a handle on what they’d become after 10 months of working the problem.

They didn’t know that, for he was staying ahead of the curve and they had a lot of the usual base building rigors to go through. No, it was the higher end stuff that was eluding him, because he was missing something.

Wilson slammed a fist down on his desk and stood up, choosing to pace a bit rather than stare at holograms of familiar statistics. The trailblazers were progressing normally…which was not normal for them. They should have been taking off like a rocket with all the experience they had, but they weren’t, and that worried him. He was missing something. He knew it in his bones.

It could be an interdynamic, for he hadn’t let them do anything other than solo training…but each of them had developed different from the others. There were 13 noticeable augmentations that all 100 of them had, but on top that there were 183 other abilities that some shared and a few of those that were unique to certain people.

Leo-072 was the best swimmer in the group, though not the highest rated in Aquatics. He spent far more time in the actual water than the others did, and his transformation had him developing a skin coating that looked like a tattoo of a net covering him in half inch-wide squares with subtle ridges. They pinched together at various points and expanded at others, but what they did was even more odd. They were interacting with the water and causing it to pull along his body as a form of propulsion, and neither Wilson nor the best Star Force medtechs understood the physics of it.

Like the ambrosia-production nodules in all of their bodies, Leo’s ‘web force’…as coined by Greg-073…was an advance beyond Star Force’s current knowledge, and while Wilson could train him to use it as simple as any other propulsion, there was something underlying it all that he was missing and it meant his training wasn’t having the effect it should.

A tone sounded from his door, and he telepathically sent the ‘open’ command rather than using the button, with it whisking open to reveal a Human larger than Wilson wearing the telltale black/gold uniform of a Golden Knight.

“There is something wrong with them,” he said, brushing past Wilson and going to one of the many data terminals in the Head Trainer’s lab, “and I think I have a lead on what.”

“I’m all ears,” he said, walking up beside one of the original Knights that had advanced so far that he now possessed Saiyan genetics, as did all of Vermaire’s personal unit. Wilson envied them that, for while he had been given the opportunity as well, he had declined. His training was not all day long, and a lot