I Choose the Skills Everyone Else Rejects

Nate woke because someone was running on his legs.

For half a second, the room made no sense. The ceiling was too low. The air tasted of smoke and hot metal. His left hand was bleeding.

Then Posthumous Disciple pulled him the rest of the way under.

He was no longer in Varen.

Rovan Hest was running. Not training. Running.

A freight tunnel stretched ahead beneath weak emergency lamps, old rails cutting through the floor, half buried under ash and broken concrete. Something screamed behind him.

Rovan didn’t look back.

His breathing was already bad. One arm hung close to his ribs, blood soaked through the cloth around his forearm and dried there before the memory began.

He reached a junction. Left passage collapsed. Right passage dark. Behind him, claws struck metal.

Rovan went right.

Nate felt every step. That was the worst part of the Echoes when they became this deep. He didn’t watch Rovan move. His body remembered being Rovan. The angle of each foot. The current already circulating through the First Circuit. The pressure building somewhere beyond it.

Something unfinished.

Nate recognized that immediately. A second route. Incomplete. Rovan was trying to build it while running.

What are you doing?

The thought was Nate’s. The memory didn’t answer.

Rovan planted his right foot. Current surged. Pain tore through his side. The unfinished route collapsed and his leg buckled. He caught himself against the tunnel wall and kept moving.

A Vein Hound came around the corner behind him. Not one of the thin animals Nate had fought near the train. This one had grown heavy, its front shoulders nearly touching both sides of the maintenance passage, pale strands moving beneath skin stretched tight across its neck.

Rovan saw it once. Enough. He ran harder.

The second route started again. Nate felt where Rovan placed the current. Too much. Too early. Rovan tried to force the entire unfinished section open at once, and his body resisted. The current backed into the First Circuit. Heat spread under his skin.

A warning. Rovan ignored it.

The Hound gained. Five metres. Four.

Rovan reached a service door. Locked. He didn’t slow. His current changed halfway through the final step. Nate knew that timing. The same ugly principle he’d been chasing for weeks. Rovan shifted his weight after committing to the door, turned his shoulder and hit beside the latch.

Metal folded. The door opened inward. Rovan went through.

The Hound struck it a moment later, ripping the door from one hinge. Rovan was already moving.

The second route disappeared again. He wasn’t trying to close it now. He was surviving.

That should have ended the lesson. It didn’t. Posthumous Disciple pulled Nate deeper.

The memory jumped.

Rovan was sitting beside a dead man. Rain entered through a hole in the roof. The building around them had once been a transport depot, seats pushed against broken windows, water running in thin streams between old ticket counters.

Rovan’s hands were shaking.

The dead man wore the same grey field coat. Older than Rovan. The front had been torn open. Nate couldn’t see his face from the angle of the memory, and felt Rovan trying not to look at it anyway.

Someone farther inside the depot said, "They’re coming back."

Rovan stayed where he was.

"Rovan."

This time he looked up. A woman stood near the entrance with a rifle and almost no ammunition left on her belt.

"We have to go."

Rovan looked at the man beside him. The memory carried the thought without words.

He was Second.

Not Second Circuit. Second to Rovan. Brother.

The certainty hit Nate harder than the sight of the body.

Rovan stood. He took something from his brother’s coat. A cheap metal ring threaded through a piece of cord.

Then he left him there.

The memory jumped again.

Night. Open ground. Rain had turned to sleet. Rovan was on his knees behind a wrecked cargo hauler.

The others were gone. Nate didn’t know whether they’d escaped or died. Rovan was alone.

His First Circuit ran hot enough to hurt. The unfinished second route was worse. He had tried to close it seven times. Nate knew that without being told. Posthumous Disciple gave him the accumulated damage. Swelling around the pathways. Small tears in the muscles surrounding them. A knee that no longer wanted to take full weight.

Rovan tried again. Current entered the unfinished route. He pushed. The route tightened. His body fought back. Rovan pushed harder.

Something tore beneath his ribs. He folded forward and vomited onto the mud. The route collapsed.

For several seconds, he stayed there with one hand pressed against the ground.

Then claws scraped across the other side of the hauler.

Rovan lifted his head. The Vein Hound had found him again, its hide black with rain, one foreleg dragging slightly. The damaged door had hurt it. Not enough.

Rovan reached for the knife at his belt. His hand stopped halfway.

Nate felt what he was thinking. He couldn’t outrun it anymore. The First Circuit was exhausted. The second refused to close.

The Hound stepped around the wreck.

Rovan stood anyway. His bad knee almost folded.

The creature charged. He moved. No current at first. One step. The Hound adjusted. Rovan’s foot hit mud.

Then current. Not through the whole unfinished route. Only part of it. A short section opened as his weight transferred.

The Hound committed to where he had been going. Rovan changed. Half a step. Barely enough. Claws crossed his chest instead of opening his throat.

He hit the ground.

The Hound turned. Rovan was already staring at his own leg, and Nate felt the realization before Rovan understood it.

The unfinished route hadn’t collapsed. A section of it remained open.

Rovan got up. The Hound charged again. He stepped. Waited. Current entered after the movement had begun. Another section opened. Pain came with it. Less than before.

Rovan slipped beside the creature. His knife entered behind its front leg. The blade wasn’t enough. The Hound hit him with its shoulder, and Rovan flew into the side of the cargo hauler. Air left his lungs.

The unfinished route flickered. Stayed.

Rovan laughed. Nate felt it through broken breathing and blood. Not because anything was funny. Because after seven attempts, something had finally worked.

The Hound came back. Rovan pushed himself off the metal.

This time the second route wasn’t something he tried to complete before moving. He moved first. Current followed the body. One section. Then another. The route assembled under load.

The Hound lunged. Rovan changed direction after it committed. His damaged knee screamed. He kept going. Another section. Current circled farther. The First Circuit remained active beneath it.

Nate felt both at once. That was new.

Until then, every attempt had treated the unfinished Circuit like a replacement. Rovan had tried to force the first one quiet so the second could close cleanly. Now he didn’t. The First Circuit carried him. The second formed around what he was already doing.

The Hound turned too slowly. Rovan reached its blind side. Knife. Neck. Once. Twice.

The creature twisted, claws opening Rovan’s back. He nearly lost the route. Instead he stepped again. Current followed. The final unfinished section connected.

For one instant, everything inside Rovan stopped fighting itself.

Then the Second Circuit closed.

There was no light. No announcement. Rovan simply moved. The next step covered more ground than the previous one. The current returned cleaner. His body stopped wasting half of what he pushed through it.

The Hound attacked. Rovan wasn’t there. He came around its injured foreleg, and the knife entered the same wound he’d made earlier. Rovan drove it deeper with both hands.

The Hound crashed into the mud. He went with it.

For a while, neither moved.

Then Rovan rolled onto his back. Sleet struck his face. His Second Circuit was open. So was the wound across his back. His knee was badly damaged. His ribs were worse.

He still had his brother’s ring wrapped around his fist.

The memory ended there.

Nate came back on the floor of his room. His chair had fallen behind him. One hand was locked around the edge of the bed hard enough to hurt. His Core was almost half empty.

He stayed down until the room stopped shifting.

Posthumous Disciple had never taken him that deep without warning. Usually he had to search. A stance. A failure. A movement repeated enough times to find the memory attached to it.

This had found him.

Nate sat against the bed. His shoulder ached. He ignored it.

Rovan’s Second Circuit had not opened because he’d discovered some perfect circulation pattern. Seven clean attempts had failed. The successful one had been ugly. Rovan had built it while moving because his body already understood movement better than stillness.

Nate looked at his own hand. He tried a shallow circulation. First Circuit. Stable. He stopped there.

Trying to copy Rovan now would be stupid. Their bodies weren’t the same. Their routes weren’t identical. Rovan had spent years preparing for that night whether he’d understood it or not.

But Nate had felt something he’d never understood from the earlier memories. The First Circuit hadn’t been the thing Rovan needed to leave behind. It had been the foundation carrying him while the next route formed.

Nate stood. His left shoulder pulled. The ache sharpened when he raised the arm. He lowered it.

That problem was still there. And suddenly he was much less willing to accept it.

He opened Body Memory.

For weeks he’d been using it after conditioning. Repair what he’d strained. Preserve what adapted. Stop before it consumed too much. Small corrections. Safe ones.

Nate looked at his shoulder.

Malvern had damaged it. But Malvern hadn’t always been there. There had been twenty years before that. Years when this shoulder had lifted, pulled, fallen and healed without a ruined energetic route running through it.

Body Memory could not give him Rovan’s body. It could not create a stronger Nate that had never existed.

But a healthy shoulder wasn’t imaginary. Nate had already owned one.

He raised his arm again until the pain arrived. Then he opened Body Memory and, for the first time, stopped asking it to repair what had happened today.

He reached farther back.

The Skill responded. Nate’s Core dropped so quickly that he shut it down on instinct. He fell against the bed, his heart hammering, the room gone cold.

For a moment he thought he’d done nothing.

Then his shoulder moved. Something deep inside it shifted with a wet, sickening pull.

Nate grabbed the joint. Pain exploded through his arm.

His hidden interface flared. Body Memory was still trying to answer the request he’d interrupted.

Nate stared at it. His Core was already draining again.

He should stop.

Instead he thought of Rovan standing in sleet with a Second Circuit closing through a body that was coming apart around it.

Nate clenched his teeth. "Fine."

He let Body Memory continue.

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