Zeroth Moment: My Cheat Skill Is Stupid, So I'll Just Ignore It

Topher could not have felt more betrayed if the young Japanese woman had physically stabbed him in the back. He twisted around, aghast. "What the fuck did you just say?!"

Hana stumbled back, her face a gorgeous mask of confusion. "What? What did I say?"

Topher banished his Ledger; he was inexplicably angry, towering over Hana as his fists clenched and unclenched with murderous frustration. "Force equals mass times acceleration. You know physics. You've known it this whole goddamn time?!"

"Why are you shouting at me?!" Hana's left hand still bore her Flux Blade in the same long, slender form it had kept since decapitating Vashyarl; it twitched slightly in response to Topher's accusation, but she still didn't raise it against him. "Of course I know physics! Every Japanese high school student learns physics, chemistry, and biology!" She crossed her arms and scowled up at him, still holding the hilt of the blade; he thought she looked ridiculous with it poking out to one side. "I don't get mad at you for knowing history, do I?!"

Topher was gasping for breath; he staggered away and sat down, mostly to get distance and make himself look less imposing. Hana started towards him to do something -- fight him, perhaps, or continue the argument -- but he held up a hand to stave her off until he could breathe. "Wait," he panted. "Wait." He wanted to drink some water, but he couldn't speak the runes while his esophagus was spasming; instead, he forced his teeth shut and began to take long, slow breaths, sucking the air in through his teeth and out through his nose until he thought he would pass out from a lack of oxygen.

Slowly, his fury receded, bringing with it clarity and understanding; he'd never actually asked her if she'd known jack shit about physics, or any other topic from Earth. As soon as the realization penetrated his mind, he felt incredibly stupid; the signs had been right in front of him the whole time. I suspect that most people are unaware of it in general, in much the same way that most people of our world are unaware of prions or Special Relativity. "One second." He squeezed his eyes shut, unable to believe how great of a fool he'd been. Just assume that because she looks like a junior supermodel, she can't be smart. You're no better than Ichirou. Eventually, he was able to speak coherently, and he shook his head ruefully. "I'm really sorry. None of that was your fault; I was just mad at myself, and I took it out on you. Totally unfair."

Hana paused, then crouched down to bring her face level with his; he could see that there was a ghost of a smirk on her lips. "You might not believe it, but I'm more than a little familiar with getting worked up." She extended a hand for him to take; he did so, letting her pull him up (even though he didn't need the help to stand). "You feel better now?"

"No, I just feel really dumb," Topher growled. He sighed, then turned to her to explain. "My Unique Skill -- Attract Object -- is mostly useless. I can use it to pick up small objects, and sometimes, if I'm really lucky, I can use it to move myself or something else large, but it's really hard to do correctly. When I was first learning how to use it, right after being summoned, Hotaka -- one of the F-Rank kids who got summoned with me -- said he had some kind of idea that he could use physics with it, but he was killed before he could tell me anything, and all his textbooks and notes were destroyed." He shook his head, marveling at the run of unbelievably bad luck he'd had with the whole subject. "I've done some experiments, but my ability to use it is still pretty crap. I know that it works kind of like gravity -- my body and the target pulling on each other -- and I can sometimes use it to pull things if I'm in free-fall or heavily anchored myself. But I don't really understand any of it, and I thought nobody else who understood the subject was still around. I never even thought to ask you, and then I blew up when it turned out I should have." He faced her squarely, unblinking. "I'm really sorry. Seriously."

Hana stared at him, poleaxed, for several seconds, then laughed -- a long, silvery laugh that seemed to go on and on. "Bailey-sama," she murmured finally, wiping tears from the corners of her eyes, "I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt my feelings." She smiled. "You'd think I'd be used to people thinking I'm just a pretty face. But you forgave me for trying to kill you; I'm pretty sure I can forgive you for losing your temper for two seconds." She chucked him lightly on the shoulder, but he couldn't feel a thing through his Arch Shielding.

Topher nodded, sighing; he wanted to go hide under a rock, but couldn't waste this chance. "Maybe I can at least make this fast for you." He spent a few minutes describing, in detail, the ways he'd used his power in various ways; the young Japanese woman nodded occasionally, murmured a clarifying question or two, and seemed contemplative. When he finally ran down, she frowned and stroked the bridge of her nose with a forefinger, then nodded.

"I'll be the first to admit it's not my best subject," she began, "since I was more interested in chemistry and biology. But I do know the basic principles. Would you like me to teach you?"

Topher hesitated. "So badly. But I don't know if we have the time."

"We have the time." Hana smiled ruefully. "What I know would barely fill a morning; we can take a little bit of a longer rest here. May I borrow your paper and writing tool?"

A few hours later, the sun had risen high overhead, and Topher's brain was buzzing with new ideas and terms; a lot of what Hana had known wasn't terribly useful to him (gravitation, relativity, and quantum theory in particular seemed pretty irrelevant) but all the concepts of motion, momentum, force, and energy that she had been able to impart in their brief discussion had slotted neatly into place in the missing puzzle-piece-shaped spaces in his understanding, and he was experiencing a sensation roughly akin to when he had been wandering around Frostford high on calculus. Simply having a few equations to plug numbers into had given him a frighteningly clear understanding of angular momentum, counterforce, and most of all acceleration; he kept experimentally tugging on nearby rocks and feeling his own mass subtly shift in response. It didn't actually let him do anything new, of course -- his Skill was the same as it had always been -- but just knowing how it worked at a much deeper level was unbelievably empowering. In a daze, he remembered the time he'd levitated Hana's Tincture of Timelessness between his hands. Before, he'd needed a string to apply the counterforce, but now his understanding was so much clearer; summoning his Stylus, he pulled on it with equal force from both his left and right hands, and watched it rise obediently into the air to hang with rock-solid stillness at a point precisely between them.

As he stood there, entranced, he forgot to pay attention to his surroundings; he got up to show somebody (he didn't know who yet, but he was damn sure gonna show this off to someone) and stumbled slightly, his eyes still fixed on his Stylus. As he regained his balance, the Stylus bobbed gently, like a cork in water, before setting solidly back into place, and the motion triggered a memory.

"Hey, wait a minute," he croaked, gesturing for Hana; she turned away from the flowers she was cultivating in mere minutes and came to regard him. He repeated the motion, watching the Stylus bob and pop in the air before settling back into place. "What does that remind you of?"

The Hostess frowned for a moment, then plopped her left hand into her right palm; her Flux Blade, now in the shape of a pair of pruning shears, poked up out of her right fist incongruously. "The floating rock, in the passage from Vashyarl's layer!"

"Right." He bobbed the pen around again. "It was just like this -- caught between two separate accelerating forces in opposite directions, of exactly equal magnitude. But I can't think of any reason why that would happen there..." His mind ticked back and forth, stuck on the quandary.

Hana frowned. "Gravity is also acceleration, Bailey-sama. It would explain why the spiraling walkway had its own gravity..." she pinched her lower lip, then shook her head. "But I can't imagine why gravity would be so strange there."

They traded ideas for a few more minutes, then gave up; the day was wearing on anyhow. Rudo, who had scouted on his own after making their meals, had returned with a new objective; the highest visible peak in the mountains, from which they might be able to see a further distance. Everyone agreed that this was a capital idea, and they broke camp soon afterwards to head for the spire.

Unfortunately, the Lava Mountains were much more active during the day; being able to see further meant that other things could see them as well, and they were assaulted by monsters on a regular basis -- giant scorpions with barbed tails dripping magma, ambulatory flowers which spat poisonous jets of frigid bile ("I knew there were things here that hunted with cold," Topher crowed triumphantly), and even some strange spidery creatures which looked like disembodied hands that crawled out of pools of lava to attack with leaping, full-body-grasping motions. But Zanasha's combat prowess and titanic strength made short work of most of them; perhaps one in five monsters made it past her initial attack, and most of those Hana or Rudo were able to dispatch before Topher had to lift a finger. He did use a few Shields of Faith to protect his companions from errant sprays of lava -- the hand-like creatures gushed it from any wound, which was nearly devastating on the first occasion they encountered it -- but for the most part he simply sat back and let them deal with most of the enemies. Not worth accidentally blasting or decapitating somebody if they jump right between me and a monster at a bad time, he told himself.

The journey to the spire took several days; however, the terrain and fauna remained similar, and before long they had settled into a routine of rising at dawn, marching quickly and efficiently towards the mountain while obliterating any creatures which approached them, then bedding down for camp when the sun set. They continued to Level up steadily; Topher hit Level 41 and 42 almost immediately, and even 43 by the seventh day. Hana also gained three Levels, while Zanasha and Rudo gained two each; no one unlocked any new Skills or abilities, but no one seemed to mind.

"This place isn't so bad," said Topher, dispatching a fleeing lava spider with a long-range empowered wand-spun Magic Dart. "How did the S-Rankers from the last summoning die here? I can't imagine somebody like Sugimoto having any trouble with this place even at Level 1."

"No one knows, Bailey-sama," Hana murmured, sheathing her Flux Blade; she had finally begun returning it to its dagger form on the fifth day, though Topher noticed that it now almost always took a sword-like shape when she fought, rather than her previous habit of shifting between weapons like whips and polearms to keep foes at a distance. "Oshima-sama was... very confident. I could not imagine anything harming her; when I heard that she had perished, I did not believe it for a long time."

"What was she like?" Zanasha wondered, cleaning Nethersbane and sheathing it. "Few tales reached my village, since she occupied our world for so short a time."

Hana frowned. "I only knew her at a distance -- and it's been a really long time, now. She was the most popular girl in the whole school, obviously; star athlete, highest test scores, impossibly pretty. Everyone's friend." Her face slowly opened up into a bright, cheerful smile. "She was like a star -- bright and expansive, with everyone orbiting her, but also... kind of alone." She laughed a little. "Even her name -- Kiku Oshima -- meant 'Chrysanthemum of Large Island'. I was always so jealous of her."

"Was she a bully?" Topher queried. "Most of the S-Rank kids from this Summoning were dicks in one way or another. Not always cruel, but..." he shrugged. "I always got the impression that they viewed everyone else as beneath them."

Hana shook her head. "Like I said, I didn't know her that well. But..." -- she paused, looking into the distance -- "...I don't think so. I never heard of anyone speaking ill of Oshima-sama, and she always treated everyone with kindness." She groped for words. "She didn't push us down. She rose above us. I don't know, it's hard to explain."

"No, I think I get it." Topher nodded, grateful he wasn't sweating through the layers of protections in the sweltering heat. "What about the other S-Rankers? Were they impossibly great people, too?"

Hana shook her head. "My class only had two -- Oshima-sama and Takenaka-sama -- and he was exactly as you describe. Talented, arrogant, supercilious, and dismissive." She looked down, remembering something Topher didn't want to know about. "I don't know what happened to him. I assume he perished in this place along with Oshima-sama." After a while, she lapsed into silence, remembering something private; Topher didn't pry, and instead focused on scanning the skies for more firewyrms or the weird flying lava jellyfish monsters that exploded when you shot them.

On the seventh day, they reached the foot of the mountain; up close, it was so large that it blotted out a quarter of the horizon. They assayed a climb, but could only make it about halfway up; past that point, the walls became sheer and it was obvious that they would be unable to effectively defend themselves if attacked while ascending.

"Should we carve a path?" Zanasha wondered, hefting her blade. "Or perhaps build a structure?"

Topher shook his head. "Take too long. We don't know what's happening to the others while we're screwing around here." He squinted up to the top of the mountain, several hundred feet overhead; it seemed impossibly far away. "And I don't think any of us can jump that high."

There was a short pause, then Zanasha coughed. "I... may... be capable of it," she ventured cautiously. "The Bracer of Sacred Blood gives me unimaginable strength, in my legs as well as my arms. But I do not know if its power can be used in such a way."

"Yeah, no," Topher immediately disagreed. "For all we know, you'd tear yourself apart, or break all your bones on landing. We need a better plan." He pursed his lips, thinking.

"Would it not be possible for you to throw one of us to the top, on the other hand?" Rudo asked, startling Topher. "With the Infuse Body aspect of my Minor Ki Mastery Skill, I should be able to survive a landing from such a height if timed carefully."

Topher shook his head. "Still too risky. But..." A thought came to him; he could not stop himself from smiling. "She could throw me."

"Bailey-sama, no," Hana objected. "You have the lowest HP of any of us; such a landing would be more devastating for you than for anyone."

"If I just let myself pancake into the ground, sure," Topher snorted, "but I can cast Feather Fall, remember? And, with my Unique Skill, I have the most practice of any of us at withstanding and controlling forces on my body. Plus my Arch Shielding, and a further Mage Shield if I run into any trouble. I'm our best shot." He waited, seeing if anyone would contradict him, but no one did; they just looked worried, which he figured they'd get over. Not like they really need me as much. I'm spending most of these fights half-asleep.

He walked over to Zanasha, unsure of how this was going to work; her hands twitched out towards him, then flinched back, apprehensive. "Be gentle," he joked, trying to help her relax. "It's my first time."

Her eyes widened slightly, then crinkled at the edges as she returned his smile; maybe I can't tell you how I feel, but I can sure fuck around in the gray areas. Gently, she grasped him under the armpits, then winced. "You may wish to brace yourself," she murmured, and Topher nodded. Then she crouched down, gritting her teeth with the strain, and hurled.

Topher felt like his face was going to be driven into his neck; he was rocketing up, impossibly fast and far, as though he had been launched by railgun. Though his Arch Shielding protected him from the forces and air pressure involved, his own inertia bore down on him like a hammer for several seconds until he began to slow towards the top of his parabola; looking down, he saw that he had overshot the top of the mountain by several hundred yards. Well, shit.

Still, this was probably better; he mumbled out the runes for Feather Fall as he reached the top of his arc and was gratified to feel the spell take hold, keeping his descent gentle and slow as his body lightened. Forgetting his objective for a moment, he looked up, sure he was almost among the star-web of the strange red sky, but the sun was still quite distant; at least I won't fall into the sun. Heh.

Turning back towards the ground, he swiveled his head around and began to look for landmarks; turning his body to look behind himself was more difficult, but his new understanding of angular momentum helped him make the necessary motions without too much trouble. Much of the landscape below, stretching out below him in a vast panorama of volcanic geography, was similar, but a few things stood out -- a bright dot of light, a forest of twinkling sparkles, and a great sea of lava encircling an oblong stretch of land with strange twin peaks on either end. He took his bearings, sighted the sun and the shadows, and determined that both the dot and the island were southwards of them, while the twinkling forest lay to the east. Probably enough to make the trip worth it. Now I just have to survive the landing.

Alarmed, he realized he was drifting off to the west; his tremendous height meant that he was going to come down extremely far from where he'd been lofted aloft. In a panic, he flailed, then remembered that he was currently untethered; focusing on the peak of the mountain far below him, he affixed his will and pulled, using his Attract Object Skill to draw the mountaintop closer to him as he braced his body for the weighty counterforce.

To his surprise, he felt only a light tug; the mountain obediently drifted closer as the world below spun and rose. You've got Feather Fall up, remember? the distant part of his mind prompted in much the same way that an instructor might note that a pupil's fly was down. You probably only weigh a pound or two right now.

Topher groaned as he realized he'd been able to do this all along; he'd learned Feather Fall back in Wanbourne, for crying out loud. But he couldn't maintain his frustration for long; soaring through the air on the pull of his Attract Object Skill was simply too fun. Hesitantly at first, then with greater and greater abandon and enjoyment, he tugged and pulled at distant objects; he swooped this way and that, spiraling and swishing back and forth through the air with glee as he realized that this was as close to flying as he would probably ever get. Like a leaf on the wind, he danced and drifted, floating as if in a dream as the spire of the mountain passed beneath him and began to rise above his head.

Of course, such bliss couldn't last forever; he was barely fifty feet below the peak of the mountain when another firewyrm attacked, spotting a tasty morsel and making a beeline for it. But Topher didn't care; a quick wand-spun Fleet Zephyr cut the creature into chunks, which fell away with startling alacrity, and he spent a few moments marveling at how much things had changed. Two weeks ago I would have been dragon bait, he mused, and now everything dies in one or two spells. And Level 43 as an F-Ranker is probably a joke compared to what an S-Ranker would be at Level 1; what kind of power will Sugimoto's teen girl squad have when they reach the nine hundredth level of the Infinite Dungeon? And how strong is the Demon Lord, if they're worried that even that might not be enough?

He pondered this for a while; after some time, however, he realized that without the mountaintop as a target he could no longer arrest his momentum as precisely, and was now drifting to the north. Shit. Where'd they...

Then, below him, he caught a flash of bright red, different than the orangish hues of lava and magma; Zanasha's hair. With a feeling of tremendous rightness and contentment, he focused on her and wrapped the force of his Attract Object Skill around her, then began to pull gently but steadily. Like going home.

Slowly, he drifted lower and lower; he could see her smiling up at him, holding out her arms and hands to gather him in as he descended. He closed his eyes. Just for a second. I can pretend.

Then his Feather Fall spell, quite unexpectedly, expired.