Dharma Power

The window still turned his stomach every time he looked at it. Aiden ran his eyes down its lines with a gloomy face, and the entry tacked on at the very end pushed the feeling to its peak.

…No, well.

Strictly speaking, he had done it on purpose to catch her interest in the first place, but seeing it written into the quest window in black and white still made him feel a little strange.

A Sub Quest, it said…

As far as he could tell, the relatively minor matters came up separately as Sub Quests, and only what weighed heavily on the main scenario made it into the quest window. This one had started out filed as a sub, so what was it doing in here as well? It was almost as if the window were hinting that he would be seeing a lot of her from now on.

There’s an arrangement to meet next time, at least.

It was Aiden himself who had asked her to meet him two days from now, promising to teach her how to feel pain. Normally he would never have done such a thing, especially given how hard it would be to make Katya feel any pain. In theory it could be done, if he landed a single blow with more power behind it than every last scrap of divinity she put out.

Easy to say.

She’s immortal even with her power held down as far as it goes, though?

He sighed deeply to himself. How was he supposed to do that to someone born with so much divinity that she could not die even if she wanted to? As things stood, he could think of nobody near him who could pull it off. Noelle included.

If those two ever fought, it would be a dragon locked with a tiger, and in sheer output they were probably about even, so ‘overwhelming’ Katya would be hard. Punching through all that divinity to make her ‘feel’ something came as close to impossible as anything could. And if Noelle couldn’t do it, nobody could.

Which was to say.

Nobody, that is, except one.

The protagonist.

In the end, everything came back to them, the honorable ‘savior’ who was surely out there somewhere. Any grand, resounding title would suit such a person, but ‘savior’ was the standard one. They stood at the very center of this world, the one who would in the end save it from the forces of darkness set to blanket the entire continent.

Savior of humanity. Guardian of the world. The mirror opposite of all evil.

If anyone could give Katya what she wanted, it was the protagonist. The whole reason he had gone to the trouble of inviting her was to drag her along to the event two days from now, where that person would appear, and foist her off on them. Once she saw someone like that, her interest in him would fade soon enough.

…It isn’t certain, though.

There was still no guarantee that they ‘definitely existed’. Even so, if there was no such protagonist, this world was already slated for ruin, and unless he assumed from the outset that they existed, the story would never move at all.

The protagonist existed. Without fail. It had to be so.

That’s that, though.

The realistic problem right now lay somewhere else.

Whatever else happened, he had to be wherever the main scenario rolled along, at a site where someone’s blood would surely flow and violence would surely erupt. To offload either Noelle or Katya onto the protagonist, he would have to go out and act himself, and that made some means of self-defense essential.

“Hmm…”

Aiden turned the gun he had brought back from the gun shop this way and that, looking it over. A classic revolver. Pull the trigger, and the hammer would strike the round and fire it.

He glanced around. Once he was sure nobody was nearby, he drew out a supernatural power, mindful as ever of the Emperor’s and Dunadan’s charge to maintain security. Handling the powers still did not come naturally to him, but by now he could at least draw one out, more or less.

First ki, then divinity.

White mist billowed up and colorless flame rose near his body at once. The mist drifted obediently around him, but the divinity coiled in the air, flicking out tongues of flame as though glad to have been called, like a puppy meeting its owner after a long while…

…It’s as if the thing has a mind of its own.

A laugh escaped him. Either way, it was a relief that the power seemed willing to do as it was told for now.

He tried imbuing the two supernatural powers into the gun’s parts, one apiece. Having watched Noelle do it before, he could at least imitate her.

The first, ki, settled into the trigger. The second, divinity, settled into the hammer.

They go in… they do go in.

When he coated the parts with the powers, the faint ki and divinity held in their surfaces showed through. There was nothing difficult about it at all, but a strange window rose in front of Aiden’s eyes right away.

Aiden’s face creased slightly. He could not shrug off that last line.

…Was there anything like this before?

He had never seen anyone in the game with a skill called Omnipotence, so he had no way to check, either. Aiden pressed a hand to his forehead as a headache throbbed its way up.

Imbuing a weapon with a supernatural power was close to the most basic thing there was in combat; Noelle had not taught him the details for nothing. So why did Aiden alone, unlike everybody else, get one condition after another tacked on?

Still…

Honestly, he had no way of knowing how much ‘full power’ amounted to here, but remembering the power of the Omnipotence skill he had seen before, he had a feeling it would be more than enough.

But even so.

If he was going to assume the very worst of worst cases, taking the safest road was the right call.

And I can’t use anything other than the gun…

Polishing up his weapons training for an event only two days away was a non-starter to begin with. Better to look for the answer somewhere close at hand. Aiden tapped his chin and sank into thought. The supernatural powers he held were ki, and divinity, and…

…There was this, too.

That made three, exactly the number needed to bring out full power, admittedly. The trouble with this one was that he did not so much as know how to handle it.

Then I’ll have to go and ask how it’s used.

Fortunately, there was at least one person nearby he could ask.

Most people knew that if you wanted to meet the Dragon Hunter, Dunadan U’jal, you only had to go to the training hall. Anyone could guess that a senior figure from a nation that served the God of the Supreme Vehicle and revered the martial virtues would be addicted to training.

That held just as true inside the Empire, where the chieftain was staying briefly for the exchange event, and sure enough, the moment Aiden set foot in such a place he spotted Dunadan at a glance. Someone monopolizing this vast indoor space and working out by shoving a house-sized lump of iron with nothing but a bare body was, well, going to stand out.

“…”

Aiden narrowed his eyes as the multi-ton lump of iron slid across the floor.

…That isn’t a person, is it?

He chewed over once more a thought he had had before. More frightening still, even someone with this much raw physical power was not one of the main scenario’s ‘leads’. Which meant Noelle and Katya, the ones he was getting tangled up with now, were monsters beyond even this…

“A familiar face. Have you come to train?”

Dunadan must have spotted Aiden at some point; the chieftain stopped exercising and turned to look at him. Muscle that looked fit to turn aside spear or blade writhed with every movement, an enormously imposing sight.

“…I came to ask for some instruction.”

Aiden steadied himself against the urge to shrink back and got the words out. However frightening the one before him looked, what had to be done had to be done.

“Instruction? From me?”

Dunadan’s head tilted in puzzlement, and Aiden swallowed dryly and went on.

“Dharma power— I’d like to learn how to handle it.”

The moment the words landed, a fierce smile spread across Dunadan’s face.

“You already handle pure-white ki and a royal’s divinity, do you not. And you want to handle a new supernatural power on top of that? Greedy, aren’t you.”

Despite the words, Dunadan’s eyes were running up and down Aiden with open interest.

“Is there some special reason?”
“…Sorry?”
“Is there a reason to throw yourself into training that far, is what I mean. The talent you already have is blessed well past the ordinary, is it not?”

“…”

Looked at ordinarily, it was a fair question.

Where the main scenario’s involved, there’s no telling what’ll blow up…

…Because he did not want to die. Because against a threat to his life on the scale of the world, no safety measure he could equip would ever be enough. Above all, because he wanted to go back to his family and live an ordinary life.

All true, but here it would be better to offer some suitable excuse. There was no need to scratch and make a boil of it for nothing.

“…There’s someone I want to look good for.”

“…”

“Shouldn’t I be becoming a better man?”

Anyone hearing that from a man plainly in the middle of his honeymoon would think of Dame Noelle, and it might even reach her ears. If it went well, might her favor toward him not rise a little? He had partly meant it that way, too.

…Like hell it would.

It was an absurd thought, and Aiden laughed at himself. Even if she heard it, by far the likeliest outcome was that she would let it pass without giving it any particular weight. The relationship rested on a contract marriage to begin with, so she would hardly take a line like that seriously.

All the more so given the ‘gap’ between them. Points of contact of one sort or another had come up, but in the end he was someone you could find anywhere, and Noelle was someone who could leave her mark on history. There was no chance his goodwill would strike a person like that as serious.

“Well then, I will help you get started easily enough. It is not a difficult thing.”

Aiden’s answer was perfectly reasonable in itself, so Dunadan grinned, apparently satisfied.

“Do you know the basic concept of dharma power?”
“Roughly.”

Dharma power had a fairly singular character, because Urgan, the God of the Supreme Vehicle, had lifted its restriction for outsiders exactly as for the god’s own subjects. Handling several supernatural powers was no ordinary talent, of course, but it was thanks to dharma power alone that such people were not extremely rare. Purely in terms of ‘manifesting’ a supernatural power, dharma power had the easiest conditions of all. Even those outside the Tribal Confederation could manifest it at once if they swore the oath of interdiction correctly.

But.

“When you first start you naturally cannot do as much as I can. An ordinary person has to put in a solid ten years to barely climb to apprentice-warrior grade.”
“…Ten years for apprentice?”
“Ten years for apprentice.”

Manifesting aside, the problem was that ‘mastering’ it was harder than anyone could imagine. It was better than ki, which a person without talent could not even begin to train, or divinity, granted only to the limited few with any chance of manifesting it, but even so the sheer difficulty of simply ‘handling’ dharma power was so staggering that its users were just as few in the end.

Opportunity, fairly given.

But thoroughly weighted toward ability.

A character befitting a god like Urgan, who sought advancement.

“Well then, shall we get right to it.”

With that, Dunadan reverently wound a string of prayer beads around one hand. The beads were a holy relic of Urgan, used when offering prayer to the god.

“O Jewel, O Lotus, send forth your radiance!”

In answer to the mantra offered up to Urgan, a bright light settled into the prayer beads, a sight Aiden had seen once before. Then dharma power surged up around Dunadan’s body.

If ki showed itself as mist and divinity as flame, dharma power was a swarm of lights that poured out radiance and wound through the air on every side. Hundreds, thousands of brilliant fireflies seemed to flit in every direction, and Aiden’s mouth fell open in spite of himself as his eyes ran over them.

“The way to handle dharma power is simple in itself. Out of the flow of energy moving like this…”

As the explanation went on, several of the motes of light flying nearby clumped together of their own accord and took on a definite ‘form’. Dunadan seemed to be picking out the precise instant when the dizzily flitting motes collided with one another, and gathering them together right then. They formed a circle, an orb of light born from the motes joining.

“It starts with the work of clumping it into a Core like this, so that you can use it. That is the measure for knowing a dharma-power user’s ability. How many Cores in total you can clump your dharma power into.”

As he listened, Aiden’s expression clouded over fast. Just from watching, he could see with his own eyes how hard this would be to ‘handle’.

He replied absently, his eyes on the motes of light wandering around Dunadan’s body. Following even one or two of their paths was enough to make his eyes ache and his head throb, and there were hundreds, thousands of them. To pinpoint the moment such things clumped together and make a Core out of it, a person’s reflexes and intuition would have to be far beyond ordinary; that much was plain at a glance.

“If ki is the process of filtering the impurities out of your body, and divinity feels like breaking in a horse that will not listen, then dharma power is commonly said to be about ‘communing’. Do you follow my meaning?”
“…Roughly.”

To use these things skillfully in time with their movement, he would have to derive every path and every possible case, every variable and vector and every branching outcome, and track the movement that way…

I can’t do anything like that…!

And not him alone; it was impossible for the great majority of human beings. That side of it was probably where the description of dharma power as communing came from, since it had to be handled by ‘feel’, in time with the movement, rather than by calculation.

“Will you give it a try, then?”
“Give it a try?”
“Yours looks like a body that has never laid an interdiction on itself. I will hand over some of my dharma power just this once, so have a go at clumping a Core.”
“…That’s something that can be handed over?”
“Normally it cannot. But in dharma power alone, counting output and operating skill, I rank among the top five in the whole of the Great Plains.”

No wonder the quantity had looked so overwhelming even next to the motes of light of the warriors he had seen before. The self-imposed interdiction the chieftain carried was clearly no ordinary one…

“Right, then. Make a start.”

With that, an alien energy flowed abruptly into Aiden’s body, and soon motes of light surged up around him, far fewer than Dunadan’s but still bright enough to dazzle.

“…”

Aiden blinked and swept his gaze around.

Is this something a person can even learn…?

The very first hurdle was far too high. He was told to clump them into a Core at the moment they gathered, but it felt like trying to catch a phantom with his bare hands. He couldn’t follow them at all…

Even as the thought crossed his mind, the windows popped up in front of him all at once.

“…?”

Aiden looked at the window that had suddenly risen in front of his eyes. Now that he thought about it, he had heard that the skill’s stage rose when the number of supernatural powers he could handle increased. Did that hold for a supernatural power somebody else had poured into him, too?

“…”

Next.

Aiden looked blankly around him. The instant that window rose, he could feel that something had clearly changed from a moment ago.

…Huh?

Something.

He could see it.

Among the motes of light that until a moment ago had been moving in a dizzy scatter, a kind of ‘law’.

Distinctly.

As though he could take hold of it.

“Do not get too greedy.”

Perhaps thinking that Aiden, who only kept glancing around in silence, was flustered by the motes’ movement, Dunadan folded both arms and spoke with a benevolent smile.

“Even I, who was called the tribe’s greatest talent, took a year to make my first Core and rise to apprentice warrior. For now, however you manage it, just getting used to the movement is—”

The sentence broke off cleanly.

The chieftain must have spotted the fist-sized orb of light that had appeared near Aiden’s body, not even five seconds after the motes of light first surged up.

“…”

Dunadan’s face set hard.