Jack sat cross-legged on the firm cot of his assigned bunk, spine straight, breathing even, eyes shut. The cramped room aboard the *Wespe* was quiet save for the low hum of the ship's cogs and gears and the distant creak of wax-slicked beams flexing with the shift of altitude. Even those sounds faded into background noise as Jack focused inward, tuning himself to a single action.
In his right hand, he held the survival knife from the school, razor sharp, and weighty. With a flick of his fingers, he sent it into the air in a lazy arc. The moment it left his grip, his ears twitched involuntarily, straining to catch every nuance of the blade's short flight.
The knife whirled once. Twice. Three times. Then—
*Fwhipt.*
The air split around it, a tiny shush of displacing pressure, and just as it began to dip, Jack's hand reached out and caught it by the grip with smooth, practiced ease.
He didn't open his eyes. Just breathed in through his nose and repeated the motion.
Flick. Spin. Catch.
It was a rhythm now. A pulse.
He'd been doing this for hours. Not just for fun, though it helped with the restlessness coiling under his skin. No—this was practice. Deliberate. Focused. Something had changed in him since that waking up in that lightless hut with nothing but a head full of panic.
He hadn't known what to make of it back then. The thing he'd killed—the ape-bat hybrid that shrieked with echoing horror and bled black ichor—it had *done* something to him. After the fight, or rather after waking up,he'd felt different. Heightened. Off, but sharper. And it wasn't until last night, after poring through the translated note Ha-joon, that balding small man, had given him, that it started to click.
Accuh. That's what it was called.
Some kind of Smokey magic thing . A piece of a creature's experience or ability. Whatever that thing had been, it had passed on its Accuh to him the moment he'd buried his axe in its skull. And without even realizing it, he had absorbed it.
Not its strength or its stamina.
*Perception.*
The knife sliced through the air again.
This time, he caught it a moment *before* it was supposed to fall, fingers snatching the hilt mid-spin.
Jack opened his eyes slowly, gaze narrowing as he turned the blade over in his hands. He could hear it all—the blade's path, the whisper of motion, the drag of air against the dull metal edge. It wasn't that his ears were sharper now. Not exactly.
It was more like… his brain *understood* the sounds better. He could parse them faster. *Feel* them the way he used to feel shifts in weight before a bar fight broke out.
He didn't have the words for it, not really. He wasn't the studying type. But maybe—just maybe—this was how that creature had hunted in the dark.
*Hadn't Nari said they were nearly blind? Eh what ever I still get to be batm*n* Jack though, if one even could even classify it as such.
No eyes. No light. Just pure sound, mapped into three-dimensional awareness.
*Echolocation,* he thought the word clumsily, remembered from a class he'd dozed through in seventh grade. Bats used it. Dolphins too.
And now, so did he.
He stood, stretching his arms behind his back, muscles stiff from sitting still for too long. The ship's movements and the small hallways made movement difficult, but he adapted. He pushed the bunk to one side, creating a narrow strip of floor, and crouched low.
*Let's see if this really works.*
Jack closed his eyes again and began to move.
Slow at first—hands out, stepping barefoot, deliberately making as little sound as possible. Then, once he got a feel for the room, he tossed the knife into the far wall. Not to stick it, just to hear it rattle and bounce.
The clang rang out, and he immediately felt it.
The reverberation told him exactly where the walls were. The cot. The pack in the corner. He pivoted, eyes still closed, and walked across the room without stumbling, sweeping his hand out to catch the blade before it could clatter to the floor.
Then he upped the pace.
He repeated the test in cycles—throwing the knife at different objects: the metal locker door, the side of the bunk, even his own boot. Every sound became a point in a mental map. Even subtle changes in pitch told him something—texture, distance, density.
By the third hour, Jack was ducking low and rolling under the cot without looking. Springing up and catching the knife midair before it hit the ceiling. Leaping back, turning, landing without so much as brushing the walls.
It was like a sixth sense was blooming—dim, still foggy at the edges, but real. His body felt lighter. More responsive. He didn't need to see the room. He *felt* it.
There were limits, of course. If something didn't move, or didn't make sound, he couldn't track it. And the ship itself interfered now and then with odd vibrations or bursts of pressure from the hull. But this? This was more than human.
He was starting to understand what was so great about Accuh.
When Accuh wasn't created by one self but when it was simply digested ,it fused with your base instincts. Your body adapted just as your mind did, if given the proper time that is. Just like how a HEMA fighter could read a swing before it landed, or a soldier ducked the moment a round cracked in the air.
It became part of *how you were.*
Jack sheathed the blade on his hip and opened his eyes at last, a slow grin spreading across his face.
His chest rose and fell, steady. Calm.
He'd gained something. Something useful . Sadly not a super strength or some secret bat-monkey martial art. But still an edge. A skill that he could hone, over time, until it made him untouchable in the battlefield as understanding stems from perception. And understanding an opponent is to have the key to beat their ass.
He sat down again, stretching his legs out with a groan, bones cracking in protest.
Still a long way to go. He was no expert—yet. It may be an instinctual understanding, but one cannot rely on just instinct.
But that would be a long journey that would take time. And he still had to get his custom equipment made, according to baldly they had a fully functional workshop on this honeycomb shaped ship that would handle if. He didn't even have to pay anything as Ha-Joon had said he would pay for anything.
"Damn he may be bald but there still is some good in him. Heheh" Jack chuckled silently to himself.
*Skip*
Jack stared out across the endless crowd of conscripts, finally beginning to grasp why the *Wespe*—this massive, floating hexagonal fortress—stretched nearly a mile from bow to stern. The place was *packed*. Rows upon rows of men stood elbow to elbow in the loading bay, sweating in the thick heat, shuffling forward like livestock toward the line of quartermasters barking orders and slapping gear into waiting arms.
The equipment being handed out wasn't impressive. Each soldier received boiled leather armor patched together with bits of rusted chain, a metal chest plate that looked like it had been stamped out in bulk and forgotten in the rain, and a lopsided steel helmet that wouldn't protect against a decent punch, let alone a blade.
For weapons, everyone was issued a short pole axe, made purely out of a green metal, a stubby crossbow, and a quiver of green-metal bolts with razor sharp bolt heads meant for piercing . A round ironwood shield completed the set , looking strangely metallic despite its obviously organic material.
Jack scowled as he watched the parade of mediocrity.
*This crap wouldn't stop a drunk donkey , let alone a monster.*
He ran a hand through his dyed black hair, his white hair was showing from the roots, and glanced down at the rough sketch he'd scribbled on his phone using photos and photo editing tools to create a rough design of what he needed . It had seemed like a good plan when he first envisioned it. But now, looking at the kind of tech and materials the others were receiving—clunky, primitive—he was having second thoughts.
*I should grab a crossbow while I can. Make the sling my backup,* he reasoned. *These guys barely know which end of the bolt is dangerous. I'll make better use of it anyway..*
Not that any of this truly *mattered*—Ha-joon had already said Jack's equipment and status were covered. The man was paying for everything. Once Jack earned his first star, he'd be training alongside elites, soldiers whose worth was measured in tenfold against the average conscript.
Still, Jack's eyes caught movement further down the gear station, where a separate group of better-dressed soldiers were browsing gear *not* being handed out for free. These men had enough Gaus—and with it came options: swords with balanced grips, recurved crossbows fitted with gears and springs, their winding mechanisms not unlike the ones Jack used to see in his father's old clocks back in the workshop.
*Now that's what I'm talking about,* he thought, smirking.
He scanned the line. Dozens still ahead. The stench of sweat, oil, and stress hung in the air like damp wool.
Jack snorted. *I ain't waiting for this bullshit.*
Without hesitation, he stepped out of line and walked straight toward the blacksmith's station, a cluster of anvils and forges tucked beneath a reinforced canopy. Apprentices were hammering glowing steel, and a woman with thick arms and a face like an anvil was barking out orders without looking up.
Jack strode forward confidently, ignoring the mutters around him. These men—skinny, sun-starved, and hunched like overworked mules—weren't going to stop him.
*What the hell do they feed these guys? Rats ass and crack? They're all little.*
He was only a few paces from the blacksmith when he heard someone step up behind him, fast and heavy.
He felt the hand before it reached him, and spun—snapping his arm up and slapping the grab away with a practiced, vicious motion.
"Get your dirty-ass hands off me, *bitch!*" Jack snarled.
The man he'd slapped stumbled back in shock. He was taller than Jack, but lanky, with the confused, angry face of someone who had never been hit before and didn't know how to process it.
Behind him, two others stepped forward, forming a half-circle. One was squat and thick-necked, arms crossed, sneering. The other was wiry, all twitching fingers and narrowed eyes.
"Hey watch ya tone freak ! First you cut the line and now you talk back to your elder!? Do you want to be humbled?" the thick one spat.
Jack looked at them, unbothered. "Pff, as if your skinny ass could even touch me."
Wiry chuckled. "You've got a mouth on you. Let's see how well it works when you're choking on my boot!!!."
They didn't wait.
The thick one charged first, swinging a wild right hook. Jack ducked low and shot forward, driving his shoulder into the man's gut. The air flew out of him in a wet gasp as he toppled backward, clutching his stomach.
Wiry came next, brandishing a training dagger. Jack backpedaled, sidestepped the first jab, then caught the man's wrist and twisted. There was a satisfying *pop* as the joint gave way. The dagger clattered to the floor.
Jack didn't stop—he slammed his forehead into Wiry's nose, snapping it sideways. Blood spurted as the man yelped and stumbled backward, clutching his face.
The tall one—the first—hesitated. Jack locked eyes with him.
"Well?" Jack growled, rolling his shoulder. "You want some too, or are you gonna run like the little bitch you are?"
The man lunged, but his form was sloppy. Jack stepped inside the arc of the swing and threw a brutal elbow into the side of his jaw. The man went down like a sack of bricks.
Silence fell across the forge.
The blacksmith finally looked up, arching one soot-blackened brow. She studied Jack, then the groaning bodies on the floor.
"You finished?" she asked, flatly.
Jack cracked his neck, eyes still on the downed men.
And after a moment of silence he spat at them.
"Yeah," he said. "They were boring."
She smirked faintly. "That's three conscripts who won't be lifting their gear today." she shook her head before she said somewhat loudly " This happens every session, everyone is on edge and jumpy, so let's not make this any bigger than it needs to be."
Then she asked " Anyhow what's the hurry? Got some news or something sony?"
"Kinda Ha-Joon said I could order some custom stuff here."
"Oh… you must be one of the star candidates. Get to the back the forge master will handle the matter."