Phantom Thunder

Chapter 14

The next morning, I perfected creating a sphere. I walked into training as focus and determined as everyone else, and was awarded with results, followed by empty satisfaction. It was a sphere. I perfect round smooth sphere. It wasn't me, and it sure as hell wasn't going to kill a phantom. I asked Talaya if she could start coaching me through making my sword, but she said the consequences of overdoing it could be fatal.

That afternoon, Spark was my partner for sword fighting. We barely made eye contact, and stayed strictly to business. The ache in my chest made it hard to do anything. I was straining to say something, but the look in his eyes and the fear inside my head held me back. That night, after showering and changing into jeans and a hoodie, I wandered down to Pluto's cavern.

His eyes were locked on the the computer and he was tapping intensely on his keyboard. I walked over and grabbed a chicken leg. He looked up, and it took him a moment to realize it was me. When he did, he pushed off his desk and spun around once in a circle.

"Well hello there" he smiled.

"Why hello" I said back, then ripped a piece of meat from the bone with my teeth. "You seam to be working on something extremely exciting."

His already bright eyes sparkled. "Look at these readings."

I leaned forward and peered at the computer screen. There was a graph, a bunch of equations, and a bunch of different lines that traveled across the screen in long, shallow waves. Near the right side of the screen, the top line shot upwards in a jagged leap. One of his nick knacks beeped steadily in the back ground, content to be ignored.

"Uhh actually never mind, those probably mean nothing to you."
I sat back and pursed my lips. "Sorry."

"No no it's fine. There isn't a student here that understands it."

"Except you."

"Yeah, except me." He looked mighty pleased with himself. "Uneducated lot you are."

"Hey!"

"Kidding!" He reassured me.

"So, what's so important about all this?" I gestured to the screen.

"Okay. I'll try to keep it as simple as I can for the simple minded one." He laughed under my murderous glare. "So I track all these different energies. There's thousands of weak one coming from different overlapping dimensions. Then there's a few important ones that I do track." He gestured to the lines on the graph. Some were smooth, some were rough and spikey, and others lulled in gentle waves.

"Keep in mind that they are not related to each other as seen in this imagine. They all have different equations for the graph they belong to, I just put them all here and then changed the equations to match the magnitude. Anyways, this one" he tapped a relatively smooth line; not completely flat. "This one measures the energy of the shadow skin. If the amount of energy was measured in scale from the floor; the other lines wouldn't be more than a centimetre. The shadow skin energy would be up to the roof. It's the highest energy out there."

"Okay..." I said. I was unsure how this was related to anything, other than personal curiosity. If he cared to know, I wasn't curious about his graphs. I just wanted to know what had gotten him so excited and worked up.

"So like I said there's thousands of other faint background frequencies. But from hacking deeper into the army's files, and my own resources, I was able to track a spike. One of those useless little background frequencies now has enough energy to be placed on the scale almost to the moon. And it's linked to these disturbances. Everywhere, reality is cracking under the pressure of this energy, then healing itself. It's what the army is trying to deal with, but they're running in circles like a cat chasing a laser. And right now the laser is pointing to the east, so that's where they're going, but the cracks are everywhere."