Use what you learned, Ethbin suggested. Gather Honour and hit it hard with an Augmentation technique. Strike its head with your staff.

  Blake ducked to the side. He hadn’t exactly trained with a staff, not for combat. He'd need guides for that eventually.

  But he could always improvise. He held his staff at its very end and waved it side to side in front of him. "Stay back!"

  You don't want to scare it off, Ethbin said. You want to kill it.

  Blake grimaced then pulled back. Ethbin was right. But he wasn’t going to win if he fought it straightforwardly, and nothing Ethbin had ever said talked about fairness being related to Honour.

  It’s not about how you fight. It’s why you fight, who you fight, and who you are. The Way will judge accordingly.

  Blake held his staff down, exposing his shoulder, making it a nice, open, juicy target. “Come on, swamp puppy…take the bait…”

  The wolf sprang forward, making a lunge exactly where Blake expected. He stepped back, twisted, then bashed the wolf over the head with his length of rebar. It did nothing. He tried focussing his Honour through his shoulders, strengthening them…but there was none of that invisible fire.

  The beast barely flinched, and Blake made it out of the range of the snapping teeth just in time to avoid the maw.

  You can’t employ an Honour technique without any Honour, Ethbin said, as if it was a deep revelation. After a few seconds, he exclaimed, Beardless Father, that cost me a decent sliver of energy! How poor was your education?

  “Let’s not talk about that right now.” Blake looked around for a way out, perhaps a tree he could climb as a last resort, but there was nothing that he could get up fast enough. Not without the wolf biting him and dragging him back down. “How the hell are you so calm?”

  Practice, Ethbin returned.

  The wolf charged again, both paws outstretched, claws extended. It caught Blake’s shoulders and pushed him down. His back squelched against the ground, and the mud rose up around the sides of his head. Dribbles fell in his mouth. He spat out the bitter liquid and retched.

  Then the wolf’s claws sank into his flesh. Lances of pain seared his muscle. He shouted. He wasn’t as strong as the wolf, nor as heavy.

  But how could he harvest Honour from it? Loyalty, worth, and bravery…

  When he was fighting Svarikson, he’d been dealing with a dishonest scoundrel who exploited his tenants. This was just a wolf trying to eat its next meal. All life had to eat, even if it was a mutated monster—probably a Blended of some kind.

  A knight understands that. But should he simply let himself die? Ethbin roared. Or should he understand that there is no other choice, and meet his enemy with dignity? It is honourable to see the worth of your enemy, and to face him nonetheless—that is a facet of bravery.

  Blake tightened his fists. He didn’t hate this wolf, but his blood roared, begging him to fight. Fire ran through his veins, filling him with a desire to strike back. He was scared. Of course he was. Perhaps it was easier to let the beast claim him, to sink away into the mud, and perhaps it was too late to win.

  But he’d rather try.

  The fire returned, roaring in his channels. He flooded the Muscle Meridians, then wrenched his staff to the side and struck the wolf on the side of the head. His staff cracked against its skull, and it went tumbling through the mud before crashing into a tightly-woven thornbush.

  Blake didn’t have time for anything fancy. He jumped up, scrambled toward the beast, then struck it again and again. Bones cracked and flesh ripped. He shut his eyes, trying to imagine the fire.

  It stayed invisible in his perception, save for a tingle, a faint whisper which he could track through his body. But the siphon? That seemed more obvious now.

  Even though the wolf was almost beaten, its skull caved in, its flanks rising and falling slowly, the Honour was still flowing. When he fought Svarikson, it had been a one-time pulse. But now, he could feel the Honour travelling through a gate of sorts. Right where his siphon was supposed to be.

  He couldn’t envision the siphon yet. But its existence was clear to him.

  First, his breaths slowed. Instead of the medium-fast combat breathing the monks taught, he timed his breaths with the pulse of the gate. As its imaginary doors swayed, calling on his honour, the Honour created by his bravery, he breathed slowly, keeping time.

  He didn’t need a textbook to tell him. It was intuitive.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Then came the willpower. For one last heavy blow, to put the wolf out of its misery, Blake directed the Honour into the right channels for an Augmentation technique. Where before, he’d been using the willpower required for mana, this was slightly different.

  Instead of willing the mana to move, he willed the Honour to accomplish what he wanted. The Augmentation technique flared. His muscles trembled. He didn’t tell it what channels to use. He just told it what to do.

  And he brought down the length of rebar. The wolf’s head cracked, and a splatter of blood caught him across the face. It was sticky and dark, and smelled foul like an infected wound.

  Finally, the doors of the invisible gate seared to life in his self-perception, exactly where the siphon should be. The source of his Honour, where it flared up from, and where it returned to when it was done. He couldn’t ascribe a colour to it, but it was almost a ring made of flame, which could open and constrict, and on the other side, there was a vast well of the invisible flame that he needed.

  He stumbled back, then flopped down in a puddle, causing a splash of water to roil up away from him. He exhaled, and the Honour rushed out of his body, leaving him feeling slightly deflated, yet still satisfied.

  Excellent work, Ethbin said. I dare say, you’ve hit the knowledge components of the first three stages.

  “But the Honour’s gone,” Blake said. “It just…left.”

  Not quite. But it is simply not swirling around your siphon like you’d want it to.

  “Is that a by-product of my fiend-ness?” He flicked his horns.

  No, no. That’s normal for people who didn’t grow up cultivating Honour. You’ve taught yourself some things, but there’s still plenty more to learn. And I apologize for not instructing you.

  “You sell yourself short,” Blake said. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that without you.”

  No, and yet you found the solutions I guided you to immensely quickly. Now, to begin building your Honour sea, you must keep working.

  “Sure,” Blake said. “But I’ve got a few more questions. Okay, so first things: does Honour have specific techniques only it can use?”

  It has modified techniques. All mana techniques will require modification to use properly with Honour. That Augmentation technique you know is a very lowly technique, even for mana. It doesn’t draw on an elemental aspect, nothing. With Honour, it’s only functioning at half its regular capacity. But that is something to learn when you see your first technique slate.

  “What’s the point of knowing how to store Honour, then, if I can draw and use it in battle almost immediately?”

  For a second, Ethbin paused. Finally, he said, An astute question. I wasn’t expecting that, nor so many. You must’ve made the Fate Monks quite irritated in school.

  “Sorry,” Blake said. “I can’t help it.”

  The good news for you is that I am not a Fate Monk, and I am more than willing to answer questions instead of demanding that you take my word for it. See, Blake, not every application of cultivation is during a fight, and you never know when you’ll need or want a technique. But most importantly, a cycling technique will give your Honour an elemental aspect—and Honour is best at using unique aspects. At the moment, your Honour is pure, aspectless. But we could change that.

  After a few seconds, Ethbin added, And if you do get in a fight, it’s best to have some saved up, to deploy a powerful technique early, or to buy yourself time. While you may be unwilling to stab someone in the back, betrayals are common among cultivators.

  “Betraying someone would be bad for Loyalty, wouldn’t it? Aside from being a dick move, it would...I guess, impact my ability to draw Honour from one of the main three sources.” He rubbed his chin. “So, last question. Once I expand my mana sea—or Honour sea—to a certain point, I’d advance to Body Tempering?”

  Precisely. You cannot advance until you have enough Honour condensed, but once it’s locked in, it’s not going anywhere. Another cultivator can Harvest you, or can try, but you’ll never drop below the stage you’ve reached. They’ll just try to take any of your free available mana, which you have none of.

  “Huh…” Blake breathed. “I’m immune to Harvesting techniques now…”

  Now, please, no more questions, Ethbin said. We need to get moving, and if I answer more, I won’t have enough energy to help you.

  Blake pushed himself back up, then shook off, almost like a dog. His shoulders stung where the wolf’s claws had bit into him, and before he set off, he used a spare shirt from his backpack to make bandages. It wouldn’t be perfect, but he could figure out a solution later. There was no clean water out here to rinse out the wounds.

  It was hard to say what time it was, though he would’ve guessed it was approaching noon. He kept walking.

  “Is there a location I should be aiming for?” he asked.

  I think I sense what we need nearby. Keep moving.

  ‘Nearby’ turned out to mean a week of walking and following Ethbin’s directions. The merge-mists weren’t terribly massive, and if he’d walked in a straight line, he would’ve emerged from the other side—on an unfamiliar world that had integrated with Earth. But he was pretty sure they were taking a diagonal route, curving up through the mists.

  Along the way, they’d encountered three more howlers and evaded a snake with a body as thick as a tree trunk. Blake took out the howlers, practicing gathering Honour, but he had no breakthroughs. Nothing to elucidate how to actually hold the Honour in his body or condense it.

  If he couldn’t do that, he’d be forever stuck at the first stage of Condensation. That sounded like hell. So he kept practicing.

  But any day, he feared, someone was going to find him. Svarikson was looking for him, right? He needed to get strong enough to fight the man off by that time. No one did, but it didn’t ease the concern in his gut.

  Every night, Blake stopped to eat some of his travelling rations. He made a hasty mist-gathering net out of twigs, which he used to accumulate clean water. It wasn’t as effective as cold metal, but it got the job done. Enough to keep him hydrated with fresh water, and enough to clean out his wounds.

  On the eighth day after he’d entered the mists, they arrived at a pond.

  At first, it was difficult to differentiate from the rest of the swamp, but the water was much clearer, and there were trees all around it, holding in an embankment of mud and regular grass. Was that dry land, forming a ring around it? Blake wanted nothing more than to climb up and dry his feet, but Ethbin said, We’re here. Keep your eyes out.

  “What are we actually looking for?” Blake tilted his head.

  That pond. And the demonic fiend inside it.