B.F.HUUPS
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Chapter 32
🕑 Added 2025-07-14 20:36:19 +0000 UTCAs it turned out, altering the threads of fate was much more difficult when the base thread was constantly moving, as it was with the clown game. At the expense of cranial comfort, he could see the many threads he could force the ball onto, but there were so many that by the time he found the one that took the ball where he wanted it to go, the clown’s mouth had moved and the base thread was going a completely different direction. Generally, there was always a path roughly where he wanted to go, but it wasn’t constant.
When it felt like his head was about to burst from all the information being fed to him through his trait, he closed his eyes and took a long breath to recover slightly, and then went and just tossed the ball in mostly at random. With the ball now out of his hand, the base thread was constant, but it still took him a bit to find the thinner thread that took the ball toward the ten, and by the time he did, it was too late. The ball had been zapped out of the air. A moment later, he was back on the obsidian tile.
So I need to drop it to be able to see the threads properly, he thought.
It made sense. Up until he dropped it, the trajectory changed depending on his timing, but once it was out of his hands, it was set. The problem with this was that the game would then zap the ball out of the air, but he already had a way around that. He just had to aim it so it wouldn’t land in any holes.
In his next attempt, he toned down Fate Bender so that he only saw the existing threads, not the new ones he could create. Once he relocated the spot where he could drop it and miss every hole, he watched to figure out the timing again, then dropped it, and immediately tried to activate the next level of Fate Bender. It took a second, but midair, the thin threads began to appear. Hastily, he forced the ball off its set path and onto another. He did not care which new thread it ended up on. He was just testing his theory.
The test was a resounding success. The ball wiggled slightly in midair and hit the board just to the side of where it should have. It bounced a few times, then landed on the four. The game’s lightning zapper did not trigger.
“Ha, get fucked, you stupid clown fucker!” he shouted. “I’m going to cheat, and you can’t stop me!”
While the clown game no longer stopped him, his own failures could. He used the same method a few more times, trying to aim the ball for specific holes, but it never quite worked, and soon, he went over the 13-point limit and was killed again.
He died another dozen times before he realized something needed to change. He had gotten fairly adept at making the new threads appear and was even pretty consistent at moving the ball off the main thread, but there was one major problem: he struggled to locate the new thread he needed. The new threads were all so thin they were almost invisible, and there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, of them, splaying out like a sawed-off shotgun on cosmic steroids. Whether he needed more Perception or Intelligence to find the thread faster, he wasn’t sure, but he knew he didn’t have it, and that his current method was little better than blindly firing and hoping for the best.
He had actually accidentally succeeded in reaching 13 once, making the gates open, and immediately dropped another ball to push himself over the limit and get himself killed. He didn’t want to win accidentally. He wanted to be able to do it consistently. He planned on using Fate Bender to cheat on whatever else was in this Dungeon Trial, and he fully expected to die, so he wanted to be able to get back with Fate Bender consistently.
He tried another dozen times, but his progress was grinding to a halt. There were simply too many threads. Without enough free points to shove into Perception or Intelligence, he needed a different solution. A way to reduce the threads so he could find the ones he actually needed.
He figured it should be possible. After all, those threads were all ones that he was creating. They didn’t exist before. Fate was just going to take the ball down the central thread without his interference. So if he was the one making them, he should be able to create fewer of them, right?
He decided to put this theory to the test by returning to his previous method of simply dropping the ball on the ground. That way, the threads were more stable, so he had more time to mess with them. He was sure Douglas was laughing at him from whatever secret viewing room he had to snoop on Aaron’s trials, but he didn’t care. He was going to figure this out one way or another.
It was a long and boring two days as Aaron tried various methods to reduce the number of threads. At first, he just tried to think really hard about the number going down, but that didn’t seem to work. After that, he instead tried to target a specific thread and make it disappear. That actually did work, but wasn’t all that practical with so many of them. He did try to advance that into making more than one at a time disappear, and while he kind of succeeded, his limit was three at once, and when he moved on to make three more disappear, the first three would begin to fade back into existence over time.
So, the incremental method wasn’t going to work. His original attempt to make them disappear en masse didn’t feel like the right solution either. And as the hours and deaths stacked on, he noticed another problem: the number of new threads was growing. It was very, very subtle, and he almost didn’t notice it at first, but after so long, it was obvious. The range that the new threads could carry the ball was increasing, and that meant more threads. More threads also meant more headaches, so his practice sessions were growing shorter and shorter as the pain in his head forced him to cut them short so he could reset.
This couldn’t go on. He needed a new way. He decided to take a step back and try a slightly different approach.
There was something strange about the thin threads. Something he was missing. He had figured they were thin just because they didn’t actually exist, and he was creating them, but now that he had been looking at them for days on end, he wasn’t so certain.
He held the ball out, watching the thin threads appear around the central one. Then, he dropped the ball, and as soon as it left his hand, he forced it onto a new path. When he did this, he took a careful look at the threads. The original thread suddenly grew thin like the other potential ones, while the new one grew thick, just as he remembered. Well, almost.
He wasn’t sure if he was just placeboing himself into thinking he had seen something, but for the briefest moment, he thought he saw a flicker. He dropped the ball a dozen more times, moving it the same way, and by then, he was sure. There was definitely something there.
His head was pounding more than ever, so he got himself killed to refresh his mind and went right back to it. Soon, he was able to see it. What was actually happening when he changed the threads. The original one shrank, yes, but it didn’t just deflate. It unraveled. And then the new thread became the main one; it didn’t inflate. New thin threads wrapped around it and braided with it as if it were forming a rope. It happened so fast it was almost impossible to see, but he was sure of it.
And this observation gave him an idea. He didn’t need to reduce the number of thin threads he saw. He just needed to tie them together to make a thicker one.
Not that that was easy. It still took him many, many attempts to just be able to move a few of the threads together. It took even longer due to the fact that his head only hurt more and more with each new layer he added to this technique. He could barely make it more than a few minutes before needing a reset now, and even after the reset, he was starting to feel tired.
After one death, when he felt particularly exhausted, rather than jumping right back in, he used the Focus Stone to take a look at his own soul. He had a feeling his exhaustion came from that rather than his mind, and his meditation proved that correct. Within his soul, things felt… wrong.
He hadn’t sensed his soul like this in quite a while, but he knew the sensation was very different. Before, it was vibrant, but now it was sickly. He had a brief moment of panic as he realized that his efforts to mess with his Alpha Trait were almost definitely what caused this. However, after a few minutes, he noticed that while his soul felt unhealthy, it also felt like it was recovering. If he pushed himself too far, he might cause some irreparable damage, but for now, he was fine.
He relaxed a bit and sat there, taking in his soul. After a few more minutes, he noticed something else. Something much deeper within him. He focused in on it, and recognized that the sensation was coming from the same place that Fate Bender had originally been. This didn’t feel quite right either. Unlike the rest of his soul, it didn’t feel sickly. It felt like it was thriving. It pulsed with energy, almost like a heartbeat, and as his senses drew nearer and nearer, it grew stronger and stronger.
He reached the place where his Alpha Trait existed within his soul, and while it was not a visible thing, Aaron somehow felt like it was an egg. An egg that was about to hatch. He reached out toward it with his senses, giving it a nudge. It gave off a more powerful pulse, as if eagerly trying to break free. Aaron gave it a more violent nudge, and it pulsed harder. Finally, he gave it a metaphysical punch, and immediately blacked out.
When he came to, he was lying facedown in the hallway, and his face felt sticky. He pushed himself up and noticed that he had been lying in a small puddle of blood. He reached up to touch his face and felt sticky lines running from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
“Shit,” he muttered, pushing himself to his feet.
There was a System message waiting for him, but before he read it, he noticed that Douglas was standing nearby with an expression that almost looked like concern.
Ah, like he’d be concerned about me, thought Aaron.
“Is that actual worry on your face, Douglas?” he asked.
“Hardly... You look terrible,” said Douglas.
“Yeah, thanks,” said Aaron. “How long was I out?”
“Just a little over four hours.”
“Well, that’s not too bad.”
Aaron was worried he had been unconscious for longer, so hearing it was only four hours was good news to him. Though he did feel a bit peckish now.
“What did you do?” asked Douglas.
“Well…” said Aaron, glancing at the System notification.
Alpha Trait Evolved: Fate Weaver
Your soul possesses the forgotten Trait Fate Weaver, a Trait characterized by its unbreakable spirit. What would break an ordinary person has little effect on you, and none can control you. Even fate itself yields to the will of the Fate Weaver. You can see not only the threads of Fate, but you can weave your own threads of Fate.
“I believe I’ve just powered up.”
