Cale’s steps felt lighter than air as he left the base with his father again that morning. It had been a week since his first trip and he had been living off that high ever since. He couldn’t stop thinking about his wind script and how much he enjoyed cutting those rocks into slices.

  However, there was one thing that really annoyed him, the activation time. He had attempted to secretly use his script a few times on different things like his food or someone else's food, or when someone was cooking in the kitchen; but every time he tried, the activation time took so long that by the time the script would activate, someone would have caught him.

  He was not sure how fighters were able to battle with scripts that activate so slowly and if he could make it faster, it would give him a huge advantage if he ever had to fight. He had spent every night looking over the code and its editor to try and figure out how to modify it without accidentally killing himself or destroying his script. He did recognize a lot of the symbols, like the red explosion button probably meant delete, but maybe it also meant destroy? The explosion made him think that maybe it would purge the script from his soul completely, and that was not something he wanted to do.

  The small scowl on his face disappeared as the smells of the dew-covered grass slowly meandered past his nose and brought him out of his thoughts. His ears picked up sounds of the forest animals waking up and it invigorated him and lifted his spirit. Soon he had a smile on his face as he daydreamed about him and Leo working together using their scripts. Leo was his best friend, and he was very excited to show off his abilities and hoped Leo wouldn’t be jealous of him, the thought actually scared him. He promised himself that he would do his best to make sure Leo got some extra scripts of his own. He wasn’t sure how the process worked, but he knew he could figure it out.

  His excitement and confidence were fueled by the success of his last training session. After he had sliced the potato, his father had him repeat the same version of the script over and over until it felt like his soul was almost empty. At first, he thought he could use his script all day long, but after a while he started to feel tired and it reminded him of how he felt the first time he used a script. His father didn’t let him go through all the potatoes in his training. While Cale sliced and diced with his script, his father was constantly trying to find something more robust for him to train with, something to challenge his script’s slicing abilities.

  That or his dad just didn’t want him cutting up all the potatoes they had found, either way, Cale was amazed at how a rock sliced just as easily as a potato and he frequently cut through the stone platform that held the training rocks. By the end of the session, he had gotten pretty good at his control, and he was able to slice without cutting all the way through the underlying rock. He still sliced the platform rock a little, but he knew with some practice that he would soon be able to use this skill with more finesse, and on a kitchen counter.

  He was sure his parents would not be happy to have a bunch of slices in their apartment’s counters. Once he had that down, he would try and make them sharper. They were already sharp enough to cut through rock, and he wasn’t even trying to imagine a molecularly aligned blade, just a simple kitchen knife.

  Cale snapped out of his daydream when he heard his father yelling for him to hurry up. He had stopped walking as he daydreamed and observed the morning around him, which meant his father had gotten a few hundred paces ahead of him. He sprinted up the path until he caught up to his father and they continued their trek to the training area. As they walked, Phil informed him that they would be hunting on the way, and it was up to Cale to make the kill.

  “Anything I should avoid killing?” Cale asked his dad. He didn’t want to kill anything considered taboo or an animal that tasted terrible.

  “Don’t shoot anything that is flying, since you have to find where the body fell and don’t want to get too off track. Keep an eye out for blue gophers. They have a burrowing acid sack in them that turns the meat inedible if it gets cut open. Otherwise, everything else is fair game.”

  “A burrowing acid sack? How does that even work?”

  “Xavier... It just works. Now let's keep moving and keep quiet. We don’t want to scare away our lunch.”

  Cale nodded his head, and they moved forward along their journey. He was slowly finding out that his dad was not very big into the details of how animals worked. Or how really anything worked other than his scripts. However, his dad did enjoy making small talk and engaging conversation with outgoing people, so perhaps his focus on the world was just elsewhere.

  Even though his dad enjoyed talking, Cale found out that he did not enjoy hours of his son asking him questions about tree bark that somehow shined or oddly shaped leaves that had little natural spinners on them. He could feel his dad being a bit annoyed at his questions, but it didn’t stop him from asking. When they were close to their campsite his father hissed for Cale to stop. Cale realized he got so caught up in looking at the environment around him that he forgot that they were supposed to be hunting! Cale crouched down low, and his face immediately became serious as he focused on what his dad was saying.

  “Xavier, up ahead I can hear a Duntor Boar. Do you hear that low squealing and snorting sound mixed in with the sound of rustling grass and dirt?”

  Cale listened to the sounds of the forest until he could hear what his father was describing. As he listened, he could hear the light squeals accompanied by heavy breathing and a lot of scraping sounds.

  “What is it doing, dad?” Cale whispered to his father, not wanting the boar to hear him.

  “Looking for bugs, it’s the main reason it hasn’t noticed us. It must have found a big meal.”

  “Is it tasty?” Cale asked, a sudden twinkle in his eyes as he thought of having boar steaks for lunch.

  “The bugs, no. The boar, yes. And the boar hide is worth a lot of money due to how tough it is.” Phil explained. “Think you could kill it?” It almost sounded like a challenge.

  “Probably?” Cale said with a scrunch on his face, “How hard is the hide?”

  “Very, very tough,” was all Phil responded with.

  “Tough... Ok, I did cut those rocks, and it can’t be harder than that right?”

  “You may be right. Alright, if you think you can kill it then go for it, but there are conditions.”

  “Conditions? Like what?”

  “Ok, condition, since there is only one. You have to kill it from afar. I don’t want you getting too close where I can’t protect you. If you can’t kill it from a decent distance away, then I will step in and take care of it before it gets to you. Understood?”

  Cale thought about it and decided that though killing it from afar sounded hard. He would at least give it a shot. He nodded his head in agreement and focused his attention on the sound of the boar. He didn’t have eyes on it yet, but he could hear it and had a fairly good idea where it was rooting around for food.

  As he crept toward the boar, he took slow, deliberate steps so that he wouldn’t step on a twig or a noisy leaf. When he attacked, he didn’t want the boar to know what hit him, and he really wanted to impress his dad. Cale’s father on Earth had been older when he had been born, and his dad wasn’t very active in his youth. Yes, he loved his original father, but his Earth dad had passed over a decade ago and it was nice having a father figure in his life again.

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  It took a few minutes for Cale to quietly sneak into a spot where he could see the boar without being seen back. As Cale observed the massive boar, he noted that it did not look like it was slowing down its feeding frenzy as it used its tusks to move the dirt around looking for bugs.

  Cale’s current vantage point wasn’t the clearest and he wasn’t sure what the best way to kill the boar was. He thought about trying to use a wind blade through its eyes and into the brain, but he knew of diseases on earth that could be transferred from the brain if it got into the animal’s meat and he didn’t want to risk that on a planet where things like scripts were possible. Who knew what super diseases existed here, the thought made him shudder.

  After some thinking he decided that just lopping off its head would be the best course of action. He didn’t know if it would make its hide less valuable in the market, but he just wanted to make sure it was dead before he worried about something like that.

  With an idea in mind, Cale moved into a position that gave him a little clearer view of the boar and closed his eyes to envision what he wanted the script to do. When he closed his eyes, he quickly realized that he had a problem! When he was cutting potatoes, they didn’t move so it was easy to envision where they were. But here the animal was moving, and he needed to know where the boar was, or he would miss!

  He opened his eyes and stared at the boar as it moved around and tried to envision the script forming above the boar. He stood there for over a minute as he tried to picture the script, but it wasn’t working. He could feel that his willpower was solid, but he struggled with holding his intent while his eyes were open. After all he had been doing it with his eyes pretty much closed the entire time he practiced previously.

  He soon decided what he was doing wasn’t working and instead closed his eyes and imagined the script like he had practiced in the past. He gave up on trying to do it with his eyes open, he would work on that later. Once his mind had been made up, his will and intent solidified. He imagined a flat guillotine blade hanging over the boar, silent, with the intent of an executioner. He knew the placement would be a little off, so he willed his intent to hold the script in place until the moment the boar was in the right spot. Then it would drop, slicing the beast into two pieces.

  His will flared to life inside him like a roaring fire as his intent finished the desired form. He activated the script and maintained his focus as he waited for it to activate. He held his hand in a fist directly in front of his chest, just inches from his face as he imagined himself holding an executioner's lever. As his script formed, he kept his hand in this shape and waited for the boar to move where he wanted it to be.

  What he had not expected was for the boar to immediately see the hanging script! His fancy smoky whisps that he had gotten used to imagining must have gotten the boar’s attention! Fortunately, the boar did not seem to understand the danger it was in. It moved forward, its nose up in the air, sniffing at the wind script as it tried to understand what it was.

  Cale kept his fist clenched as he felt his willpower draining. He had never held on to a script this long and it was taking substantially more willpower the longer he held it. It didn’t take long for the boar to lose interest in the script since it apparently didn’t have a scent nor did it seem to pose any threat to the creature.

  Cale watched as the Boar lowered its head to resume looking for food. The moment the boar took an extra step forward, Cale pulled his fist downward like he was pulling an invisible handle attached to the blade. With an iron will, his wind script sliced downward with an infallible motion. There wasn’t even a shudder in the script nor a final squeal from the animal as it sliced cleanly through the boar's neck and buried itself deep into the ground.

  Phil

  Understanding Script: A script used to “understand” someone’s intent. It allows one to both understand what someone is saying or to get them to understand what he is saying.

  Darker skin. Black hair. Green eyes. Runs a special unit that surveys the outer lands for clues, surviving communities, and any tech of the ancients that they can carry. Phil’s Unit specializes in re-contact situations. Some of the people have reverted back farther than others. Re-contacts can be very volatile.

  --

  He watched as his son slowly crept toward the boar after he had told him to kill it from afar and wondered if he was doing the right thing as a father. He was thankful no one else was out there with them. If someone were to stumble upon him having his not-even-five-year-old son kill a Duntor Boar from afar – with no weapons – they would give him a verbal beating and possibly try to give him a real one. But to his relief no one else was around to judge him and he needed to know what kind of son he had, he needed to know what kind of person his son would be.

  He had not been sleeping well after their first training session. When Diana told him long ago that she saw Xavier use a script, he believed her, but he also thought that maybe it was a fluke, a miracle even. He had never seen Xavier even attempt to use a script and what kind of toddler would be able to maintain that kind of self-discipline?

  Over the years he had let doubt enter his mind, and when he agreed to training his son out in the wilds, he had imagined his boy struggling for months, if not years, to finally master his script, if he could even use one at all. But what he saw on his first day had left him unsettled.

  Xavier had not just learned how to use his script; he had even synced with it. Usually, it took someone a year's worth of training to sync with their script, and it was considered a massive milestone in one’s life; it represented a change in how the world saw you. Every sync someone achieved made that script substantially stronger, and on occasion, even changed the core of the script’s function. That is how his friend Olter was able to make a sword out of his script even though the core script he inherited from his family was a generic fire throwing one.

  But here Xavier had synced after a morning of just basic tasks designed to help one learn a script! It shook him to his core. He knew his son was intelligent, anyone that actually knew him could tell you that. However, intelligence did not equal morality, and he was not about to let his son grow up into a monster. He needed to know now what direction his son would be heading so that if his course needed some correcting, he could do it before Xavier became too strong.

  He watched as Xavier stopped a good fifty feet away from the boar and started prepping his script, which seemed like a good idea to him since scripts have a little delay to them. He smiled to himself as he watched his boy struggle with setting up his script instead of instantly mastering a new form of intent. It was good that everything didn’t come naturally, it would make him understand his scripts better. When he noticed Xavier’s body tense up, he recognized the look and prepped his script for activation in case Xavier’s attack didn’t work.

  He had told Xavier the boar had a tough hide, but he hadn’t been fully honest. The Duntor Boar didn’t have just tough skin; it had tough bones as well. The last time he had killed one he hadn’t been able to penetrate its skin or break any of its bones but was only able to kill it after he landed a vicious kinetic kick to its head, causing its brain matter to leak out of its nose.

  It had smelled terrible, but he had gotten a great price for the excellent quality of the animal’s hide with it being fully intact. He knew that they didn’t have a knife strong enough to actually butcher the animal, but it was the perfect creature to test Xavier. Plus, he knew he could sell it for a good price, and his wife was going to go shopping for the upcoming festival soon. They made good money, but his wife also knew how to spend good money, and she had already been talking about the things she wanted to buy when she went into town.

  Phil was curious as to what kind of attack his son would use. He was expecting him to try and throw his wind script at the creature, it was a good distance away and it made the most sense to him. However, when he noticed Xavier’s script had activated, he didn’t see a single thing leave his body, instead his son’s face and body were unmoving as he kept his fist clenched tight and close to his chest.

  Did something go wrong? He wondered to himself as Xavier remained unmoving in his position. He glanced over at the Boar to see if it had noticed them yet and was shocked at what he was seeing. Right above the creature was Xavier’s script in the shape of a large flat blade. He watched as the creature noticed it above its head and he could feel himself holding in his breath as the Boar soon lost interest and resumed its meal, slowly moving forward and directly under the blade. He quickly glanced at Xavier, and to no surprise, he saw sweat pouring out of his body under the stress of concentration.

  He understood what kind of willpower it took to hold a script like that, and he felt a touch of pride as he watched his boy do a feat that normally took years of mental training. He noticed Xavier's face tighten a little and he looked back at the boar. It was moments from moving into position and Phil could feel his entire body tense with anticipation, afraid to blink in case he might miss something, which turned out to be the right call.

  When Xavier’s script activated, he would have missed it were he not paying so close attention. There was no noise from the movement as it dropped. A silent execution as it sliced down and buried itself deep into the soil. For a second he thought it missed and glanced at Xavier to see what he was doing when he heard a tremendous THUD followed by an even larger THUD and then a “WOOHOO!”

  His head snapped back to the boar and to his absolute shock, he saw the Boar laying on the ground – dead. The thuds he had heard were from the boar's large head falling to the ground, followed by its massive body.