“You know I was showing off, right?” Koyl asked. “Normally people just use it to make themselves stronger.” I ignored him and brought my attention back to the task at hand.

I held the coin in my hand and closed my eyes, drowning out as many of my senses as possible so that I could focus. In my mind, I could see the coin in my palm, but the only usable interface I could interact with was the one I used for heating things. I flexed it a little bit anyway, trying to create motion instead of heat, but only succeeded in making the coin uncomfortably hot. How did I figure out the heating ability again? I thought, trying to remember. Changing my mental idea of heat was one thing, I understood the basics of what heat was, but manifesting a physical force from nowhere to move an object was just not possible. I didn't even know how to begin.

“It's not moving,” Koyl said, breaking my concentration. Of course it's not moving, I grumbled, I don't know how to do it. I opened my eyes to see that Koyl's face was ten centimeters from my hand, watching the coin intently.

“I don't know how to move it,” I said.

“I still can't believe that you don't know how to use sehpztaazmoydh,” Koyl laughed.

“What is sehpz?” I asked. I hadn't ever heard the word come up in conversation except in the context of magic. From context, I had inferred it had something to do with strength, but maybe also movement. Koyl sat back up and scratched his chin. He hasn't shaved in about two days, I noticed.

“I don't know how to explain it man,” Koyl shrugged, “it's just sehpz.”

“What does it do?” I asked. “Is it a substance? An object?” Koyl curled his lips in and thought about it.

“It's what makes things move,” he replied. “When you move something, you give it sehpz. When you stop something you take the sehpz away. Bigger things need more of it to move.” So it's kinetic energy directly then, I thought, but that doesn't really make sense because kinetic energy doesn't exactly work like that. It's more like... force.

“Hm,” I grunted, “so does sehpz have a direction?”

“I don't know,” Koyl grumbled, “I'm not stupid, but it isn't as though I spent a lot of time reading books about this crap.”

“So what determines the direction an object moves in when force is applied?” I asked, mentally using the word sehpz for “force”. Koyl looked at me like I had asked a ridiculous question.

“Whatever direction you chose to push it in, obviously,” he replied. His strange confidence in such a ridiculously incorrect answer was amusing. Sometimes I almost forget that he's a human, I thought.

“And if it isn't a person doing the pushing? If a boulder rolls down a hill and smashes into a tree, how does the tree know what direction to move in?” I asked, with a slight half-smile curling up the right of my lips.

“Ask a priest,” Koyl snapped, “now are you going to waste more time trying to figure this out, or are we going back to planning a murder?” Considering that the advance payment is between fifteen and twenty days of inn and food costs, I should figure this out now and plan later, I thought.

My eyes closed again and I focused on the coin. Instead of trying to picture it like I did when using heat magic, I tried to visualize the forces acting on the coin. I knew that Koyl probably didn't do anything remotely like what I was doing when he showed off his little trick, but Koyl was also terrible at magic so it was possible the two were related. Really, the main two forces acting on the coin are gravity, and the repulsion of electrons in my hand against its own electrons, I thought, other forces would include air pressure, minute shifts from my muscles adjusting and my body shifting, possible tectonic forces acting through the ground and my body, gravitational attraction from the moon and nearby massive bodies, then other miscellaneous trace forces.

It was a lot to try to picture, so I decided to cull anything that wasn't significant enough to produce a visual change in the coin's position. I was left with a visualization of three arrows, one of which was shifting around randomly as my body moved from its internal subconscious motions. Okay, I thought, now do I just... magnify the upward force? In my visualization, I simply changed the magnitude of the upwards arrow representing the force my hand was exerting to defy gravity, but I didn't feel the familiar sensation of blue energy leaving me, nor did the coin move. With a frown, I checked my heads-up display and saw that I hadn't used even a sliver of power. Nutrition is doing well though, I noted.

Why didn't it move? I asked myself. There were too many possibilities. The first was that it wasn't possible to modify the upward force at all due to its nature. I wasn't entirely sure of the mechanism, but electrons had to repel each other to produce what humans thought of as physical force from contact. Since electrons had a near-zero chance under normal conditions of spontaneously finding themselves detached from an atom's orbit and floating in free space, perhaps whatever power was being used to manifest the effect simply couldn't work. Another possibility was that my visualization was wrong, and yet another was that I did produce movement but it was so small and used so little energy that it was imperceptible. This is why a numerical display is better than a graphical one, I thought.

“We're so screwed man,” Koyl said once again, breaking my concentration. I kept my eyes closed but decided to ask him what he was talking about. “I just realized that Steelheart could rat us out to the Hatchet Crew if we try to run,” he explained. “That crusty old man probably would have used that as an argument tactic if we hadn't agreed to a price.” He's right, I thought, it's probably not possible to go back and complete the three kill requests without being caught. If even one was killed, Steelheart could inform the guards and bring more force than I could reasonably evade.

“I'm just going to figure this out first,” I said, “we can work out the details later.”

“It still hasn't moved a bit,” Koyl replied. “If you're serious about what you said, are you really trying to learn sehpztaazmoydh in a few hours? I mentioned that manifesting it outside yourself is the most difficult form of sehpztaazmoydh, right? I only figured it out by chance a few years ago, and every time I do it I feel like my eyes are going to pop out.”

“You didn't mention that,” I said as I opened my eyes, “why did you do it then?” Koyl grinned sheepishly. “Ah, right, you were 'showing off',” I muttered.

“Can't blame me for it when you make everything look so easy,” Koyl grunted. “A man has to have some pride, even a little.” With a sigh I closed my eyes once more.

What if I need to make a new force instead of changing an existing one? I wondered. My mental model of the coin hadn't changed, and I removed the force for my body movement because it was just useless. If I want to make a new force to raise this coin up, it would need to be pushing against something else, I thought, I want to make it hover, like Koyl did, rather than just jump. Now, what could I use? It's not like I can just manifest electrons or- I stopped myself, taking a breath. I recalled how overthinking the mental model of heat didn't help at all, and I realized I was doing the same thing for force. I just need a visualization, intent, and energy to spare, I thought.

In my mind, I imagined a new force on the coin, a new arrow pointing upwards. I then increased the magnitude of it, hoping the coin would lift up but feeling nothing. That's because it needs energy, I thought, and if this ability can't manifest physical force from nothing that means I need to create an equal and opposite force somewhere else. I held out my off hand and imagined a force in the direction of gravity against it, equal in magnitude to the upward force on the coin. That was when I felt the drain of energy, sudden and sharp, and the coin flew off of my main hand.

“Shit,” Koyl swore as I heard the coin smack into the wall to my left and clatter to the ground. Somehow my attempt at creating a straight upwards force had moved the coin diagonally, and so vigorously that it launched itself as if thrown. “What was that?” Koyl asked me once I opened my eyes.

“I tried to make it float,” I replied, looking over to the coin at rest and picking it back up with my right hand. “Didn't really work,” I added.

“Yeah, it spun out of your hand somehow,” Koyl said.

“Spun?” I asked. Koyl made a few airy gestures that I couldn't decipher.

“It sort of... went up like this,” he said, using his hand to trace an arc through the air. “It wasn't a straight path, it moved all weird at first, kinda went up slow, then vibrated, then shot off,” he tried to explain, “damned near took my eye out.” I quickly checked my energy and contained my shock when I saw that nearly a quarter of the top bar was empty. It can't possibly use that much normally, I thought.

“How close were you watching?” I asked. Koyl frowned, then put his face ten centimeters away from my hand. “Did you see the whole path?” I asked.

“Not the end,” Koyl replied.

“But the beginning, you saw it all?” I asked. “You didn't blink or anything?”

“Yeah I saw it,” Koyl affirmed.

“Was it going straight up at first before turning, or in some other direction and then it went up?” I had a strange instinct telling me something about what had happened, and I wanted to confirm it before trying to replicate the experiment.

“It was going like this,” Koyl replied unsurely. He put his finger on the coin then traced the path more slowly, making a rough circular arc until reaching a thirty degree incline, at which point the path went more straight. Equidistant from my left hand, I thought, like a lever arm of some kind. I closed my eyes again and reproduced my experiment, this time making sure my new forces would match the existing ones before adding any energy. Then, I reframed what I was doing to have the force on my left hand resemble that of a stick attached to the coin pressing into my palm, and added an outward force to match to the coin. Then finally I added a rotational force which, when combined with the stick's outward force, produced enough upwards force to cancel gravity. With a mental flex I allowed energy to flow from me, and the coin went weightless in my hand. I opened my eyes, then with great effort added a tiny bit of extra energy to the rotational force, and watched as the coin lifted up and began to move away from my hand.

“Got it,” I said, checking my heads-up display. Energy was draining slowly at first, but then it began to rapidly deplete and the coin shook unsteadily. I quickly cut the connection and the coin fell back down. Why did that- I began to ask myself, before realizing my stupidity. The maximum range, I thought, I almost tried to lift it past eight centimeters. Koyl gaped at the display, then sighed and rubbed his eyes with one hand.

“You have a talent for making me feel useless,” he laughed.

“If it helps, the combination of those two tricks was quite exhausting,” I replied. I was at around seventy percent on my short-term storage, but if it hadn't recovered while I spent time setting up the second action I would have been closer to sixty. Very inefficient, I grumbled, I'm clearly doing something wrong.

“It doesn't,” Koyl replied, “so do you think you can use that to, I don't know, rip Yaavtey's heart to bits or something?”

“I can barely lift the coin,” I replied. “We might have to come up with a better plan than that.”