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‘Huh. I think I understand... mostly.’ Hector scratched his neck. The integration users had completed their work, and the tunneling party was making headway again.

‘There are various ways to go about making a net,’ said Garovel. ‘Generally, you want your strongest combatant to empower the net so as to make it as durable as possible. Opponents will often try to break nets with EMPs and the like.’

‘Can’t the enemy just break these relays or whatever?’

‘They sure can. That’s where the integration users come in. They conceal their work so that the opponent won’t have such an easy time locating the net’s weak points.’

‘Er... I’m still kinda unclear about what the integration type actually is,’ said Hector. ‘I know that it fuses materials together, but, uh... how?’

‘Are you sure this is the time and place to be asking about all these different things? I can’t help but feel you’d retain the information better when we aren’t in mortal peril.’

‘Maybe, but... uh... I mean, as long as we’re not being attacked right this second, it seems like as good a time as any to me.’

Garovel gave a small shrug. ‘Fair enough, I suppose. Integration involves elements like materialization and transfiguration do, but it differs in that a single integration user can eventually learn to work with any number of different elements. An integrator starts off with only two elements already in their repertoire, and they have to manually acquire more from there.’

‘How do they do that?’

‘By using a hyper-state. Which is a whole different conversation, really, but the short of it is that integration and mutation users have a hyper-state called “pan-wzrost” which lets them learn to use new materials.’

‘Hyper-states again... eesh. How many are there, anyway?’

‘Four. Pan-rozum, -forma, -moc, and -wzrost. Rozum is the most difficult to use; wzrost is the easiest; forma and moc are about the same.’

‘...I guess I need to know what they all do, huh?’

‘Probably.’

‘Ugh...’

Garovel chortled. ‘What happened to that eagerness to learn you had earlier?’

‘This is different. This shit is all, like... I mean, I’m nowhere close to using any of it, right? So... it’s just...’

‘Materialization can only use pan-forma and pan-rozum. But yes, they’re both quite impossible for us, currently. I can save the explanation for later. Though, I do get the feeling we’ll be seeing them in action fairly soon. I’d bet anything that Asad can at least use pan-forma.’