Unfettered

The raider had a spear. The Unfettered had empty hands and no armor. I thought the contest already decided. Then the spear-point stopped a finger-width from her throat, not because it struck anything, but because the man holding it could not make his wrist continue. She touched his elbow with two fingers. He dropped the spear. She touched his chest. He sat down. She bowed to him afterward as if he had helped with a lesson.

-- recovered fragment, road-court testimony, East Gate

What an Unfettered is

The Unfettered fights without armor, without reliance on weapons, and without letting fear close the body. Their discipline conditions the nervous system into a living interface with the Miasm. They call the inner resource Wind because that is what it feels like when the body learns to move before the ordinary mind has finished giving permission.

Armor blocks the conduit. Weapons buffer it. The bare hand is not a symbol of humility, and the unarmored body is not a boast. They are the cleanest available instruments. An Unfettered has spent years removing interference between intention, motion, and Wind response.

Other channelers anchor their connection to the Winds through language, lineage, or contract. The Unfettered anchors through the body itself — the trained cadence of breath, footfall, and the deliberate stillness that precedes a strike. The channel does not require recitation. It requires practice, and practice, and more practice. When the body's cadence is clean enough, the Wind moves with it. The channel is Substrate-powered; in dead zones where the Miasm thins to nothing, the Wind does not answer. In saturated ground, an Unfettered of sufficient discipline is something a witness cannot easily explain.

Outsiders often mistake the Unfettered for ascetics, wanderers, or harmless road-travelers. Settlements that know them make space on the practice ground. The body that appears unarmed may be the most disciplined instrument at the gate.

Chassis

Class features

The Unfettered's class features are the load-bearing skeleton of every Unfettered, regardless of which path they follow. They are the accumulated mechanics of training the body as a Wind-channel: the unarmored posture, the martial cadence, the point-economy of Wind, and the long list of what a disciplined body learns to do before it needs instruction. The subclass at L3 sharpens what the chassis has already built. All Wind-spending features are Substrate-powered; they do not function in dead zones where the ambient Miasm is absent.

Feature ladder

Major class features

• Unarmored Defense (L1). While you are wearing no armor and not wielding a shield, your AC equals 10 + your DEX modifier + your WIS modifier. The body moving through the Miasm has its own geometry. The trained posture is not the posture of standing still; it is the posture of already having moved.
• Trained Cadence (L1). Your practice has given you mastery of combat styles that use unarmed strikes and Unfettered weapons (shortswords and any simple melee weapon lacking the two-handed or heavy property). You gain the following benefits while unarmed or wielding only Unfettered weapons and wearing no armor or shield:
  • You may use DEX instead of STR for attack and damage rolls with unarmed strikes and Unfettered weapons.
  • Roll the Martial Die (starting at d4, increasing with level as shown in the Feature Ladder) in place of the normal damage of your unarmed strike.
  • When you use the Attack action with an unarmed strike or an Unfettered weapon on your turn, you may make one unarmed strike as a bonus action, provided you have not already taken a bonus action this turn.
• Wind (L2). Your trained cadence has opened a point-economy of channeled force. Your Unfettered level determines the number of Wind points you have, as shown in the Feature Ladder. You spend these points to power Wind features; spent points are unavailable until you finish a short or long rest. Regaining Wind points requires at least 30 minutes of the rest spent in focused, deliberate practice. Wind save DC = 8 + proficiency bonus + WIS modifier. Starting at L2 you know three Wind techniques: Flurry of Blows, Patient Defense, and Step of the Wind.
  • Flurry of Blows. Immediately after you take the Attack action on your turn, spend 1 Wind to make two unarmed strikes as a bonus action.
  • Patient Defense. Spend 1 Wind to take the Dodge action as a bonus action on your turn.
  • Step of the Wind. Spend 1 Wind to take the Disengage or Dash action as a bonus action on your turn; your jump distance is doubled for the turn.
• Unarmored Movement (L2). Your speed increases by 10 ft while you are not wearing armor or wielding a shield, increasing further at higher levels as shown in the Feature Ladder. At L9, you gain the ability to move along vertical surfaces and across liquids on your turn without falling during the move.
• Deflect Missiles (L3). When hit by a ranged weapon attack, you may use your reaction to deflect or catch the missile. When you do so, reduce the damage taken by 1d10 + your DEX modifier + your Unfettered level. If you reduce the damage to 0, you may catch the missile if it is small enough to hold in one hand and you have at least one hand free. If you catch a missile, you may spend 1 Wind to make a ranged attack with the weapon or ammunition just caught as part of the same reaction, with proficiency, at normal range 20 ft and long range 60 ft.
• Slow Fall (L4). When you fall, use your reaction to reduce falling damage by an amount equal to five times your Unfettered level. The body reads the drop; the trained cadence slows the answer.
• Extra Attack (L5). When you take the Attack action, you may attack twice. The cadence has compounded; the second strike opens before the first one has finished closing.
• Stunning Strike (L5). When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, spend 1 Wind to attempt a stunning strike. The target must succeed on a CON saving throw (Wind save DC) or be Stunned until the end of your next turn. The body of an Unfettered carries the Miasm at its surface; the strike delivers a disruption to the target's own Wind-signature, and for a moment the target's body stops listening to itself.
• Wind-Empowered Strikes (L6). Your unarmed strikes count as psionic for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to non-psionic attacks and damage. The cadence has fully permeated the strike; the blow carries the Wind's register. Creatures that resist ordinary force do not find it easy to resist a hand shaped by years of disciplined channel-work.
• Evasion (L7). When subjected to an effect that allows a DEX saving throw for half damage, you instead take no damage on a success and only half damage on a failure. The cadence reads what the body is about to enter. The motion has already begun.
• Stillness of Mind (L7). As an action, end one effect on yourself that is causing you to be Charmed or Frightened. The trained stillness is a real technique: the Unfettered returns to the cadence, and the cadence does not include the state being ended.
• Purity of Body (L10). Your mastery of the Wind flowing through the body makes you immune to disease and poison. The colony-activity shaped by years of disciplined channel-work maintains the body's internal signal-environment. Pathogens find no foothold in tissue this thoroughly managed.
• Open Signal (L13). Your Wind-channel has extended its reach to the communicative layer of the Miasm. You understand all spoken languages, and any creature that can understand a language can understand what you say. The channel reads the substrate of speech the way it reads the substrate of motion.
• Diamond Discipline (L14). Your mastery of the Wind grants you proficiency in all saving throws. Additionally, whenever you make a saving throw and fail, you may spend 1 Wind to reroll it and take the second result. The body that has held this discipline for this long has closed most of the gaps through which a failure can arrive.
• Timeless Form (L15). Your Wind-channel sustains the body against the wearing of ordinary time. You suffer none of the frailty of old age and cannot be aged by psionic effects. You can still die of old age. In addition, you no longer require food or water. The discipline has become metabolic fact.
• Empty Body (L18). As an action, spend 4 Wind to become invisible for 1 minute. During this time, you also have resistance to all damage except force damage. The body in this state is not absent — the Miasm has simply redistributed around it, and the usual signatures that draw attention or carry damage have been suppressed at the surface.
• Perfect Self (L20). When you roll Initiative and have no Wind remaining, you regain 4 Wind. The discipline is old enough now that the channel restores at the moment of greatest need. The body knows what a fight requires before the first roll settles.

Subclasses

At L3 an Unfettered's discipline settles into a path. Three are shipped at launch: Unfettered of The Way (the apex of trained control, motion, and the deliberate redirection of force), Still Hand (the interruption path, which ends conflict by refusing its rhythm), and Iron Nerve (the conditioning path, which trains the body to keep moving under pain, terror, and hostile signal).

Unfettered of The Way

He crossed the yard without hurrying. Every opponent moved first. Every opponent regretted it. He never seemed to strike where they were. He struck where their balance had already decided to be.

-- recovered fragment, apprentice's slate, Broken Ring school

Identity

The Unfettered of The Way trains control: redirection, openings, breath, pressure, and the exact moment when a body can be asked to fail. The Way is not a faction-doctrine. It is a recovered word attached to a discipline whose fragments survived in deep-strata data caches long after the Forgetting; most of the living schools are descended from those fragments, whether they know their lineage or not. The schools call themselves reinventions. The fragments are older than every school.

Practitioners of The Way are unsettling precisely because they do not appear to overpower. They make force misplace itself. A brute can be resisted. A person whose own motion has been borrowed against them feels the world turn traitor. The Way builds on the Unfettered's existing Wind-channel, extending it into contact: the Flurry of Blows becomes a diagnostic tool; the body's recovery is accelerated; the settled posture begins to project a Wind-calm that disrupts hostile intent before it arrives. At the highest levels, a practitioner of The Way can leave a vibrational charge in a target's tissue and choose, at any later moment, whether to discharge it.

Subclass features

L3: Open Hand Technique. Whenever you hit a creature with one of the attacks granted by your Flurry of Blows, you may impose one of the following effects on that target (one effect per hit, chosen when the hit lands):

• It must succeed on a DEX saving throw (Wind save DC) or fall Prone.
• It must make a STR saving throw (Wind save DC). On a failure, you push it up to 15 ft away from you.
• It cannot take reactions until the end of your next turn.

The technique is not purely mechanical force. The Unfettered of The Way reads the target's balance and weight distribution through the contact, then spends 1 Wind after the Flurry of Blows attack to redirect the target's own position against them. The target's mass does the traveling; the practitioner's hand is simply the point where the redirection occurs.

L6: Wholeness of Body. As an action, restore hit points to yourself equal to three times your Unfettered level. You must finish a long rest before you can use this feature again. The body trained to manage its own repair budget can draw on that budget deliberately. The discipline makes the recovery do work the rest would have done slowly. No outside channel is involved; the practitioner is spending what they have already accumulated.

L11: Tranquility. At the end of each long rest, you gain the effect of a Sanctuary protocol (save DC = 8 + WIS modifier + proficiency bonus) that lasts until the start of your next long rest, ending early as normal if you attack a creature or use a hostile Wind technique. The settled cadence projects a Wind-calm that makes it genuinely difficult for a hostile mind to identify the Unfettered as the correct target. This is not invisibility and not persuasion; it is a state in which the Miasm at the body's surface becomes difficult to read as a threat or an opportunity. Witnesses describe approaching the Unfettered and then finding, to their own confusion, that they had chosen a different direction.

L17: Quivering Palm. When you hit a creature with an unarmed strike, you may spend 3 Wind to begin building imperceptible resonant pressure in the target's tissue. The vibrations are harmless and undetectable. They persist for a number of days equal to your Unfettered level, or until you choose to end them harmlessly as a free action. You may have only one creature under this effect at a time. At any point while the target is on the same plane of existence as you, use your action to discharge the built pressure: the target makes a CON saving throw (Wind save DC). On a failure, the target is reduced to 0 hit points. On a success, the target takes 10d10 damage. The mechanism is a psionic pressure-accumulation technique delivered through disciplined contact. The discharge does not look like a strike. From the outside, it looks like nothing at all, until the target stops.

Still Hand

The Still Hand stood between the two brothers for an hour. Neither brother lowered his knife. Neither brother struck. By sunset both were weeping from the strain of wanting violence and being unable to find a clean path to it.

-- recovered fragment, settlement arbitration, New Ditch

Identity

The Still Hand studies interruption. Their art is not the strike, but the removed possibility: a wrist stopped before the cut, a foot placed where a charge cannot form, a breath caught before a shout becomes command.

Many Still Hands become guards, mediators, or escorts through tense territory. They are not pacifists by requirement. They simply know that preventing a fight can demand more discipline than winning one.

Iron Nerve

The noise-machine screamed until my teeth hurt. Everyone near it folded or ran. The Iron Nerve walked through the sound with blood under both eyes and put one palm on the housing. The machine kept screaming. She kept walking her breath down. Eventually the machine gave up first.

-- recovered fragment, cache breach account, Siren Room

Identity

The Iron Nerve path conditions the body against pain, terror, neural interference, and the false commands of hostile systems. These Unfettered do not ignore fear. They train so the body can receive fear as information without obeying it.

Iron Nerves are prized in ruins, Redoubt fringes, and any place where machines can assault the senses directly. Their calm is not temperament. It is scar tissue made useful.