The Third Step: Chapter Sixty-Three (Patreon)

I spent that night processing the golden soul potion, which helped condense my mana slightly. It wasn't nearly as dramatic as the first time I'd drunk one, not after having taken so many drops of destiny and advanced so far, but the following morning, my mana definitely felt denser. After a couple of morning chores, Dawn, Dusk, Ed, Liz, and her grandfather all trained together in the garden, and I walked into the vault. The armored ghostly guardian – now burning with the power of peak fourth gate magic – eyed me, and then moved aside. 

Between the battle with the flock, the contents of the Sekhem ring, and as a general side effect of exploring, we’d found plenty of mana sources of varying levels of power. Many of them wound up returned to nature, used for alchemy, or sold for cash, but that still left us with quite a few left over. And it was those leftover dregs that I intended to use. I gathered up a collection of as many different sources as I could find, and then began to absorb them. Several of them weren’t directly usable for restoring my own reserves of mana, but that wasn’t what I actually needed them for. No, I sent all of them spiraling toward Combat Echo. 

I’d had the spell ingrained for a while now, and had been using Hudau Heart to feed it a slow trickle of mana, helping to charge the spell up. The issue was, after having used my Ephemeral Rebirth to fight the Flock, I’d needed to split my regeneration even further in order to fill both of them. Right now, my Combat Echo was about eighty-five percent of the way full, while Ephemeral Rebirth was only at about five percent, maybe less. The Rebirth took a lot more mana than Combat Echo, given it needed to be permanent and had an effect on my spirit, so there was no way burning a few mana sources would get it ready in time for the tournament. Combat Echo, on the other hand? I might be able to stuff myself with enough mana to get it active. 

It took me ages, and was the worst sort of work – boring, but intense.  Moving all the mana into one spell wasn’t exactly interesting, so I struggled to keep focused on the task. But each time I lost my concentration, the mana I was directing would slip from my control, and if I didn’t notice fast enough, it would dissipate. That wasted the natural treasure and my time, so I did my best to focus, throwing myself into my mana-garden to trim waste and work on consolidating the gains I’d made. Starfish Regeneration in particular had grown rather explosively, and had several unneeded branches that I could trim. 

After a few hours of directing the mana flow, the spell settled in my spirit, letting out a satisfied ‘clunk’ sound as it did. I wasn’t sure the sound was actually real, or if I’d just imagined it, but I supposed there was a limited difference between the two while I was within my spirit. I cast Hudau Heart, then paused to consider what, exactly, I wanted to do. With the spell filled, any additional power I sent into it could be used to expand the copy’s total supply of mana, so directing a portion of the flow into the spell could still be beneficial as a trump card. But would it be better to focus it on my mana-garden, and pushing back mists? Raising my walls? Perhaps direct it into Ephemeral Rebirth? I argued with myself for a while before leaving a tiny trickle going to Combat Echo, releasing half of what was left to speed my mana recovery, and the other half to feed the Rebirth. With that done, I joined everyone up above to train, summoning a copy of Ikki, who swiftly began to split the training off into groups, focusing on different things. While he fought Liz and Ed in hand to hand combat, focusing on helping Liz use her shadow whips from close distance, I was paired with my familiars and Liz’s grandfather. 

“I’m going to be casting Shadow Surge, one of my fastest spells. It will be your job to read the motions beforehand, and dodge,” Liz’s grandfather said, raising his hand. I immediately teleported to the side, and he knit his eyebrows together. “Well. That just ain’t right.”

“What?” 

“Hold on, let’s try again. Dusk, Dawn, help me when you feel like it.” 

We began circling one another, and my eyes flitted from the two spirits to Liz’s grandfather. After several long seconds, Dusk and Liz’s grandfather both unleashed attacks, and I teleported out of the way, only to be right in line with one of Dawn’s crystals. I twisted out of the way, dodged another shadow attack, then one of Dusk’s shockwaves. Liz’s grandfather was getting visibly confused. 

“You’re already doing it,” he said. “This isn’t a skilled new person either – you’ve got practice.” 

A moment later, a look of comprehension dawned on his face and he smirked. 

“Wait, I think I got it. Let’s go again.” 

Again we fell into it, when suddenly a stone smacked the side of my head. It wasn’t hard, nowhere near enough to give me a concussion, but it stung. Weirder still, I hadn’t seen it coming, not at all. I turned to Liz’s grandfather to see him holding a small pile of rocks in one hand, while his other was now empty from having hit me. 

“How did you hit me?” I asked, confused. “I was dodging all the spells just fine.” 

“You’re making a mistake I’ve run into before at the guild,” he responded, dropping the stones to let them tumble to the floor. “We usually only see in people with knowledge mana as a supporting mana type to a primary combat mana, but I suppose it makes sense you’d have done it. You learned backwards.” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Most fighters learn to read the flow of a fight through the somatic world. Punches, kicks, flicked hands to cast spells, all that good stuff. As their mana senses sharpen, they start incorporating them into this understanding to help dodge spells. After all, few spells require you to flick your hands left to send a bolt in that direction. It’s just what comes easy to us.” 

“But I’m sensing power as it builds and fires at me,” I realized, nodding along. “It’s why I can dodge through the field of combat, but the woman was able to shoot me in the head without me noticing.” 

“Exactly. You’ve got to learn to do things backwards now, and learn how to read the more physical cues. I doubt you’re terrible. In fact? I bet in melee you’re actually pretty good, given you’ve got some skill in fighting with the White Viper style. But you’ve developed a bit of a ranged blind spot.” 

“Is that really a problem, though?” I asked with a frown. “I mean, I can already take a bullet to the head. To get more powerful weaponry, you’ll need to use energetic materials, like stormsteel, and those show up well in mana senses.” 

“It’s not the end of the world, but it is a problem,” Liz’s grandfather said. “For one, if she’d shot you in the throat, you wouldn’t have shrugged it off – you don’t have bones protecting your airways, after all. For another, while my ships primarily use spells and mana cannons, we do sometimes also use…” 

He fished around in his storage ring for several long moments before he withdrew a crossbow bolt and tossed it to me. I snagged it out of the air and began examining it. The bolt was clearly enchanted, but I didn’t feel anything from it – it felt just like a normal crossbow bolt to me. Despite that fact, I could clearly see symbols that somewhat reassembled the fireball spell worked into the shaft of the bolt. 

“Veiled crossbow bolts,” Liz’s grandfather finished. “These are third gate ones, containing a fireball spell that can be remotely detonated by applying mana to a specialized crossbow. But certain mages can veil their spells even as they're fired. You could likely buy enchanted glass with a veiling for combat potions. Certain talisman fighters add veils to their talismans.” 

In response, I focused my senses on the bolt, and watched as the veiling enchantment broke, letting me get a good sense for the fireball spell contained within. Despite being called fireball, it was really closer to my alchemical fire bomb than the incredible display of power that some fire mages could pull off. 

“That is a strategy, and a valid one,” agreed Liz’s grandfather. “If your senses are good enough, you can pierce any veil. But do you really want to take the bet your senses will always be better than your opponent’s ability to hide? You have to succeed every single time, but it only takes one successful veil to eliminate you from the tournament.” 

“You’re right,” I agreed. “It’s something I should learn, I just… Well, at least it explains how I never learned it in the first place.” 

With that done, we turned to training the still extant, but smaller than expected, gap in my combat power, with Dusk and Liz’s grandpa pelting me with small stones in order to train my need to pay attention to my surroundings. At one point, I thought I’d managed it, only to learn I’d gotten better at interpreting the interruptions in light and wind that Sky Dragon’s Senses provided. That forced me to use the sensory self-restraining band that I’d used before. 

After some time, I took a break and swapped, fighting Ikki in a purely hand to hand contest, with no magic at all. Despite him having significantly less strength than I did, being slower than I was, and the fact he wasn’t even using his sword… I still lost. Nine rounds out of ten, he’d simply slip aside from my palm strikes, punches, and kicks, slam a hand into the soft part of my throat or the back of my leg, and knock me to the ground. It was somewhat embarrassing just how bad I felt like I was, but I had to remind myself that Ikki had been practicing martial arts for literal centuries. Even if there was a limited amount you could grow without spell-backed development, every one of his motions was perfect. 

And he tried to hammer that perfection into me. “You’re overthinking”, “You’re focusing too much on your upper body”, “You’re overextending”, “You’re not thinking enough”, “Control the flow of your motion”, and on and on and on. My head was spinning after the first day of practice. 

That night I drank the hollowvoid potion. I knew that the actual seed worked by extending tendrils of will and soul mana through spells, improving the control and power a person had, and I expected this would do something similar. The drop of resolve had also increased my wall height, so it was possible it would do something with that.

The morning of the second day, I wasn't sure if it had actually worked with my soul mana and will, but I definitely seemed to have a more exacting control over my spells, both in terms of feeding them mana and manipulating their effects. I nodded my appreciation at the gift, then headed out to cook breakfast and train. Today was different from the first day, with Liz and I primarily focused on fighting one another, at least as much as either of us could. We were honestly a poor match up for one another in a fight, at least when I was working to restrict my power to the Gumiho theming and when she was attempting to hide the non-lunar aligned magic from her desolation mana. With our kits that restricted, if Liz hit me a few times, she won. If she couldn’t hit me, I’d wear her down and win. There was nothing else to it. 

That changed when we sparred without our limitations. We already knew one another’s tricks fairly well, so there was no risk of us playing our hand against one another. When we actually cut loose, things were much more interesting. She could hit hard enough to match even a three cycle Mantle Dragonfyre, and was more than fast enough to dodge it with the help of her growth shoes, which stopped it from being an instant win condition. When I unleashed a massive wave of magic with my overwhelming echo strategy, Liz was able to counter with waves of weak echo attacks she’d stored in her full-gate spell. When I tried to cut through her attacks with Foxfyre, she was able to do an immediate follow up with another thanks to her legacy. When I summoned my armor and tried to wade through her attacks, she was able to use her sword skills to keep me at a distance and wear through my reserves of mana, turning it into a slow, drawn out fight. If I countered with Foxsteps, she countered in turn with the echoes of her sword – and since they weren’t a spell, Fungal Armor didn’t adapt to them.

Of course, it wasn’t just her countering my tricks. I pushed her hard, and won about half of the matches, but she also pushed back hard – her echo spells and sword echoes were dangerous, and could deal some serious damage if they managed to punch through my armor. Even when Dusk threw in on my side, I only won three out of every four matches. Dusk’s ability to pin Liz down was invaluable in cutting off paths of retreat, but Liz could still sometimes win by simply overpowering me, which in a tournament match would have resulted in my loss, even with Dusk still on the field. 

The extreme spars were rough on both of us, but they had one benefit that applied to me: my growth spells. Though they weren’t perfectly saturated yet, I was getting close. Very close. If I only had another week or two to train, I was all but certain I’d be able to tip them over the edge. But unfortunately for me, I didn’t even have one more day, as I had my next event coming up: tug of war. With that in mind, I downed the ninelight potion and lay down to sleep, glad for the additional improvements to spell synergies and ingrained effects that the potion would offer.