Ed's Training Trial (Patreon)

Ed stared at the entrance to the cavern, with its disturbing stone. Stalactites should line up relatively well with stalagmites, but these were… Not right. They were askew, just enough to disturb him. They way they lined up resembled the teeth of some great beast more than it did any natural cavern

“You’re sure that this is safe?”

“Safe? No. Very little in life is safe. But any harm that comes to you from this should be manageable, and your insurance from the Lightwatch should be plenty to cover any potential damages.”

“Alright…” Ed said, though he still sounded uncertain.

Meadow patted his shoulder and smiled at him.

“You don’t need to do this, Edward. It’s up to you entirely.”

Ed closed his eyes and took in a slow, contemplative breath.

“No,” he finally said. “It’s okay. I’ll do it.”

He strode forwards, into the maw of the cavern, and the world around him shifted.

Meadow watched as he entered the trial. The world was littered with endless things of this sort: natural arrays that condensed the power of natural phenomena, handcrafted challenges from powerful mages seeking to leave something behind for worthy heirs, or even strange relics that nobody – not even the oldest of mages like the Storm King – could identify the origins of.

As Ed marched into the cave, heat began to rise off of the ground. They weren’t deep enough for it to be from the heart of Ddeaer, so it had to be some other source.

An elemental of telluric mana that resembled a human with a single massive arm and leg rose up in front of Ed, stone creaking and crumbling away, and a massive fist swung at his face.

Ed leapt back and sent power into his Skin of Stone spell, then formed a spear out of the ground around him.

That caused the elemental to pause. The shaping of stone with ungated mana was normally something that only an elemental could do, so he may have confused it…

Ed set his grip with the spear and waited for the elemental’s next move. After a few seconds, it surged forwards and hooked its fist at him.

He spun his spear quickly, catching the elemental by where an elbow would be on a human, and for a moment they were locked in a battle of raw strength, Ed’s stone spell pushing hard against the elemental’s natural advantage.

After a few seconds, he lost, and his spear was pushed back, but he’d used the time to shift his weight, and he slid out of the way of the fist, then dropped and kicked at the massive leg.

His blow connected, but didn’t do much. The elemental reshaped so that its giant fist was where its head had been, and drove it down at him, so Ed tossed the spear aside and forged his Stoneshield.

This time, when the fist connected, it was stopped dead by the dense mana inside of his shield. It pounded over and over again, but Ed slowly rose to his feet, then stomped.

The movement and accompanying surge of mana caused a gravitational field to press down on the elemental, and a sinkhole to open up under its feet – er, well. Foot.

The elemental’s natural magic lashed out, and gravity inverted as it flew out of the sinkhole. It hovered in the air.

That was fine by Ed. Flying via gravity manipulation was a mana hungry third gate spell, while a basic gravitational pull was only a normal second.

Then the stalagmites and stalactites broke off and began to rotate around the elemental’s body, then fired at him.

He clenched his fist and thrust it into the air, casting Lesser Wall of Stone. A ten foot tall, five foot wide section of stone forged itself out of his mana, and the sharp spikes cracked against it.

As soon as the barrage ended, he dropped the wall, and sketched out a pair of quick spells.

A spear launched from his fingers, and the elemental took it head on. It shattered against its stone body…

Which was the mistake Ed had been hoping it would make. The second spell came into effect, and stone warped and wrapped around the elemental, pinning it in place. Ed then redoubled the mana he was pouring into the field that held it down, and watched it fall to the floor and crack.

It rose up, the bonds of his spell absorbing into its body in order to heal itself.

Ed sketched another spell and began to draw power out of the earth underneath him, restoring his spent mana.

This was going to take a while…

Meadow watched as Ed slowly but surely wore down the guardian elemental, until it conceded defeat and stepped aside. She did feel a bit bad about the challenge – trying to fight against an elemental with your own mana type was always a pain, but the mages who’d built this place had wanted to instill its importance into their sect members.

Ed passed deeper into the caverns, and as the temperature continued to rise, he was forced to keep his Skin of Stone spell active almost permanently, when he finally entered the next room.

The room had been set up as a giant forge, and a series of wards and enchantments ringing the forge were pulling mana dense lava from deep beneath the ground up and into the forge’s heart, then cycling it and pouring it back down.

He paused and slowly swept his gaze over the room, then empowered his Analyze Earth spell.

The tools in the room all resonated, crafted from various third gate materials, but the lava flowing up from the earth was fourth gate, which had him a bit on edge.

There was also something odd about the lava. There was a curled lump that…

The lump exploded into movement as a snake, easily ten feet long and dripping with lava, erupted from the center of the forge. Ed called his Stoneshield, set his feet, and shaped a spear from the ground around him.

The snake was faster than anything that big had any sort of right to be, and he barely had time to brace himself before it surged at him and smashed into the shield.

He was pushed back until he smacked against the wall, but he used that as a brace to empower his push forwards. The butt of his spear smacked into the snake’s jaw, hard, and it snapped shut and reeled backwards. It let out a hiss and molten light began to gather in the back of its throat, third gate mana pulsing.

Ed’s eyes widened, and he suddenly wished that he’d had the mana and foresight to learn Fuse with Stone.

But he hadn’t, so instead he sketched out his Lesser Wall of Stone again, then braced his Stoneshield against it and empowered his Skin of Stone.

The blast of lavalike mana slammed into his wall, and it slowly ate through it. Wherever a thin spot appeared, he shifted more mana into it, but he didn’t have a ton of third gate mana.

Quickly, a spot cracked open before he could patch it, and he shifted his Stoneshield to hold against the wave of lava.

The wall cracked again, and Ed plugged the hole with the butt of his spear.

Then the tide of lava ended.

He didn’t drop his wall, though. He didn’t know what this lava snake thing was, but it might be intelligent enough to try and bait him out from behind his wall, only to blast him with another round of lava.

But he couldn’t sit there forever. Analyze Earth told him that the tremors in the earth were retreating, and his eyes widened.

The serpent was heading back into the forge. Maybe it was drawing in more heat for another blast?

He lowered his shield and peeked through the hole in his wall, and sure enough, his guess was right. He took a deep breath, and prepared himself.

The moment the serpent was submerged in lava, he thrust his hand out and caught it in a sinkhole.

He’d never tried to make a sinkhole on lava before. Some aspects of the spell were much easier, since lava was already rather liquidey – a very scientific term – but the mana he was using didn’t feel quite right to him.

Oh well.

He layered that with his gravity field, and the snake dropped from where the forge was until it got caught in the downward flow and sunk deep into the earth.

He winced. He really hoped that didn’t hurt the snake. It had been immune to the fourth gate lava that was being pulled up, but…

The door to the next room swung open, and he quickly released his spells. The snake swam back up and laid down in the forge, and Ed let out a relieved breath.

Meadow watched him, nodding. The original idea behind the sect’s plans had been for them to use metal spells throughout the weapons in the room to defeat the snake before it could release a lava blast, but Ed didn’t use metal magic, so she was glad that he’d worked out a solution that worked for him.

In the next room, Ed faced off against an egg.

Not in the trans sense. That actually would have been easy enough – he probably could just talk to them. Also ask them why they were stuck in a trial like this.

No, it was a giant egg, made of iron. It rolled around the room incredibly slowly, but surely.

Ed wasn’t really sure what exactly he was supposed to do in this room. The egg was easy enough to dodge, but none of his attacks could crack it. Even his single emergency damage spell, Stone Arrows, was barely able to scratch its surface.

On the plus side, lightly jogging around the room to dodge the egg’s movements was giving him plenty of time to pull power from the earth and restore his mana. After the snake challenge, it had been getting really low.

Once he’d gathered up enough mana, he released it outside of his body and condensed it up to fourth gate, then fed it into his Stone Arrows spell.

A barrage of a thousand conjured arrows impacted the egg, and this time they left the surface pocked and pitted, even with a few cracks along its surface.

After that, he was off running again, collecting more mana.

It took him three overcharged Stone Arrow spells to finally crack the egg open, and inside there was the key to the next room.

Meadow snorted in amusement. The Ironthread Sect had intended for that room to practice the delicate manipulation of iron bands on a moving target, to get them to solve the puzzle of mana manipulation within the egg.

She supposed that she couldn’t fault Ed for just cracking it open.

Ed slowly worked his way through a dozen other challenges: fighting conjured creatures, solving a puzzle of colored iron cubes, fighting more creatures, working through a theoretical mana yield construction problem, and then fighting even more creatures.

The iron cube puzzle took him the longest. It involved undoing the puzzle with your bare hands, then using a spell to attach the links together into a chain that could then be snaked across the room to hang a rope bridge from.

The gravity spell that Ed had to use to move it wasn’t built for such delicate maneuvering, and Meadow actually thought she may have to step in and help him, but he’d eventually gotten it.

Ed staggered into the final room, exhausted. He’d drained and refilled his mana so many times that it was starting to feel like a worn sponge, ready for replacement.

In the center of the room was statue of a stern looking man with a trimmed beard stood in the room, his arms crossed.

Ed raised his shield, prepared for another fight or challenge, but to his pleasant surprise, the statue bowed to him.

“Well done, Inner Sect Disciple.”

“Inner Disciple?” Ed asked. Meadow had said something about this being a sect ground, he thought, but he honestly didn’t remember what the ranks of a sect were. Inner was good… right? He thought so. He just couldn’t remember if inner or core was better.

“You have completed the trials of a thousand iron threads,” the statue continued, seeming to not realize that Ed had asked a question. “As your reward, you may be gifted one of the following.”

Five spheres of glowing light appeared in the air before him, the work of some enchantment woven into the talking statue.

“What are they?” Ed asked the statue.

The statue was silent, so Ed probed each one with his mana senses.

The first one gave off a similar impression to an ingrained spell effect. Some sort of boon to permanently make him stronger. It was strange, and more powerful than any ingrained effect he knew of except for his Skin of Stone spell.

The next one felt like a source of mana of its own, but not in the way that a natural treasure or magical item did. Instead, it felt rather like another person’s mana-garden, but the composition wasn’t anything that he recognized. It was telluric, but also other things as well, air and darkness, cold and heat…

Orb number three made Ed laugh. He recognized the mana signature inside of it. That was an ordinary spatial ring. He knew the development and industrialization of them had gotten way better over even the past few decades, and this one definitely felt worse than the locker-sized one the Lightwatch had handed him.

He shifted his attention to the fourth orb. It also contained a mana source, but unlike the second one, this definitely felt like either an enchantment or some sort of natural treasure that could be used in a similar way to an enchanted item.

Last, he glanced at the fifth and final orb. It felt like some sort of… something. His mana senses picked up knowledge and mental mana from it, like some sort of recording device.

He reached out to select an orb.