I never realized how much of a convenience an alarm clock was until I really needed one. After asking Ophelia and Titus about how they made sure not to oversleep without such things, and both of their answers effectively being ‘just don’t’ I figured the most I could do was leave the blinds open so any hint of light might wake me. It was a risky bet, but I didn’t have an alarm clock.

I think I got lucky with it, for the most part. Going to sleep early certainly helped though. I was tired enough to pass out the moment I hit the bed, and I woke up as the sky was lightening. I wasn’t familiar enough yet with the world to guess how much time there was until the sun started going over the mountains, but I also didn’t see a point in waiting to find out. Instead, I just got dressed, went downstairs, and checked to see if David was awake.

He was, and the fresh bread baking in the oven smelled heavenly. I grabbed a plate of breakfast from him, and sat down in the kitchen so I could talk to him as I ate. I hadn’t been much of a social butterfly in my old life, but here I had too many questions to make that a viable solution. And David was cool.

“David, man, a question for you. How do you wake up early enough to be here every morning and do all this?”

David, in response, pulled back his sleeve and showed me a device that looked very similar to a watch. It had 20 markings from it, evenly spaced, and a symbol for the sun and the moon on the top and the bottom. No watch hands though, or really any way to tell the time from what I could see. “I have a time stone to help me.” He gave a quick overview of how it worked. The sun marking was noon, and the moon marking was midnight. Each of the little markings around the outside was an even segment of time, and when it came up, the item would give a small buzz and the line would glow for a moment. If you channeled mana into the device as a whole, it would make the nearest line to the time glow, and if you channeled mana into a single line, the device would buzz heavily the next time that passed.

“Where can I get one of these? And why don’t Ophelia and Titus use them?” I asked, feeling a twinge of greed well up inside me. So far, this world had been a strange mix of technologically bare and oddly modern. They had indoor plumbing and working lights, but I knew it wasn’t electricity that the lights used. However, they didn’t seem to have vehicles that weren’t drawn by animals. They could produce enormous panes of glass somehow, but the streets were cobblestone instead of something like concrete or asphalt. Magic had to be a big reason for the odd places the tech had developed.

“A lot of non-human species don’t really need them. They seem to wake up exactly when they want to, so it never really caught on. I don’t know more though, sorry. You can find them in the market though. They are a bit expensive, but not rare.” David gave me a sheepish grin, as if he was embarrassed he didn’t know more on the subject.

“Nah, don’t worry about it man. I was just thinking it would be nice to have a timepiece or something. I haven’t seen a clock since I got here.”

It really bugged me though that they didn’t seem to have clocks of any kind anywhere. A few sundials sure, but they should have figured out the basics of clockmaking by now, right? I was pretty sure earth had water clocks at least. And the first mechanical clocks were in like the 1500’s or 1600’s? Maybe I had just missed it? They were so commonplace back on earth that it was possible my eyes had just skipped over them.

“The church bells are the only real way to keep time, but they don’t start until the sun peaks over the mountains. Nobody uses clocks this far north because they freeze up constantly. Maybe a few of the aristocrats keep them indoors, but I’ve never seen one since I moved here from Restava.”

“Couldn’t they just keep them thawed with magic?” I asked, happy to have an answer, though it wasn’t a satisfying one.

David just shrugged. I suppose he couldn’t know everything.

I finished up my meal quickly after that, and made a mental note to ask Ophelia to go with me to the market to pick up a time stone. Which I needed money for. I didn’t have any money left, at least, not more than a few silvers. Maybe that would be enough? David had said they were expensive though… “God damn mental tangents…”

I shook myself out of my thoughts. If I didn’t stop letting my mind wander, I wouldn’t get anything done. Or worse, I’d be late, and Teacher would smash me with that wooden sword again. I didn’t want to go through that one again, so I hurried outside and took a look around carefully.

The old man wasn’t present, leaving me to the garden area in peace. I decided to start stretching, loosening up my muscles and getting my head in the right space. On earth, I often had a hard time with this sort of thing. My mind would wander, or I would get bored and just stop. It hadn’t been as much of a problem since arriving, but I worried that if things became mundane, those old problems would begin to resurface.

I only got about 10 minutes to myself before Teacher arrived, coming through the door behind me.

“On time today? Good. We’ve got a lot of work to do.” He wasn’t carrying anything with him, and instead he joined me in my stretches, showing me a few ways to enhance the routine. “I’m glad you weren’t just wasting time when I got here. You should do this every morning before we begin, it will save you a lot of aches and pains.”

I had that mostly figured out, but didn’t see a point in saying so, instead just nodding. “Of course teacher.” I gave him a proper look. He just looked like an older man in his 40’s or so. Muscular for sure, but when I looked at him, that same feeling of an impassable gulf between us struck me. It was strangely terrifying, but also reassuring. I knew he wasn’t weak, knew that he could likely teach me all kinds of things that I’d never get the opportunity to learn on my own. I decided to try using the PSD on him, and focused analyze to get whatever information I could.

Name: Teacher

Race: ???

Age: ???

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Level: ???

Focus: ???

Well that was useful. He gave me a startled look, the expression only crossing his face for a fraction of a second before he just rolled his eyes.

“That won’t work on me, Niles. I don’t know how you got an inspection skill so early, but there are ways to counter them. And if someone is far stronger than you, they can tell you tried to inspect them. Keep that in mind.”

The training today was different than the day before. We didn’t bother sparring again as Teacher said he had learned all he needed about my level of experience the day before. I knew exactly how much that was, as I was a total novice. We didn’t bother with the weapons at all actually, focusing all on the basics. Foot positioning, posture, movement, and keeping on your feet.

“Remember, if you fall to the ground, you might as well be dead. There is a reason people say ‘he fell in battle’ as a way to say someone died. If you are on the ground, and your opponent is on their feet, you’ve already lost.”

Just with regards to the basics, there was so much to learn. He would constantly push on my shoulders, my stomach, my hips, knocking me to the ground over and over. “Bend your knees more, if you are stiff you can’t keep on your toes! Keep your shoulders in line with your hips, or you’ll easily be pushed off balance.” At one point, he swept my feet out from under me. “Your opponents will attack your legs if they think they can knock them out from under you. Keep light on your feet and avoid it if you can.”

He drilled this into me over and over until I could stand up against or avoid his most basic pushes and strikes. Even with kinetic vision, the man had a tendency to move so quickly that I could hardly keep up. I might know where his blow would land, but my reaction speed wasn’t quick enough to think through the action and avoid it. He must have picked up on this, because after about 30 minutes, he paused.

“You have a perception ability?” He asked, giving me an appraising look.

I nodded. “Kinetic vision. I can see motion before it happens, in a way. Know where things are moving and how they will get there, that kind of thing.”

He clicked his tongue. “That's a good one. Good ascension possibilities for it as well. But you are thinking too much because of it right now. You won’t be able to move quickly enough if you are trying to think through every move.”

I nodded, having figured that part out. “It needs to become muscle memory, right?”

“Muscle memory… that's a good description. You need to be able to move without thought, without considering where the attack is going and how to avoid it. You just need to avoid it. But that will come with time and experience.”

We took a break shortly after. While teacher didn’t seem at all tired, I was panting and sweating, my body aching already.

“Ophelia told me that you grew up in a remote village, is that right?”

“Its… close enough. I don’t know much about fighting or focus cores.”

Teacher nodded, a favorite gesture of his when he wanted to think before speaking. I had come to realize. “In most places, families will spend years training scions, hoping to get them a core with a combat focus so that they can go into the dungeons. You can find much wealth there, and even a single successful expedition can take a family out of poverty. The families of this house do the same, but with every member. All of them are trained up from the time they can walk. Fighting is as much a part of their life as eating and talking.”

He paused, staring at me. “You don’t have that luxury. Let me make this clear, over the next 18 months, if you put every ounce of effort into training that you can, you MAY be able to be as good a fighter as the weakest of them, if you are naturally talented. I don’t think you are.”

Well that was a shot to my pride, but… It made sense, in a way. “Okay… But Ophelia wants my help, so what do I do?” I asked, doing my best not to let myself feel defeated.

“You go the extra mile. You get down the basics, then we spar, again and again. You have a unique set of abilities, ones that are rarely seen. We train you from the ground up to integrate those directly into your fighting style.” He gave me something of an eager grin and continued. “Your focus core was a magic type, not a melee type, right? Almost everyone who gets a magic type core will sit in the safety of the back, away from the fighting. You won’t.”

“Okay, but… why?” I scratched the back of my head, trying to think it through. But other than surprising opponents, I didn’t really understand the point to it. Sure, I would be harder to kill, but I didn’t have the abilities to fight in close quarters. Frankly, sitting way back tossing out spells sounded much better.

“Because mages powers are more directly powerful than their melee counterparts. A barrier fighter can disperse force and weaken attacks. They can shield their allies from the worst of the worst, and that’s useful. I’d say it's better in most cases, as a single fighter can single handedly weaken the entire enemy force. But a barrier mage can entirely negate attacks. I saw how you used them yesterday. You can stop an attack almost the moment it starts. You don’t have to be strictly better than your enemies if you never let them get an attack off in the first place. You’ll become an unassailable fortress walking through lines of your enemies.”

Now THAT sounded cool. But really really dangerous as well. “My abilities aren’t efficient enough for that. I’ll run out of mana in a heartbeat if I try to fight more than one person at a time. Even if I become their equal in skill, I just don’t have the juice to fight like that for long, I know from experience.” Besides, it was just unrealistic. Even in videogames, juggernaut builds had several weaknesses. Almost always was that they were slow and found it hard to respond to a large number of smaller attacks from multiple angles. This would just get me killed.

“That's true enough, sure.” He admitted, but he didn’t stop. “We can work on your efficiency. Teach you to stop burning excess mana with your abilities, and how to increase how quickly you can draw more mana in. That will help. But for the competition, you can’t ask for a better idea than this. You don’t have to actually go in and fight, you are still a mage. But what do you think is going to happen if you and Ophelia fight two on two and your opponents find out that they can’t get to Ophelia through your magic?”

“They are going to dive right at me.” I had considered that already, but hadn’t figured out an answer.

“So, you don’t have to last long. Just make quickly killing you impossible. If they go after Ophelia, you can block every attack while she focuses on pure offense. If they go after you, and they most certainly will, mages are seen as easy targets after all, they will find a fortress, and Ophelia can still go all out. That is the situation you want to create.”

“The smartest ones will just split up and try to take my focus away from Ophelia so that she can't fight like that. It's what I would do against us.”

“So don’t lose focus on Ophelia then.”

Unreasonable old man… We theorycrafted for a while longer as the rest ended, then moved back into combat training. Still without weapons. By the time we were done with the morning session, my entire body was once again sore and bruised. Everything was heavy, like I had stones tied to all my limbs. But at least I had a semblance of a plan and a path to follow. I was eager though. That afternoon we would finally start lessons on magic and learning about focus cores. Hopefully I could learn a few of the secrets I had only began to unravel.