Honestly, Alice was just confused. This entire situation seemed familiar, including the offer of training. Why was he offering the same thing twice? And why did he seem so torn up about something that should be unrelated to him?

”What would make this different from the last time you offered training?”

”The intent. When I decided to begin your ‘training’, the point wasn’t to get you powerful enough to achieve your goal. It was to convince you that you weren’t capable enough to achieve your goal, and have you quit. Of course now I know you would rather just bang your head against a wall until something breaks.” He said that last part with the slightest hint of mirth cutting through the somber mood.

Alice was stunned. She couldn’t think of any reason he wouldn’t like her, but he had tried to make her give up on her only goal.

”Why?”

The edges to Karandi’s face sharpened ever so slightly as she asked.

”I’ve seen enough death in my lifetime. And with you disregarding every threat, I couldn’t bring myself to sit idly as you marched to your death. So I tried to stop you.”

Alice could understand the sentiment now more than ever, but it still didn’t sit right with her.

”Why? There had to have been a better way than whatever this is! Right?”

A deep sigh left his lips. “Surely there was. But I had no time to find it. If I had not kept you here on the day you came you would have left already, probably been dead too.”

”So what changed? Why am I now worth actually helping?”

”The simple answer, you’re not. You could make your choice to leave and I wouldn’t stop you. But were you to choose otherwise, I’d enjoy knowing you might live.”

Alice was entirely unsure what to say. So she decided to say nothing instead and simply process what she’d just heard. It seemed she just couldn’t get her thoughts to settle. With the sudden ultimatum and the stakes riding on this decision, she just felt like any choice she made would be wrong. So she decided not to choose, not yet at least.

”I need more time to think about it. I’ll come tell you my decision later.”

Alice shifted behind him and through the doorway. Before wandering back into the forest. There was a lot to think about, but Alice wasn’t really in a thinking mood. So instead she decided to go back to her latest fixation. She repeated the familiar steps once more.

Gather mana in the ground. Shape the mana into a long cylinder with a sharpened point. Aspect the mana to earth. Then finally pull the rod out of the ground and compress the dirt that came out. A crumbly spear that would at most stun, and only weak creatures at that. While it had been easier than before due to her stats, no matter how fast or efficient she was it was still a horrible attack.

It felt like she’d been stuck on this for way too long. And as far as she could tell, somehow getting rock from dirt was impossible. She contemplated just digging deeper and just pulling out actual rock, but she’d already realised the flaws with that. It would be harder to control her mana that far away, it would limit her to certain environments, and the vibrations from pulling rock out of the ground just made it too obvious as an attack.

Didn’t seem to stop Karandi though.

There was always the chance that it was just impossible at her skill level, but this seemed less like a lack of skill and more a lack of knowledge.

Alice decided to stop before she lost all her hair from frustration, or worse; pulled it out herself.

She tried to recall what her mother had taught her about magic but it seemed so far away. On the edge of being forgotten. It was quite fuzzy, but the main points were: Conjuring was purely mana based magic, it did no actual physical damage; and… the other one, the one Alice had been using most. It needed more mana-control and knowledge than conjuring, in exchange for being less costly and more practical.

Alice could guess that the main bottleneck was her knowledge on how things worked, meaning she had trouble doing those things with mana. So perhaps she should just stick to conjuring until she improved her skill.

With that as her start, Alice tried to make the simplest attack she could think of: throwing a ball of hard mana.

It was quite easy to get the foundation down. Making a ball of mana was simple enough, making it sky blue so she could see when she’d succeeded was also really easy. She could also move it with little issue, but not outside her range, which was currently about ten or so metres. But moving it was not the same as throwing it. Leading to the two main goals she had: Keeping the mana stable outside of her range, and making it physically tangible.

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Of the two keeping it stable seemed the easier option. Of course it was; she already had experience doing it. Wards were such an example, any ward that stopped working when the maker left the area was quite useless after all.

It was quite strange though. If Alice was there she could keep a ward up as long as she could keep her focus, but once she left the area or stopped manually supporting it began getting ‘eroded’ by the ambient mana. The same mana which seemed inert and lifeless normally, though she couldn’t directly sense it so maybe that behavior was to be expected.

The solution to this erosion was to simply add more mana inside the ward to replenish anything lost. It was quite simple to translate it to her soon-to-be projectile.

Alice felt like now would be as good a time to test what she had.She placed it at the edge of her range before moving back, it acted as expected staying stable in the air, though it did jostle a bit. She willed it to move forward and it did, only to shrink rapidly at a growing rate before fading out of existence after moving a metre.

That was horrible range for any projectile, though since she only used two percent of her mana maybe it was the expected result? She could always release it at the edge of her range to have a functional range of ten metres.

This also made her wonder what exactly her mana was worth. She’d only ever cast spells well within her means or so far outside of them that she had no solid grasp of how much she could do. But that would be better left for later. It wouldn’t do to get distracted now.

Trying to make mana tangible was a difficult task. She knew mana could trick you into thinking it was tangible, such as the ‘wall of fear’ the spider had used, but it hadn’t actually stopped her from moving through it.

Her first thought was to just make the mana denser, though there seemed to be a few holes in the logic she used to get there. Remembering to note her mana usage, she opened her status and looked at her mana. 74%. She began adding adding mana to the ball while keeping its size constant. She realised that the amount of mana she fed to it per second was growing. Once she reached 30% mana she chose to conserve what mana she had left and instead decrease its volume.

The ball steadily shrank from something slightly larger than her head to something about as wide as her hand. The difficulty in compressing it steadily grew from practically nonexistent, to feeling like pushing a brick wall. But once she got to that wall, the ball had a diameter of her index fingers length.

Alice wanted to try testing it again, but with it using up most of her mana she was hesitant in case something went wrong. Instead, she tried touching it to the palm of her hand. The feeling was difficult to describe. The ball went straight through her skin, but she could feel some resistance to it. Her hand, or at least the part touching the ball, also felt quite nice. She tried gently releasing control of the mana and it began sinking into her hand, no matter how she oriented her hand it still traveled into it, denying gravity and spreading the pleasant sensation all the while. As the ball sank it began drawing in her mana and compressing it in a similar way to how it was made, though the new mana was nowhere near as dense as the original ball.

This continued until the ball sank to about the midpoint of her hand, where it began moving up her arm. Alice decided now was a good time to stop this and tried pulling it out of her arm. She couldn’t help but wince as the pleasantness evaporated and was replaced by a sharp pain that left her forearm feeling empty and numb. When the ball left, her mana was now sitting at 18%, having repossessed most of her remaining reserves.

Alice would have liked to see what was going to happen once the orb completed its journey, but without knowing how safe it was, if at all, she decided to stop touching it. Not one to waste her involuntary sacrifice, Alice recompressed the mana around the sphere making it slightly larger in the process.

She also wanted to try aspecting the mana to see if anything would change. She decided to use rock as that seemed to align best with what she was doing. As she did so, the ball gained a weight it hadn’t had before, as well as shifting from the blue Alice had originally made it to a stone grey.

Still afraid to touch it, she opted to test it on a tree. She assumed it would give a similar result to last time, though if the tree had no mana she had no idea what could happen. It could simply go through, which was a possibility. Alice walked toward the closest tree and began pushing the ball into it. There was a definite resistance, though not as much as she expected. Almost like pushing into clay instead to wood.

Alice decided that was good enough for now and mentally threw the ball at the tree. The ball hit the tree with a muted thud and went in with barely any resistance, though it didn’t continue through the other side. Showing that this series of experiments was a partial success. It did have a physical effect on the world, it was quite easy to do, though it wrung her almost entirely dry for barely any result. Maybe there was some effect she couldn’t see, but it looked to be an entirely pointless endeavour.

Alice understood on some level that this failure would probably be the first step to her future. But that didn’t do much for her. It felt like she was always a few steps shy of success, only to find she was still at the beginning. How many steps would it take?

It was just too much for her. It had only been a few weeks and she was feeling overwhelmed. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see her parents again. Play with Josh. Even Uncle Toddley would be good. She just wanted someone to tell her it would all be fine. That eventually she’d be done.

Instead, all she got were tears falling from her eyes.

I- I can’t can’t cry now. I’m a big girl aren’t I?

That thought only further reminded her of home. Whenever she cried her mom would give her a nice warm hug and comfort Alice. She always found it easier to work through her problems afterwards. Her dad would cheer her up with the brightest smile in the world. Josh’s parents are the ones who told her big girls don’t cry. But she couldn’t believe it, it’s not like there was any one day were she became a big girl, so why should there be one day where she stopped crying?

The loneliness shook Alice off her feet. She needed to get up and continue working, she felt closer to a solution than ever before. But she just couldn’t seem to find her legs in the sea of memories.

She slowly remembered every memory that crossed her mind. Feeling both a weight off her shoulders, and painful pangs of homesickness.

Eventually she fell asleep to the steady rhythm of her own sobbing.