When I woke up I found myself in a flatland looking area, there were no trees, grass or animals anywhere. In the distance I saw Raiju messing around with his katana, but he quickly noticed me.

“Good morning you lazy bastard, it’s time to start training.” He had a malicious look on his face.

“I’m going to be limiting my core to Blue Rank in order to spar with you, by the end of this training you should be able to hold your own against me.” He readied his katana and charged at me.

I quickly willed my soul bond to manifest into a greatsword and blocked his attack, replicating another gladiator's technique.

“Oh? Isn’t that the technique of one of those idiot gladiators? It’s a good technique, but it has a fatal flaw.” Raiju smiled and vanished.

All of a sudden my vision went upside down, at the same time I felt a hand around my throat and got slammed into the ground.

“It blocks your vision, losing your vision is basically a death sentence.” Raiju reached his hand out and helped me up.

“How fast can you change the shape of your soul bond?”

“It takes around a second.” I said.

“Let’s make it faster, if we do that then you could have a weapon style that has no weakness. Constantly swapping could confuse people and keep them from reading your movements.” Raiju inwardly was jealous, being able to learn everything so quickly and have a weapon to keep up with it? Not fair in the least.

For hours and hours I was beaten to a pulp by Raiju, most of the things he did were completely foreign to me.

He never seemed to tire, if I managed to cut him then he would immediately close it back up.

It took time but I managed to slowly incorporate multiple weapon techniques into my fighting style, but they were still incredibly crude.

I could swing my greatsword and knock him away, then immediately follow up by changing to a bow when they were in the air. I had an endless amount of combinations, but I hit a plateau at half a second per transformation.

“Any questions? I’ll let you have a break so talk to me.” Raiju sat down and immediately tossed me a flask of water from his spatial ring.

“How do you never tire? And why is your regeneration so powerful?” I asked.

“Your thought process is way too simple, think outside the box.” Raiju stood up and sat next to me.

“Lightning isn’t only limited to the outside of our body, much like how you can accelerate your reflexes. Instead go a level higher, manipulate the cells your body parts are made of.” Raiju sliced his palm open with his katana.

“Notice it isn’t healing? I use lightning to stimulate the cells in my body to hasten the healing process.” I saw a spark of electricity fly across his hand, behind it all the previous damage to his palm healed up almost instantly.

“The downside to healing with lightning is the pain, but you won’t suffer from that since your mother built your resistance up. Just know that you can’t heal everything, if it’s small cuts then it’s fine. But anything else I would suggest getting someone with a light, water, or nature affinity.”

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“Now as to why I never tire? Lightning itself is energy, you’re thinking too narrowly when it comes to your powers. The cells in your body are incredible things, I’ve learned a lot about my body over the years.” Raiju shook his head. I could tell he was somewhat displeased with me so far.

“But the good news is we have plenty of time to fix you, I can tell you aren’t very creative. I’m assuming you’ve used that special ability of yours and just copied people your entire life.”

My face immediately sank when he accurately deduced basically what I’m proud of, it hurt to be seen through so easily.

“It’s not a bad thing when it comes to martial arts so I’m not scolding you, get that dumb look off your face.” Raiju walked up and slapped my face.

“You have a great ability so don’t think it’s bad, it’s just that mana is something you learn from first hand experiences. Mana and martial arts are two completely different beasts, that’s why fusing the two together is damn near impossible. It takes a lot of time, experimentation, fine tuning, and practice to make it come to fruition.”

Hearing someone call me out hurt, I won’t lie. I never had anyone to really coach me or show me stuff, luckily I had eidetic reflexes so it wasn’t an issue. You can only get so far copying people.

“To top it all off, don’t you have more than one affinity?” Raiju asked curiously.

“I have a few more, but I’m not sure if I should talk about it.” I wasn’t sure if he was the loop, there was always danger in showing someone all of your trump cards. My mom is one of the most careful and meticulous people I’ve ever met, so at some point she started to rub off on me.

“I’ve already made a deal with her, if you feel safer we can wait for her.” Raiju said.

“If you’re willing to get her involved then I can trust you.” Nobody would willingly get on my moms bad side, I doubt he could run from her anyways.

“I also have gravity and time as my affinities, but I haven’t experimented with them very much since they’re both fairly dangerous.”

“Sounds about right, you don’t fuck with time.” Raiju laughed.

“I’ll make the executive decision for you to practice here, if your mother has a problem with it she’ll let me know.” Raiju looked around himself as if waiting for Yuna to say something.

“Dead silence, let’s go for it.”

I nodded and activated both of my eyes, their original appearance came back out.

During the years I was with Yuna, she trained me to be able to turn them off essentially. My eyes would garner a lot of attention so it was safer this way, it was basically just me sealing my powers.

“Woah, those look weird as hell. You’re so exotic.” Raiju said playfully.

“Have you attempted any sort of time manipulation yet?”

“I can hasten my thoughts, but that’s all I’ve tried.” Time manipulation was arguably the most dangerous and most powerful affinity I have, one misstep and I’d unravel my existence.

“I can tell that nature your mother has is rubbing off on you, I won’t say it’s bad but there’s a time and place for everything. Let’s try expanding on what you’ve done so far, try slowing me down.” Raiju started steadily walking towards me.

Controlling time was much more fickle than Lightning, but my control over Time was better than my lightning since my mother made sure I wouldn’t screw up without her supervision.

Slowly the area around Raiju started to distort, his image began to blur. After a few seconds he looked like he was slowing down, better yet I didn’t notice any repercussions.

“Good job.” Raiju sounded incredibly muffled and slow.

I released my control over the time around the area, returning Raiju back to normal.

“That’ll be deadly if you manage to condense the area you affect, I guess before we try overloading you with new stuff we can start working on your mana control. Once we get your mana control acceptable we can move on to incorporating mana into your martial arts.”

“Sounds great to me.” I replied.