Alton yawned and pulled the blanket up over his eyes to block out the sun streaming in through the window. He gave up as his bladder loudly announced that it was time to get up. His head was pounding as he forced himself up off of the soft bed in the inn he had stayed in for the past two nights. The taste of whiskey lingered in his mouth as he rolled his tongue around, trying to moisten the dry, cracked membranes. He had dreamed of her again, despite the massive amount of alcohol he had ingested to prevent any dreaming at all.
He was due at the fortress today to meet with the priests the council had sent. While he would rather drink himself to sleep at the inn or train the new recruits, he had to admit he was curious to test his new abilities. His core finally felt usable again, and he had cautiously cycled it to full over the last few days. He washed his face and dressed himself before heading downstairs to look for some breakfast.
Yuri had been handling the more mundane of the recruits with Alton’s instructions while Alton was off enjoying his first proper bed in months. The first week at the training camp had gone as expected as Alton observed the progress of his future team. That each of the kids was a physical specimen didn’t surprise him. Since the start of the war, the training camps and academies of Agorra had been aggressively and efficiently putting out soldiers. The real surprise, Alton thought as he stuffed his face full of eggs and potatoes, was that each of them was in the second tier. He lost himself in thought back to his time at the specialty unit academy.
———
Alton sat in the classroom during his first week at the academy as one of the mage instructors droned on about mana theory. He found mana theory difficult to understand and suspected he lacked the raw intelligence necessary to do so. Listening to mages argue about the various schools of thought surrounding the manasphere was a surefire way to give Alton a nasty headache, not to mention a case of mage aversion. He far preferred just being told what to do and how to do it.
“The ambient mana in the country of Agorra has only been usable for the last forty years. When a person can first feel the ambient mana around them, it is said they have undergone a mana awakening. Once a person has awakened, they will sense the mana gathering inside of their body near their heart. This is actually a separate cavity that all humans possess, regardless of the ability to sense mana. There are many theories about this, but those are for a more advanced version of this class. Much of what we know is from the texts we evacuated from the mountain. The rest we are still learning.” The older man explained. He looked to be in his fifties and had a kind, grandfatherly face. He spoke slowly and scanned the classroom as he taught the newest recruits of the specialty unit academy.
“This cavity is called a person’s mana core. Its initial size will vary from person to person, with the highest capacity being somewhere around sixty percent larger than the smallest. It is possible to increase the amount of mana one can hold in their core through use and practice. The mage academy has developed a set of exercises that you will learn to help you increase your core in the quickest and most proven way.” He turned and wrote the word Cycling on the board.
“Cycling mana refers to consciously drawing in ambient mana from the environment and circulating it through your body until it comes to rest inside your core. Everyone is able to feel the mana around them in different ways. Once you are able to draw it inside of your body, you are then able to move it around, almost like a muscle. This muscle can be trained to respond quicker and faster. The first tier of power represents the ability to circulate, or move mana to targeted areas of the body, to make that targeted area more powerful.” He wrote the words tier one on the large paper stretched against the wall and underlined it.
“The first tier two mana user emerged fifteen years ago, and even years later, most mana users remain at tier one. The academy has established a rough set of guidelines to estimate the tier level of an individual. Tier two represents the ability to circulate mana throughout every part of one’s body. Most people will only be able to infuse through direct physical contact, even in the tiers directly after the second.”
“From tier three and onwards, the different tiers become much harder to delineate as the path of power takes many roads. Agorra and the army use a standard system to grade mana users that includes measuring the size of a core, ability to influence external objects, and finally the speed and power that you can do so. Tiers three and four are improvements on the second tier. Body enhancers become stronger and faster. They gain the ability to overload a muscle or group of muscles in a process we call surging. Enchanters can infuse mana faster and create more powerful objects, and everyone’s cores fill quicker and grow in size. Every mage specialty progresses differently. We won’t cover those today.” He added tiers two, three, and four to the board.
“Tier five is where the next major changes occurs. We will discuss body enhancers first to keep it easier to understand. Body enhancement refers to actively circulating mana through a certain body part, or multiple body parts, to increase strength, size, and resilience. When a body enhancer reaches the fifth tier, they will be able to infuse mana directly into the skin, muscles, and organs. This is a passive action rather than active, making the user much more powerful even when their core is depleted or they are otherwise incapacitated. We believe that these cumulative effects are permanent and have uncovered no evidence to the contrary. The most powerful body enhancer in the army is only tier four. All of our knowledge of tier five and beyond come from the mountain.” He wrote key parts of this onto the paper under a listing for tier five. He didn’t bother to write any higher tiers.
“The fifth tier for enchanters, mages and the other styles of mana users is regarded as the ability to influence objects you are not in physical contact with. Each specialty will naturally have its own progression, but that is a good baseline for you to understand. We are still young in our learning about the manasphere. So much was lost when we were forced to flee the mountain. If you discover anything exciting or reach the higher tiers, I and the faculty here implore you to return and share your knowledge with us. Agorra will grow together by the strength of its sons and daughters.” He finished and wrote another word on the last section of the paper, alta stones.
“So we come now to awakened objects and alta stones. Alta stones are mined throughout Agorra and can act as a reservoir for ambient mana. The current reigning belief is that the stones were created during the last battle between the Mad God and the crown princes of Edoria as a result of his ultimate attack. These stones can also be found implanted in objects that survived our exodus from the mountain. Awakened objects are any objects that have been implanted with an alta stone, or inlaid with special runes that can store mana. This can be as simple as the manalights currently in this room or as advanced as Captain Rulti’s famous sword, Dragonclaw. For the purposes of your army training, you will encounter these eventually, but not until you are placed on a team. Our smiths and enchanters are progressing at a rapid pace to create more, but the total amount remains limited.”
————
Alton had freshly awakened when he went through the academy for the specialty units. Back when he joined the army, it was unheard of to already be in the first tier, let alone the second. Alton was now only in the fifth tier, despite training and using his mana for the last ten years. To have an entire group of recruits already at the second tier was incredible.
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Today, he would visit the priest at Kitsu and then head back to the practice yard to test the recruits’ core sizes and how each of the kids had practiced with it. The training academy for the specialty units followed the same basic progression program of the main army, but allowed each one to specialize in their preferred style. Options of specializing with mana were near limitless, and the Agorran army was exploring as many as possible. The army even paid more per tier to encourage personal growth.
Alton himself specialized in body enhancement, using mana to improve his strength, speed and reaction time. It was very useful for his position on the strike team. His team would be used for many different missions in the next few years of this war, but combat would always be at the heart of them. Alton buckled on his belt and checked the storage stones that lined it, ensuring everything was in place.
The belt was a gift from the enchanters before he left the third army camp. It could store enough mana to refill his core four times over. It had a large buckle made of silver in the shape of a wolf. The eyes were made of two alta stones. The belt alongside Fang were his most prized possessions. He had spent the last few days filling it since he hadn’t needed his mana otherwise.
Using the alta stones were not a true replacement for cycled mana through a person’s core, since roughly twenty percent of the mana was lost in transition. It also had a fatiguing effect on the user, making it a burden to use more than one stone each day or so. Agorrans all over the country were trying to overcome those natural limits and the limits of how much each of the stones could hold. The rare stones were found in mines throughout the country and identifiable by their blue glow when charged.
He finished packing up and headed downstairs to have breakfast and pay his tab. The owner of the inn was an old friend of his, a retired seamstress from the army herself. She wasn’t in this morning, letting her daughters run the business mostly. He smiled and nodded to the oldest of the three, Izzy, and settled himself on one of the long oak benches. He ate a hearty breakfast of eggs, bacon, potatoes and bread, refilling his plate three separate times. This was his last quality breakfast for a few days, if not a week, so he took his time and relished the experience.
----
Alton waited in a secluded section of Kitsu Fortress for the priest to arrive. He was sitting down with legs crossed as he circulated mana through his body. Carefully, he pushed through every muscle and flexed it with his mind. His core felt alive in a way he had never felt it, like a puddle turned in to a lake. Now that it wasn’t raw anymore, Alton was ready to dive in and explore its depths.
The priest should have been here by now and if he didn’t arrive soon, he would start without him. Not that Alton disliked priests and scholars, he liked them as people and valued them as support staff. He just found talking about things instead of doing them tedious. He circulated through his legs and bounced off the ground to his feet. Crouching down and surging through his legs, he jumped as high as he could.
“Congratulations! No fruit tree shall ever be safe from you again, my friend.” A voice called out from the entryway.
Alton turned and smiled at the older man that had walked in. “Jonah! When they said they would send an old friend, I didn’t expect you.” He closed the distance and embraced the man in a tight hug.
Jonah was a priest from the first army Alton had grown close to during his time there. His kind nature and priest robes disguised the raw talent he possessed as a mage. He was one of the stronger instructors at the mage academy and on the cusp of the fifth tier himself. Despite a large age gap, Alton, Jonah, and Davih had spent many nights together and developed a strong bond.
“Well, they figured if they sent anyone else, you might throw a tantrum and refuse to work with them.” Jonah said with a hearty laugh.
“Hah. Might just have done that.” Alton said with his signature cheeky grin.
“For today, let’s just measure the physical. Next session, we can dive into the more esoteric, shall we?” Jonah asked and swept his arm out dramatically.
Jonah had Alton perform all sorts of arbitrary tasks that the mage academy used to measure core size and potential. He enhanced each of his muscles one by one and completed physical exercises to record the results. He sprinted up and down hallways while Jonah timed him, jumped off increasingly high ledges until he felt pain upon landing, lifted heavier and heavier objects and more myriad tasks.
Alton was struggling to get his core to empty doing the routine feeling tasks. His body felt powerful. Every marker of physical strength had increased by half since his last measurements. Once the standard battery of tests was done on his muscled under enhancement, they began the fun part and he started surging. His strength when surging had quadrupled from his last tests. It drained his core quickly, but he could sustain a full body surge for at least ten seconds, individual body parts for closer to a minute.
When he surged his mana into Fang, things really got interested. The sword lit a brilliant white and blue. It flared so brightly it left an afterimage in Altons’ vision for a few seconds. The empowered sword could cut through anything short of thick steel, depending on how much mana it was fed. He practiced for ten minutes, only stopping because Jonah bugged him to keep to the structured test.
Alton could infuse three small alta stones using about a quarter of his core. That was another marked improvement and would be a great utility in the field for powering mana devices. When his core was down to about ten percent, he sat to cycle and Jonah used a special instrument to measure the ambient mana in the room and how it changed. He cycled for an hour and got his core about half full, more improvement. This was going to be a game changer when he got back in the field. He wouldn’t let his team down this time.
“I need to go to the training yard now, Jonah. I have recruits to whip into shape. You are welcome to join us in training.” Alton teased his old friend.
“Alas, I have all these results to ponder over. My friend has become a hero of legend, haven’t you heard?” Jonah ribbed him back.
Altons face dropped as he considered his friend’s words. “A hero would have saved them.” He said to himself.
“Alton.. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have” Jonah struggled with what to say.
“I know, I know. It still hurts like it happened just yesterday. If only I could have pushed through faster!” Tears rimmed Alton’s eyes, and he exposed his grief.
“Even the Mad God couldn’t save everyone, Alton. Not even him.” Jonah replied solemnly.
They embraced again, and Alton made his way out of the fortress and back down to the training yard. All that mage academy testing was great to put numbers on paper, but he had some much different testing in mind for his little wolves. If the recruits could have seen his grin, they would have shivered.
---
“We will begin by testing each one of your mana cores. I know you are tested by the academy, but these will be different. How much power you can shove inside an alta stone matters very little in your role on my strike team. What role you hope to gain on my team is what you will be tested on. If you aspire to be a blade, we will test how effective you can make yourself. If you aspire to be a shield, we will test how hard of a hit you can take. Utility and healers will go with my friends in the skirmisher team you met last week. I am no expert in those fields.” Alton began the first session of his second week with the recruits. “Line up by role.”
Alton watched the kids sort themselves out. During his own recruiting, everyone wanted to be a blade just like he had. Shields were second popular, but most people wanted to deal hits and not take them. Healers and utility roles were a newer addition to the specialty units, so he wasn’t sure how much enthusiasm there would be. He was going to break his team into two squads of three made up of a blade, shield, and utility. He would pick a seventh, a healer to round out the team and increase its flexibility.
“Rico, Edress. Amelia, Normil. Brent, Nelson. Lonni, Miser. Line up across from your partner and cycle. The rules are simple. Blades, you need to get three hits before time runs out. Shields, defend and prevent the blades from getting three hits. I will signal when to begin and when to end. If your partner is incapacitated, you stop immediately and shout for a healer. Use every bit of knowledge, mana and skill that you have, impress me.” Alton ordered. He looked around at their youthful faces. When he felt like it had been long enough, he gave a sharp whistle and then fights began.