Earned Skill:

Capoeira: Punch

Earned Skill:

Capoeira: Kick

Earned Skill:

Movement: Dancing

Victoria was stumbling her way through a series of Capoeira moves, a Brasilien type of Martial arts. Not for their effectiveness in combat, but for their dance-like movements, jumping, flipping, and spinning around while throwing out spinning kicks and punches.

The reason she was stumbling and almost falling on her nose half the time? It wasn't that she couldn't do the moves, but wearing High-heels didn't make it easier, and the rather extreme movements caused certain, normally purposefully restrained, bodyparts to flop around. Even then, she would have managed, but she still wasn't quite able to perfectly time the use of Aura to strengthen the right muscles at the right moment, and it took her a lot of concentration.

She had already been at this for almost half an hour, slowly working her way up from slow and simple movements to continuously faster and more complex ones. And while she had already earned three Skills, the one she was working towards still hadn't shown itself.

What she was trying to get, was a combat-oriented body enhancement. While it wouldn't belong in either the Household or Fashion category and thus level at only a tenth the speed. A body enhancement that would end up in one of those would be far too static, unable to keep up with the complex movements a fight necessitates.

Of course, she could take the easy way out and just constantly strengthening her entire body with Aura, just like it had been originally. But she knew that that wouldn't be enough if she wanted to get out of Tier one. She would need every advantage she could get, and since she wouldn't have a lot of energy of any kind for a long time, she would have to learn to be efficient. The less energy she wasted, the longer she could fight with greater strength.

But after half an hour, Victoria was finally spent. While the strengthening Skill she was trying to learn would make her Aura usage a lot more efficient, only strengthening the muscles that actually needed it during every movement, the way she used the Aura to strengthen them was still very inefficient. Improving that would be the next step.

But even if she didn't get the Skill, it wasn't like she hadn't learned anything. Actually, she was quite excited to learn even more about and playing around with Aura. Especially since, according to Andrew, it is impossible to hurt yourself with it.

But even if she didn't get the Skill on her first try, she still had made some gains. To be specific, one more level in all her High-heel Skills, and even a second level in the dancing Skill she had just gotten.

Victoria theorized that that was because the Skill counted as a Fashion Skill. Supposedly, Skills were put into categories like Fashion and Household Skills according to your intentions when you got them. And while she certainly got the Skill while performing martial arts, she was acutely aware of the history of this fighting style.

To be precise, the fact that the dance-like movements were originally meant to disguise it as exactly that, a dance. It was meant to allow slaves to train themselves in self-defense and fighting techniques right under their Slavers noses.

"Hmm... Seems like you are done with training your Aura, right?", Andrew asks for confirmation.

"Yes. What next? Magic or Psy?"

"Using too much Psy will make you lose your concentration faster, so Magic first. There are two important things you need to train first before you can start learning any spells, so we will start with those."

Victoria had been a bit excited to learn about the elemental and conceptual magic Andrew had explained to her earlier, but it made sense to start from the beginning.

"The first is your mana sense. It's supposed to be always active, just like your hearing, your sight, your touch... like all the other senses. Sure, you normally ignore taste and smell, but you still feel it when something changes. Also, your mana sense is still confined to your body, but you should be able to feel the mana for maybe ten meters around you as well.

But you can practice that during your everyday. Just try feeling the mana in and around you whenever you have some concentration to spare, since it doesn't actually use any Mana. That doesn't mean it's not important though. A good Mana sense is the only thing that could allow you to predict what nasty little effects are hidden in the spells that are thrown at you. It can even serve you as a pair of eyes on the back of your head and underground or above you. Of course, nowhere near as good as your actual peepers, but if the mana behind you suddenly gets disturbed and you aren't the one doing it, it's usually a good idea to dodge. Interesting fact, since it doesn't use any of your mana, it belongs to the Technique type Skills and not the Mana ones.

Anyway! The thing you have to train is your Mana-control. Else every single spell you try to cast is going to explode in your face just like your first time."

"Right, I actually wanted to ask about that. The moment I tried to sever the connection to the mana of the spell, all the mana I had left went into the spell as well. That... didn't feel quite natural.", Victoria spoke out her concern.

"Ah, don't worry. That's completely natural, and what's supposed to happen. It's so-called Mana-unity and the only reason you can have 'your own' Mana in the first place. Without it, all your Mana would disperse into the air and ground. Or some other mage could suddenly take control over it and cast spells inside your body. That definitely wouldn't be fun.

What happened is simple. Your Mana always wants to stay as one unity, with itself and your body, or to be precise, your soul that's inside your body. Which is also the reason it was so difficult to drag your Mana outside your body in the first place. Then, when you tried to sever the connection between the mana inside your body and the one outside, you also started to reject the Mana inside your body. That resulted in all your Mana slipping out."

"So, to prevent that from happening, I need to have a strong enough control over my Mana to overcome that effect, which would also allow me to cast spells faster."

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"Exactly. Now, let's get to the training. It's simple enough. You just have to cast spells again like you did the first time, but try putting more focus on the Mana you want to keep than on the Mana you want to cut off.

If that becomes your instinct, you might experience a certain degree of recoil when your casting fails as the mana rushes back in, but at least your spell won't explode into your face with the power of your entire Mana-pool."

It was as Andrew had said. The exercise itself was simple. Just the first part on its own, bringing some of her Mana outside her body, was something she managed to do relatively quickly after just a few attempts. Far from fast enough for a fight still, but it didn't take her minutes anymore.

Once the Mana outside her body had stabilized a bit, she then shifted her focus back inside, listening to Andrews advice to try and keep her Mana with her.

Of course, the first five times, she didn't even get to the point where she could try casting the spell. As soon as her focus shifted, she lost control of the outside Mana, allowing it to violently crash back into her body.

Only on the sixth try, did she manage to finally keep everything where she wanted it to be, allowing her to take the next step. Infusing the Mana with the idea of Water, only to instantly lose control again. This time, when the Mana came rushing back, it came with a feeling of queasiness, not dissimilar to how she had felt after her very first attempt the day before. Only this time, it wasn't as strong and quickly passed.

According to Andrew, the queasiness was the result of the half-formed spell dissolving back into her Mana and the effect it had on her soul.

About a dozen failed attempts, and a small bout of frustration later, she became too hasty and failed to shift her focus, resulting in another explosion of magical water into her face. This time, however, she somehow managed to retain just a modicum of control over the spell, allowing her to direct most of the force away from herself and reduce the spray just enough that jumping back allowed her to remain dry.

Already a great deal of improvement if she believed Andrew, but nonetheless, her magic training was cut short prematurely. And she was feeling sick again.

But luckily, it took only a few minutes for her to regain a few slivers of Mana. It was far too little to cast any sort of spell, but as soon as it happened, she started to feel a lot better. Not quite perfect, but better.

"You know those show-off scenes in movies where they make big rocks float in a circle around them? For Telekinesis, we are going to do exactly that. We are going to try at least... You are going to try.

Well, baby steps. First, you will have to try and make something float, and it's best if you start small.", Andrew explained the last exercise.

This would be the most basic and cost-effective type of telekinesis. But also the hardest one to control. If she believed Andrew, there were two more. One where she could create 'objects' of pure energy, and another where she infused an actual object with her psy over a long time, making it immune to other people's influence and even granting it certain special abilities if she kept at it.

Victoria picked a random small rock from the ground and commanded it in her mind to move up. Before she could react, the rock was already catapulting several meters into the air before it fell down again.

"First lesson: The strength of your thoughts is directly related to your output. Yesterday you had to be quite violent to break the seal on your Psy, but this exercise is a matter of precision."

She picked up another rock, this time starting with her thoughts barely a whisper, slowly working her way upwards. At first, the rock became a bit lighter in her hands and then it slowly started to rise upwards. When the rock reached a few centimeters in height, she started to reduce the strength of her thoughts and make it float in place.

All she achieved was making it float up and down as she constantly readjusted the strength like she was balancing it on a constant stream of air.

"Not bad for a start."

Andrew takes a step forward and pokes the stone with a finger.

Instantly, Victoria feels a slight pressure in her mind before she loses control of her Telekinesis, the rock falling back down.

"Lesson number two: This kind of Telekinesis is very susceptible to outside influence. Try again, and this time, don't make it hover, but stay securely in place."

Victoria nods and picks up another stone. As soon as it floats a few centimeters over her hand, she commands it to stop. As soon as she did, the stone fell back down.

"Lesson number three: Not moving isn't the same as not falling. Remember, movement is relative. You aren't moving relative to the planet, but you are still constantly spinning and hurtling through space."

This time, Victoria didn't only push the stone upwards but also applied gentle pressure down. Seeing that she was on the right track, she also applied forces from all four cardinal directions, making the rock stand completely still in the air.

Although it was a bit straining on her concentration to maintain all those forces, as soon as the god poked the stone again, she could feel exactly from which direction she had to increase the force to resist and keep the object in place.

If someone had told her that she would be able to do this just the morning of the day before, she wouldn't have believed it. Well, the day before for her, seeing how it had already been over a year since the first wave.

"Very good. Now you know how hard it is to just keep something in place like that, not even saying anything about moving it, or moving several things at the same time while also thinking about their rotation."

Earned Skill:

Telekinesis

At that moment, Victoria earned the Skill. But Andrew continued his explanation: "This is the most basic, Psy friendly but concentration heavy kind of Telekinesis. It's so basic, the Skill doesn't even have a special name.

The other end of that scale is Telekinetic manifestation. It's a lot easier to imagine and control an invisible floating hand and use it to wield a sword for example, than it would be to control the sword directly. Of course, it also takes a little more Psy to do.

A third type that of control, which can only be done with infused objects, is moving them relative to your body. It has the advantage that complex movements become a lot easier to do, but every kind of force working on that object gets transferred to your body. For example, your body weight would increase by the weight of the object, and any sort of impact gets transmitted to your body as well, and vice versa. Maybe it's easier to imagine it as being connected with the object with a very long, very strong, invisible, and untouchable stick.

It has its advantages, for example, you can put your entire bodyweight's worth of energy behind an attack with your floating sword, but the disadvantage would be if your sword gets pushed back, so do you. Also, you can't fly around on your sword that way, it would be like grabbing your feet and trying to lift them from the ground."

Like that, Victoria continued training her Telekinesis, even bringing it to level two, despite doubting that it was a Household or Fashion Skill. After floating one stone, she made it fly around slowly in increasingly complicated patterns, finally even adding a second one, although that one was only floating in place. Of the three energies, this was probably the one she had the most talent with.

While she did want to try herself at Telepathy and Empathy, those were things she had to train with a very mentally strong partner who is ok with her reading their thoughts and messing with their head. So it sadly wasn't something she would be able to try herself at any time soon.

When she had finally run out of Psy as well, Andrew decided to teach her one last thing.

"Okay, this is the last thing I'm going to teach you. Meditation. If you just go about your day like normal the way you are right now, you would maybe have a third of your energies regenerated by the end of the day. That's where Meditation comes in. If you are good at it, it allows you to regenerate to about ninety percent of your energies in maybe half an hour. Although, using Meditation repeatedly within one day, will make it less and less effective. The only way to completely regenerate your energies is by sleeping.

Just so you know, there are ways to instantly and fully regenerate your energies, but those result in most cases in a temporary loss of stats. And that can take days to recover from. And if you really overdo it with those things, the stat loss can even be permanent.

So, Meditation. For each energy, you have to do something different. For Aura, you have to agitate it until it's just about to activate, keeping it at 99.9°C if you want to say it like that. To regain Mana, you have to forcefully increase the speed at which the Mana in your body circulates. And for Psy, you basically just have to completely empty your mind.

And just so you know, efficiency demands that you do all of them at once. It's three times faster after all."

"And many times harder... I don't think doing Aura and Mana at the same time is going to be that hard with a bit of practice, but doing so while keeping my mind empty?"

"Deal with it. It pays off in the long run."

Earned Skill:

Body: Meditation

An hour later, the morning bell was rung, signaling the beginning of a new day.