Almost immediately, Dylan felt a tug at his consciousness. The space occupied by his card catalog shifted and a Blank Card flew out from between his eyes, flashing to where Assimilating Void had just dissipated into golden light.

Dylan instinctively directed the card where he wanted it to go, and as it stopped in front of the Lizard Ravager, black streaks of electricity began to tear it apart. The pieces spread and formed a strange rotation. Fragments continued to fall apart and dance against an unseen current.

Suddenly, the black lightning flashed with a greater intensity, swallowing all light in a two-yard radius from where the Blank Card had disappeared. In its place was a dark maw that shared echoes with the void Dylan had seen in the wake of the Tutorial dungeon’s destruction.

“And you want me to punch that?” Risha asked.

“Five seconds,” Dylan reminded. Although the process of creating the void had looked complex, it had all happened within less than a second of him positioning the Blank Card. But even still, there wasn’t any time to waste.

She sighed. “Fine. But your dad’s paying the treatment cost if it rips off my arm.” Dylan could tell she was joking by the light tone her voice carried back to him as she stepped forward.

Despite its appearance, the void had been created by someone with a low tier one level of power. Neither of them was worried that it could truly hurt her.

Risha’s arm took a dark orange cast. A slight tremble swept through the sand as she planted her feet, and when her fist swung forward, it carried the howl of the wind with it.

But there was no sound when it met the void. Her arm disappeared to just past the wrist and then got stuck.

After a second, the void trembled and began to fracture.

After two, it shattered, once again revealing the ravager behind it.

Risha’s strike swept forward. It wasn’t as fast as before, but when it met the smoky veil around the monster, it passed through the defensive screen as if it were nothing but air.

Knuckles met scales and the monster exploded into a mess of gore that immediately began to dissipate when it touched the ground.

At the same time, Dylan felt a new card added to his hand. Before looking at it, he watched Risha shake out her fist and asked, “How’d it feel?”

“Weird,” she muttered. “Like reaching into a slimy ice cave.” She shook her hand again, this time more violently.

“What about your strength? How much did it feel like it stopped?”

“Hard to judge.” She turned and walked back to Dylan. “Maybe a third of it? It was a lot for something coming from your level.”

“Yeah,” his voice trailed off as he pulled his new temporary card from its illusory state and into his hand.

It looked different from what he’d expected. With the exceptions of DESTROY and his Blank Cards, the rest of his collection shared the same general appearance. A dull shade of light gold with a metallic appearance but the texture of polished wood. A scorched symbol branded on the surface to identify each one.

Instead, the temporary card was pale blue and slightly transparent, its texture soft. Dylan almost had the illusion that he was squeezing together a cluster of light. The image of a moving fist came together on the surface like a constellation.

[Name: Fist]

[Type: Temporary Spell]

[Summoning Cost: Free]

[Activation Cost: Free]

[Effect: Call forth a fist to strike at a target with 300.3 Physical Power.]

Dylan’s eye widened uncontrollably. It was the largest amount of power he’d ever seen a card capable of displaying. But it was an oddly specific number.

He tried to summon a detailed view of the card, and nothing changed. But he had a hunch and checked his stats.

[Statistics]

[Resilience: 27, Tier 1]

[Physical Power: 8.5, Tier 0]

[Magic Power: 30.03 (27.3+2.73), Tier 1]

[Mana: 137.5/137.5 (125+12.5)]

[Mana Regeneration: 1.302/minute (1.24+0.062)]

[Class Statistics: Resilience, Magic Power]

With the improvements resulting from his afternoon training, his magic power had reached 30.03. Exactly one-tenth of the strength Fist could display.

A true cross-tier card.

Because the stat threshold to reach each new tier was exactly ten times greater than the one that came before it, Assimilating Void’s apparent ability to absorb and then output ten times the force of Dylan’s magic power meant that its maximum potential was exactly one tier above his current level.

The possibilities that left him with were astounding. Ten times the strength he could display at the moment was significant to him, but when placed in the wider world, it was ultimately underwhelming. Ten times the strength he could display a year from now would be another story.

Moving from tier one to tier two was easy. The talented and the privileged could manage it in a matter of months. But then things slowed down. Not only did the amount of needed stat accumulation to move up again increase dramatically, but the actual rate of stat growth began to decline. Without special training methods, access to mana-rich environments, or significant rewards from the System, most people required much more than ten times as long to reach tier three than they did to reach tier two.

It was why Dylan’s father was just now on the verge of breaking through to tier three despite having gone through the Tutorial more than twenty-five years ago. It was why many people stopped focusing on their advancement and started to stagnate before even reaching that level.

Growth was hard. Despite the stat ratio between tiers remaining constant, the actual difference in stat values was an ever-widening gulf.

And that fact just made Dylan value Assimilating Void even more. The stronger he became, the higher the card could reach.

But Dylan shook his head. He stopped himself from thinking too far into the future. Chances were that maximizing the card’s potential wouldn’t be that simple. It could display great power relative to his own capabilities, but that power came at the cost of severely limited resources and could only appear in full force under incredibly dangerous circumstances.

Facing a blow with ten times his strength was currently only a matter of a few hundred points of power, but after reaching his father’s level that would change to nearly ten thousand. A slight mistake when trying to block an attack of that magnitude could be devastating.

Additionally, although nothing was listed about it under the card’s detailed description, Dylan had to imagine that Assimilating Void followed the same general patterns the rest of his collection did. The effect of his magic power would most likely cap out at one hundred until the card could be upgraded. And given the cost of even playing it once, advancing its mastery progress would undoubtedly be a challenge.

A sudden knock against his head interrupted Dylan’s thoughts and almost startled him enough to drop the slightly transparent card he was holding. “You there?” It was Risha’s voice.

“What?” He fumbled to regain a solid grasp on Fist. “Oh, yeah. Sorry.” He looked up to face the woman. “Guess I just lost myself there for a moment.”

“It’s fine. I’m used to it by now.” She nodded toward his hands. “So, how’d it work?”

“Much better than expected,” Dylan smiled and moved a few steps away. “You’d better be serious about defense.”

“I’m always serious.” The woman grinned.

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Just keep in mind how much of your own attack got blocked and be prepared to handle the same amount of force. Ready?”

Risha just winked.

He sighed. “Here we go.”

Dylan swiped Fist in front of him and activated it. Unlike the golden motes typical of normal cards, the temporary card scattered into thin strips of blue light that coalesced into the ghost of a fist. With a flick of his mind, it burst toward Risha.

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

The Pugilist crossed her forearms and held them in front of her. As the fist approached, her skin took on an orange glow, her veins bulged a bit, and her muscles became more defined.

A loud bang echoed across the ring and carried gusts of white sand with it.

“Ouch!” Risha called, shaking out her arms.

“You’re not really hurt.” Dylan was sure. The orange glow had clearly faded, but otherwise, there wasn’t a mark on the woman.

“Well, no, but I might have been if I’d been caught off guard and hadn’t activated my skill.”

“Might have been,” Dylan repeated.

“Eh, hard to say.” She thought for a moment. “Hurt but not injured. Probably.”

Dylan nodded. It was about what he’d expected.

“Anyway, that was impressive. It should be enough to flatten all but the most advanced welves out there.”

“Shame I can’t do it on command.” A wistful tone crept into his voice.

“Again, the fact you can do it at all is impressive.”

Dylan agreed. Assimilating Void and the temporary cards it could produce broke some of his common sense. Great defense and a powerful attack only balanced out by an expensive cost.

But Fist didn’t cost anything, he thought. Is it the same for all temporary cards?

Dylan had no other reference points, but he was inclined to believe that the card could be activated for free because of how it was made. The extreme cost of using Assimilating Void paid for both its protective effect and its counterattack. But he had a hunch that the summoning cost was different; being free may simply be a feature all temporary cards shared.

While Assimilating Void added a temporary card to Dylan’s hand, the actual definition his card catalog gave for the mechanic mentioned them being added to his deck; he assumed that his hand was only one example of where they could be created. If temporary cards had a summoning cost, any that he couldn’t immediately play or discard would bloat the mana he needed to pay to maintain his deck.

Dylan couldn’t be sure until he had more examples to test, but he didn’t think he was wrong. He didn’t think the value of the mechanic would be limited in that way.

He wanted to do more experiments, both with Assimilating Void and with the potential of temporary cards, but he’d have to wait.

Instead, he drew a new card at the beginning of his turn and shifted his attention to the next reason he'd wanted to work with Risha in the ring.

Phantom Rally.

He had two copies of the card in his collection, and as he’d set one to be his Favored Card, he’d been holding onto it since he’d summoned his deck. After wading through most of his other cards, he’d finally found the second.

Dylan pulled four of the five cards in his hand out of their illusory state and said to Risha, “This next test won’t be quite as powerful as that last one, but I think it should come close.”

When she saw him activate an Intermediate Energy followed by summoning a Phantom Archer that he’d been saving, she asked, “The phantom arrow thing, right?”

“Close enough,” Dylan nodded. “In about ten seconds, I’m gonna start increasing the archer’s power, and after twenty it’ll shoot. Is that enough for you to prepare your defensive skill again?”

“For an attack at the level you’re saying it’ll be, that’s plenty.”

“Good,” he said. “Back up a bit and I’ll get started.”

As Risha moved away, Dylan turned to focus his attention on the archer.

Phantom Rally’s salvage effect could double his phantoms’ physical and magic power stats, but that effect would only last for the remainder of the turn it was activated on. If he wanted to stack as much power as he could, he needed to be very precise about his timing. Discard both copies in his hand the instant a new turn began and then reshuffle the deck to discard his Favored Card once more.

Because both reshuffling and the archer charging its shot took around five seconds, he wasn’t confident that he had the time to reshuffle again to get a fourth copy of the card. If he was off by even a fraction of a second, when the archer released its arrow, the empowering effect of Phantom Rally would have already ended.

He didn’t know if a late shot would still carry all of the power it had accumulated under Phantom Rally’s effect or if it would return to normal. He decided not to take any risks and stay with three copies of the salvage effect.

For the same reason, he also decided not to try ordering the archer to charge its shot early and hold it until he’d finished the reshuffle that would give him a fourth copy of the card. He didn’t know if empowering the archer would take full effect after it had already charged its shot.

He’d used Phantom Rally that way only once before. In the final moments of the fight against the lizard boss in the dungeon he’d empowered an archer that had already been holding a charged shot. It had seemed to work at the time, but it was hard to say if the arrow’s strength had fully doubled or if it had simply been blessed by the one or two seconds the salvage effect had been active before the phantom had finally fired. It was something that needed more testing.

Trying to double the phantom’s power four times was alluring but unstable. Besides, three empowerments would already push the archer to about 240 physical power. It was enough for his test. Reaching 480 after doing it again would make things more difficult for Risha to defend against.

But maybe, if things went well, he could try again the next day. Maybe even go for five discards after testing the effect of Phantom Rally on an already charged shot.

When a new turn tugged at his mind, he began. He discarded both cards and reshuffled.

A wave of mist erupted from the archer, a glimmer of light leaking through from the phantom’s body.

When his deck thrummed and a new Phantom Rally appeared in his hand, he discarded it again, ordering the archer to fire.

The mist around the humanoid figure became violent, the light it emitted seemed to crack at the air.

The arrow began to form, and the bow trembled.

As Dylan watched, he realized that the archer’s body was breaking apart, all of its mist joining the roiling mass condensing between its hands.

He frowned but kept watching.

In the following seconds, it was like the arrow had hollowed out the core of its wielder. The phantom stood there like a slowly fracturing pane of glass.

When the arrow leapt from the bow, it took the phantom with it. The archer’s shattered body broke completely, joining the roiling tide of mist streaking toward Risha.

A hazy comet framed against the slowly setting sun.

Even though he knew it wasn’t as powerful, the spectacle the shot created was much more impressive than the ghostly fist that had come from Assimilating Void’s temporary card.

Dylan was pulled from the moment of reverie by the exploding light cascading from Risha’s crossed arms.

Tendrils of lingering mist swam through the air around the woman as the vision faded.

Risha coughed and waved away the remnants of the blast. “You weren’t kidding. That was good.” She began walking to Dylan’s side. “What happened to the archer?”

“I don’t think it could handle the power,” Dylan said, recalling the wording of Phantom Rally’s salvage effect. It doubled physical and magic power. Nothing else.

He considered that maybe, with the archer’s low resilience, it had trouble withstanding the forces within its own body, and when it channeled those forces into its arrow it could no longer maintain its form.

Luckily, I only tried three copies. He still needed to test it, but four might have overwhelmed the archer before it could fire.

“There’s a balance to everything.” Risha patted his shoulder.

“Guess so.”

There was a moment of quiet before the woman spoke again, “So, any more tests?”

Dylan ran through a mental checklist and answered, “Just one.”

“The flower thing, right?”

“Lunadera’s Bloom,” Dylan said. “And if you already knew that, then why’d you ask?”

The Pugilist just shrugged.

“Anyway, the test I really want to do with it would require someone who can use tier two mental debuffs, but I don’t think there’s anyone like that around here right now.” He glanced across the people remaining in the training ground. The numbers were getting close to what they’d been when he’d arrived in the morning.

“Nah,” Risha said. “Those two,” she pointed to the only pair of guard members left other than her, “are only good at physical attacks.”

“Sensing a theme here.” Dylan stared at Risha.

“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with specializing in physical attacks. It just can’t do what you’re asking for right now.”

He nodded. “I know. I guess I’ll just have to do that part of the test later.” A new turn began and he drew a card only to put it aside, ignored. It wasn’t what he wanted. “Still worth checking the card’s other abilities.”

“What were those again?” Risha began massaging her forearms.

“Mental clarity and mana regen.”

The woman nodded, and they fell into a comfortable silence.

A few more turns passed, and Dylan began to wonder if they should cede the sparring ring to anyone else who still wanted to use it. Lunadera’s Bloom didn’t exactly need to be sheltered under the dampening enchantment in case he mishandled playing it.

But then, finally, he drew the card.

He looked over to Risha and said, “Got it.”

She nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“Monitoring your mana should be pretty straight forward, and I don’t think that part of the card will have any difference in the way it affects people at a higher tier. What I really need you to pay attention to is your mental state and the clarity of your thoughts.”

As he finished speaking, he pulled the card into his hand and played it.

It disintegrated, and the transparent orchid emerged in its place.

Dylan watched the illusory plant bloom before him, eyes tracking the growing white halo that transformed into the image of a waxing moon. He let himself relax into the gentle fragrance as the moon rose. He felt flush with the comfortable sensation of mana coursing through his veins.

When the moon reached its apex, now full and shining, clarity coursed through his mind mirroring the mana in his veins.

He began to worry about how showy he was being. And not just in that moment. Many of his actions with Risha had been flashy.

Assimilating Void and its counterattack, the trick with Phantom Rally, and now this. Not to mention everything else I've done today.

While he didn’t particularly like attention, he’d never intended to keep a low profile after returning from the Tutorial. But with everything that he’d done during the day, he almost felt as if he’d been trying to attract the eyes of those around him. He knew he hadn’t been; the visual effects of his training were simply written into the nature of how his cards worked. There was nothing he could do to change things.

But he still felt uncomfortable.

I guess that’s one more thing I need to train myself for.

He closed his eyes and pushed unwanted thoughts from his mind, just existing in the sensations produced by the booming orchid. It was a pleasant way to relieve his tension after the long day.

When he felt the light from the fake moon disappear, he opened his eyes and looked at Risha. “And?” he asked.

“It was nice.”

“Can you elaborate please?”

“Mana regen worked just like you said, and the rest was nice,” she repeated. “Not sure how else to describe it. Thinking felt better. I guess that might be the sense of clarity you described.”

Dylan nodded. “Probably.”

It’s a lot harder to judge the effectiveness of something that can only be described through subjective feelings than the cards with concrete numbers to look at.

“You here again tomorrow?”

Risha stuck her tongue out. “Three days total, so yeah.” She tapped her fingers against her crossed arms. “But I don’t know if the third’ll actually stick.”

“Why not?” Dylan let his deck dissipate and the two began to walk out of the ring.

“Announcement on what to do with you all’s coming down soon. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. Once we have you placed somewhere, personnel will probably shift away from the training ground to help you get situated in your new assignments.”

“Where do you think I’ll be?”

“The wall.” Risha didn’t even take a moment to think. “Anyone decently capable of combat will either be on the wall or just behind it. But I wouldn’t worry too much about it. You’ll be there to be an extra pair of eyes more than anything else. That’ll let us free up some of the more experienced members of the guard to do some more flexible work.”

“So, no actual combat?” Dylan didn’t know whether to be grateful or disappointed.

“I wouldn’t say that,” Risha said. “We’ll put you guys up there during the day when the strongest monsters are least active. If something weak enough comes close, we’ll most likely give it to you all to practice your hands.”

“Got it.” Dylan nodded, and after passing out of the sparring ring, he said, “I’ve gotta head back. See you tomorrow.”

Risha gave a brief wave as he left.

On the short journey home, Dylan began to consider how to set up his deck for his coming time on the wall. I’ll have to see if any decent cards come out of the materials Dad’s getting me.