Dylan opened his eyes and looked up. “Mr. Bennet.” He gave the Warrior a nod.
The man was standing with his arms crossed, contemplative expression on his face. “How often can you do that?”
“Do what?”
“That lizardman. How often can you do it?”
“It depends,” Dylan thought for a moment. The question was deceptively complicated; there were too many variables that could affect the answer. His deck composition. His use of mana. Whether or not he chose to reshuffle. How often he had a chance to restore his cards. But in the end, he chose to oversimplify things and give the most basic response he could come up with. “Every time I have about thirty minutes to rest and meditate, I can summon it once.”
“For how long?”
“Also about thirty minutes,” Dylan said. “Assuming it doesn’t die.”
“Would that affect you?” Bennet asked. “If it died, I mean.”
“No.” Dylan shook his head. “What’s this about?”
The Warrior scratched the stubble at the back of shaved head and sighed. “You’ve also seen what this place is like.” He nodded toward the rest of the training ground. “There’s only so much we have available to help you all. I was wondering if you’d lend your lizardman to the cause.”
“What do you mean?”
“As a sparring partner and for target practice.”
Dylan frowned.
“Think about it before you refuse,” Bennet urged. “You newbies sparring with each other is good, but it’s not the same kind of thing as facing a real monster. And that’s what your lizardman brings to the table. A real monster. You’ve all been through the Tutorial, but you still need all the experience you can get.”
“Even if that’s true, I can’t spend too much of my time helping the others with their training. I have things that I still need to practice myself.” Dylan could understand where Bennet was coming from, but the Lizard Ravager was just one of his cards; using it in the way it seemed the Warrior wanted would mean neglecting the other exercises he’d planned on doing.
“I’m not asking for all of your time, just some of it.” Bennet held up a hand. “And it’s not like helping with training won’t benefit you. We’ve got a girl from your group who’s good at creating magic barriers. She’s usually here in the afternoons, and one of the ways she’s been practicing is by using her abilities to try protecting both sides of a sparring match. She’s helping herself by honing her skills while also helping others by allowing them to fight longer and harder. You could be the same. You get experience controlling your lizardman in combat while providing your friends with a realistic monster to fight against.”
It doesn’t sound like a terrible idea, Dylan thought. “That explains the sparring partner part, but what about the target practice?”
“Without using mana crystals, the mannequins are stuck being stationary targets. Something that could move around would be helpful. Especially when you can summon it again when it dies.”
“Ah,” was all Dylan could say. While I’m sure there are people who would appreciate it, that’s not the same as helping with sparring.
While helping in the ring, he may not be able to practice everything he wanted, but he could still exercise his ability to control the ravager. If the monster were to act as a stand-in for a mobile training dummy, the value of the experience for him would be much less.
Maybe I could do one but not the other.
“Anyway, think about it,” Bennet said.
Dylan pursed his lips. “We’ll see.”
“Good,” the Warrior nodded, seeming to take what Dylan had thought was a noncommittal response for an affirmative. “I’ll let you get back to your rest.”
As the man walked away, Dylan sighed. I’ll worry about it after I’ve finished testing my cards.
He once again sunk his mind into the process of restoring his deck. When he felt the familiar, comfortable hum coming from the void in his consciousness that held the cards, he checked his mana and estimated he’d need another fifteen minutes of meditation to regenerate it all.
Letting awareness fade, he simply drifted along the currents of mana washing through his body. Not thinking of the problems either he or the town were facing. Not worrying about what would happen in the future. He melded his consciousness to the processes happening within his own body and didn’t return to himself until a sense of satiation echoed through his core.
Dylan opened his eyes, not sure of the exact time, but he felt like he might have been resting for longer than he’d planned. He looked up to the sun and estimated that it was almost noon.
Probably took an hour then, he thought.
Stretching, he looked around the field for an open space big enough for him to move onto the next part of his training plan.
The ideal place for what he wanted to do would be the sparring ring, but he felt that it would be selfish of him to occupy the space alone. Besides, he doubted that it would be empty anyway.
And, as he’d expected, a simple glance told him that it was in use. Four people had paired up into groups of two and were fighting a small team battle. It wasn’t actually that dissimilar to his own thoughts about how to next exercise the ravager.
He wanted it to fight against a pair of the phantoms. Of course, he expected the lizard to win, but he felt that the process of the fight could give him a better sense of how the creature operated than its attack on the mannequin had. He also wanted to take the opportunity to try and get a better handle on how to more precisely control all of his summoned creatures.
His plan was to go through the deck twice, and each time, he’d have the ravager face four rounds of combat. For the first playthrough, he’d control the phantoms and let the ravager act freely, and for the second he’d do the reverse.
Although he wanted to try to control everything, he didn’t think he was skilled enough at splitting his mind to try and micromanage three summoned creatures at once. Especially when they were divided between two sides of a fight.
As Dylan’s eyes swept across the training ground, he noticed more people scattered around than there’d been when he’d sat down to meditate. In total, there looked to be about thirty people. A couple dozen of his peers and five members of the guard. If he’d waited until any later in the day, he guessed that he might have trouble finding the room he needed. Without enough distance from the ravager, the Phantom Archers would just be cannon fodder.
Eventually, he settled on a spot on the opposite side of the sparring ring. It wasn’t quite as wide as he’d hoped for, but it was long enough.
He’d just begun to jog over when a flash of light erupted in the sky past the city wall. The blast of an explosion rippled through the air to set off ringing in Dylan’s ears, and the ground trembled beneath him.
He turned his head to catch the slowly fading remains of a giant fireball. But its flames weren’t behaving naturally. Instead, it was as if the fire was being siphoned to a point on top of the wall.
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Squinting, Dylan thought he could make out the figure of a man at the heart of it all.
Is that Hensly? Are we under attack?
He summoned his deck just as his hearing began to clear.
“—ay here! I’ll check it out!” It was Risha’s voice.
Dylan pulled his eyes from the fire to catch the Pugilist sprinting away from the sparring ring. She was fast. Much faster than the ravager had been. But that was to be expected.
He remembered the woman bragging about how her physical power had just crossed eight hundred a few months back and how that meant she could officially start calling herself high tier two.
Of course, Dylan’s father had reminded her that her resilience was still in the low seven hundreds, so she still hadn’t technically advanced beyond the middle of tier two yet. She’d responded by saying that stats were all just numbers and to stop trying to kill her mood.
But the difference between the numbers representing the ravager’s stats and Risha’s were staggering, and so were the differences in the effects they caused. By the time his cards appeared around him, the woman had already left the training complex.
She must have used some kind of skill to accelerate so quickly. It probably wouldn’t be more than two minutes before she arrived at the wall.
The other members of the guard weren’t idle either. They moved to keep order and secure the facility.
“Everyone, stay calm!” Dylan heard Bennet’s voice cut through the training ground. “It’s unlikely to be another attack at this time of day. Probably just a stray monster, but until we know for sure, pause all training and remain vigilant.”
Dylan’s hand finally appeared before him, and he immediately played a pair of Basic Energy cards and summoned the ravager. With a howl that only he could hear, it tore its way into existence. Whether it was for a battle or to continue training once the guard gave the all clear, he wanted the monster by his side.
“Gather in the sparring ring,” a female voice said. It was one of the two members of the guard who’d arrived while Dylan was meditating. He didn’t know her, but her equipment suggested that she was an Archer or some kind of similar class. “If things do go wrong, we’ll use a mana crystal to power its protective cover.”
After instructing the ravager to stay next to him, Dylan followed his peers, feeling more secure with the woman’s words. Although not as good as the covers installed with the rings in the largest or smallest of Fairbasin’s training grounds, the one here was designed to take several peak tier two blows before shattering. It should be one of the safer places in town.
I wonder if Dad was thinking about that when he told me to come here to train. He must have known that the guard would be equipped with mana crystals to power the thing in an emergency.
As he stepped past the short wall marking the boundaries of the sparring ring, he looked down and stepped over a dense line of runic script. The dampening enchantment surrounding the ring. Somehow, it didn’t feel as complex as what he’d seen during Sara’s trial in the dungeon.
He sighed, wondering if he’d ever see any of the members of his Tutorial group again. It wasn’t like they’d become particularly close to each other, but he’d been glad to meet and work with people who hadn’t known him his entire life. Who hadn’t known about his brother becoming an Adaptive Bondsmith. And, thinking back on it now, who may not have cared if they’d found out.
It's not gonna happen, he thought, but he wouldn’t mind seeing a few of them in the real world, outside the confines of the dungeon.
He shook his head and moved forward.
The sparring ring was just over one hundred yards from end to end, so there was more than enough room for everyone currently in the training field. Its default surface was a soft whitish sand, but when powered, it could change parts of its terrain to suit the needs of whoever wanted to use it.
In a way, it reminded Dylan of a less advanced version of the practice room in the Tutorial. He even guessed that the designer of the manatech beneath his feet had aspirations to recreate that space, but there was only so much human ingenuity could currently accomplish.
“Everyone here?” The woman who’d called them to gather spoke again. Seeing no one else in the rest of the training ground, she nodded. “Good.”
Dylan then watched her open the console that controlled the ring and take out a mana crystal from a pouch at her belt. She was ready to use it at a moment’s notice.
Around him, the air felt tight. Even though they’d all been reassured by Bennet about how the situation probably wasn’t dangerous, and even though they’d have the protection of a working cover if the man turned out to be wrong, they were all still essentially kids. They’d already lost friends and family and had to live under the constant threat of losing more.
The relative safety of the moment couldn’t truly make them feel better when it came coupled with the reminder of the ever-present danger encroaching around them.
No one spoke. Feet shuffled. A few people coughed. But everyone seemed to come to a tacit agreement to be quiet and listen, hoping to hear good news. Fearing to hear bad.
Time stretched, but after counting his turns, Dylan knew that it had barely been two minutes.
Risha should be at the wall by now.
He tried to look over and see what was going on, but the wall was too far away to make out anything clearly. The fireball had long since disappeared, the only sign of its existence the tension it had left in the air.
Dylan saw a swarm of figures, most likely the guard, but couldn’t see what they were doing. His visual acuity had increased since he’d gotten his stats, but it wasn’t good enough to notice small details a mile away from him.
Another minute passed, and Dylan began to feel conflicting waves of calm and restlessness. There had been no follow up to the explosion, so maybe that was it. But there had been no word about what the situation was either, so maybe there was still danger.
He began to take deep breaths, trying to push unnecessary thoughts out of his mind. It helped, so he closed his eyes and continued.
Four minutes from when he’d summoned his deck and he kept breathing.
Five minutes and he did the same.
When he heard the noise around him change, nearly six minutes had passed.
He opened his eyes and looked around. Seeing where everyone was facing, he turned to find Risha returning to the training complex. It was hard to read her expression, but he thought that he could make out annoyance and relief.
“We’re fine!” she shouted once she got close enough. “Just a small flock of bird monsters of some kind.” She stopped after jogging up to the edge of the sparring ring. “Firehead had the great idea to just try and blow them all up at once instead of letting the guard do our job. Startled the whole town.” She shook her head and sighed. “Anyway, like I said, we’re fine. You can all get back to what you have to get back to.”
Dylan let out a breath, understanding the look he’d seen on the Pugilist’s face. Relief because there was no imminent danger. Annoyance because of the panic the situation had caused and maybe because of the man that had caused it.
He didn’t know much about Hensly. Just that he was a powerful Fire Mage. He’d been in town to evaluate someone he was mentoring and had stayed to help defend against the break.
Dylan had felt nothing but gratitude toward the man before. Without him, Fairbasin would no doubt be in a far worse condition. But based on the man’s actions moments earlier and the way Risha had talked about him, maybe pure gratitude was too simplistic an emotion to hold about him.
He decided to ask his father if anything else had happened with Hensly. If, like Risha was implying, the bird monsters this time were something the guard could have taken care of without alarming the entire town, then maybe this wasn’t the first time the Fire Mage had done something expedient at the cost of the considerate.
Or maybe it was just Risha being in a sour mood about being stationed in the training complex instead of on the wall.
Dylan would have to wait and see.
When the other newly awakened began to file out of the sparring ring, he followed behind. He tried to put the “big explosion in the sky” incident out of his mind and focus on his training. He still had a lot he wanted to do before nightfall.
As he walked, he reviewed the cards in his hand. He’d mostly been letting his turns pass in the ring, and now he needed to prepare for his next round of tests. He already had a pair of Phantom Archers ready to go, just waiting for the energy to pay for them. A new turn began as he stepped over the dampening enchantment, and he chose to generate.
He was about ready to reach for a card to play in order to generate more when Risha stopped him.
“Dyl, wait a second.” She grabbed his arm and pulled him over to her. With her strength, he had no ability to resist, so he didn’t even try. “I haven’t had the chance to talk to you about your class yet. We should spar.”
“Now’s not the best time.” He shook his head. Especially when you’re even more annoyed than I’d been prepared for today. He thought again about the explosion.
“It’s as good a time as any. Look, everyone’s already left the ring. No need to wait.”
Dylan followed her nodding head to glance behind him. She was right; the ring was empty. Even the group of four who’d been using it before the explosion had moved somewhere else.
Shit. “It’s not that I don’t want to,” Dylan began, looking for an excuse. “It’s just that…” he caught the ravager out the corner of his eye. “It’s just that I don’t want to spar if I’m not in my best condition.” He pointed to the monster. “I summoned this when the explosion happened, so it’s already been a while. My mana’s been draining this whole time. I’m not at full strength anymore.”
It wasn’t exactly a lie. He had been spending his mana to maintain his deck. He just felt that Risha didn’t need to know that the amount of mana he’d spent wouldn’t really matter in a battle as short as theirs would undoubtedly be.
“It’d be best to wait until later in the afternoon. After I’ve had a chance meditate.” Then he quickly added, “I mean, after I’ve had the chance to finish my other exercises and then meditate.”
Even though Risha didn’t look like she believed him, she said, “Fine, but you’re not done with training today until we have a match.”
It wasn’t a question.
Dylan nodded and jogged away once she released his arm.
Hopefully, she’ll be less excited about punching things in a few hours.