Chapter 31: Clash

It wasn’t long until Nav showed up and walked over to Crimson with an amazed expression on his face to say, “I wasn’t expecting to see you for another half hour. Did you beat everyone else?”

Crimson glanced back. The four who had beaten him earlier had shown up, one after the other a good three or so minutes after he arrived, and were looking at him with… What expression would he even call that? It was somewhere between anger and excitement…maybe competitive? With a bit of eye contact, he realized that it was definitely a competitive spirit.

He said, “Yeah, I finished first.”

Nav grinned, “You just made some new friends. ‘Viskiv alyees’ this evening is going to be fun.”

‘I die tonight.’

Acting confused, Crimson asked, “I know ‘Vis’ is ‘I,’ and alyees is ‘this night,’ but what is ‘viskiv?”

The grin on Nav’s face got even wider, “‘kiv’ doesn’t mean anything on its own, but when used with ‘Vis’ it means ‘I die.’ So the full phrase is ‘I die this night.’ It’s a kind of combat training we do in the evening. I don’t know where the name came from, but it’s stuck for a hundred years or so - well before my youth.

“At breakfast, you said ‘Viskor fylees’ which means ‘I live this day’ it is a way of thanking the hosts for providing the means to live for another day.

“This training - the morning training you just finished - is called ‘Viskor fylaum’ which means ‘I live next day.’ It is training to live another day.”

The grin disappeared from his face, and he continued heavily, “Viskiv alyees is preparing to die. It is a very cruel combat training where broken bones and trauma are common. It is only for warriors, and it is used to prepare wolfkins to meet their ends with honor and strength. You’ll meet yourself for the first time when you die tonight.”

Crimson cocked his head to the side in confusion, “I end up with broken bones regularly during my usual training. I wonder how different this will be.”

Nav laughed at him, “There’s a big difference between this training and breaking a bone every few months. Don’t worry, you’ll find out for yourself tonight.”

Crimson wanted to argue but decided to keep his mouth shut. An argument wouldn’t be productive for either of them.

After a moment of quiet, Crimson opened his mouth and asked about wolfkin culture. The ‘do’s and ‘don’t’s of living there. They finished their discussion after just an hour and continued to wait. It wasn’t long after the conversation was over that the last two stragglers - Verity and Talis - arrived. It took Crimson an hour to run back, but double that time for the two of them, and they weren’t that far behind the next person — the exhaustion was getting to everyone by the end.

Talis in particular looked to be in bad shape, the instructor was still shadowing him and would start yelling in his ear if he slowed at all.

Rhea, for how bad her health was, actually looked better off than the shortie. Her running form - while slow - was perfect and controlled. She’d had an excellent teacher.

Once she stopped running, her excellent form collapsed and she staggered over to them while Talis just crumpled onto the ground where he was. She instantly slumped against Nav at the first opportunity, and he supported her as she seemed like she’d pass out.

She tugged at the collar of her shirt and sniffed it. She immediately gagged and pinned her ears back before saying, “I smell Gods awful. Kill me now.”

“I’m sorry miss,” Nav said, “I can’t do that. Let’s get you and Crimson to the bath.” He turned to Crimson, “Head back to the Den, it’s the fifth tunnel, finish up quickly before the miss and I arrive.”

Crimson nodded and started jogging up the hill. The sound of Rhea cursing behind him in response to his ability to still run was amusing to him.

It didn’t take him long to reach the Den, so he went immediately to the fifth tunnel and walked into a dark room. He cast [Magic Light] to see, and was greeted by a small waterfall, falling into an equally small pool of water. The only etiquette he’d been told about baths here was to ‘get clean’ so he stripped and stepped into the water.

It was very cold and clear. It only came up to his knees, but he swiftly found a bucket and soap to clean himself. It only took him a second to give up on the bucket - switching over to magic instead.

Wet and shivering, he stepped carefully out of the water, then used magic to pull all the water off to dry himself, and got dressed. Yet again, he noticed a difference that came as a result of his new [Mana] Rank, but that wasn’t in his [Blessing]. Since he was quite familiar with water magic, it was far more apparent to him that his control had sharply increased.

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It was closer to what he remembered being able to do before he’d gotten his [Blessing], but still just slightly slower. Because of his higher stats, he was better at building magic than before, but his ability to manipulate mana had been handicapped. Comparing the before/after difference, they’d been roughly equal in speed for a while, but now he could clearly state that he was not only faster at building spells, he was far better at manipulating the spells than he’d ever been.

When he eventually reached the same mana control speed he’d been at in the past, he’d be quite a bit more powerful than ever before. That was even before taking into consideration that his stats would continue to rise and he’d learn new [Skills].

With a grin and another shiver, he walked out of the tunnel and started a fire in the fireplace to huddle beside it. He’d gotten a lot better at dealing with the cold in the past year. He’d spent all of his previous life living in a desert climate, with the temperature regularly reaching 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, and never dropping below 75 degrees in the winter.

Falst had a pretty temperate climate, but it had gotten significantly colder than he’d ever experienced before. It hadn’t gotten cold enough to snow, but that had only been a surprise to him - with his limited experience with cold, he couldn’t imagine how it could get much colder.

After several minutes of shivering and messing with his pathetic excuse of a [Flame] spell, Rhea and Nav finally turned up.

She still looked miserable, and Nav seemed to be trying to hide his amusement from her.

Nav shot him a knowing sideways glance before saying to her in Kiiwolf, “You’ve really changed since you got that coming-of-age prayer. Did it say anything good?”

She glared at him, “Why should I tell you anything? It has nothing to do with you!”

He grinned awkwardly, “Well, I was the one who ordered the prayer, and I was also the one to give him the details he needed to be able to write it so I-“

His words were cut off as she grabbed him by the collar and attempted to shake it, only for her efforts to be in vain as his [STR] was significantly higher than a weak girl who lacked a [Blessing].

She growled low in his face, but Crimson could still hear it with his high [PER], “What did you tell the [Priest]? How did you know all that? There’s no way in the [Blessing] you could know any of that!”

Nav’s happy grin broadened, “I didn’t know much, but I told the scribe everything I could. He came highly recommended by the [High Priestess] even though he wasn’t clergy himself. I don’t even know what’s in the prayer, but I’m glad that it’s helped you.”

With a nervous premonition, Crimson slowly did his best to weaken his presence.

Rhea snapped at Nav, “You didn’t even ask a real [Priest]? Who? Who wrote that Gods' cursed prayer?!”

Without an ounce of hesitation, Nav pointed at Crimson and said, “I had him write it.”

Rhea snapped her head to him and her eyes opened wide. For the first time, he saw right into her eyes and saw what kind of girl she was.

Because of how his [Eyes of Will] worked, he usually couldn’t see much unless a few conditions were met. The most basic condition of all was direct eye contact, without that, he couldn’t do anything with his eye powers. Once that condition was met, what he could see was very inconsistent. He could usually only see the predominant ‘will’ that a person possessed. It could be described as something similar to their ‘nature’ or ‘desires.’

A prime example of being able to see a ‘will’ would be that Talis kid from earlier. The greed writhing in his eyes was so omnipresent that Crimson couldn’t learn anything else about him.

He was usually only able to learn a single thing about a person through their eyes anyway. Unless the ‘predominant’ thing changed as eye contact was being made. It wasn’t a [Skill] that would help him learn if someone was lying, and it definitely wasn’t as useful as Verity’s [Aura Reading] but on rare occasions, he could see more than he was supposed to.

In Rhea’s eyes, he saw two things. First: the mire of miserable despair. She saw herself as trapped with no way out and accepted it. Second: hunger. It was a hunger that defied the first thing he saw. It was the same hunger Crimson saw when he looked in the mirror. It was the same hunger he saw in Verity’s eyes.

It was the hunger to grow stronger.

In many ways, being power-hungry was considered a bad thing, and Crimson agreed with a few points. Many of those who hungered for power only wanted the elation and control that came with it. Verity sought power to change herself, Crimson sought power for its own sake, and to prevent himself from ever feeling powerless again.

Just with eye contact alone, Crimson would never have known why she hungered for power. His power wasn’t helpful that way, in this case, the limitation was his ability to understand people, which was poorly developed, but he had written her coming-of-age prayer. He knew Rhea very well, despite having only a few interactions. He knew that she wanted to prove her mother wrong, that she wanted to escape death. She also wanted power for the same reasons he did: for its own sake, to never feel powerless again.

In her face, he saw fear grow as she looked at him. It was the fear of someone who was able to look behind the mask, and she lunged at him to grab him by the collar.

He was stronger than her, so it wasn’t hard to wrench her hands off him and hold her wrists together to restrain her hands. They both flinched at the contact - his high [Affinity] for [Mana] and her high [Affinity] for [Void] causing them to feel repulsed by each other, but he refused to let go. He wouldn’t just let her do as she pleased.

She growled, glaring at him right in the eyes, and said, “How did you know all that? How did you-“

Her words cut off, and she continued to stare him in the eye.

The other downside to [Eyes of Will] was that it was a two-way street. Just as he could see someone’s Will in their eyes, so could they see his. In the past, they’d only been able to see the surface of his Will, the most basic emotions he was feeling at that moment, but as the [Skill] had gotten stronger, he was able to see more, so people looking at him would also be able to see more. He could control it to some extent, but it took a lot of concentration and preparation - something he very clearly lacked at that moment, to enable her to see just as much of him as he saw of her.

Crimson slowly let go of her hands, his skin was crawling from the instinctive rejection of the contact, but he forcibly controlled his instincts. There wasn't any actual pain or anything like a physical repulsion - it was all psychological, so as long as he controlled those instincts there wasn’t an issue with interacting with her.

She backed away from him with an expression he couldn’t understand, then turned and ran toward her room.