Chapter 11: Something I Can Work With
“These are the three options then—sword, staff and bow.” Amara observed.
“For now.” Chelsea said. “I have no doubt a shape changing weapon is going to have more shapes as it ranks up. That much is obvious.”
“Do you have a preference for one?” Amara asked.
“To be honest I haven’t used any of them in my life. I’ve never picked up a weapon before in my life, besides a knife to cook. Does that count?”
“To Laius it might. To us, it doesn’t,” Chelsea said.
“For a beginner,” Amara said, “The sword will be the easiest.”
“Will it really?”
That didn’t make any sense to Nara. Shouldn’t a bow be the easiest? Warfare on Earth had bows as the superior weapon for much of human history. The Mongolians had dominated central Asia with their horseback archery. Projectile weapons, such as trebuchets, were superior siege weapons.
“You have to learn to aim with a bow.” Amara said. “Then try to hit a moving target. That takes skill. To add to that, you will be moving as well. With a sword…” Amara grabbed an imaginary hilt, and stabbed downwards, “…you can just attack. A blade is very lethal, and most enemies at iron rank are still physically delicate.”
“The staff is useful, but you’ll have to use considerably more power to try to strike a lethal blow.” Amara continued, “A bat or a cudgel would have been easier, but you aren’t the type that seems inclined to physical power. A spear would have been the easiest, but I think it’s best to utilize the advantages the weapon provides.”
“I guess I can agree with that assessment,” Nara said. Her body was on the slim side. By slim, she meant not strong and of healthy but unimpressive fitness. She was slightly taller than average for women of Earth, at 5 foot 7 inches (170 cm), but had never worked to build muscle. “Sword it is.”
“You will, of course, master all of your weapon forms.” Amara said.
“Right. Sure.” Nara said, holding back her sarcasm against Amara, who meant well.
She highly doubted that she could. For herself, she’d set the bar on the ground, and gingerly step over it and consider the endeavor a success.
Amara’s eyes sparkled, “You will be shocked on just how much a skill book helps.” She eagerly gestured to the black gem. “Try transforming it into the sword.”
With a thought, Nara transformed the weapon into its sword form. It took a form similar to a Japanese chokuto, but doubled edge. It was a straight, light, and elegant blade, and a bit on the short side—easily wielded with one hand. Tilting the blade, stars reflected off of the cool night-black metal, and almost imperceptible silver designs shimmered like Damascus. The handle was wrapped with silver handle cord.
The hilt fit perfectly in her hand, as if it had been specifically molded for it. She balanced the sword, gauging its weight. It was on the lighter side, but still made of metal—at least, it looked like metal. The weight felt right in an indescribable way. It was like an expert had shaped it for her, knowing what she wanted and needed when she hadn’t known herself.
When she released the sword, it transformed into a small tear drop earring, settling beneath her ear. When she turned her head, the gem floated gently, unaffected by gravity.
Without realizing it, a smile had crept onto Nara’s face from the wonderous transformations. It was all very magical. She had spent a long time in the astral, wandering, but none of it felt like real magic—more dreamlike and feverish, as if she was never quite conscious. This felt more real. Which sounded crazy even to Nara, since magic hadn’t been a part of the first 23 years of her life.
Her eyes met Amara’s and the warrior flashed an energetic grin, reciprocating her excitement.
“Now, that’s something I can work with.”
*****
“I know that’s what I said, but the first thing we have to do is work on basic movement abilities.”
Before her eyes, wood and stone was shaped into a parkour course. It was even more intense than something like Ninja Warrior—far more verticality, with holes and loops, crisscrossing platforms, poles, and tall steps like the logs martial artists in movies trained on. It was a complex, almost labyrinthic playground of wood and stone.
“We’ll start basic,” said Amara. “Laius and I will oversee your combat and movement techniques. Go ahead and activate that Phase Shift ability you’ve awakened.
Nara nodded, and did so. She instinctually knew how—that was the benefit of essence abilities. The know-how was part of what you awakened. She activated the ability, and immediately felt the overwhelming drain of mana, emptying her mana pool out in a few seconds of use. At an extreme mana cost per second, it wasn’t something she could use for more than 4 seconds, solidly landing it in the ‘trump card’ tier of abilities. In practical battle, she shouldn’t be using it for more than a single second at a time. Thankfully, she didn’t phase through the floor. It appeared an unsaid effect was the ability to control what she phased through. She’d have to remember that the results of her Guide weren’t all-inclusive.
Before she deactivated her ability, Amara flung out a fist. It unleashed a roar of thunder, gouging out the earth in a deep uneven gash. Behind her, trees were annihilated, reduced to smoldering and crackling stumps.
She ended her ability and stumbled to the ground from both mana exhaustion and shock. Her head turned, drawn to the unbelievable destruction just behind her. Even the ground she sat on was carved out, dusty and blackened.
But before her very eyes, the grounds began to repair themselves, like magic.
“Chelsea won’t be happy,” Laius said at the resulting carnage of splintered wood and forest devastation.
Amara glanced at the now ruined tree line, “That’s not too hard to fix.”
“She won’t be happy,” he repeated.
Amara cleared her throat, awkward. “Good news. You’re invulnerable. Bad news, you’ll need to be on top of it or you’ll run out of mana and be left a sitting duck.”
Laius extended his arm, handing her a bottle of deep blue liquid.
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Item: [Mana Potion] (iron rank, epic)
Classification: consumable, potion
A high-quality mana potion brewed by Laius Sotir, who places great importance on taste. Tastes like blueberries.
Effect: Rapidly recovers mana.
-Consuming additional potions before the lingering effects of a potion have worn off will trigger potion toxicity.
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Reading the description, she popped the cap and downed the potion.
“Huh. Tastes more like blueberry flavored milk, I think. Surprisingly delicious.”
She hadn’t had flavored milk aside from chocolate milk, as far as she could remember. Memory was none all to reliable at the moment; she didn’t put much stock into her ability to recall details.
Upon drinking it, her mana gradually recovered. It was a combination of a burst of mana and a continuous regenerative effect. Since she had expended large amounts of mana, the effect of her aura had also triggered, granting her instances of Integrity. Since she had gotten her aura ability, whatever that meant for her, she hadn’t really felt its effects. As far as she could tell, boons were buffs. When her mana was used, it triggered, and she gained several boons in return. It offered a recovery effect for health, stamina, and mana, refilling her mana along with the potion. It was nowhere near the potency of the potion, but it did contribute something. She didn’t know what potion toxicity was, but assuming she couldn’t drink consecutive potions, then a regenerative effect was useful.
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“You’re all recovered now?” Amara said. She offered her hand, and helped Nara to her feet. “Try out your other active ability. Cosmic Path.”
She did, and a patch of night sky manifested. It was like a painted swath of the cosmos manifested beneath her feet. Looking down, she felt as if she was standing on an invisible pane of glass, gazing down into deep space. As she moved quicker, the path slightly elongated, forming a slight trail. Movement caused the view of space to shift, as if she was truly looking into boundless space.
“Try running,” Amara instructed. Nara thought she sounded a bit like a game tutorial.
She did, at first, clumsily. It was like running in her dreams, uncoordinated and uneven from her internment as a bodiless specter in the astral, but she kept at it. The magical repair and reshaping of her body providing physical support where she once had none, and her mind began to remember how it had run long ago, back on Earth.
Information flashed through her mind—techniques from the skill book. She shifted her running posture, matching the information the book provided. She wasn’t a professional runner, but now her posture resembled such. She had trouble maintaining it, fighting between habit, residual clumsiness, and new technique implanted through magic.
She activated the speed enhancement portion of the ability—the ability didn’t just make her shadow Starry Night by Van Gogh. She felt her maximum run speed increase, and even her reaction speed sharpened. It wasn’t by much, but she was faster than before.
“Next…” she said out loud, her face glowing with anticipating, “…is the weight decrease function!”
She jumped, and she launched into the air as if her gravity had shifted to that of the moon’s. For an exhilarating moment, she felt suspended and weightless. The Cosmic Path still followed beneath her feet, a shadow cast on air.
Her air control was tenuous. She failed her arms as she began to slowly descend from the sky, tilting back and forth precariously with nothing to hold on to. Her feet touched down, tipping forward with her momentum. She fell, hands planted onto the grassy ground.
“Wow!” Nara exclaimed, breathless, “I’m feeling the magic now! Not as if I hadn’t been already. But now, for sure, I’m feeling it!”
“You don’t think shifting your body into an alternate dimension to avoid all damage was more magical?” Amara said.
“Huh. Well that’s just so outside the norm of my common sense that it didn’t really register. And it didn’t come with all the fancy visual effects.”
*****
“The Way of the Traveler is split into six main styles.” Amara said, the crystalline drawing board was now outside. They hadn’t physically moved it there; they had stored it in some dimensional pocket then walked outside. Nara was looking forward to never having to inconvenience a friend to move furniture down a flight of stairs in exchange for restaurant ramen.
“The Way of the Seeker, The Way of the Dancer, The Way of the Hunter, The Way of the Charlatan, The Way of the Envoy, and The Way of the Pugilist,” Nara recited from the newly implanted information.
“That’s right.” Amara nodded. “The Way of the Seeker is focused on movement techniques for both top speed and for navigating complex environments.”
“It says ‘For chasing, and for running. There is no further traveling at the end of the road’.” Nara read out from the book within her mind.
“Advice I agree with,” Amara said. “No warrior survives without retreat. What I want you to do is choose two additional styles to focus on, on top of The Way of the Seeker. You’ll eventually integrate all of them into your main fighting style, but first you need to build a base. The less complexity, the better.”
“Just choose two?”
“Whatever suits stands out to you at first glance.” Amara said. “Don’t think too hard about it. Let instinct lead the way.”
Nara wasn’t the instinctual type, but she followed Amara’s instructions. She examined the skill book once again.
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Item: [The Way of the Traveler] (bronze, legendary)
Classification: Consumable, Skill Book
A comprehensive guide of combat and other techniques for an avid traveler, made by an experienced traveler of the cosmos.
[Way of the Seeker]: Quick and agile, focused on mobility in any terrain. For chasing, and for running. There is no further traveling at the end of the road.
[Way of the Dancer]: Flowing and adaptive, capable of shifting from light to heavy, focused on smoothly receiving and returning attacks to bring out the fullest capabilities against multiple opponents, or dancing around a single opponent.
[Way of the Hunter]: Stealthy and elusive, focused on identifying weak points and inflicting debilitating strikes to finish the opponent or to gain the advantage.
[Way of the Charlatan]: Tricky and unconventional, shifting through ranges, weapons, and methods. Focused on deception for humanoid opponents or intelligent monsters.
[Way of the Envoy]: Defensive and perceptive, a form focused on reading the opponent, understanding their abilities, countering, then seizing the moment. Useful for both difficult opponents and unconventional monsters.
[Way of the Pugilist]: Aggressive and powerful, a form focused on unrelenting attacks when high pressure is needed.
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“Dancer and Hunter then?” Nara suggested.
“What are your reasons?” Amara asked.
“…You just said to use instinct.”
“I did. But now think on why you chose those two.”
She thought for a moment. She may not have had specific memories, but she felt she had a decent grasp of her own personality. That itself hadn’t faded.
“I’m not very good at deception, and I don’t like the idea of going on the defensive for an extended period of time, and I’m not that aggressive. Process of elimination.”
Amara gave no indication that she was satisfied or unsatisfied with her answer. Whatever her answer had been, Amara would be able to teach her. She wasn’t teaching her advanced techniques, rather the basics of movement and combat. Nara would be teaching herself how to fight through the skill book and later arrangements.
“Climb onto those platforms, and we’ll begin.”
They started with basic parkour. Nara hadn’t done parkour before, and her first day was largely disastrous. She misjudged ledges, slamming her face into the hard platforms. Her hands slipped when she grasped poles traveling at too high of a speed. She also wrestled with her fear and nervousness, pushing herself to sprint across platforms and launch herself was just not something she had been able to do yet, as someone that feared breaking her teeth on playground equipment even as a kid and having to spend a day at the dentist getting her new buck teeth filled in.
Her aura proved useful. Integrity stacked as she tired and bruised herself, restoring her stamina and mana and slowly healing her minor injuries. It was slow, but a magical sight that boosted Nara’s confidence. Scrapes and bruises that took days and weeks to heal fixed themselves up in hours instead. Any serious injury, Redell fixed. The equipment and grounds had enchantments to prevent Nara from accidentally killing herself, but Amara insisted they didn’t reduce all the damage she could take. Knowing which maneuvers were dangerous and to what extent, how to mitigate that damage, and how quickly she could recover from certain damage was part of the learning process. This learning was more subconscious than active, like gradually remembering the cooldowns of abilities in video games when turning off the UI.
It was slow progress, but she persisted, techniques from the Way of the Seeker called up from her mind as she needed them. By the end of the day, she had already made marked improvement. The assistance of magic and instant knowledge made her learning more efficient.
“Remember this: Skill books are shortcuts.” Amara said, as Nara panted with hands on her knees. “They are useful shortcuts, especially for an outworlder that needs to catch up. In fact, all essence magic is a shortcut,” Amara said. “It’s my personal belief that there is no essence magic that cannot be replicated with ritual magic.”
“Is that your aspiration?”
Amara chuckled. “It is not. My passion is to create useful magic and artifacts for everyday life. I style myself an inventor, who dabbles in various fields to complete my projects.”
“Inventor-warrior.”
Amara grinned proudly. “That’s right.”
“What was the magic that I used to create a body for myself then? I know it was some sort of astral to physical matter conversion ritual.”
“I want to create a ritual that can create any material from the astral. Right now, those that are crafters, especially at the middle ranks, can struggle to practice their skills since they need to purchase expensive materials. If we can produce materials with ritual magic, we may surpass this issue.”
“That sounds amazing.”
To Nara it was, genuinely. Amara was creating magic to convert energy into matter, if magic was considered a type of energy. Something that Earth can only do on an atomic scale, in highly controlled experiments.
“One day, when it is completed,” Amara said. “For now, the costs of the ritual is more than the material it produces. Each ritual needs to be configured for a specific material, and the ritual itself is highly advanced astral magic. It’s not something many can cast, even if the ritual was cheaper.” Amara peered at Nara, “Which is why it was highly unusual you could change my ritual. The formula should not have produced an outworlder body.”
“What was it supposed to produce?”
“It was my first experiment to produce a plant, an herb for alchemy called Loftia.”
Nara thought back to one of her racial abilities, Astral Domain. She hadn’t had the time to explore any of her racial abilities, but that was one of the ones she understood the least. She had barely touched upon its full capabilities. In the astral, she had called it her holorealm. But, according to the ability description, she could create physical reality.
She had some instinctual sense of what she could or could not create. Like abilities, it wasn’t complete knowledge, still requiring trial and error. It was limited by her rank, for one. The other, she could only physically create objects she understood, intimately. Even the Record of objects stored in her Archive was not enough, although those records may serve Amara well in her endeavor.
There was some physical matter Nara understood well enough to create, like oxygen and water. And apparently, to her surprise, spirit coins.
She didn’t need her STEM college degree to understand the structure of water. That was something taught in basic chemistry, although its properties had been expanded in higher level sciences inadvertently. A memory came back to her…she had taken a class on quantum physics, just once. She didn’t remember most of it afterwards on Earth, but now her memory was in a strange state of forgotten yet clear. Those bits she fished out of the depths were as real as a fish flopping on a wooden pier. Not to mention, her Guide ability showed her information, as long as she knew how and what to ask it. Was her Guide and its functions a result to compensate for her poor memory, her own desire to remember what was forgotten?
She cupped her palms together, closed her eyes, and focused. She pulled magic from her astral domain, using her body as a channel for the magic. It was a delicate process—pull too much and her body would be damaged, but her body had a high resistance to the astral and its forces. Her soul was shaped by her experiences, and her body benefited. She had room for learning and mistakes.
A pool of clear water rose from within her palms, seeping through her fingers and dripping onto the ground.
Amara stared, mesmerized as astral magic coalesced into permanent physical matter.
“Maybe…” Nara hesitantly offered, “I can help you as much as all of you are helping me.”