The lands south of Pentaburgh were subtly different to the ones Lucas had been through when he’d forged out west of the city, and the strangeness only became clear in contrasting the two areas. The further south they went, the more normal the landscape seemed.
Oh, it was anything but ordinary. Snow-capped mountains zigzagged on the far horizon, rolling meadows stretched on forever with only the occasional forest to divide them, and crystalline rivers slithered through the landscape. In terms of beauty, the southern countryside was equal to the western in every way.
It was in the little details that they differed. The south seemed more… mundane. Where there had been a faint hint of blue to the grass and leaves in the west, the southern verdure was more as it should be at this time of year: green. Trees in the west, in retrospect, had seemed to cower. There’d been an unnatural stillness in the air, a stale taste to every breath.
And that was before he even got into how some of the species of plant had seemed to blend together. He’d been writing it off as some random whim of a passing floramancer, but now that he knew the art better he was doubting that assumption. Mana could compel a plant to do something unnatural with the right know-how, but fusing them together like some of the bush-tree hybrids he’d seen… That rang odd to him.
When he brought it up a couple of weeks into their trek south as they crossed a wide, green grassland, Valerie looked grim. “That would be the influence of the Blight.”
Lucas’ eyebrows climbed. “I thought the Blighted Lands were further north than that?”
“The Blight ever reaches out to influence new territory,” Valerie said. “The frontlines have it mostly contained from truly expanding, but the areas to the south of the border are so unpopulated that some amount of its foul contamination leaks through. This causes mild chaos events even many kilometres outside of the Blighted Lands proper, which drives people away from living in the area, which allows the Blight more room to manoeuvre. Thus, the problem compounds, and eventually the Blighted Lands will push deeper into Mornlunn, where the process will start all over again. A slow death.”
“So the further south we get, the less we’ll feel the Blight?” Lucas asked.
Valerie nodded. “It occurs to me that you have spent every moment since you arrived in this world with the weight of the Blight’s gaze on you, without you even realising it.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Lucas said. “Do you think that’s been affecting me?”
“It’s hard to say, as my read on your personality comes from the accounts of your friends, some of which were written after having not seen you in decades, and a mere few weeks of knowing you.” Valerie’s eyes narrowed. “Either way, getting you to Dawnguard will do you good.”
Their journey from the Lost City had taken them down through an undulating patch of hills, then across a long stretch of moorland, followed by a seemingly endless mire known as the Hagland, until they reached the Carbra River, which they’d followed for miles before splitting away down a rocky stream that cut through a solemn oak forest called the Oakenwood. It was slow going; many paths had grown over long ago, forcing Lucas to flex his floramancy for hours on end. He didn’t mind, really, taking it as good practice, but it would’ve been nice to make more than a few miles’ progress every day.
They only made it out of Steffonshire after two weeks of travelling, which seemed dire until Valerie showed him the map. Steffonshire was far longer than it was wide, and because of its moors and mires it had been sparsely populated even before the Blight advanced to its doorstep. Indeed, the abandoned settlements they’d spotted had been few and far between. Even beyond the reaches of the Blight, people were suspicious of the county that contained one of the most famous fallen cities on the entire continent.
Harwyckshire, on the other hand, supposedly boasted a decent population even today.
“I feel it prudent to give you prior warning and a few words of caution,” Valerie said, watching him as they set down their things to make a camp at the end of the Oakenwood. She unclasped her cloak and folded it with a reverent kind of care. “First of all, I would advise you to keep your floramancy subtle if you employ it in front of people at all.”
“I figured that might be a problem,” Lucas said with a frown. He sat his new sack down with a lot less regard. It was mostly filled with spare clothes, some good sticks, and a selection of fruits and vegetables he’d tried to engineer to be long-preserving. They hadn’t rotted so far with some care from his mana, so he was calling it a success. “You guys talked a lot about superstitions surrounding it. I’m not going to get mobbed or something, am I?”
Valerie didn’t respond for a worryingly long time. “People can be irrational,” she finally settled on saying with a clipped tone.
“You have to keep in mind that common folk have been told for decades that floramancy is practically demonic magic,” Wick said. He’d plopped himself down on the ground the moment they’d stopped for the day, armour still on. “There are highly learned scholars of magic out there who believe it unquestioningly. What’s a country man who may never have met a Wand before to think? I don’t think it’s irrational at all for people to protect their homes from evil.”
“Angry mobs should not get to decide who or what is evil,” Valerie growled.
Lucas tensed, expecting barbed words to go flying back and forth between the two—Wick would surely question whether Valerie thought only the order should get to decide what was evil, or something like that. To his surprise, the shieldmaster winced before bowing his head, black hair shading his eyes. “I apologise. I spoke thoughtlessly.”
“As ever,” Valerie snapped. She exhaled sharply through her nose and turned to Lucas. “As long as people don’t see your floramancy, we should have no problems. And even if your floramancy does get outed, I will deal with the issue.”
Lucas blanched. “Uh, I’ll just hide it. Pass myself off as a pyromancer, maybe.”
“The potential of a mob is another reason we’ll be hiding your identity.” She paused. “Be careful about speaking in large crowds. The translation spell that comes with the Great Powers will translate your words to the native tongue of the listener, while their words will be English to you no matter what language or dialect they speak. This is a very well known trait of the Heroes, and suspicion will fall on you swiftly if people realise you have it.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lucas said. “Wasn’t really planning on doing much talking anyway. Didn’t wanna give myself away by not knowing about something obvious.”
Valerie nodded. She started running her fingers along certain spots of her armour, and the white metal shimmered into translucent moonlight before flowing up into her heart. In moments, she was clad in only a long-sleeved shirt, tight trousers, and long socks, all sky blue and all made of thick, smooth material.
Lucas slipped into another set of marginally tighter plant-based clothes he was coming to think of as his exercise outfit, and they moved a short distance away from the camp, where Valerie started marking out an arena using sticks Lucas’ plant sense found for her. She then led him through some warm-up exercises, stretching out in a routine that was remarkably modern.
(As it had turned out, it was. Stretching before exercise was no new concept to the people of Mornlunn, but Rian had introduced some ideas from his basic understanding of 21st Century sports science to the troops under his command, and it had spread throughout the warriors of the world over the decades.)
When they were done, Valerie spoke, “One more thing. You should be prepared to hear people talk about you with considerable vitriol.”
Lucas shrugged. “People not believing I’ll ever show up like Rena talked about, I’m guessing?”
“More than that. With a hundred years to consider the idea, people of all stations and statures have come up with creative explanations regarding your absence. Quite a few have concluded the blame falls on you in some manner, and won’t be shy about saying so despite my presence.”
“I mean, it isn’t my fault, though? It’s not like I asked to get dragged to another dimension, let alone show up a century after I was meant to.”
“It’s one thing to know that intellectually. Hearing people’s feelings about you for yourself may be more emotionally taxing, so it seemed prudent to forewarn you of it.”
Lucas sighed. “These people don’t even know the real me at all, just stories.”
“They may know more than you think,” Valerie said. She settled into a ready stance, legs bent, arms loose at her sides. Then she attacked.
They went through the usual routine, Valerie beating him up with various techniques, critiquing him on what he could have done better, then going again with the expectations that he’d implement her suggestions. The humiliation of getting battered by a woman half a head shorter than him had faded quickly over the last couple of weeks in the face of how fast her tutelage was rubbing off on him.
Oh, she was still kicking his arse every time, but he was lasting longer in every exercise.
They started off with grappling, where she got him in an arm bar in about four seconds before she let him up and advised him how to do better. After a few dozen or so more little bouts playing out various situations, they switched over to punches and kicks, with similar results. Weapons came next, with swords fashioned from wood to Valerie’s specifications using floramancy. There was where the gap between them was widest, despite that being the skill Lucas had the most experience in by far. His accidental self-teaching in the way of the stick, apparently, didn’t let him measure up to years of training as a Skycloak.
(Fixing his firehand was steadily becoming even more of a priority than it already was. It was as much a hindrance as a help in his training; it gave him some advantage in that his opponent had to constnatly be wary of it, but so did he. They were having to practise double as it was, with one-handed manouevres for times when he didn't want to burn someone, and two-handed so he didn't pick up bad habits that would be detrimental if and when he fixed it. The sword training was especially aggravating in this regard, having to reinforce his stick and grip it lightly with the firehand.)
Lucas had been confused about why she was prioritising teaching him how to fight people, at first. Considering his whole ‘saviour of the world’ status, he’d expected to jump straight into stuff that would help him with one day defeating the Demon Lord. Valerie had simply reminded him that factions like Jyn’s were out there, and thus Lucas needed to be able to defend himself against human opponents as a prerequisite to revealing his arrival to the world.
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Even with that explanation, a part of him was still sure she just wanted to kick his arse. The Skycloak was relentless and merciless. Only when she was holding back was he able to follow her movements, and her strength was unbelievable. The Gift let him learn absurdly quickly—Valerie claimed he’d improved to a level that would usually take a talented fighter a few months, and made sure to emphasise that was while training multiple disciplines—but it still felt too slow when she was manhandling him.
Especially when she hooked her wooden sword around his ankle, moving faster than he could react to, and sent him sprawling onto his back. She rested the tip of her sword against his chest.
“Focus,” she said, then pulled her sword away to let him up.
Lucas growled under his breath in frustration. That bout had lasted perhaps ten seconds.
The thing was, ten seconds didn’t sound like much, but it felt like every extra second gained was twice as hard as the last. Bridging the gap as he was now seemed insurmountable.
He needed an edge. The biggest advantage available to him was, of course, his magic. He needed strength, speed. More than what merely slowing his mana had given him.
For that, he needed to understand why slowing his mana made him stronger.
Staying on the ground, Lucas breathed deeply and slowed his mana as much as he could. He watched its effects through his inner eye.
He felt denser. More solid. Like he was more there, in the present. Like this, he’d had the strength to pull a sled that had to have weighed 100 kg halfway through an overgrown city. It was the factor that let him last 10 seconds against Valerie. Her monstrous strength would bat his sword out of his grip without it.
But why? How?
Inside, his mana backed up. Mana was only produced when spent, his soul working to maintain a consistent state as well as it could. In this state, he was basically not losing any mana at all.
But he was losing some. It took concentration to identify it, but he could tell a trickle of new mana was being produced, starting around the area of his chest that Jamie rested in. The mana wasn’t coming from Jamie—it wasn’t fire attuned.
Last time he’d identified something in his mana, it had been through specks of foreign mana travelling through his body. He replicated the trick now, leeching a bit of plant mana into his system and watching it circulate around his pathways. It made several full circuits before he caught sight of some of them disappearing.
Curiously, a few specks vanished as they passed through one of the pathways in his upper bicep. One of the first pathways he’d manually opened, he realised.
Following the lead, Lucas focused on his upper arms, where his pathways were most developed and abundant. Here, the tangle of pathways was so thick it was hard to see it as anything other than one big mass, but some focus let him pick out individual pathways. Each was as thick as the main channels carrying mana through his torso, and it had been a long time since they ached from mana passing through them. They were fully matured. All taken together, they pretty much overlapped with every last atom of his actual arms.
Lucas took control of the mana in the grain-of-sand-sized area where he’d seen the little dots of plant mana vanish, and instead of slowing it, he sped it up instead. He usually only did this when he wanted better external control, as it let him more quickly replace the mana he was spending around himself. Now, he just wanted to get a better idea of where it was escaping. Mana stayed slowed in the rest of his body, only to surge in that tiny area.
The effect was immediate and obvious, a tiny stream of mana trickling out of his pathways for no apparent reason, just like it would if he was consciously projecting it. Seeing as it was his mana, he could follow its progress. Or lack thereof, since it was vanishing before it could pass the bounds of his skin.
Lucas found himself baffled and intrigued. As he thought about it, he started to see the shape of things.
Mana pathways weren’t physical things. Not really. One could map them to physical locations on the body, but they weren’t actually here in the mortal realm. In its default state, mana was intangible, spiritual. It could interact with the physical world both within his body and without only when he acted on it, when he made it change.
It was that thought that lit a spark of idea in Lucas’ mind, and it quickly caught alight and started blazing with all the strength of the sun. Mana could affect the world, shape things to his will. Making things more of themselves, fires burning hotter, plants growing faster, was its easiest function, but it could, with cleverness and control, change things.
Who was to say it couldn’t do the same to him?
That might have been what was happening when he slowed his mana down. It would explain why it made him feel more solid, why it ached. He was potentially changing himself in tiny, tiny ways, if only temporarily, by accident.
What could he do if he changed himself—shaped himself—deliberately?
He set to doing just that, letting his already-slowed mana seep out of his pathways and into his physical body, preparing to alter his arms in the same way he’d shape a plant. It would be easiest there, where his pathways were so abundant and covered so much space.
“I feel the need to clarify,” Valerie said, dragging his attention back to his surroundings, “that I have not been running an elaborate ruse to motivate you into finding an alternative solution for self improvement. Actively enhancing your physical capabilities with mana is dangerous when your mana system is undeveloped, and I can’t even begin to guess what you might do to yourself with only your arms at the required level of growth.”
Lucas grunted. He was still on the floor from where she’d trounced him, while Valerie stood over him with her wooden sword pointed to the ground, both her hands resting on its pommel.
“But the responsibility always lies with the teacher. I misjudged where your mind would take you when faced with a challenge, and any injury you did to yourself would have been my fault. It’s clear now that I should explain mana enhancement to you before we go any further.”
And with that Lucas let his mana return to his pathways and focused all his attention on Valerie.
She gave him a wry smile. “First, we must start with the heart. As I explained to you when you were mapping your pathways, it is the central point of your mana system. It doesn’t perform the functions of a human heart, to be clear; it’s taken on that name because of its location.”
Lucas nodded. He’d already noticed how often the heart was part of a working; Valerie drew her sword from her heart, the opalescent light that covered Wick’s armour and shield like film at times came from his heart, and, of course, there was the heart’s flame that marked the start of a pyromancer’s journey. Presumably, Rena had had some kind of heart thing going on too.
Valerie fisted her hand over her heart, with her knuckles facing to her left. A white light flared to life, and the handle of a blade coalesced in her grip. In the past, she’d always drawn her sword in an almost immediate motion. Here, she pulled on it slowly, letting Lucas see how her sword seemed to form from a disc of wispy mist over her heart.
The sword was far too long to be drawn just from straightening her arm if it appeared fully-formed at once. Instead, it snapped to full length in a swirl of mist the moment it was clear to do so. She held it sideways in front of her, twice as long as her arm and a hand’s length at its widest. The crossguard was also white, unadorned and with no engravings. A white aurora started bleeding from her heart to the blade, and it lit up like moonlight.
“Your soulheart regulates the nature of your soul, of your mana. For some magical disciplines such as pyromancy, this means attuning a certain kind of mana there yourself in order to customise your mana to your desire. For most of us, it’s a matter of soulbonding an item or creature.”
“Can you soulbond more than one thing?” Lucas asked.
“To a degree. There must be compatability between them, and one's heart can only endure so much. Stars typically bond more than one of the other categories: Sword, Shield, Bow, and Wand. This grants them versatility, as it means their mana has more than one aspect, and there are benefits to each of the four paths. But it means being weaker in each. Mana can’t be more than two types. When you bond more than one class, in truth you’re splitting your mana between them.”
“So, if you had a Bow and Sword, they’d both be 50% weaker than just having one class?”
“The numbers aren’t necessarily so even, but you have the right idea. As a shieldmaster, Wick’s mana makes his body far more difficult to harm, and he can extend its protection to any defensive objects bonded to him. Bows gain keener senses and dexterity that helps with their accuracy. Wands perhaps go without saying: they attune their mana to the discipline they wish to be their speciality. And my sword mana makes me much stronger and faster than my body should be physically capable of.”
Lucas eyed the muscles visible through Valerie’s tight trousers. “And I’m assuming it multiplies your base capabilities?”
“Correct again. That’s why you must be sure to train your body as well as your mana. The amount your mana increases your strength is based on the density of your mana, and if you’re already strong, there’s more to multiply.” She paused. “It’s worth noting that the Great Star is most likely going to offset the drawbacks of multi-classing for you.”
“I do really hope that’s the case,” Lucas said with a smile. “So what else can you do? With sword mana, I mean.”
Valerie cocked her head to one side, owl-like. “What do you think sword mana can do?”
Lucas thought about it for a moment. “Well, I’m guessing… basically sword stuff? Like, there’s obviously the things I’ve seen you do. Projecting light from your blade to hit from a distance, and calling your sword back to you. I reckon you can make your sword sharper and tougher, so it doesn’t break. Uh. Shit man, Rian would be so much better than me at this. You can probably enhance your instincts; stuff like knowing where and when to strike, and seeing weak points and incoming attacks. And you can cut things that can’t usually be cut, like when you cut the fireball Wick was riding on, back in the city. Anything that a sword can conceptually do or be used for, sword mana can improve that and take it to absurd heights.”
“Good guesses. Everything you listed is possible with sword mana, and there's so much more.” One corner of her lips twitched up. “They say Lord Rian could cut the distance between himself and his foes.”
Lucas snorted. “Sounds like him. He could probably have done that back on Earth,” he joked. "Is it like that for every kind of soulbond? You gain traits from the thing you're bonding with?"
"It is," Valerie said. “Now, enhancement. The act of permeating the body with mana in order to grant specific physical or mental attributes, and the vector through which the aforementioned soulbond abilities are granted. As you’ve discovered, the technique involves taking hold of your mana and actively moving it through your mortal form to augment your capabilities as you desire. This is known as cycling. Can you tell me what dangers could come from this?”
“Doing it incompletely could injure you,” Lucas said with a sigh. “Enhancing your muscles but not your bones could mean fractures or even breaks. And enhancing just your bones might make them too strong to be contained by your flesh, or something? I dunno.”
“You’re on the right track,” Valerie said. “Immaculate control of your mana can offset the danger, but it’s inadvisable to try enhancing yourself until your system has matured to cover your entire body, since that makes it much easier. It usually does so by one’s early teenage years, for what that’s worth.” She paused. “Cycling is generally a full body technique. I’ve never met anyone in your situation. I don’t want to speculate what you could do to yourself by enhancing only your arms.”
“Probably pull them out of their sockets quite violently,” Lucas said.
“That’s a possibility,” Valerie agreed. Her eyes hardened. “I’m going to have to ask that you refrain from any attempts to enhance yourself until you’ve matured your pathways. The risk is too great, otherwise.”
“You can’t heal it?”
“My healing capabilities are not absolute. It’s entirely possible that you could deal yourself an injury I could not rescue you from. I have every intention of teaching you enhancement in future, when it’s safe. Please be patient until then.”
Lucas’ shoulders slumped. “Fine,” he said.
“Good,” Valerie said. She hefted her wooden sword, gesturing at him with the point. “Now, get up. Tonight’s training isn’t over.”