Vayra opened her eyes and ran back to the cliff. She placed her hands in the cracks and climbed back up to the top, doing her best to remember the handholds and footholds she’d used before. Left, right, left…a little jump, and a reach for the next ledge.
In a matter of minutes, she made it to the top.
Again, she faced the training dummy. She wedged a foot into the stone and braced herself on the other side with a knee.
Nathariel had just hit it really hard, right?
She gathered up as much starlight as she could from the scarf, then reached up and drove a Starlight Palm into its center—its gut—as hard as she could. The starsteel wires lit up, filled with white starlight and a few specks of glowing Arcara, and it shot around the body of the dummy in the blink of an eye, before surging back out a vent in the center. Vayra was much too low for the counterattack to hit her.
“Alright, maybe I have to do more than hit it hard,” she muttered.
‘You don’t say…’ Phasoné replied.
With a chuckle, Vayra observed the dummy. The mechanism that had resisted her when she’d tried to pull out the pin at the base…she had to make it move the opposite direction. If she pushed the metal bar back from where it had struck her from, it would pull the pins out. Only problem was, she couldn’t reach the bar.
She reached up and swatted the ring above it. Maybe another mechanism would push the ring she needed into position. There was a small notch that she could push.
If she tried to move the rusting ring with her own arms, it would take hours. But with the boost of a starlight palm, it moved in an instant.
She blasted a pulse of starlight back into the notch, and as the energy vented out, the ring shifted.
Gears clunked and a ratchet clanked, then the bar below swung out towards her with the force of a cannonball.
She reacted as fast as could. She summoned the base of her seer-core from the stars in her scarf, then sucked it into her left arm to give it strength. Starlight Braced her fingers just in time. She caught the bar and pushed it back the other direction. The pins popped out of the bottom of the training dummy, and it fell backwards with a clunk.
“That took way too long,” she said.
‘Yes, yes it did.’
Vayra continued along the path as fast she could. She broke into a sprint, until the forest ended and she reached a plain of empty, barren earth, scoured by a volcanic flow. All that was left was umber, bubbly rock.
Scattered across the plain, however, were Nathariel’s training dummies. These were even rustier, and their bases were nearly sedimented into the ground. They must have been left out in the open for a while.
“Are you just going to stare at them?” Nathariel’s voice boomed from behind her. She spun around trying to find where he stood, but she couldn’t see him. “Fight them,” he instructed, “one by one, until you reach the path on the other side of the flow.”
Vayra ran out into the field until she reached the first dummy, and for the rest of the day, she tried to defeat it.
It didn’t matter where she started hitting it. Eventually, it settled into a pattern of strikes and counter attacks. Each time she pushed a rod inwards or deflected a wild swipe from a metal bar, another came from the side, redirecting her motion against her. A few times, it even caught her with a vent of her own power.
At the end of the day, covered in bruises and scrapes, she scrambled back to her feet, facing the first dummy and ready to try again. Her duty was to learn. She would never see the galaxy the way her wanderlust wanted her to if she couldn’t put an end to Karmion.
A pair of bootsteps clattered behind her, and she whirled around. Nathariel walked towards her, his arms crossed. “Like I said, they’re tuned for someone stronger.”
“I’m sorry—”
“I’m not mad,” he said, then beckoned her back towards him, along the path the way she came. “You will improve, and this is how. We will try again tomorrow. Until then, Glade and I have prepared dinner.”
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Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
For the next month, Glade’s duty was to watch Vayra train. The Order of Balance would not let her over-extend herself, or injure her Arcara channels, or give herself a permanent physical wound that she could not recover from. He was the only Order member here, and so that was his duty.
But it seemed nearly impossible to injure her Arcara channels. Just the act of cycling mana cleared them out, according to Nathariel.
“How?” Glade had asked the man.
Nathariel had held out the Godscourge book and tapped the cover. With a grin, he said, “Ancient Velaydian Secret? You’re more than welcome to read it.”
Though Glade might have wanted to, he didn’t have time to read the book. When he wasn’t watching Vayra, he was following Nathariel’s instructions on cycling his mana, and the few dregs of Arcara he had.
His low Spirit Potential made converting mana to Arcara more difficult. His body just wasn’t as good at it as a God-heir. But that didn’t stop Nathariel from teaching him a weak, low-stage cycling technique to push the little wisp of magical energy around his body, allowing him to envision his channels and his dim core.
“You’ll need to give yourself an area of control at some point,” Nathariel told him, while handing him a small vial. It was an elixir, and from its turquoise colour, he supposed it was a concentration booster.
It also provided him with an initial burst of almost-purified Arcara, which he readily accepted and integrated into his own spirit.
With the improved concentration, he took to attacking the training dummies. They were the ones that had been kept inside, and their mechanisms were clean and oiled. He didn’t need enhanced strength or magical techniques to make them work.
Not yet.
“They’ve been tuned for a God-heir with immense power,” said Nathariel. “And it was a pain to tune them so high, so I’m not taking them down a peg for you. The good news is, skill can account for much, especially when it’s raw strength you’re compensating for.” He pulled the sword out of Glade’s sheath, then tossed it on the ground behind them. “I know you’re good with that. Let’s see how you handle hand-to-hand.”
In a matter of minutes, Glade had disabled all five dummies that had been arranged outside the house. Open palm strikes, fists, blocking with his forearms and knees, and rapid kicks.
“Very good.” Nathariel pushed the line of five dummies back into an upright position, then picked their pins back into place. “Now, do it while cycling your Arcara.”
That was a greater challenge.
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At the end of the month, Vayra toppled the last of the dummies on the plain. She stood on the opposite side of the treeline, looking back and panting. There had been ten, or maybe fifteen of them. She hadn’t been counting.
At the start, she had relied on memorizing their movements and patterns, but each one was unique, and she couldn’t remember them all. The only way to succeed was by reacting instinctively and quickly, and when they provided an opening, striking their cores with intent. The chain of generating her seer-core to pulling the Arcara in, then imbuing and reinforcing her limbs with it…well, she made the process faster.
The process of Bracing only became easier when she began to think of it much the same as shielding an object. Even easier when, with her spiritual senses, she tried viewing the paths that her Arcara took through the devices’ starsteel wires, illuminating their internal workings and giving her a little foresight into where the next blow might land. Toggling it seemed slightly more natural with practice, but it quickly became overwhelming if she didn’t push the spiritual sight away.
Of course, using her scythe would have made it much easier, but if Nathariel had gotten these masterfully-crafted devices from his teacher, she didn’t want to destroy them in an instant. Besides, cutting though them in a single scythe swipe wouldn’t do her any good.
Once she reached the end of the plain, though, the training course wasn’t over. She sprinted through the woods on the other side, looping back towards Nathariel’s hovel on a road she had never travelled before.
The sun was setting, and its light filtered through the skeletal trees and ashy horizon. She could barely see the turns, but the fading light made the gullies’ burbling magma glow even brighter. She strengthened her legs with starlight Arcara and boosted her jumps, pushing over each obstacle with determination.
By the time she returned to the hovel, she found both Glade and Nathariel waiting for her. Glade looked happy, and almost proud. Nathariel’s face was unreadable, but still, he nodded.
“Dinner is ready,” he told her. “Inside.”
Vayra glanced back at the sun. It was gone below the horizon, now, and she was a little late. She looked down at her arms, smeared with mud and dust from the day. “Can I clean myself up, first?”
“Dismissed.”
Vayra ran down to the river, then waded in up to her shoulders. She wanted to relax, to say that she could take it easy for a day or two after defeating the training course, but that wouldn’t help anyone, and she knew it. There were still hurdles to climb.
She still couldn’t reliably use the Mediator Form, which would be her strongest weapon when, inevitably, she had to punch up against more powerful opponents. Nature had given her the edge she needed, but she couldn’t find a way to tap into it.
‘Myrrir will be a Commodore by now,’ Phasoné said. ‘And if you face him again, his attention won’t be split between you and Hammontor.’
Vayra leaned back in the water and splashed a little bit up into her face. As she scrubbed the dust and dirt from her cheeks, she funnelled Arcara around her body, aiming it where it was needed the most to help her bruised flesh heal. It was hard to tell from the outside; phoenixes had clear blood, and internal bleeding didn’t show as blatantly from the outside. But she could feel the soreness.
With a sigh, she dropped her head, then said, “We’ll learn. We’ll figure it out. There’s still time.”