Livia was sitting on Brunner's porch, looking out over the small, cleared field where sparring was usually conducted.
She was getting more and more used to the presence of Mr Beard, but it was still distracting beyond compare having a voice in your head. Suppose all I can do is get used to it.
As she noted down how her members all matched up currently, and how it compared to a month earlier, it gave some interesting results. Oscar was still doing well, for being Classless, but there was just no way he could keep up with the rate of improvement Roldy and Kalle went through with the many Skills they could work on. He was more often than not delegated to a supporting role; but you couldn't count him out during the spars either, he kept coming up with solutions that allowed him to stay in the game despite the way they all got used to his tricks.
Hyde was the quickest to improve though, and Harold kept trying to find him high quality meals despite the rarity of magic beasts in the area. The orchard had some slightly magic farm animals to supplement his mundane diet, mostly goat-like creatures, with the exception of how they could sweat and release a fragrance of blooming apples, supposedly to blend in where they grew up.
But Hyde was still feeling his hunger increasing week by week. It seemed the [Druid] had no way of sourcing better prey than that, not regularly. But then again, it was not yet that time either where it became strictly necessary, not until Hyde started gaining his inherited magic abilities; which was not until well into adulthood.
But with growing size came growing confidence in the mosswolf, but it wasn't just that. The extraordinary part was still the power of his mind, and gaining this opportunity of learning the ways humans fought; which he was picking up at a surprising rate, even if he could not put it all to full use himself.
It was teaching him to think of ways to put his own unique body to better use. He started tackling with his hips, spraying the eyes with the unexpected moisture from his back, even working on his tail dexterity. It used to be a real weakness since the humans could just grab on when he was juking, but lately his increasingly dexterous limb had kept making them miss, which was obviously deliberate because Hyde was ready and gained some advantage out of it every time.
Magic and Skills still tipped the scales–heavily–but in mundane combat Hyde was starting to catch up.
Of course, Brunner was a towering giant above the rest.
Despite lacking a combat Class, it was just a matter of the status of his body, it had been channelling magic for so many years that he could push it far beyond any natural limits. He toned it down to spar, of course, but nowadays he had to actually watch himself when telling the lads to go full throttle, and he’d even started working up a real sweat when having to deal with Roldy, Oscar, Hyde and Kalle all coming at him wielding their full Skillset.
Mr Beard was still hung up on the events of yesterday however; luckily Livia had just finished writing when he interrupted this time.
[I just don't see how it is possible, were these trees really why all those towns were raided so early on, or had this project been destroyed before that? But if he spread it all over Doc Forrest, some should have survived...]
Does he have to think out loud… Sigh. "You guys never found out about this?"
[If they really held this kind of thing secret and did not trust the leadership of today enough for Humanity to even know to defend them? No, I have to believe someone must have known, at some point.]
"Did you have any relationship with Zisle, or some knowledge of the [Druids] found there then?"
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Mr Beard finally acknowledged her. [Not that I recall. If they had access to this type of resource... The whole continent was always hostile to us Humans, we thought. Our probing expeditions certainly encountered outright hostility, and if I recall correctly then the Cloven certainly indicated that their attempts had fared no better.]
Livia felt far from certain of how good an indicator that was. Brunner’s experiences seemed to hint at a more complicated situation over there, but who knew how things might have changed hundreds of years later for the Zisle encountered by Mr Beard’s people.
[This period in Human history may be worse off than we anticipated, this peace rests on some grim foundation, of that I am increasingly sure.]
"Why're you always acting so ominous, can't you just explain what you mean?"
[I truly must consider this properly first. I do not wish to taint your thinking before even I am sure of my assessment.]
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Kalle had been working like an animal after he finally levelled and was able to recover from his development of the 3rd [Wailing Bolt].
Oscar had been a lifesaver–if Roldy was the one with him every step of the way–a rival who could always see what you were working on would always be prepared accordingly.
It made it that much harder to close the gap and get a win, and Kalle felt like he needed a win.
Despite the two being Casters, both were far from the kind who had a Spell for every occasion. And so they expected they would need to get down and dirty and actually fight a lot, and really only use their magic to supplement that.
[Telekinetic Push] was an obvious such Skill. Sure, you could use it to flip your note pages or bring your toast to the table in the morning, real mage stuff. But you could also push knees in, shove feet and just be nasty with it.
Kalle had probably broken Roldy's nose more than twice, and even if he had regenerative magic, it still hurt like a bitch in the moment and made it all the harder to see through the tears, or to focus on your next move of figuring out when you might be able to fit a heal in.
Not to mention a full breath.
If it happened early on and Kalle managed to keep the pressure up; that was when he had a real shot. But more often than not Roldy’s endurance would win out.
Learning to fight with it all in mind, despite pain or the wiles of your constantly adjusting opponent, it was the challenge of a lifetime.
When Kalle did win he usually finished by landing the occasional low percentage [Mind Blast] throughout the match; they had agreed that five fully powered ones would likely be enough to cripple the [Druid] and win the fight.
Incorporating such finishers into his defensive movement had been his focus, but lately he'd been working on something else.
What he'd realised was how even [Esper's Balm] could be useful in combat, certainly to remove shock and the like from himself, but also to just read the emotions in the air. It was subtle, but after starting to learn from Sten he'd realised that traditional fighters did something very similar.
Every feint Roldy threw seemed transparent in comparison. Sten’s every thrown strike was disguised as one technique and meant to be ending up another, making your defences a mere waste of energy.
Now Kalle was starting to get a sense for the very deception itself, its uniquely flavoured energy.
On this day it finally clicked.