"When it comes to magical classes, there are two main types, casters and controllers, with the former using spells and the latter using direct manipulation. There are benefits to both, and they are recognized as equal, but casters are more common as it is much easier to get started, due to the fact that a basic spell can be learned in a few months while manipulation skills generally take years without aid from the system."
-A basic primer on classes by Johnson 'Teach' Cobbler
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The next day was for skill testing, so after waking up and going to the training area, this time arriving after Leo since I had slept in due to the previous days' exertion, I considered what specifically I wanted to test first. I had already tested most of what I could think of in regards to my [Elementalist] class during the tutorial, so it was pretty much just my [Bestial Constructor] class that I had ideas for, plus a few that relied on both. There were two main things I wanted to test today, them being what was considered a beast by the system, and how much energy I could imbue into a single construct.
Deciding to start with making the strongest construct possible, I decided to go with a hawk, as I also wanted to test with a bear later to see if the size affected its maximum capacity. Feeding energy to fill out the shell of the construct, using Lightning because I wanted to see how fast it would be, I kept pushing my energy in, forcefully compressing it whenever it felt full, until I could feel my hold on the energy start to weaken, threatening to burst out if I lost control for even a second. Finishing the construct, feeling the energy tremble for a second inside the body of the hawk before stabilizing, I checked my stat screen and saw that I had used 274 mana in its creation, and I could feel the intensity of its energy through the mental connection. Appearance wise, it was almost a solid blue, and rather than arcs appearing inside of its body, they instead crackled around it, arcing between feathers and talons, making it look far more intimidating than my previous creations. From the leakage it gave off, which was actually more than the standard, either due to the density of its energy or errors in its creation due to the high volume of energy used, I was still confident that it would last a good while longer than my other creations. Basic observations over, I moved on to the fun part, testing its physical abilities. Starting with its speed, the reason I used Lightning to begin with, I ordered it to fly to the other end of the training field and back as fast as it could.
*CRACK*
As soon as I sent the order through the mental connection, I heard the now-familiar crack of lightning as the hawk became a blur, the echo of its takeoff not even fully faded in the time it took to travel the 30 meters between my location and the wall I indicated and back, the noise causing Leo to snap his head over to me before shrugging and returning to his training. Still somewhat in awe of its speed, I had it do some more flying, this time ordering it to do some spins and avoid pretend obstacles to test its agility, and while it was slower than its linear movement, it was still barely more than a blur as I struggled to give it instructions fast enough to make it do repeated aerial maneuvers.
More than satisfied with its speed and agility, I moved onto strength testing, and found that while it was able to carry the disc targets without issue, which were around 20-40 pounds, one was its limit as it was unable to takeoff while holding two, and struggled when carrying one and a half, as I had broken a few of them the previous day during training. When ordered to attack, it was able to leave a pretty deep gash in the wood, a heavy crackle accompanying the talon strike and leaving slight burns at the point of impact for its attacks. While I was tempted to try my [Detonate Construct] skill, I had a feeling that the explosion would be large enough that people might come and investigate, and I didn't want our hidden training area to be discovered so soon, plus if the bear had the same maximum as the hawk I wanted them to fight so I can get a better idea of their capabilities.
Spending the next hour or so having the hawk do various tests, I only started making the bear construct after I had 300 mana to use, as I figured that even if the bear did have a higher maximum it wasn't worth wasting time waiting to regenerate my mana to full, and 30 mana was well beyond the margin of error. Activating the skill with a mental tug, this time the shell taking the form of a bear, I started to channel Crystal into it, condensing until as much as I could, this time it was the shell itself that started to cause issues, barely able to contain the energy within. Ending the skill and seeing 287 mana missing from my pool, I examined the construct that I had just made. Unlike the hawk, there wasn't actually that much difference between this bear and the lower cost ones, though it was more reflective and seemed more solid.
Thinking about the difference I felt between making the two constructs, I realized that I was stupid and had invalidated the experiment. Since I had wanted to make my constructs fight, i made them both out of the element most suited to them, but I had forgotten that my Crystal attunement was higher than my Lightning attunement, and as such was easier to control, so while the first time it was my lack of control over the energy itself that stopped me, it was only the second time that it was the actual maximum that the skill could take. While I was pretty confident that the size of the beast didn't actually have any bearing on the maximum mana it could hold, as the bear maxed out not far from the hawk, I would still need to construct a hawk out of Crystal once my mana regenerated just to make sure, meaning that I wouldn't be able to do any mana heavy training until I regenerated another 300 mana, putting off all the other tests I wanted to do by hours.
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Disappointment in my lack of forethought aside, I started testing the bears physique, finding that while it was only marginally faster than its lower cost compatriots, its attacks were much sharper, leaving deep gashes in the wooden targets and able to lift the extra log with almost no encumbrance. The main improvement however, was in its durability, as even whacking it as hard as I could with my staff only took two to three percent of its energy away, and it didn't even slightly react to the force. Doing a few more tests and letting Leo and Jason, who had arrived only a few minutes after me, know that I intended to have them fight, which made both of them pause their practice since they wanted to watch, we all went to one edge of the area while we sent them to the part without any targets or dummies before I ordered them to fight, having had the bear do some rigorous exercises until it had around the same amount of energy as the hawk.
As soon as I sent the order, the hawk flew into the air with a crack before the bear could even begin its charge, and left without an opponent in its vision, the bear idled for a moment until a blue blur struck it in the head, the hawk having dive bombed it with its talons clenched in a fist. But the bear's durability was nothing to be scoffed at, as even with the aid of gravity and its immense speed the strike was only enough to momentarily stun the bear, not to mention that I felt that the dive had actually done more damage to the hawk than the bear due to the vast difference in durability between them, quickly getting over the impact to its head, the bear snapped its jaws at the hawk, who was able to react fast enough to avoid its glimmering maw and take to the skies once more. Knowing that the lacking intelligence of the constructs, which was unaffected by the increased amount of energy, I knew that the hawk would just keep repeating its divebomb, while the bear wouldn't do anything without the hawk in sight, and since I didn't want to just watch the same events repeat themselves until the hawk dissipated from the recoil of its own attack, I sent an order to the hawk telling it not to dive anymore, which was thankfully just at the edges of how complex an order could be before it didn't understand them.
With my order, the hawk changed tactics, flying lower to the ground and raking along the bears face and sides with its talons as it repeatedly flew by, using its superior speed and reaction times to avoid any counterattacks. Even with the repeated attacks, the bears tough crystalline hide meant that it was taking almost no damage, the extra lightning effect of its attacks rendered ineffective by the crystals non conductivity. It only took a few seconds, which was enough time for the hawk to make multiple passes, before the bear reared up on its hind legs, freeing its forepaws to use for counterattacks in addition to its mouth, its weight more than enough to keep it stable even with the hawks constant attacks. The fight continued on, an electric blur barely avoiding shining tooth and claw while chipping away at its energy, while its opponent unflinchingly endured strike after strike, too slow for its counterattacks to land, but only needing one lucky strike to turn the tables, and it seemed that luck was in its favor today, as the hawk got too greedy with one of its strikes, attempting to go for its eyes and blind the beast, but was instead greeted with the clamping jaws of a physically stronger opponent clamping on its left shoulder, and once it had the hawk in its jaws, the bear went back down to all fours and rapidly shook its head to dig its teeth even deeper into the the hawks body, who was ineffectually flapping its one free wing to try and get free, the lighting arcing around its wound unable to damage its foe like it would against flesh and blood. It took only a few seconds between the hawk getting caught in the bears maw and it dissipating from lack of energy, the bear becoming still as it waited for further orders.
"Damn, that was cool."(Jason)
"Yeah, but I thought that the hawk had it."(Leo)
"Eh, it was barely doing any damage, the bear still has over half of what it started with, plus it's pretty much an exact counter since the extra lightning damage from its attacks and injuries did absolutely nothing to it since it was made out of crystals, which are also pretty resistant to slashing attacks, which means that the hawk couldn't really do anything effective to it."(Mason)
"What? If you knew all that why did you have them fight in the first place?"(Leo)
"Because I wasn't sure about how much damage the hawk could do, plus I wanted to see how effective they are without any orders."(Mason)
"And it looked dope."(Jason)
"Yes, that too."(Mason)
The fight concluded with the bears victory, I spent the next few hours until it ran out of energy by sparring with it using only my staff, and losing every single fight. Eventually I changed from trying to fight the bear to trying to get away, as I quickly realized that any situation that resulted in me fighting without any mana would also result in my death if I stayed, at least against anything as physically superior as the crystal bear currently charging at me. I was only able to keep up my running for thirty minutes or so at a time before I needed to take a breather, highlighting my need to do stamina exercises, as I wished to train my END without using stat points, since levels were far and few between, and I wanted to improve the stats that my class actually made use of as much as possible.
It wasn't until around noon that I finally regained enough mana to make a maximum Crystal hawk, which ended up taking 284 mana, proving that the size of the construct had no impact on how much energy it could hold, as the three mana difference between the two was well within the margin of error. After confirming that size had no effect on capacity, I spent the next few hours training my reaction speeds by having the hawk dive at me from different directions, though I ordered it to never actually make contact as the added density from its crystal talons made it so that its dives were far more effective than its electric counterpart, managing to crack stone with its landing.