Chapter 33

A Learning Experience

After entering the arena building I walked to a small podium next to the arch. I found the mana circle Samuel had described to me, and connected my mana to it.

My head filled with images of possible arena layouts, terrain features, and objects that could be placed at my desire. I also found the setting that controlled mana density and ratios. I was surprised to note that the arena could in fact create death mana, it was just set to zero by default.

For my first test I chose a forest setting, the arena could create trees and plants that would respond to life mana like the real thing. The rest of the life you'd find in a forest was absent though. I did find a setting that caused animal and bug sounds to play randomly, so that it wouldn't feel so unnaturally empty, so I turned that on.

I altered the ratio of mana to skew slightly more towards life. I could have made that the only element around, but I planned on testing other things too, and that would never happen outside the arena. I felt that life had a kind of partnership with air, water, and a lesser partnership with earth.

When I accepted the prompt for myself and my staff and entered the arena, the ambient life, air, and drops of water mana rushed to greet me.

I laughed at the playful breeze, and felt the warm embrace of the life mana as it flowed into me adding to the life mana already saturating my form. The water mana's cool touch helped bring focus to my mind. The other elements were drawn to me as well, but they were quiet to my perception. I could tell what they were, but I received no feedback from their concepts.

As I made my way to the center of the arena I found myself mildly disturbed by the fake nature noises. They sounded very realistic, but the meaning behind the different calls was clear to me, and what I was hearing was like listening to a bunch of different people all spouting random phrases.

I managed to ignore it and get to testing. I took a deep breath, and tried to get an understanding of how to use my newly altered aura ability. Something told me it was just as important as my new cores.

It took time, and concentration to unleash my aura even with the help of my instincts. But once I did, it was as though I had unleashed the floodgates. Mana flowed out of my core, and spread into the area around me. The ambient mana touched by it connected with me, and began to respond.

I grinned, feeling a choir of wordless suggestions from the mana about what we could do when connected in such a way. I picked a suggestion that sounded like it had a lot of potential, and the mana got happily to work.

I felt it sink into the nearby plants, and a connection formed between myself and every living thing it touched.

It was a lot like entering the web of life, only I was still fully aware of myself, and able to move. The plants I was connected to began to grow perceptibly, the trees groaned as they sprouted new branches and their trunks thickened while they grew taller. I felt how I could guide their growth. I wasn't in control of them, not exactly, but they would take their cues from my will if I focused on them.

When about a quarter of the total mana in my core had left me, I cut off the flow. Something told me that was enough for what I was asking.

I was no longer sending energy out of my core, but my aura remained. It seemed to act as a beacon for the ambient mana. More and more free life mana was drawn into my sphere of influence, adding to its power. The plant growth became explosive, existing trees grew many feet in height, but that wasn't the most stunning thing. The trees and plants all dropped their seeds at once, and those seeds grew as well.

As the seeds began to sprout, I felt how they were growing into something more akin to life elementals than plants. They would live only as long as the life mana they absorbed from my aura lasted. I felt a few suggestions from the mana on how they could grow. Images of different types of monstrous plants flooded my mind, some of them positively ghastly, though I was able to tell that the more horrifically magical varieties would require much more mana than I had invested. A few of them would even require me to figure out how to draw mana from different cores, that was currently beyond me. I wasn't sure how I knew for a fact that it would be possible eventually, but not yet.

I quickly picked one that took the form of an animated thorny vine. I knew from the mana that it would spread its roots out, sending them wide and deep, and create a network with all the others of its kind in the area. When I selected it, I felt the density of my aura drop to almost nothing, as it was absorbed by the rapidly growing sprouts. Vines exploded from them using the mana they had consumed to mature nearly instantaneously. They ended up growing roughly ten feet long and an inch and a half thick, the thorns that developed all along their length that were an inch long, they were wickedly sharp and ended with barbed hooks.

It almost seemed like they were inspired by my staff, who had fully grown into an animated version of the tree I had taken the seed to create it from. It danced around, using its large roots like legs. It had grown thorn covered branches which it was waving around with glee. From the bond I felt that it could no longer float at its current size, but it seemed happy to experience a new form of movement.

I tore my attention from my companion's exuberant display, to observe my more temporary creations. I watched the vines wriggle around, partly burying themselves in dirt, before they lay completely still. They didn't respond to my presence, because we were linked through the life mana that animated them. They didn't have any kind of minds, no thoughts or feelings came through the link. They were alive, but not living beings, they would respond to stimulus in predictable ways, but nothing more unless I guided them.

I knew that guiding them would require more mana pumped into my aura, and it would be difficult. Getting the vines to do something outside of what they were tuned to do would require focus and concentration. I scratched the side of my head as the information on how the plants worked flooded my mind.

If I was going to use this particular ability in the real world it seemed like it would be best to let the vines act on their own. But I wanted to know how effective they would really be, no information on that was forthcoming.

I came up with a very stupid idea, if I wasn't in the arena where I was protected from real harm I never would have done it. But I wanted to see how they worked, and there was only one way that would happen.

From the feedback I received from the mana I knew the plants would live for roughly fifteen minutes, even without my aura present. They bled a small amount of mana naturally over time even while laying still like they were. They would rapidly expend the life mana inside them for fuel if they started moving, which would cut down the time they had.

I felt an intense sense of danger coming from the life mana as I made my decision.

I had to grit my teeth and push through the dire warnings from the mana inside my body. But eventually I switched my primary core back to pure mana.

Two things happened at once, the first was me falling to the ground as I felt a wave of extreme weakness overcome me when the life mana faded from my body.

Second was every single vine in range exploded into motion. As they grabbed hold, their thorns dug into my flesh, they constricted with such force that I realized they could potentially be deadly even without their thorns. My tough, fur covered skin surprisingly resisted the sharp thorns for a few moments before they actually drew blood, but I was helpless to stop them in the state I was in. They were so much stronger and faster than I expected. They wrapped around whatever part of me was closest to them, and were each pulling me towards their base. It was exceptionally painful, the vines were doing a very good job of trying to tear me apart. I felt my joints begin to give, and my muscles tear.

I desperately reached inside myself and switched my core again. This time to earth, since I hadn't tested it since my class evolution, and I thought it would be too solid to be torn apart.

The moment I switched I squeezed my core for all I was worth, trying to increase my saturation quickly so that my body would change.

It worked, the earth elemental form activated, though it was less efficient than allowing it to happen slowly. Some of the mana I pumped out of my core ended up being lost outside my body. I turned to stone. The vines kept pulling, but their thorns broke inside of my skin. I was no longer being hurt, but all the pulling bothered me. Not because of pain, but because of the movement it created. The mana inside me reacted to my irritation, I felt a connection begin to form with the mana in the ground below me. The connection pulled me down, it was as if gravity had increased for me, and me alone.

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My body sank into the soil, the parts of the vines that were under me were turned into pulp. I was completely immobile, I didn't have the strength to move my own body, it was good that my stone form didn't seem to need to breathe. That was optimal, I didn't like the idea of moving.

The remains of the vines around me were reduced to short stumps that oozed green fluid as they moved. The life energy inside them was running out rapidly with their sap, and every futile movement drained them further. I could feel it when they used the last of their life energy and fell still, decaying rapidly to join the soil below them.

I had already been releasing my aura. I wanted quiet, I wanted stillness, the earth mana whose desires I was sharing helped me get it. Everything my aura seeped into turned to stone. With the exception of the still living vines. They resisted the mana in my aura with their own. I felt them trying to move, they did not seem to enjoy being rooted in stone instead of dirt.

I shook the stone underneath them, some of the more fragile, thinner branches of the stone trees broke apart in the shaking and fell to the ground. Then all was quiet, the shaking had disrupted the root systems of the vines, killing them. The only still living thing inside my aura was my staff, and it was quietly enjoying sticking out of the ground as a vaguely walking stick shaped stone pillar now that the shaking had stopped.

I felt my mind begin to shut down, since there was no longer anything to react to. I fought to switch my core, I didn't want Dux to have to be the one to do it. I almost succeeded, but the mana's influence sapped my will to fight. My mind cleared of all thought, and I just existed for a couple minutes as a strange stone sculpture, covered in broken stone vines, laying in a cracked stone forest.

When Dux made the switch for me, it hurt like hell. I went from comfortable, thoughtless deep meditation, to painfully bleeding mess. The thorns that had broken off inside my skin as an earth elemental, had turned to stone shards. They remained in place when my body transitioned back to flesh. Several of my bones felt slightly fractured, my tendons felt like they had all been partly torn, and my muscles were bruised badly where the vines had been, and they sent even more pain my way when I so much as twitched.

Tears streaked from my eyes at the sudden re-emergence of sensation. That the sensation was pain made things so much worse, but the influence of the stone mana lingered in my mind. Feeling things seemed wrong, terrible, unnatural.

I struggled to reinstate my earth core, but something held it away from my grasp.

"Easy Angel, you're hurt and bleeding, you have stone shards stuck inside yourself, shifting back to earth won't fix the situation, it will only allow you to ignore it. Think about what you can do."

As the influence of the earth mana left me I instinctively reached for the healing power of my life core. But it too refused to activate, causing me to panic. My heart rate skyrocketed, and my core frantically pulsed out its pure mana. The healing from pure mana was slow compared to life mana, but I would take what I could get. I began to intentionally push even more mana out of my core.

"Calm down! Think! If you switched to life, you would heal with the stone inside you. You need to get rid of it first. What can you do to make that happen?"

I felt it as Dux forced me to calm down, a small part of me rebelled at his manhandling my mind like that, but it was definitely helpful.

I needed the stone out of me, for half a second I considered just clawing it out, but there were too many thorns. After some thought I came to the conclusion that switching to something insubstantial could work, there were several elements that seemed to have that effect. I didn't know if air would be one of those elements, and if I hadn't been in the arena, where nothing was permanent, I wouldn't have gone for it. But I did, it was probably for the best.

The air mana flowed into me, energizing my injured body. When the form shift happened I started to move in the direction of the slight breeze that had already existed. The broken stone thorns fell to the ground.

I wove my way through the forest at an increasing rate of speed, lifting further and further off the ground as I moved, I soon blew through the branches of the trees. The air around me moved with me, I leaked mana slowly from my form, I hesitated to call it a body, even calling it a form lent it too much solidity.

I was a spirit of air, a sapient gust, I could not stop moving. At best I could dance around things that caught my interest. Stopping would be an impossibility, I wanted to play anyway. The mana around me responded joyfully, weaving through the air that was my being, it joined my motion.

"That worked, but you're moving too fast to switch directly back to life, you'll have to switch to something with less momentum first."

I swept through the arena in circles, enjoying the freedom of movement. I was still leaking mana slightly, but my air core was enormous. It contained as much mana as my pure core, perhaps more, I wasn't worried. I was too filled with joy to worry.

I didn't want to think about the leaking, I was having too much fun. Besides, it was slowing down as time went by.

"Angel, I know you're having fun, but you really should change back, I can't do it for you while you're moving like this, I only have the power to switch your core to the pure one. That would kill you. Oh well, it's not like it matters anyway, I guess this will be a good learning experience for you. I've run out of time to talk, good luck."

I definitely heard Dux both times, but I pretended I didn't, I was really loving the sensation of the air element. I would change back eventually, but it didn't feel important.

I could fly! It was amazing, I flew over the trees, and brushed the arena roof. The ceiling repelled me violently, that actually hurt. I lost a large portion of the air made up my body when it happened.

I spent mana to restore myself, surprisingly the slow leak continued. I might have to consider figuring out how to fix it, but I was only down to half of my huge air core's mana, I still had plenty of time to play.

The area above the trees was boring, and the roof was scary, so I returned to playing in the lower area. The leaves rustled, and the branches swayed as I playfully moved through them.

I was having so much fun, I wished I could be this way forever. The local air mana seemed to agree as it followed my motions, gathering with me, it ran through the area that composed my consciousness, and became a part of me.

When my now more substantial form moved quickly the branches started to break under my force, the lighter pieces were carried with me.

I began to feel less playful.

The more mana that joined me, the more my play turned to destruction. I still felt overwhelming joy, but it was in the breaking of the things around me. Trees began to fall, my force toppling them.

I began to spin in a tight circle, I became a tornado. I delighted in uprooting trees and sending them spiraling through the air.

I pumped out more mana from my core, leaving me with a quarter of my air mana inside. The area I controlled grew, where I moved, the forest was flattened. The trees became nothing but splinters, even the petrified area was ground to dust by my might, when I ran out of toys I loosened my spiral. Becoming nothing more than a large area of high winds in the flat arena.

I felt someone enter, and sped towards them. Intent on sharing the joy of flight with them.

Something grabbed hold of me, that should be impossible, I struggled against its attempts to control me. I lost a lot of the mana that made up my form. Foreign mana encased me, I found myself contained in a shrinking bubble.

"I believe that's enough. I've been watching you, that was very impressive. But you lost control of yourself, didn't you?" I heard Nefen's voice call out through my howling attempts to fight containment.

Nefen was holding me captive, the mana that was practically ruling my mind was still pushing me to break free. But his voice called to the part of me that knew better.

I slowed my frantic swirling as much as I could, and switched my core to water. I had completely forgotten Dux's warning but I somehow instinctively knew that switching directly to a more physical form would lead to disaster.

As I switched, I focused on eventually getting back to normal.

My body transitioned from gas to fluid, and I splashed on the inside of the bubble, the momentum of my furious movement causing me to swirl around before I settled.

Then, because it was my focus, I was easily able to turn back to normal.

I ended up crouched in the bubble that had contained me.

"Thanks for that, you're right, I completely lost control of my mind." I felt exhausted. I was still bleeding slightly from my earlier wounds, that must have been the leak I was feeling.

"Good recovery, you will need to practice doing that, I will not always be around to contain you."

Nefen looked at the flat plane of destruction that the arena had become, and narrowed his eyes.

My staff came flying toward me, having stayed on the opposite end of the arena from me once I started rampaging. It seemed confused, and maybe slightly disappointed in me.

I nodded. Then, because I felt so spent, I decided to cheat a little to recover using the arena functions.

"I surrender"

Match End

Winner Nefen

The arena reset, and my condition with it.