One year later
Currently around a dozen men had gathered around on the ramparts and were making bets.
“50 gold on the kid landing a nut shot on Lionel again, this shits too funny.”
“I bet 20 gold that he knocks one of Lionel’s teeth out again!”
This had become a daily occurrence around 2 months ago, Solstice had grown a lot with his control over mana and it was clearly showing. He had grown accustomed to using only Lightning and gravity so fighting anyone faster was a walk in the park. Currently he was having a fight with Lionel again which was almost a daily occurrence. Leo never interfered since he believed it was good practice for Solstice and he internally wanted his brother's attitude knocked down a peg.
After a few more bets were placed they saw was Lionel fly into the fortress gates and leave a giant dent in it.
“Respect your elder's kid, or I’m going to break another arm or leg.” Lionel said casually pulling himself out of the dent he just made. Over the past year he had dispute after dispute with this kid over how he treated people. It was only right for the strong to trample the weak, if you get trampled on then all you need to do is get stronger. But no, he kept defending the people who were weak. Lionel wanted to teach the kid a lesson, but he wouldn’t back down, no matter how many bones he broke and no matter how much blood he spilled, each and every day he found himself in front of the kid.
“Respect my elders? Fuck you, you're just a scum piece of shit!” Over the year, Solstice had developed a rough type of speech being around all the soldiers in the core. He cussed a lot more and had begun to grow into his body which was quickly showing, in just a year he grew multiple inches and was around the height of a normal human, his hair was down to his shoulder blades now and had become a mix of white and black strands of hair.
After this rough dialogue the two charged each other again, but Lionel ended up eating dirt on his way to him. Solstice loved randomly decreasing and increasing gravity at important times like charging, he increased it when Lionel had charged forward with all his weight and made him face plant into the ground.
“Look look, I bet one of his teeth is going to be gone again!” Yelled another spectator, and right he was.
As Lionel rose back up, he saw his bloody tooth on the ground and his anger shot through the roof.
“Fuck it! I held back without using mana but now you’re pissing me off!” Lionel immediately began to channel his mana and a giant shroud of darkness covered where the two were fighting. Solstice was confused but since he couldn’t see anything all he could rely on was his other senses.
He felt the ground tremble in front and braced himself, but a hit never came, instead he felt something sinister behind him.
In a very quiet and menacing voice, Lionel only whispered one thing.
“Eat shit.” He hit Solstice in the back of his as hard as he could and sent Solstice multiple feet into the ground. Right after the hit he released the shroud over the arena, and everyone saw only Solstice’s feet were poking out of the ground.
“Hey, he lasted a lot longer, he’s really good at them sudden changes though.” The spectators never thought he would win, but damn was he good at getting cheap shots in.
Leo appeared out of nowhere with lightning coursing around his body, and he grabbed Solstice by the foot and ripped him out. He was holding him by the foot and Solstice was just dangling and looking at him.
“Like the show?” Solstice smiled after multiple seconds of silence.
“Hardly, if you make it through the course today then I’ll let you move on to the next part of training.” Leo said very bluntly. Almost every day Leo had forced Solstice to run a chaotic course throughout the barren wasteland they were in, it was infested with demonic beasts and incredibly hazardous plant life. Solstice could only use lightning throughout it but that’s not what made it difficult, what was incredibly hard was the length of the course paired with using only his actual mana, not the ambient mana. The course was several miles long so if he didn’t have a smooth and consistent flow of mana he would run out and be forced to turn back and endure the punishment from Lionel.
“You have 1 hour, if you don’t make it back here then you know what happens.” Leo started the watch and in an instant Solstice augmented his body with lightning and sprinted off.
Slowly Lionel walked forward and was rubbing his head from where he landed.
“He’s got some crazy precise control now; he’ll probably pass this time.” Lionel was an arrogant person, but he could see potential clearly, and to miss Solstice’s potential was like not noticing a car hitting you.
“Did he finish his “punishment”?” Leo questioned.
“Barely, I didn’t think his body would transform that much, I went through over three people's worth of solution, I’m not surprised he was in that much pain.” The punishment Solstice had been going through was sitting in a pool of a special solution that continuously injured your body to temper it. Lots of dragons in the fortress would go through this treatment but only needed so much before their body reached their maximum potential. Because of Solstice’s lineage being mixed, his upper threshold was multiple times higher than normal people, but this almost meant more reconstruction and tempering he had to suffer through. The pain was equivalent to being bathed in molten lava for hours on end, it was only supposed to last around a few months of soaking but for Solstice it was lengthened multiple times over. Because of this his training ramped up to an incredible degree with the twins which caught everyone’s attention.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Over the year his body hadn’t grown much more but if you felt his body, you would notice it was much more solid than before, but it didn’t sacrifice any of his agility which is what made his physique more impressive.
—-30 minutes later
Solstice had made his way back way earlier than he thought he would, over time he noticed his body felt more limber and powerful, but he couldn’t really notice the difference until now.
On the final stretch of his route, he saw Lionel in the distance with his arms crossed, and once again a crowd had appeared to bet.
“No handicaps this time.” Immediately Lionel started to cover the area with his shroud, he wanted to mercilessly beat Solstice today.
Solstice immediately used the ambient mana to increase gravity by multiple folds to force the shroud to stop short of him. Lionel saw this from within it and clapped.
“It seems you do have a brain, too bad.” Lionel stayed within the shroud and began to hurl spears of darkness that homed in on Solstice. The spears were incredibly fast but Solstice managed to only get grazed by them but that didn’t stop his planning, he was currently making an armada sized volley of metal and blood spears in the sky above the shroud to hit all of it at once. Lionel smiled when he saw this, he had no way of finding out where he was so the right conclusion is to blow all of it up, that’s what every dragon would do!
As the spears began to streak towards the shroud, the shroud became more tangible and deflected all of the spears.
“You aren’t the only one to try that, I’ve had many years of experience kid, it’s a little too earl- “before Lionel could finish his sentence, he felt a sinister magic encapsulate him. Solstice in what little free time he had been messing a lot with space, gravity and most of all recently was corruption.
Corruption by itself was a relatively weak form of magic until you reach the apex of it. It starts off with small things like inflicting sickness or influencing their mind to bring out their dark tendencies. But at higher levels you could change a normal person to a serial killer or even drive people to mad, it had a very high skill cap for magic though.
Throughout the fight Solstice had been channeling more and more corruption passively into Lionel in hopes of weakening him over time and it seemed to have just kicked in. Lionel could feel his body weakening by the second, he had to end this quickly or he might actually lose.
“You little shit, come here.” Lionel charged at Solstice from out the shroud but before he could reach him, he saw Solstice wave and enter a portal.
Solstice had gotten somewhat proficient in space magic, but he could only barely make portals within eyesight. He looked down from the ledge he appeared on and saw Lionel furiously looking around for him, Lionel was getting angrier by the second and he was hoping that this would fuel his recklessness. After almost a minute Lionel finally saw Solstice and charged him once again but before Solstice could jump into another portal, he felt something coiling around his body preventing him from moving.
“You think I’ve shown you all I got?” Lionel was semi proficient with shadow manipulation and used it to surprise Solstice and keep him still for a few seconds.
“Man, that's going to hurt.” Victor said after seeing the rage in Lionel’s eyes, he was clearly putting almost all he had in this punch. When the punch landed on Solstice, he flew off the ledge he was and plummeted straight into the earth. When the smoke cleared all people saw was Solstice on one knee coughing up blood from the strength of the punch.
“Damn you still didn’t go down; you've got some endurance.” Victor himself was surprised to see Solstice actually get back up from that hit, clearly the solution he had been soaking in tempered his body to an absurd degree, enough to where he was a walking tank now.
Solstice was trying to stand up, but the hit knocked all the air out of him, and he couldn’t seem to get his bearings. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lionel staring at him with a look of admiration for once ever.
“Well, I guess this concludes our training. My condolences for the next step.” With that Lionel spread his wings and flew back to the base, the entire point of this training was to prepare him for the hell Leviathan was going to unleash on him.
Solstice was confused but stood up after a few seconds and walked back to the fortress only to see Leviathan standing right by the gates.
“Nice little cat fight there.” He said with a playful tone. He then waved Solstice to follow him to his home in the deepest part of the fortress.
A few minutes after walking through the town they came upon a small house made out of a pure white material, it had five guards in front of it at all times apparently in order to guard it.
After walking into the house Solstice noticed it only had stairs leading down into darkness.
“This house leads to the core, where I reside, so come.” Leviathan and Solstice walked for almost half an hour before reaching a giant crystal cave.
“Here’s a history lesson for ya, when this world was in its infancy I was made. I was created in order to protect this core.” Leviathan pointed over to a core that was the size of a bowling ball.
“This core is the reason anyone in this world now is alive. Over the millennium I’ve been alive, many have attempted to control it, but I stopped them. But not because I was made for it. Do you feel the mana in the air here? There’s no place on Aevis that houses more mana than here, the biggest reason I kept you with Leo and Lionel was to slowly accustom you to strong mana surroundings. Well, that and to get your body up to par, you had a shit body in all honesty, for a dragon.” Leviathan had one qualm with Solstice, and it was the state of his body, because of the confliction with his elven lineage, the durability wasn’t nowhere near as high as it could be, luckily the solution he soaked in had brought it to a perfect equilibrium.
“You wanna know the difference between primordials and me? I was the first, they may have been created seconds after me, but I was still first and assigned for this. For the next two years I’m going to show you why I’m the best. Don’t worry about broken bones or nearly dying, the mana here will keep you alive.” Leviathan smiled before ruthlessly punching Solstice into the wall and knocking him completely out.