Omia looked around her as she now stood among the rows of students she recognized from last year. Before, there were twenty seven cadets. Now, there were an even twenty, a far cry compared to the six she’d seen in the last batch of second-years.
“I’m surprised to see such a large class of second years” Francis started his speech. “But not surprised on who made it through. All of you have been motivated beyond belief the last year, and one of the hardest working groups I’ve trained. We’re going to get right into the action, because I can see some of you are staring at the ridiculous sight before you,” he said, looking straight at Omia.
Omia had her claymore in its scabbard, careful to not hit anyone in the sides with it, but it was still almost as tall as she was, and looked absurd on her.
She was at the front of the class as well, so it was easy to see her if they were looking at Francis. She didn’t doubt others had already noticed.
“Many of you are curious if she can actually fight with that. I will be honest, I am too, so let's do some sparring.”
‘This doesn’t seem very official,’ she thought, but shrugged. She’d been sparring with her dad for a while, so she didn’t think this would be a lot different.
There were a few training sets of armor and weapons off to the side. There was one set of leather clearly made for her specifically, as it was a lot smaller. She’d brought her own wooden blade too, so she didn’t need one of the wooden longswords.
When they all put on their armor, Francis chose who was sparring with who.
“Omia will go first, then we’re going to break off into teams and spar with one another. Omia’s opponent is, of course, going to be Jamei. Jamei, last year Omia outdid you, let's see if you can get one back over on her.”
With a round of cheers, Jamei stepped forward, the rest of the class forming a circle around them. Omia pulled her claymore out and slung it over her shoulder. While she could hold it out at arms length, she didn’t want to tire herself out before the fight.
Standing a few paces from one another, she smiled at Jamei, and he grinned at her. He was a mountain of a man, taller even than her dad, and maybe thirty percent taller than her
“Hope you’ve been training,” Jamei said “because I certainly have. Those undead are no joke.”
She hummed in agreement, but didn’t really say anything. When it was clear she had no taunting words, Francis held his hand in the air, then when he brought it down, said “Begin!”
Omia lowered her sword as Jamei drew his, and they moved closer to one another. When he was in range, she didn’t hesitate to bring her claymore at him in a diagonal downwards slash, as she didn’t want to let him close the gap. She had reach, despite him towering over her and having longer arms.
Doing exactly what her dad had done multiple times, he blocked her glancing blow with his shield, hoping to unbalance her as the blade went flying over his head. When he moved in to try and slash at her, she pushed off the ground, spinning herself even harder and bringing the full weight of the claymore to bare as it did a full circle around her.
Jamei barely got his shield up and her weapon hit him full force, and he was knocked off balance. Pulling the sword back slightly, she made a stabbing motion, poking him in the chest.
With a yelp, he took a step back and scrunched his brow, the others laughing at him for getting hit. Omia was still beating him, despite his training.
‘Hard to beat strength’ she thought ‘A two handed strike from me will need to be blocked with both hands.’
She believed she matched his strength almost exactly, but she was putting the full force into that blow, while he wasn’t ready for the power behind it.
‘I can’t do that spin thing again either. It only works if they aren’t expecting it. Dad always got me when he thought I would pull it off.’
Instead, she did several weaker slashes at his shield, always keeping him out of reach. She never committed herself fully to a single attack, nor did she ever stop moving her sword. She simply leveraged its weight in wide arcs around him. Each time he’d redirect her blow, it would just come back from the other direction, and he’d need to redirect it again.
Groaning, Jamei realized he was being pushed back. “This isn’t working. I can’t stop you with one hand and I can’t just drop my sword, so the shield has to go.” he said, then took a few rapid steps backwards around the edge of the circle while unlatching his buckler. She didn’t push the advantage, as she actually really liked what happened next. She thought it was fun.
The moment he let the shield hit the ground, she was right back to it. This time, he was blocking her solely with the sword.
He tried pushing her claymore to the side so he could get within range and hit her, but she didn’t let him redirect the blow, instead focusing on pushing her sword into his own. Where he would’ve taken a few steps forward into her guard, he found his own sword blocking him as she kept her claymore glued to his longsword.
Now, instead of dealing with glancing blows, he shifted and turned his sword multiple ways, trying to get his blade around her, but she was stuck to him, a thorn in his side. No matter which way he moved his blade, she was bearing down on him with her own.
Eventually, she saw him get an idea, and he grinned. He didn’t bother trying to push her sword away, instead pushing it up and over himself, dragging closer to the base of her claymore. He still wasn’t able to get past her guard, but they were now hardly a foot from one another, where he pushed down on the middle of her sword at an awkward angle. He could leverage all his strength towards her as she was much shorter than him, but much of her own was spent just keeping her sword in hand.
Still, her dad had tried this before, and she didn’t need a sword to get out of this. Bringing her foot up, she saw him pale for just a moment when he assumed the worst, only to relax when she kicked him in the side of the knee.
‘Dad said to NEVER do that again…’ she remembered the first time she’d hit somewhere else. One of the few times he’d yelled at her too, which made her cry, but she never did it again.
Jamei sighed in relief at the same time as his leg gave out from under him, and she used the weight of her blade to push his body onto the injured limb, knocking him to the side. Down like a tree, the giant fell to the ground, not even bothering to stand up.
“Oh thank the Gods, I thought I was a goner,” he said, getting raucous laughter. When she’d brought her leg up, she saw several others wince, so he wasn’t the only one who thought she’d do something else.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Francis looked thoughtful though. “Omia, how long have you been training?” he asked.
“Since I was nine, so about two years? Most of it was longsword though. I just transferred over the techniques to Claymore and learned a few new ones that adapted it.”
Francis nodded. “I can see that. You used some longsword techniques near the end, which would have been ridiculous if you were using an actual claymore. They’re far too heavy for something like that. By the end of the year, you’re going to need to be a lot stronger if you want to use the official one you will get at graduation. For now though, this should be okay, but I’m not letting you in that forest unless you either get strong enough to effectively wield a claymore, or switch to a longsword when I don't see fast enough improvement.”
* * *
After some light sparring between them and similar results from the others who fought her, they went back to some light exercises. Omia believed it was to keep up some familiarity more than it was to build muscles- most of the cadets looked as thickly muscled as the typical guards walking around. They would probably ease off that as the year went on, focusing more on swordplay and practical examples as she’d seen when she shadowed the second years before.
Near the end of the day, the class was dismissed to rest a few minutes while Francis once more pulled her aside.
“I’ve been watching you fight the other cadets. Your sword skills still need some polishing, but not all that much with how much effort you’ve put into them. I know you like showing up to all my classes because you want to stay ahead, but my classes can only do so much past this point. This year, I want you to focus more on your Glimpse. I talked to your dad about getting you a tutor, and he told me you already have one?” he asked the last part.
She nodded yes, as Torei was more than knowledgeable about mana and seemed very enthusiastic.
“Very good. I’d like you to only show up to three of my classes per week from now on. For the other four days of the week, I want you either working on your Glimpse or actually having a social life. I’ve already heard from your parents that you aren’t very close to anyone?”
Omia shrugged her shoulders. She knew people, and they knew her, but she wasn’t exactly interested in anyone else in the first place. Even before she started coming to Francis’ classes, she wasn’t extraordinarily close to anyone.
“Alright, well, a lot of childhood friendships don't necessarily work out, but it’s still important to talk to others. You need more practice with that than anyone I know, too.”
She scrunched her face, but still didn’t say anything. Francis shook his head and smiled, but still dismissed her to go rest as well.
As Francis told her to, Omia dedicated the next few days and weeks to Glimpse practice. It was during one of these practice days that Omia had a bit of a breakthrough.
She was still allowed to go out into the fields under supervision of her dad and his friends, and apparently they were getting paid to do this, so she went frequently. While out in the fields one day, she was feeling particularly stupid because she had to bite a blade of grass, and decided she wanted to change that.
Torei had spells, why couldn’t she? So she had the idea to cast a “spell” of draining the grass of its energy, without her touching it.
Summoning a small wisp of undeath mana, she sent it towards the blade of grass.
Her own mana always responded a lot better to what she was telling it, so it was quite easy to keep it from falling apart. Still, if it got too far away from her, she would struggle to control it, so she held her hand close to the blade of grass she wanted to drain.
The whisper of her undeath mana touched the blade, and she felt a pulling sensation as it tried to take her mana, but she pulled back in a slight tug of war.
Her undeath wrapped around the blade of grass, pulling as hard as she could make it, and she felt strength seep out from the grass. It continued to try and eat her undeath mana, but any of the energy it pushed to grab at her was just further drained away. She felt it send out small spikes of life energy to hurt her Undeath mana or stop her, but the spikes disintegrated under her pull. After around twenty seconds of back and forth, the blade of grass fully wilted.
Smiling and proud of herself, she noticed Torei staring at her out of the corner of her eye, and looked back at him.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“Do what? Drain the plant? I just pulled on it with my mana.”
“Wh- b- Wh- what? That shouldn’t have worked! Death Eater grass devours undeath mana! If you touched it with your undeath mana at all, it should have just gotten pulled right away from you!”
She shrugged her shoulders. “It didn’t.”
Immediately, Torei adopted a wide-eyed expression and started muttering under his breath. “But if… does mana… does mana produced from a Glimpse carry the same function of that Glimpse…”
And, over time, they realized they’d made a breakthrough. Apparently, when a Glimpse produced mana, that mana would do exactly as the Glimpse did much easier. When Omia made undeath mana, it would devour Life Grass easier. When Torei produced undeath mana, he could intermingle it with other mana types, allowing for him to control that mana easier.
He was ecstatic about this, as it let him easily manipulate all the different mana types, even if not in their pure form. Now, he could mix undeath into a bucket of water, then control all the water into different shapes, making it easier to visualize what exactly he was holding.
She still helped by describing his spells to him with mana sight or telling him when his undeath mana was unevenly spread out, but she noticed that his control over mana was looking sharper by the day.
As for her own spell, she made leaps and bounds there too. When she went out and created a teeny tiny wisp of mana, she would use it to absorb Life Grass. At first it was slow going, but she found that when she absorbed life mana, her Glimpse would heal a lot more rapidly.
With a new empowered Glimpse, she would make another wisp, then another, and another.
If they were out in the fields all day, she could have a cloud of undeath mana as large as her by the end, and just slowly move it around her. She imagined it as a massive, weightless claymore that slowly cut down the grass as it passed by. It still took each blade around twenty seconds to give up all its mana, but with how many blades of grass she could pull at once, it was ultimately faster and more modest.
With each swipe, she felt herself growing stronger. With each pull from her Undeath mana, she felt her Glimpse grow stronger, letting her pull life mana out faster. Her control, too, grew to new heights.
They had to move out way further into the fields as well, because they were creating a wilted gray spot within view of Darien, which, while not illegal, made some guards uncomfortable.
Luckily, Death Eater grass sprang up almost as fast as it wilted. Within a day or two, any grass that she absorbed was either replaced by a new blade or popped right back up, despite being very dead when she’d left it.
Stronger she grew, until she was able to wield her training claymore easily with only a single hand. When she’d pulled that out during a sparring match, her opponent had laughed pretty hard.
After one of their lessons, Francis announced that next week, on a Thursday, they would have an excursion into Wiltwood, and to not skip that day. Normally, they had a fairly loose schedule, but this was one time when it was set as “all of you better be here.”
Frantically squeezing in some last-minute Glimpse training, Omia barely considered herself ready when it was finally time to suit up and march out.
It was around a third of the way through the year by this point, and Francis said she still was not quite ready to wield a real Claymore, so this time she would be using a regular longsword.
Standing in front of the forest, Francis told them to do one final inspection.
‘Potions? Check. Bandages? Check. Longsword and buckler? Yep. Armor? Of course. Backpack with all the survival supplies? Got it. I’m as ready as I’m ever gonna be.’
Seeing that everyone was ready, Francis, in his own set of armor, led the way into the shade of the Wiltwood, and Omia mentally braced herself for another battle with the pull of the forest. This time, she would be ready.