The trip took them half an hour. The immediate awe and wonder lessened somewhat over that time, but that was like saying the ocean lessened when the tide ebbed.

More likely, Ryan had become accustomed to the feeling of being in the sky. As if he had stepped into ice-cold water, it had overwhelmed him at first, now he savored the experience.

The landscape was largely the same below them, an endless sea of trees and some rocky cliffs, but he did spot the occasional animal and got a unique bird-watching perspective.

When that got boring, Ryan did corkscrews in the air, tried and failed to chat with the others past the wind, and tried and failed to avoid the bugs. He was grateful for the goggles.

For a good stretch of time, he simply flipped around, hands folded behind his head as though he was laying on his bed and staring at the ceiling, and basked in the sunlight with his eyes closed, or gazed at the clouds when they cast shade.

“I could spend hours doing this,” he said conversational, “doing nothing but savoring it.”

“It’s a lot more stressful when you’re the one controlling the spell,” the assistant told him, “flight chugs mana like beer on a Friday night.”

Well, he had a lot of mana, didn’t he? He wondered how he measured up to actual mages in that regard.

But eventually, Mrs. Perin slowed them down as they neared their destination: a small clearing among the trees with a wooden flag pole planted in the grass, no flag, in the middle of nowhere.

They righted themselves, ‘standing’ again, and after a short delay, followed her down.

An electric feeling shot up his body during the descent, as if something had come loose inside of him, and it reawoke a bit of that earlier excitement.

When his boots touched the grass, his legs nearly gave out from under him. He took shaking steps and felt the spell end.

Ryan chose to smile, jumped, and let out an excited whoop, “That was awesome!”

“I’m glad you enjoyed it,” Mrs. Perin said and her assistant began to go around to collect the tarps and goggles from them. “Tell your parents, tell your friends, tell your fellow scouts. You’re welcome to hire us for more airdrops in the future.”

“Sure!” Ryan would. He was willing to bet the other guys were going to brag when they made it back to camp, and he would join them.

How could someone not do that at least once in their life? Worth every cent.

“Tone it down a little, will you?” Parker grumbled.

Silas threw up into the grass. He steadied himself against the flag pole for support, his large guitar case flat on the hump of his back, and he was covered in sweat.

“Are you alright?” the assistant asked him.

He nodded. Another gag cut the gesture short. Only a bit of murky liquid came out of him this time, and it looked like mostly spit.

“Are you sure?” Mrs. Perin asked in a more professional tone, “we can take you back with us if we must. You’re days away from camp, at minimum.”

“No, no,” he spoke hurriedly but with a ragged voice. “Not sick, I’m just … I don’t know. I tried to keep it in, almost managed, caught me when I let my guard down.”

“Are you afraid of heights or what?” Barry asked with a grimace.

The smell was beginning to reach him and Ryan took a step back.

“Not heights. I like to climb.”

“When you take the tram in the city, or if you’ve taken a boat ride before, do you ever get queasy?” Mrs. Perin asked him.

He straightened his spine, wiped his mouth, and still looked a little shaky. “A little? More if my seat is facing the wrong way.”

She nodded. “Might be motion sickness, then. You can come back with us if you want, but it should fade if you take it easy for a bit.”

“We’re not going to get far today anyway,” Parker said.

“Thank you,” Ryan added, “for the trip.”

Her assistant collected the last set of goggles and swung her duffel over her shoulder, looking to her employer.

“Alright, then. You’re all set? Yes? Yes. Good luck. Don’t get eaten by wolves. And goodbye.”

She cast a smaller version of her spell on herself only this time. As she slowly rose into the air, they said their goodbyes.

Then she and her assistant shot off, quicker than they’d flown with them, and it was just the six of them in the wilderness, days away from everything and everyone and their expectations.

Ryan intentionally dropped his smile. After a few seconds, it snuck back up again.

Micah jogged a lap around the Tower to warm up, wearing the wristband. At a slow pace and medium difficulty, he could jog even with the spirits harassing him, and he had beaten the practice mats recently, so he didn’t have to wait until a teacher opened the gym to exercise.

He still ran the mats every other day, but he no longer felt as much pressure on his spirit when he did it, with or without cheats.

The spirits could empower the wind tunnel even more, but then it wasn’t an issue of enduring it spiritually, but that he couldn’t physically run against a wind that strong without cheating.

Micah wondered if spirits needed upkeep like muscles, or if there was such a thing as spirit cardio. Could his spirit get fat?

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If not, otherwise, he had trained it until he was close to the limit of what he could achieve against the headwind, so he’d chosen to switch things up to combat the monotony.

He hadn’t been in the Tower for almost two weeks by now, though it was summer and he wanted to earn money and ingredients. It felt nice to remind himself of its presence by jogging with it looming above him for twenty minutes at a time.

He slowed to a stop on a lawn near their school’s private entrance, did a few stretches, and brought out a skipping rope.

Together with the spirits, they had come up with a new challenge. His job was to jump rope normally, and their job was to mess with the rope and stop him.

It usually ended with him getting slapped in the face, but he remembered how Shanty had mentioned training control, and this was a nice way to do that.

He had wanted to do it through juggling at first but … Micah was bad at juggling, and it was a pain to chase after the balls when they bounced away.

This was better. Today, it almost felt easy. He turned on the spot, hopped from side to side, or whipped the rope to one side or underneath his feet to dodge attacks, and blocked a few attacks with magic and his knees, but … something felt off.

He wasn’t in top form today, not really. It was still easy. Something else then. Were the spirits having a bad day?

It wasn’t very windy, the city was unusually quiet, and the sky was bright but shaded by white clouds.

It was the type of day on which, a few years ago, he would have loved to doze in the grass.

Micah considered doing that. He didn’t need a break thanks to his vitality potions, but it might be nice to gaze at the clouds for a while.

As he considered the fields of green hands around himself, though, the rope passing through his vision with a whipping sound, he dismissed the idea.

He felt restless. It was the type of frustrating restlessness he felt when he wanted to rest but had too much energy to lie down, that made everything feel crooked, like a drawer that didn’t shut right, clothes that fit wrong no matter how much he adjusted them, a room that was just slightly too warm around his clammy skin but slightly too cold around his feet at the same time, an itch that wouldn’t go away.

He stopped, drank some water, and took a few seconds to cool off. The spirits didn’t complain.

In fact, they were watching him. They were slow today as they hovered on the spot or drifted in a slow circle around him, but they felt restless, too. Restless … impatient?

They didn’t give him the sense of frustration he himself felt. They looked more like they were waiting for something … Waiting on someone?

Micah frowned and plopped down on the grass.

He focused inward, as he had so often these past months, and visualized his spirit as a hollow ghost inside himself.

Its skin was wispy and permeable, only its hands were defined and cohesive, but he could strengthen that mist into a thin membrane in other places if he concentrated.

It had lungs that were even more defined than his hands, and muscles that helped it breathe, though they could move on their own. From within, tiny veins spread throughout his body like roots, connected to the faintest impression of a heart.

It was barely visible at all and as wispy as his skin, but if Micah stared long enough, he thought he could almost catch a glimpse of it beating. Blink and he’d miss it.

That entire circulatory system was colored a ghostly green as the magic he breathed in flowed through his veins.

His eyes were harder to visualize, mentally speaking, because he felt like he was trying to turn his head around and look back at himself. They were more defined than his heart and less than everything else, but they looked like discs, not orbs. And he thought he caught glimpses of a faint glow within them that tunneled away to someplace else.

Another layer of his spirit? If he had to guess, those discs were tinged silver.

It was his lungs he focused on now.

Inhale. Air essence filled him and his spirit carried it throughout his body.

Exhale. Slightly less air essence rushed out as he consumed some of it, and the rest was slightly less potent as he used its energy to empower his body.

In and out, in and out. It felt more like air essence than wind, and Micah felt that same frustration rising again. Something was bugging him, something that felt wrong, and he wasn’t sure what.

Inhale. Air essence in—No. He rejected it, like peeling off his sweater and flinging it across the room because it was too warm.

[Controlled Breathing] helped him and this time when he inhaled, he only breathed in physical air. No essences at all.

Exhale. He pushed essences out of those ghostly shells inside of himself. They dimmed as the magic left him.

Again and again, Micah breathed until he was empty and the shells themselves only held a faint green tint to them.

Somehow, it helped. He smiled in relief and let go of a tension he had been holding in his body.

For a few seconds, Micah enjoyed the tranquility.

Then, those lungs and veins inside of him rippled and swayed like grass in the breeze.

They turned wispy. For a moment, Micah panicked thinking he’d harmed himself in some way, but he felt fine, and he focused more closely on his spirit.

Green wisps rose from it and as he breathed, now that he was empty, flowed and filled his body with magic once more.

His own magic.

Of course, the body produced natural essences, but those were no different than the ones found in nature, of poor quality and quantity. This felt more like the bits of essence he had consumed from the wind spirits.

Essence his spirit, rather than his body, produced. Empowered by it. It felt like mana.

Micah straightened his spine and shifted where he sat, legs still crossed, and he felt impatient again as the magic infused him, but there was no frustration tied to the emotion this time.

This was why. It had been there inside his spirit, strained to its limit, and it had wanted to be let out, used, wanted him to move like the wind.

He was too amazed to move right away. He watched as slowly, the output diminished to a trickle.

Micah didn’t have a lot of mana. It felt like he had even less of this … whatever it was. If it was like mana, it was a finite resource and he was already using it up by doing nothing.

Though the day was calm, his hair rippled and shirt billowed slightly in a nonexistent breeze.

With a quick effort of will, he found he could control it, stop it from using itself, but that would be another thing he had to learn to do and when he did use it, there wouldn’t be much of it to use.

Could he …?

He thought of the spirits, how they worked together, how their tassels trailed off until he wasn’t sure where they ended and the wind began.

He thought of how he had run with them these last few weeks.

Rather than run like the wind, how about running with it?

Micah inhaled and welcomed the air essence back in. It met his own wind essence but now that it had been let out, the weaker air essence couldn’t force it aside again, unless he let it.

The two forces intermingled and, hand and hand, took each other in stride. They flowed freely throughout his body and worked together as he let them empower him.

Different from mana then, from an affinity. Separate. This was his.

[Essence Path explored!]

[Minor Aspect — Wind obtained!]