Will landed hard on his ass for the hundredth time that day, to the laughter of the guild at large. He would have thought that the humor would have worn off after the first ninety nine times, but perhaps the rest of the guild saw something he didn’t from his favorite spot on the floor of the training arena. Will had been surprised to find that the guild building was far larger than he realized. It included several essential services including the training arena he was currently using.
The arena was a thirty foot square depression in the floor about five feet deep. The floor was covered in a white sand that he was told had been put there to help blunt any falls. Having fallen on that floor a hundred times by now, he felt he could make a good case for how sand was far worse than the hard floor. And anyone who wanted to disagree could test it themselves. Of course, no training arena would be complete without the half bleacher, half bar table setup so that several hundred people could watch at the same time. Apparently his suffering was not such great comedy as to fill the stands, but there was a group of fifty people who had been here for the hours they had been ‘sparring.’
“You like the ground so much do you?” Will’s sword instructor said. “Maybe you should go be a farmer sooner than an adventurer!” The jab was weak. The instructors insults had been getting steadily worse since he had started getting bored. Still, the insults had Will in a constant seething rage. He had contemplated ripping off the bracelet and teaching the man a lesson, and constantly had to restrain himself. At first he had thought to use his spirit enchanting to turn the tables on this guy. His moderate strength boost would give him an effective 330 strength, which would be more than enough to beat the sword instructor to a pulp. He had been horrified to learn that instead of gaining a 500% multiplier, his moderate strength enhancement gave him a 105% multiplier. That meant that his 66 strength would be boosted to a whopping 69 strength. Since the results were percent based, it meant that the returns were even less for his other stats.
It made Will start to think that maybe he wasn’t as great as he thought he was. Also, he was sure that petty insults and slight jabs never provoked this kind of anger on earth. All in all he had always had a fairly cool head. Insults never bothered him. He had always been of the opinion that insults said more of the speaker than the target. It had allowed him to laugh at even his most determined critics right up until his friends had turned into those critics. Maybe he had more reason to be angry than he had given himself credit for. But as he tried to trace the source of his anger, it wasn’t one of his many betrayals that it led to, but rather his two mental concepts. Even suppressed, they tried to fight. He had never realized this before as he had relied on The Desolate Heart of the Frozen North for its emotion suppressing effects. It meant that the concept was always far more dominant.
The constant fighting between them was obvious now, and it was leaking into his emotions and personality. The worst part was that all that had been happening before. But since he had been suppressing his emotions with his cold concept, he hadn’t realized it. That more than anything was what had caused the incident at Bramble.
Will got to his feet and retrieved his practice sword. He squared up to the instructor and took several deep breaths to disperse his rage. But the instructor didn’t raise his weapon.
“We are done, newbie.” He said. “Good on you for not rage quitting. You might just be able to make it after all.” He then climbed out of the training pit and walked away. Will wanted to throw his sword at the man. He wanted to scream and stomp and throw a good tantrum, but instead he flopped down into a sitting position and took a few moments to breathe. He wanted to let his rage loose, to destroy something, to allow himself to lose control for just a minute. But that wouldn’t work. For as much as he wanted to let loose, doing so would breed a weakness in him that would cause problems later. If he let loose now, there wouldn’t be a problem. But if that became a way to cope, he could unintentionally do something terrible later on when he just had to let go.
After a minute or so he had gotten himself under control. There was still a simmering rage underneath everything, and now that he was entirely in control he could exercise and burn it off. As he got ready to go for a run, Emerys caught up to him.
“Hey Will! Done getting beaten for one day?” Emerys started to jog and then run next to Will. He caught Will’s glare and just laughed. “Me and Amalise were wondering when we are going to head out? Lord Atherton made it very clear that it would be a poor idea to stay.”
“I have a lesson with a concept expert in a few hours, we can leave after that.” Will said. They jogged through the town gate and out onto the path beyond. Instead of running along the path however, they turned and ran along the wall, turning up the pace until they had reached a good twenty miles an hour. They ran in silence for a few minutes.
“Do you want to know why you kept on being knocked down?” Emerys asked. Will looked at him in confusion.
“I thought it was rather obvious. He was a lot stronger than me.” Will said.
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“Actually, no. He is a cultivator, not a god. While his stats are far better than that of a human, I suspect his total stats would be less than your strength.” Will was shocked enough to stop for a moment and had to catch up.
“How did he keep beating me then?” Will asked. Emerys stopped and gestured to a fallen log just inside the treeline.
“Summon your sword and chop down with all your strength.” Emerys said. Will shrugged and pulled out his sword. He positioned himself as if he was about to chop with a wood axe, and when Emerys didn’t try to stop him, he brought the sword down hard. Suddenly he was on the ground, feet sticking in the air with the sword barely touching the wooden log. He was stunned for a moment before he remembered physics still existed. He had brought the sword down so hard that the sword’s natural resistance to movement had caused his entire body to rotate. Will stood up and tried again, this time with as good an approximation of a proper swordsman’s stance as he could manage. He fared little better.
The problem wasn’t his stance, but rather his feet. He had insufficient weight or friction to keep his feet where they belonged. Unless he took to wearing ridiculously heavy armor, he knew no way around this. That is when he turned to the smirking Emerys, who gestured for Will to hand him the sword. He took the same woodcutter’s stance Will had tried first. He brought the sword above his head and brought it down in a brutal chop. Will expected to see Emerys fall, but instead he watched as the log was cut cleanly in two.
“What?” Will cried out. “How did you do that? Physics doesn’t work like that!”
“It is actually pretty easy if you have a physical concept, which I hear you do now.” Emerys said. “It involves using your gates to manipulate space in a minor way. You see, with sufficient control you can close your gates around reality itself. Turns out reality is pretty hard to move.”
Emerys produced the giant sword that the Curseforged Abomination had wielded. Despite the fact that it was more than twice the length of his body, he held it out to his side with little difficulty. The more interesting thing was that he was holding it parallel to the ground by the hilt with his arm fully extended. Yet his body stood as if everything was perfectly normal.
“Right now I am engaging most of my gates to keep me upright. If I let them all go except for the one in my wrist…” His entire body suddenly rotated up as though his wrist were the pivot point of a seesaw. He then fell to his feet, having disengaged the gate in his wrist. “I can lift the sword without my gates, but it requires careful balancing or I will just fall over.”
Will was left speechless. This opened a whole realm of possibilities. He had always wondered how that would work. Comics would have some superhero lifting something super heavy while standing on top of something light. Sure they could have incredible strength, but it didn’t mean that the ground had the same strength, or a building, or whatever improbable location the hero found themselves in.
“This little trick is called dimensional locking, and it is quite useful with practice.” Emerys concluded.
“I’ll say. How long did it take you to learn?” Will asked.
“A couple weeks, but I already had a reasonable grasp on gate control in the first place. Since you got your concept earlier today, it may take you a bit longer.” Will nodded and put away his sword. They both started to run again and were soon both too winded to chat.
Over an hour later Will and Emerys returned to the guild where they washed up and got changed. Will was feeling both sore and tired from the day's efforts, but he had managed to work out his rage for the moment, and that felt surprisingly good. He would have to work on that. He couldn’t run for over an hour every time someone insulted him, but exercise was a better coping strategy than going ballistic on a training dummy.
Will was ready for his appointment with his concept manipulation trainer a good ten minutes early, but as soon as he sat down in the common room, he was called on by a tall woman in mages robes. The woman was severe in her appearance and no nonsense in her tone. The introduction was brief as she introduced herself as Magess Bryn. Her name felt odd until he realized that magess wasn’t her first name at all, but rather the feminine form of mage. Will then remembered that he wasn’t speaking English, and it didn’t matter if magess wasn’t a word. It was in whatever language this was.
He was so preoccupied with her name that he nearly missed the start of the lesson where she started describing a set of exercises he was to do every day for the foreseeable future. It involved repeatedly calling upon his concepts in various ways, and then putting them back where they belonged. It was far harder than Will thought it should be. When his concepts were strong, he simply had to let them loose. Now that they were suppressed, they were squirrely and slippery. He had a hard enough time getting his metaphorical hands on his physical concepts in order to draw upon them, much less complete his tasks. His mental concepts, Desolate Heart of the Frozen North, and Inferno of the Tumultuous Mind, were a complete no go. They were in such constant flux he would have a better chance winning the lottery than getting ahold of them.
Magess Bryn was surprisingly patient however, and gently corrected every time he made a mistake. By the time their hour was over, Will had made a slight, but appreciable amount of progress. He could now get a hold of his physical concepts about half the times he tried. It may not seem impressive, but it made Will feel better about his chances at getting the bracelet off sometime within the next decade. He would work on it and hopefully be able to show the first body enhancement in a week when he met with another trainer. It wouldn’t be Magess Bryn, as she was staying here, and Will would be traveling to the coast to board a ship to the Brythorne Isles.
When Will left his training session, he found the Emerys, Amalise, and the followers all loaded up on a wagon pulled by a pair of horses. They invited him aboard and an excited Koma howled as he padded along aside. Emerys explained that the horses had been given a concoction that made them less wary of danger. It would allow them to get more comfortable with Koma without getting majorly spooked.
And with that, they rolled off toward the coastal city of Martel.