Willow

Overnight Camp, Feather-branch Forest, Savriâ

After the harrowing game of chase-the-cowardly pop-hopper boss form, the party had made camp for the night. They had returned to the prior area they had planned to make camp, as it was only a ten minute walk to return. More pop-hoppers were definitely nearby. The map they’d found had three rough Xs which they suspected to mark hopper campsites, due to one of the Xs being directly where they had found the hoppers they’d fought. At least, they thought it was. It was pretty tough to be sure given how samey the feather-branch forest was. On the bright side, the map did have one major landmark which would be their next destination. They believed the huge circle near the center of the scribbled map indicated the sight of another sunsquat tree.

While Willow would have loved to just rush off to verify the landmark was a sunsquat, she didn’t contest Kent and Naomi when they mentioned making camp. They were both clearly beat after the last days of walking and then the stress of the fight.

Honestly, she felt she should be exhausted too. She trained a lot back on Earth, but she didn’t think constant training for shortish bursts of high activity and some running would translate to endless walking followed by an annoying fight which had devolved into something more like tag. Before Kent had found the tracks, she’d actually been planning to ask if the others wanted to take a bit of a break the following day, maybe break camp half way through the day instead of first thing in the morning. Instead, they’d gotten excited and followed the trail immediately.

She looked toward the tents, all three setup near each-other and began making her rounds as she let herself get partially lost in thought. How did she still have so much energy? She knew she would sleep as soon as she laid down and closed her eyes, but she didn’t feel exhausted or even sleepy. The only reason she was sure she’d sleep easily was the fact she’d felt this same way for the last three days. She had a theory about what was going on. In fact it was a theory that she held a high level of confidence was entirely correct. She was pretty sure her mana was helping her. She’d been spending a lot of time playing with it. There wasn’t much else to do as they walked, after all.

One of the things that she’d noticed was that if she focused and kind of ‘watched’ as her mana regenerated she could ‘see’ some of the mana seemed to be lost. At first she’d just assumed whatever generation was happening wasn’t perfect and there was some wasted energy, like how an engine wasted some energy on heat and such. Having observed more carefully and doing her best to look deeper, she was slowly gaining a sense of clarity as to what was going on in her new little inner dojo. The ‘lost’ mana was actually reinforcing said little inner room itself.

The reason she’d decided to think of her new discovery as a dojo was pretty simple, that’s how she wanted to picture it. At first she’d been struggling with trying to ‘see’ the slimy, gooey discipline mana, her yet unnamed mana, and each of their “cores.” She’d originally been trying to visualize them similar to how she’d thought a dantian, or ‘qi center’ might look. Coach hadn’t ever truly believed in qi, chi, or other energies but some of the teachers he had brought in as guest instructors had. They had taught her and, while she hadn’t ever fully believed any of it she also hadn’t discounted it entirely. So that visualization had been her initial go-to. Until she realized it was a dead end. Trying to picture her energy as something as foreign and nebulous as energy structures flowing through her body had been both exhausting and just hadn’t ‘clicked’.

Once she had realized she needed to change her approach, she’d experimented a bit. She had tried picturing her internal mana in a bunch of different ways. As a computer, as a book, as a library, as a refrigerator, as a TV, and a bunch of other stuff. In the end the thing that had resonated with her had been picturing a little dojo room. She didn’t picture coach’s dojo, she built her own from scratch. It was currently just a fairly small room, maybe nine by nine meter but she couldn’t force it to be any bigger. Despite originally thinking of it as an ‘imagined’ room, she was starting to change her mind. It was more like a representation and visualization of something real that didn’t have its own visual or physical form. The size being ‘set’ seemed to be due to the amount of maximum mana available to her. She could change the shape of the room if she wanted to, but not the space available.

As soon as she had finished picturing the details: racks of training weapons, mats, paintings and photos, and other decoration, she’d felt the entire thing ‘click’ in a way she had both been looking for and also didn’t understand. While she had been building the mental image, it had felt restricted but had also seemed somewhat fuzzy. Most images in her head were fuzzy, after all, so she’d hardly noticed. Actual visualization had never been Willow’s strong suit, as even picturing her own hand after staring at it and trying to memorize it would result in an indistinct mental picture. That all changed as soon as she felt that ‘click’, though. She could now ‘see’ her little dojo room, and through that could monitor her mana as it was used or generated. The way she could tell how much mana she had was simple, but also not very empirical.

Her discipline mana manifested in how orderly the dojo was. When she used a lot of the mana, it became more and more dingy and messy. If she used a chunk of mana to activate her focus she could literally watch the picture frames hanging on the walls gather dust and tilt just slightly. If she kept going, she would notice cobwebs form in the ceiling corners. As mana was generated, her space became more and more orderly. When the room was entirely orderly some of the mana appeared to push at the previous status-quo as to what ‘entirely orderly’ really meant. That might mean the training dummies might become better aligned with each-other, or maybe one of the door colors changed slightly. However, she cold also tell that some of the mana was going directly into the structure of the dojo itself, causing the walls to become stronger. She could also see what appeared to be the hint of a painting of a doorway on one of the walls of the one-room dojo, that painting was slowly becoming more distinct the more mana flowed into the structure. She even felt that some of the mana was even going to something outside of the dojo itself, but still within her. She suspected it was strengthening her body, which is why, she suspected, she wasn’t exhausted like she should be.

Naturally, her other yet unnamed mana aspect was represented differently. It manifested in an avatar of herself. If she wanted to, she could picture her dojo from the perspective of herself standing inside of it. She could ‘see’ through the eyes of a version of herself, though she could also just feel everything that was going on within the dojo as if a goddess looking down upon her domain. The little Willow avatar couldn’t actually interact with anything, at least not yet. When Willow tried to pick up one of the wooden short sword on a rack containing various training weapons her hand just passed through it. She had noticed the sword shifted ever so slightly, as if struck by a strong breeze. Essentially, she visualized her second mana type as herself as a ghost!

Her second mana aspect also didn’t entirely go into making her ghost more “real” within the dojo. Some of it seemed to go into making the ghost more detailed as well. Her internal avatar was currently something like a sketch, a rough outline with some defining features but missing a lot of specific details and color. She thought that the amount of mana she had was represented through her ability to interact with the dojo, while the completeness of her self-image represented the same as her dojo structure. She wasn’t entirely sure what that structure and self-image represented, but they seemed similar in nature.

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Once she’d had her ‘click’ moment and explored her inner dojo thoroughly, she realized she had a much better instinctive understanding of how much energy she had available. She could roughly estimate what she could do with it all, too.

The most recent thing she’d found was her ability. It had been more difficult to picture, for some reason, though she still felt this entire mental image was the best possible one despite the difficulty. She had tried to figure out a way to visualize the ability, but no matter what she did it refused to appear within the wood-paneled walls of the room. Eventually she had let the matter drop, planning to try again later.

It was later that same evening when she had caught a glimpse of her ability through one of the two windows set into a wall. It turned out, it had already been represented the whole time, just not inside the dojo. She had been staring out through the windows, which looked out onto a view of a picturesque yard with a pond and manicured garden. Once the view had become familiar, she had smooshed her face up against it and angled her head to see as far as she possibly could in each direction. That’s how she managed to glimpse the edge of a graffiti mural. She couldn’t tell exactly what it looked like, but she knew that was her ability. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was entirely certain.

Pulling herself from her thoughts, she activated her focus and grinned. She hoped learning about and using her magic never got old.

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Madrick

Adra Vadren’s Command Tent, Adrasmiith Warcamp, Hesvāra

While Madrick would have enjoyed taking additional time off to watch over his one and only disciple, he unfortunately had more important things to do. He was staring at one of the people who demanded these important things get done now. Adra Vadren, commander within the Adrasmiith faction’s ‘royal army’ - called such despite Adrasmiith being a faction rather than a kingdom for not-even-the-gods-knew-what reason - sat behind a large fancy desk and pretended not to notice Madrick.

Ahhh the political games. How I haven’t missed you. Madrick tuned out the world, glancing briefly into his soul nexus. The endless skirmish within his soul continued unabated. The glory of the eternal battle had been diminished, but not extinguished, by his death. Thinking about the manner in which he had died unsettled his soul nexus, the soldiers all becoming enraged as the conflict escalated as if the war had just begun and passions were high and their blood still boiled. He watched for a moment before forcibly calming himself. Wasting mana by letting his emotions run rampant was counter productive.

Instead, he focused his anger into a needle of cold ice which he would use later. That ice set into his soul nexus, the soldiers began to grow lethargic and weakened. This would temper them, they would need to learn to overcome the elements. He relived the final moments of his godhood. He watched as his best friend and his most favored lover, walking on his right and left side respectively, suddenly struck. The action had been coordinated, decisive, and utterly without warning. Madrick still felt Cheru’s karambit, the thin excessively curved blade she preferred, slide in through his back and directly into his heart. That itself wouldn’t have been enough to slay him, of course. The poison, along with his treacherous former friend Baāleth’s massive hand-axe cleaving his head from his neck the very next instant, had barley been sufficient.

Madrick felt the fire of rage descending into his soul nexus again and once again forced it to coalesce into an icy form of fury. The sound of a cleared throat brought Madrick’s focus out of his introspection. He noticed, with amusement, that the battle fervor mana which had leaked from him in his anger had ignited Adra’s ire. As one of the many humans who despised the Glavi on principal, Madrick was more than happy to inconvenience this one.

The voice of the small, weak, dry, grey-skinned creature almost seemed to contain a hint of emotion due to the influence of Madrick’s mana, “It appears you have come, as my superior promised.” Despite almost having emotion, the Glavi’s voice was still the same monotone and lifeless one shared by all of its kind.

“It appears you’re here as well. Just as your superiors promised.” Madrick was trying for dry, channeling as much of Ki’ai’en’s understated wit as he could. It still came out more sarcastic and angry than anything. Ah well, he’d tried. Dry wasn’t really his style anyway.

Adra steepled its fingers together, resting its skin-and-bone elbows on the desk it sat behind and stared at Madrick with its pupilless, scleraless, void-like eyes. He stared back without moving, aside from his foot tapping and his right fingers slapping against his crossed forearm as he waited impatiently. He hated these kinds of stupid games. What’s more, he didn’t have to put up with them. He was only doing so now because the Adrasmiith had something he wanted. They’d made a deal to give it to him, assuming he took care of their little problem.

After counting to thirty, the stupid Gravi still hadn’t gotten to the point. Fuck it. Madrick turned around, “Fine, I’ll find what I need elsewhere.”

“Please remain.”

He looked back over his shoulder, eyes narrowed, “Tell me the problem I’m here to solve. Quit playing your idiotic power games. We both know who has the power here.”

The narrow nose-slits of the Gravi flared ever so slightly. Likely it was feeling actual anger for one of the few times in its life. Madrick, and more importantly the mana he’d inadvertently released into the air, tended to cause that.

“We have been given this planet to do with as we wish. We are unable to do as we wish. This is due to the haunted.”

With a snort, Madrick turned around and walked back over to look down at Adra as he waited to hear more.

“Spirits appear. They are between rank nine and rank thirteen. They are most prevalent within the battle sites. The battle sites are what the Adrasmiith is interested in. We need the spirits removed.”

Grinning, Madrick nodded, “Certainly something I’d be more than happy to help you with. First though, what the hell do you mean by spirits? Elemental? Reanimated corpses?”

“No.” The Adra answered in a now fully disimpassioned tone, “Fully autonomous energetic beings. They are ghosts. They take the form of their former selves. They retain their spells. They retain their abilities.”

“Impossible. The soul and attached soul nexus return when a being is slain. When monsters are slain their energy is either absorbed by their slayers, or it’s condensed into a core. There’s no such thing as a ghost for either.”

“And yet. We have evidence. We have seen.”

“Bah, so this isn’t going to be as simple a job as ‘go kill that army’, is it?”

“Unlikely. We have destroyed the spirits. Many times. They return.”

Groaning, Madrick turned and left the tent without further questions. He’d go check these “ghosts” out himself. Hopefully the Adrasmiith warriors were simply incompetent and had failed to fully kill whatever “energetic beings” they had encountered. Madrick himself would hardly fail at his favorite task, he’d just have to check the claim that they came back after being killed personally.

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Having destroyed a few hundred ‘spirits’, Madrick sat atop a grassy mound which he was fairly certain had once been a massive pile of bodies which hadn’t been buried or burned. Nature was always the victor in these battles, in the end. Unless Madrick had been present, then he was the victor. He chuckled, in a good mood after a decent fight.

The spirits had come in the form of hundreds of different races, all of them beings which had come from tutorials. His working theory was that one or more of the warriors which had participated in this battle had a path of shared, or maybe forced, vengeance. They might have had a technique which activated upon death to create these odd ghosts. True ghosts, he knew, were simply not possible. The spirit of the departed was a known quantity, they could not linger when they were immediately collected on death.

Deciding taking a break called for a quick check on his disciple, Madrick looked through Willow’s activity feed. He was a bit surprised to see several alerts that she had altered her soul nexus. She had altered it many times. He saw a total of forty alterations. A smile slowly spread across Madrick’s face. Generally, changing ones soul nexus was a horribly difficult process which required extreme concentration to an existing nexus and create a new one. Yet it appeared his disciple could change it tens of times in a single day. Interesting. He wondered if she even knew what she was doing. He would wager that she had no clue.

Continuing on, he saw an alert that she had entered battle. He replayed the recording and laughed so hard he fell off his hill.