Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty-Two (Patreon)

[Insert obligatory Hitchhiker's Guide refrence here] 

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“Briarthreads,” I said. “It synergizes well with my existing powers and items, and I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty.”

Summoning still did sound good, though… Maybe once I was third gate, I could pick up a summoning spell to pair with my plant magic. Was there a spell to summon plant monsters? It was worth looking into.

Meadow smiled and nodded.

“I think that was a wise choice, dear. Here, let’s get it written out for you.”

We headed in and she pulled a sticky note from the pad and wrote out the spell array for me. I examined it – it was definitely more complex than the Fungal Lock spell was, but not quite as bad as an Analyze spell. About the same difficulty as Pinpoint Boneshard.

We spent a while practicing with the spell until I was beginning to run low on mana, and then I worked on feeling out my mana-garden without the use of any potions or spells. By the time the evening rolled around and I went in to make dinner, Ed was alight with the faint glow of his telluric mana.

I frowned as I sliced the fennel bulb up, glancing at him. Something had really gotten under his skin recently, pushing him to work on polishing his mana-garden. I wondered what exactly it was.

Probably Liz. She had a massive disadvantage when sparring with him, given that she was still just a second gate mage, and he was a Spellbinder, but she still managed to keep up pretty well. Her mana-garden was just much more polished than his, letting her express power to bridge the gap.

The following day, Ikki showed up exactly on time, as he had before, leading me and Ed to the back part of the garden.

“Before we begin, are you still wearing your binder?” Ikki asked, looking at me seriously. He wasn’t angry, but I got the distinct impression that trying to lie to the time mage would be a bad idea.

“No,” I said honestly.

“Good. Now, let’s begin. Malachi, hold the basic fighting stance that I showed you last time.”

I dropped into it, doing as he said. He poked and prodded at me until he was content with how it looked, then nodded.

“Hold it,” he commanded.

I did as he said and he turned to Ed. They spoke rapidly, and then began to spar. I watched them, my form starting to relax some.

Ikki blocked a punch from Ed lazily, then zipped back over to me. He pushed me back into the stance quickly, then shook his head.

“Hold it, don’t slack.”

He returned to sparring with Ed, and before long, I realized just how devious his training had been.

Holding still seemed easy. It wasn’t doing anything, after all.

That was horribly wrong. Within thirty seconds, my muscles had begun to gently ache, and by the time a minute had gone by, Ikki was having to streak back to correct my form again.

By the time five minutes ticked by, I was clenching my teeth to keep from groaning at the burning sensation in my legs. Ikki zipped back over to me and nodded.

“You can release the form now.”

I did as he said, shaking out my limbs to try and work out some of the tension in the muscles.

“I want you to do that every day,” he said seriously. “Perhaps you can combine it with your meditation exercises. Now, kicking. The basic roundhouse kick. Show me.”

I twisted and kicked, and Ikki shook his head.

“No. Here, go slowly.”

He took my leg and guided it through the motions – pulling my leg up, then twisting, and striking out with power. Then he guided me through a few more times, before he finally stepped back and nodded.

“Now, try.”

I did my best to imitate the motion, and Ikki frowned for a second.

“Place your hand against the wall,” he finally said. “Get close. Use it for balance.”

“Now kick,” he told me once I was up against the wall.

I did as he said, and my leg grazed against the wall. I instinctively pulled back, correcting my form slightly as I did. A small smile graced his lips and he nodded.

“Go through five hundred kicks like that, then we can move on.”

“Five hundred?” I asked, and he gave me a flat, unimpressed look.

“Yes,” was all he said before zipping away to spar more with Ed. I groaned internally, but started kicking.

By the fiftieth kick, I had to let go of the wall and shake out my legs a second time and walk around the garden for a few moments. I took the opportunity to focus on enhancing the plants in the way that Kene and Meadow had helped show me, then returned to my wall and started kicking again.

By the time I finished, my leg was aching and sore. Ikki zipped back over to me and studied me for half a second.

“You took longer than I’d hoped, so I’m nearly out of time for the day. When I’m gone, I want you to turn around and do the other leg five hundred times, understand?”

“Yes,” I said, though it came out as half a groan.

“Good,” he said. “Now, since you took so long, the magical part of your lesson is going to likely be a little bit shorter. You have not progressed much in your understanding of Internal Pocketwatch, Capture Moment, or Lesser Image Recall, so there is little for me to teach you. I suppose I could go into detail about them, but I find that your experience will serve better than a lecture. So, let us talk about your meditation.”

He turned to look at Ed.

“Since this is not specific to time magic, you may also join us. Your performance in the spar was abysmal, so let us hope that your cultivation exercise is better. You two, go get some water, then come back and show me.”

I thanked him and went inside and poured myself a glass of tap water, chugging it down quickly. It was normal water, but it felt like drinking the most potent of restoration elixirs.

After a second glass, I went outside and fell into the stances of Depths of Starry Night, moving my mana to sink it deep into the foundation and up into the sky, pushing at the limits of what my spells were able to do. It actually felt pretty nice to do after the burning sensation in my legs, stretching them well.

Ikki examined me closely for a few moments, then nodded.

“It’s an adequate technique, well suited towards a generalist mage with a variety of mana types. You got it from the Librarian Sect, yes? To increase the power of your spells?”

“It’s from the public library,” I agreed. “And the idea is that it will slowly but steadily do that.”

“Don’t dismiss the advantages that sort of slow improvement can offer,” Ikki said seriously. “Now, Edward, go.”

Ed sat down and closed his eyes and began his movement meditation. To my surprise, with my enhanced mana senses, I got a general sense of what he was doing. He was pushing his mana out of his garden, running it through his body, and then pulling it back into his body.

It wasn’t quite a standard sitting meditation, since with each area of the body that the mana passed through, he moved the limb, but it wasn’t as movement-heavy as mine.

Ikki’s eyebrows shot up.

“Granitebody?” he asked.

Ed cracked an eye open and nodded.

“Yeah, it was described in the spell manual for my Skin of Stone spell. It seemed a better fit than the generic one that the Lightwatch gave me, so I figured it’d be a good one.”

“Do you plan to be an endurance-based melee fighter?” Ikki asked.

“I kinda am already,” Ed said with a shrug. “A lot of the spells that I’m going to put into my first gate are going to improve that as well.”

“Then it’s a suitable technique for you,” Ikki said. A small, wry smile touched the corners of his mouth. “It seems that both of you conspired to ensure that I’d not be able to use my lesson plan for the time period between your learning and mastery.”

“Sorry,” I apologized.

He waved a hand dismissively and shook his head.

“I was not actually upset. Just surprised. I had planned to show you the Time Viper’s Dance, and encourage you to search out a more suitable one, but since you already have, let us move on. Have you begun to ply using the meditation during exercise yet?”

I felt my legs groan in protest, but shook my head.

“No, I don’t. Doesn’t it need to go with the motion?”

“Not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “Your motions are designed to help focus your intent and make your mana control better, but it’s not necessary. You can do it any time that you’re not using your mana or recovering much of it. Now…”

He pointed to the wall.

“Get to kicking with your other leg and start trying to move your mana in the exercise.”

I let out a sigh and did as he said. Mixing the exercises made concentrating on the mana flow much harder, and I lost my balance a few times, even with my hand on the wall to help support me.

By the time I was just over two hundred kicks in, Ikki vanished, leaving Ed to stumble mid punch. After he regained his balance, he meandered inside, then came back outside to watch me finish, occasionally calling out small bits of advice. When I finally stopped, I let out a frustrated sigh.

“Is it weird to you that MY mentor is spending more time with you than me? Also that he’s teaching me more about exercise than he is time magic?”

“Nope,” Ed said, taking a sip of water. I made a gimme gesture, and he scrunched up his nose and held it up high, well outside of my reach.

“You’re a terrible brother,” I said, sticking out my tongue.

“Die of thirst, brat,” he said, chuckling. As I headed inside to get some more water of my own, he continued to speak.

“Well, you’re… Really green. Like, a part of the two-year training for the Lightwatch had me do some really similar stuff to what you’re doing. Yeah, sure, Ikki’s probably a time magic arcanist, but you’re not. He can’t teach you much with time magic until you’ve got the fundamentals down, and since hasting is one of the major aspects of time magic, enhancing your coordination is necessary. Even if you stand in the back and cast magic, you need to be able to move well. He probably kinda feels like he’s wasting his time here until you’ve got your fundamentals down. I’m not a time magic user, but I’m at least enough of a fighter that he can engage me in sparring.”

I glanced at him. It was easy to forget that there were different types of intellect, and while Ed’s scholarly intellect may be way lower than mine, his emotional intellect and understanding of people was pretty spot-on.

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“Yeah!” he said, then gave me a goofy grin. “It’s pretty cool you’re training, though. Maybe I can finally get you into the gym with me!”

“Maybe,” I said noncommittally. It wouldn’t be too bad, hopefully…

But I still had a lot on my plate, so for now, I took a seat on the couch and began to sketch my Analyze Space spell, then my Internal Pocketwatch spell. I was getting close on Internal Pocketwatch, I could feel it, though I still had a little while left on Analyze Space.

Twelve days left to master them. I thought I should be able to make it, but it was definitely less of a comfortable deadline than the first one that Orykson had given me. If he kept shrinking them, I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d be able to keep it up.

But that was a problem for later. I began to shift my life and death mana into temporal and sketch some more.