Mana Mirror: Chapter Forty-Seven (Patreon)

Hey everyone! I'm releasing this chapter and the next one a bit early this week due to some scheduling stuff. This also means that you get some more time to stew on that big choice at the end, which is fun!
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The following morning, Meadow arrived bright and early as early, and woke Ed up as well. Once we were out in the backyard, she eyed me and smiled.

“I see you’ve managed to master Briarthreads, I assume through riving the spell. If you don’t mind, what happened?”

I told her the story, and when I was done, she took my hand and gently patted it.

“You did the right thing, saving the slipshark. You may not have gotten rewarded for it, but life’s often that way. No good deed goes unpunished.”

When she said that, she stared off into the middle distance, seemingly lost in her own thoughts, then she smiled again and glanced at the garden.

“You’ve made good progress with enhancing the plants mana production, but it’s mainly a matter of time and energy now, rather than skill. You have to burn mana to generate mana. Well, it seems like the time has come for you to start seriously focusing on pruning your mana-garden. Your rive may have let you master Briarthreads, but the spell’s full of inefficiencies, and as I’m sure you were warned, they’ll be much harder to work through. That’s fine, life happens. Let’s get to work, though.”

I began to fall into the stances of Depths of Starry Night, moving my body slower than the movement would normally have required while I focused on my mana-garden. I wasn’t quite skilled enough to manifest myself inside my garden without the help of a potion or a spell, but I could…

I was broken out of my mindset by Meadow chuckling and shaking her head.

“No, dear. That’s great for when you’re not with a teacher, but for right now, we’re going to be doing more active training.”

For a horrified moment, I thought she was going to start me on physical training in the same way that Ikki had, and I let out a sigh of relief when she spoke again.

“Go ahead and call your spell.”

I did as she said, powering my Briarthreads spell. Meadow stood across from me and did the same.

“Now, the defensive properties of this spell are automatic, but they rely on your sensory input. That means the more your mind gets used to the spell, the more effective it’s automatic shifting to block is. Not only that, but the offensive properties take a guidance of your will to use, and we will be training that as well.”

One of her briar-ended threads slashed forwards, and my own spell twisted to take the hit. Given that Meadow had to be an Arcanist, I was surprised when it didn’t take an absurd amount of mana to stop her blow. In fact, it took less than the shadow claw had.

“How?” I asked.

“I lowered my power to that of someone roughly on par with you,” she said. “You’ll learn the skill eventually, but since you’re only first gate, you can’t push your gated power any lower. Now, strike me back.”

I did as she said, using a brief effort of will to send one of my threads slicing at her. Meadow’s spell effortlessly blocked it with the tip of just one strand, rather than all of them converging, and she countered with an attack almost instantly.

Now that I subconsciously knew I could take the hit easier, only a few of the threads moved to intercept her briars, but it was still many more than her single defense had been.

We continued like this for a while, with my spell slowly adapting. Once I’d gotten a handle on defending one for one, Meadow began to switch it up. She’d send three, then one that was massively overcharged with mana, and then another that was just normal.

By the time we took a break for me to refill my mana and practice sketching my other spells, I asked Meadow a question that had been burning at me for a while now.

“Isn’t what we’re doing more or less training towards ingraining, not working out the flaws of the spell?”

“On the surface, yes, it is,” Meadow said. “But in truth, it’s… softening the foundation, for lack of a better word. Go and try to work out some of the issues with the spell now.”

I closed my eyes and began to move through stances, sending mana through the spell. I envisioned the overgrown briars with my mind, the long threadlike roots and branches reaching through my mana-garden, and then tried to break off some of the overgrown branches that were holding me back.

I had thought that trying to pry extra branches off of the Analyze Death had been hard, but in comparison to getting this to budge, it was a breeze. The branch felt like solid iron in my grasp, and the briars dug into my palm.

I was in my own spirit – or perhaps my imagination, or somewhere in between, since I wasn’t fully manifesting in my mana-garden yet – so there wasn’t any blood, but it felt draining on a different level, a mental strain that wore me down quickly.

I let go of the branch when I felt Meadow put her hand on my shoulder.

“By increasing your understanding of the spell, you’re able to weaken it, allowing you to prune it more easily. As a happy coincidence, you do move closer to ingraining it as well. It’s a win-win, and you should always celebrate those in life.”

I nodded and thanked her. We continued to practice until my mana was nearly dry a second time, and she went off to check on Ed’s progress as I worked on using the dregs of my mana to improve my efficiency with my Analyze Life and Death spells.

I was so caught up in my work that when Meadow returned, I wasn’t even aware that it was lunch yet. She’d made us a dish with bunches of fresh greens, garlic, onion, and more spices than I could guess, all made in a quick pickling, just long enough to infuse the flavors without letting any of the crunch of the ingredients be lost.

It was a bit spicy for my tastes, but it was definitely tasty, and better than most of the vegetables that I’d had in Mossford’s culinary traditions.

Either that or my dad was just really bad at making veggies. It really could go either way – he was a good cook, but everyone had their blind spots.

Meadow and I practiced for a while longer, and I spent the afternoon practicing on pruning my garden. That evening, I worked on Analyze Space and Pinpoint Boneshard. I was absurdly close with Analyze space – I just needed a bit more time to push me over the edge.

But without the money to drink potions like water, the best I could do was to use the mana I had and hope I had enough time.

The following day, Ikki and I worked together. He had me hold a fighting stance and practice my kicking again, all while working on maintaining the Depths of Starry Night’s movements inside my mana-garden. The moment either my physical or magical technique slipped, he had me start over again.

It was torture, and we’d gone through almost his entire two hours before I completed the routine and he moved on.

“You have mastered Analyze Space and Internal Pocketwatch, yes?”

“I haven’t with Analyze Space yet, but I’m close,” I said. “I have mastered Internal Pocketwatch, though.”

Ikki nodded slowly and seemed to contemplate something for a moment.

“Sketch it out, then power it and Internal Pocketwatch.”

This was actually my first time powering Internal Pocketwatch – I’d sketched it to mastery without using it a single time. No wonder some people complained that it should be renamed reflexive, instant, or instinctive. Mastery really was a terrible name for it.

I sent power into my sketch and mastered spells and felt the world change around me.

The lines and distances of Analyze Space were familiar to me now. Internal Pocketwatch wasn’t anything like it, but it still provided a flow of information into my mind. I knew what time it was, down to the second, in multiple calendar and timekeeping systems.

There were other functions to the spell too. I could sense an alarm, something that would alert me with a small pulse of mana after a certain amount of time had passed. There was something like a timer as well, letting me track the time between moments for a bit of mana.

Lastly, I could feel the flow of time through me, solid and normal. I figured I wouldn’t get much use out of this feature until I was using haste spells, but it was there, part of the spell.

For such a simple spell, I was incredibly impressed with just how many functions it had managed to build into it, and how mana efficient it was. Even with my still relatively undeveloped temporal magic, I was easily able to put enough power into the spell to set an alarm for the following morning, or run the timer function for a long time. Even just using the time-checking function of the spell, I could use the spell for hours without a sweat.

No wonder he’d said that Internal Pocketwatch was essentially superior in every way to Analyze Time, with the sole exception of sensing for pockets of temporal energy. Even if it was twice as efficient as my other Analyze spells were, the Pocketwatch would still blow it away.

“Dodge,” Ikki said as I was reveling in the flow of information through me, and I felt a blow connect with my arm.

I lost my concentration on the spells and the world returned to normal around me.

“How do you expect me to dodge?” I asked. “That’s so much sensory input!”

“Yes,” Ikki agreed easily. “It is. Which is why I expect you to be able to dodge. The world is full of strange, dangerous things, and both of the spells offer an advantage. By using them in conjunction, you should be able to get a sense for how fast I’m moving, how fast you’re moving, and you can use that to help determine your pacing and moves in a fight.”

“Can’t I do that without sensory overload?” I asked as I sketched out Analyze Space again.

“Yes,” Ikki said. “It will simply be less effective. Once you have ingrained both of them, that should provide a solid enough stream of information for most fights, and help carry the burden of sensory overload. But will you always have time to ingrain your spells before a – dodge – fight?”

He struck me again as he spoke. Having not expected it, I didn’t move out of the way in time, and his palm struck me squarely in the shoulder. I winced. That was definitely going to leave a bruise…

We continued like this, with me trying to adapt to the sensory overload of using both of the spells while dodging Ikki’s attacks. As soon as I’d begun to adapt to that, he had me use my Analyze Life spell as well.

Oddly – or perhaps not so oddly, given his comments about ingraining the spells – adding Analyze Life didn’t strain me nearly as much as the other spells had.

It still left me beaten, bruised, and sore as I tried to adapt to the spells, but I hadn’t taken quite as long to adapt to it, which was an improvement.

At least, I told myself that it was an improvement.

Before Ikki disappeared, he asked Ed to keep sparring with me, so I could continue to work on my use of both spells, which Ed was happy to comply with.

Of course he was. He wasn’t a battle maniac like Liz, but he still did enjoy the feeling of exercise, and there were few things that did a number on your body like sparring did.

Sparring with Ed was very different from sparring with Ikki. Ed was a lot more gentle, and gave me a lot more time to ready myself for the motions. I appreciated it, but I had to acknowledge that Ikki’s method was probably more realistic.

After another hour or so of practice, with plenty of breaks for water and to catch our breath, Ed called it for the day. He offered to show me his post-exercise winddown routine, and I accepted.

He flopped on the ground and led me through some breathing and stretching. It felt a bit strange, but I had to admit that did make me feel less shaky. I made lunch, and then set to work on my spellcraft.