Chapter 456: Like in the movies

“Nat, please put your shirt on,” Dennis complains.

Unfazed, I continue working on the stances Lissandra taught me.

“Why? It would only get dirty,” I reply.

“There might be dangerous predator in the area,” Aaron says, his tone serious.

“Huh? There is not, I would’ve sensed it.”

“Is he making fun of us?” Aaron asks, turning to his brother.

“He can’t be like that, right? He must be trolling us.”

I ignore the twins and continue. The idea isn’t to learn martial arts or anything like that. The intention is to move my body and, while doing so, send kinetic energy through, practicing moving it in bursts at the right time.

With the Burden Enhancement Inscriptions drawn all over my skin, I wouldn’t be able to move without kinetic energy, even if I wanted to, but fighting the inscriptions burdening me while moving kinetic energy this way puts a tremendous strain on my body, and I can feel sweat pouring out of me.

One slow movement after another, each requiring my full attention and effort. Just a single slip and I’ll crumble back to the ground and be forced to pick myself back up while fighting the inscriptions.

Lately, I’ve been spending every free moment either doing this or training with the Restrictive Training Emblem, which is visible even now, as a tracery of lines across the skin over my heart. Between the two, my body is getting annihilated, but my control over kinetic energy is vastly improving, and my body is getting stronger.

Of course, the only reason I’m making my body stronger like this is to prepare myself as a vessel for more mana, but I can’t say I’m not enjoying the process.

Back on Earth I always liked training, whether I was learning a new style of fighting, or going on a simple run. I’ve always found the feeling I get after finishing a difficult bout of training addictive, and this is no different.

I watch as my muscles twitch and stretch, fighting the inscriptions restraining them. I sense kinetic energy as it flows through the fibers, supporting them, as I strain to synchronize the motions.

Lissandra couldn’t use kinetic energy. Likely because she couldn’t be bothered, so by far, the best user of kinetic energy I’ve seen is Whitey.

The field he created, halting everything around him in the air, be it people, debris, or projectiles, was amazing, but the part I keep coming back to is his movement. It’s not just about raw power. Within that field, he tailored his expenditures, using the minimum amount of energy to accomplish each specific task, whether that be holding a stone in place, shifting large fields of debris, or restraining Beyonders, who each require a unique application of effort. All in the name of maximizing efficiency.

Then there were those quick, twitchy movements of his. His steps launched him across great distances without ever disturbing so much as a single grain of dust. He had an insane degree of maneuverability and not even the air seemed to betray his movements.

Whitey is… was a Champion candidate. I could feel it the moment I saw him. There were a few people on the Entrance floor who had the same aura about them. For instance the man with the fire crown, and the beautiful woman with her even more beautiful mantle moving around her as if it had its own mind.

Neither one bothered to hide their title, unlike me. There is an option to do that, and I’m doing it. But not them, they flaunt their titles with pride, shoulders wide.

Dumbasses.

Unlike them, I will move sneakily. Like a true hypocrite, I'll gladly do the very things I’m always complaining about. Maybe that's why people find my pride so strange.

My control over kinetic energy is growing every day. And I don’t think it’ll be long before I can reliably take someone my level with kinetic energy alone. Hopefully.

For that, I need to see Whitey.

And then, after you throw in all the free stat points I’ve been getting, my new arcane passive, the body modifications I’ve got planned, Lily’s healing marks, and the arcane items currently in my possession, it should be more than possible. However,h I don’t exactly have most of them on me at the moment.

I still have Flamebearer though, and the Echo Gauntlet which allows me to replicate spells or abilities. And that’s something I totally can’t wait to play with.

Maya has Bloodthirst; I’ve rented it to her for now, in exchange for a reasonable amount of compensation, to be determined later. The Golem Heart is still with Sophie, under the same terms I established with Maya.

Lastly, there’s the cursed phantom something ring, which remains with Tess. I would probably have sold it anyway, and it would probably help them more than anything the extra shards could do for me.

Of course, that comes with its own offer of future compensation.

Good, but doesn’t that mean I have most of group 4 firmly in my grasp? If I wanted, I bet I could overthrow mighty Tess, it wouldn’t even be hard with all the trouble she’s made. But that problem is well on track to solve itself.

I have plenty of other items too—mana stones, loaded with information, mana stones from multiple Veil Ignition stations, the information I’ve gotten from other people, documents from the Bastion, materials produced from the bones of powerful monsters, a cache of metals I’ve collected over our travels, including the arcane alloy I got from Nevan.

I don’t have a hoarding problem.

I’m sure I can use every one of these items.

It’s a shame there is no inventory or spatial storage items in the system shop. I would have expected something like that to pop up by now, especially after I got that vial that allows me to compress and store a swimming pool's worth of water.

At some point, I stop thinking and delve deeper into my training.

Movement after movement, the kinetic energy within me surges, battling against the inscriptions. I focus on the need to actively breathe, forcing my chest to move with kinetic energy because I couldn’t figure out how to exclude it from Burden Enhancement Inscriptions.

A quick step, kinetic energy shoots from the bottom of my feet, traveling through my legs and waist, before joining with another burst of kinetic energy born from a twist of my waist. They mold themselves together, becoming entangled, as they war against each other while being forced together by my will.

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The wave shoots past my shoulder, with a slight twist of my elbow, forcing my forearm to contract, and then… nothing.

Instead of kinetic energy bursting from the palm of my hand, it bounces back, flowing back through my body, mixing with an oncoming wave, then once again interfacing with the muscles and bones of my body.

I take a step back, a wave of energy shoots down through my legs, building from the bottom of my feet, strengthening my stance, a wave spreads through my back, flowing around my waist and rejoining itself on the other side.

I feel a slight tear in some unimportant organ followed by the burn of a pulled muscle, caused by an excessive burst of excessive energy. A too-slow reaction from my side, and my shoulder dislocates under the strain. A lightheadedness as I forgot to breathe for a few minutes already.

When I stop and the inscriptions dissolve with a mana wave I send through, I feel my arms shaking and take a deep breath in.

My skin burns, and I feel like falling to the ground.

“Pulling” on one thread, my aqua arcanum vial flies to my hand, and I dump a bathtub’s worth of water on my head, reveling in the refreshing sensation.

I comb my wet hair with my fingers and sweep it away from my face, catching Lily’s gaze. For a moment, she looks almost scared that I’ve caught her and I follow her gaze, to somewhere around my chest where I hold the glorified water bottle in my hand.

“You look thirsty, Lily,” I say, holding the item in a questioning gesture.

Lily, looking scared, turns around entirely and plops down on the ground, with renewed interest in her dark experiments.

“There is no fucking way he didn’t do that on purpose.” Dennis wildly shakes his head.

In reaction, I pop all the evil orbs that float around them, “I will be modifying them a little bit.”

For the next few hours, both of them have to go back to a single orb, as they struggle to keep them up for longer than twenty seconds.

The next day, I take my mana and form it into the shape of a sword, using the same process I used to create the manabloc chairs. The goal being to make it last as long as possible.

It’s more difficult to restore, and slightly more “brittle,” and I can’t make it as sharp. But I know the sword I just made has the potential to remain intact for weeks without losing its shape.

There is some mana leakage, yes, and it’ll still dissolve over time, though I can’t say it’s any worse than I would expect from an experimental process.

My goal is to make this “manabloc” material as flexible, sharp, mana-conductive, and repairable as normal mana. All while keeping its property of being able to stay materialized for a long time.

Who knows, in a few years I might be able to make items like this that last for years at a time. Then perhaps my next goal can be to make them conductive to mana other than mine.

Another goal after that would be to inscribe them so some sort of effects would activate while accepting foreign mana.

I’m imagining not needing to use arcanadium, endurium, voidsteel, or any other materials. Just my materialized mana and the epic, maybe even arcane weapons made of it. Even if they only ever last a few decades, I would be happy with that.

But to reach that goal, I’ll have to keep experimenting with this manabloc material. Instead of materializing my mana in a loosely imagined form, I try to weave threads of much thinner mana through it. Perhaps that’ll solve the issues I’ve been having with brittleness and durability. Though it does add quite a bit of difficulty to the process, not to mention that I’m not sure how this is going to work for parts like the blade.

Maybe I could combine it with a different type of mana; some of the weapons I’ve seen were made like that. Formed of varying alloys, each tuned to fit a different function. It was even in notes Miwa left me, so it could definitely be worth trying.

It’s also possible that I’m just being extremely dumb and making things far more difficult than I need to, but I think it’ll be a good training method for materializing Ley Lines. That’s the main reason I’m even doing things this way.

After all, I’ve already spent an inordinate amount of time experimenting with those pale blue threads that feel so different from the pale blue of normal mana.

I don’t even think I would be able to materialize much more than a finger’s length without my new passive. At least not without melting some part of my brain.

My mana reserves are quite large, I would say, and I think most people would agree, but even I was surprised how much of my body’s mana it took just to make that short thread, not to mention how much I had to use my eyes in the process.

Honestly, it probably means I shouldn’t be doing it and that I’m going against the nature of the skill in some way, at least I think it does.

As if something like that ever stopped me before.

Maybe I should try using black mana. I’m curious how well I can handle it now, particularly with all the levels and passives I’ve picked up since last time. I’m curious how it would react to a

[Ley Line]

, materialized or not.

But, I’ve already made up my mind that I’ll try to avoid using it before I reach level 60 in

[Focus]

and

[Mana Manipulation]

. It was part of the recommendations Lady Lissandra left me with. I need to work on my basics before trying to mess with things like that.

It’s yet another thing for me to look forward to when the time comes.

POV Maya Jones

Now that it is night and the rest of our small group has gone to bed, Tess changes her bearing. Her shoulders slump, her eyes lose some of their shine, and her movements don’t feel quite so domineering.

It’s a part of herself she only shows to me and Kim, now that our group is split. She puts on a front for Famir and the others.

Though maybe she’s not exactly the same; she is a bit less controlling now.

It’s a good thing.

I sit down next to her, and she leans against me with a sigh, her blonde hair tickling my nose. Sometimes, I get a little jealous of how tall she is. I’m not the shortest, but having a girl eight or so years younger be a bit taller than me is quite a funny experience.

It’s amusing to see her like this though. Even I thought she was pushing things too far, and that guy noticed as well. He really can be annoyingly intelligent at the weirdest times.

Tess is young, 20 years old. What she’s going through is probably something she feels for the first time, and for her, it seems like the worst thing ever.

In a few years, it will all be a distant memory. In a hundred, she might not even remember the details, only the feelings she had.

I can’t help but feel a bit scared at the thought of living so long. How will I interact with normal people knowing they’ll live such short lives by comparison? How will it feel to love someone and watch them grow old while I remain the same?

I won’t lie; there are things I love about all of this, and I wouldn’t want to give any of it up, but there are other things that terrify me. That’s why I love what Tess is trying to do. She wants to make us companions, friends who survived the same experience, who are equal and can understand the troubles others might have. Not just friends for a few years, but someone we could still call a friend tens or even hundreds of years later.

“Did you think it would be like in the movies you told me you liked to watch?” I ask, smiling as I give her nose a flick in response to another tickle from her hair.

That young blonde doesn’t react, and that’s all the answer I need.

“Silly girl.” Sometimes I forget how young everyone is.

Myself included, of course.