Chương 41: Change of Plans

Despite supposedly being the easier option of the two, gravity magic was not easy. Not for Jonny, at least. It had been nearly two weeks since Igrette taught him the principles of it, and he still had made no progress. Igrette said it was to be expected, since it was his first time trying an "elemental shift," but that didn't make it any less frustrating. He was pretty sure Tommy hadn't struggled this much to do his first elemental shift. He was using fire and wind spells basically from the moment he learned magic.

Of course, those elemental shifts were supposed to be easier than gravity, but even still… This issue with gravity was that he struggled to visualize it. With something like fire, it was easy. Fire was fire. Get the air really hot and it glows, or something like that. Igrette had even had him try a water shift, just so he could get a feel for it. That was easy, since he kind of visualized his mana as water anyway.

The water shift didn't really do anything useful for him, but it was easy, and it helped him understand what an elemental shift was supposed to feel like. Gravity was completely different. He didn't get it. He didn't understand how he could visualize being heavier. He understood why he needed it. Igrette had demonstrated very effectively when she told him to punch a tree as hard as he could, and he ended up sliding backward across the snow. But he couldn't do it.

At the very least, as they traveled and he fought, he had been able to make some minor micro-adjustments to help alleviate the issue a little bit. For example, when fighting smaller beasts like the pikas, he leaned into his attacks more, making sure to put his whole body even into his basic strikes. It felt extremely awkward to basically be doing haymakers for every blow, but at the moment, throwing his whole body into a strike was the only way he could get the leverage he needed not to be pushed back.

And against larger foes, like the angry mountain goat from the previous day, he didn't bother striking at all. Grappling was significantly more effective, since he could make leverage for himself, and as strong as the beasts were, their limbs could only bend so far before they broke. But he really wanted to be able to just punch them. Not only would it be faster and easier, and leave him less vulnerable, it was also straight-up cooler. Good grappling was pretty cool, but it just wasn't quite the same.

There was something about watching someone's eyes lose focus and roll back after Jonny delivered a solid punch that even the craziest submissions couldn't compare with. That night, as he waited for their goat meat to finish cooking, he had a rock in his hand, and was repeatedly dropping it to the ground, watching it fall, hoping to gain some kind of insight. Gravity pulled things down.

Well, according to Igrette, that wasn't exactly how it worked, but as far as Jonny needed to be concerned, that was accurate enough. Gravity pulled things downward, toward the center of the planet. It pulled the rock down, and it pulled him down. What he needed was to make it pull him down harder. Pulling down harder meant that the ground would be pushing up against him harder, which meant more friction, which meant less sliding, which meant stronger punches. But how?!

Beside him, Igrette suddenly snorted with laughter. Jonny flinched in surprise. He hadn't realized she was awake.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing…" she said, shaking her head with a small smile.

"I just never thought I'd see the day…"

"The day of what?"

"When I was your age, my teacher took me out to the mountains too."

"What does that–?"

"At first, I thought he was a good teacher. He taught me survival, and he taught me combat, and he gave me food and clothes. He was gruff, but after five years with parents who barely even glanced my way, his gruffness was like a warm hug. Then winter came around. The magic beasts got more aggressive, and the temperatures fell, making the mountain more dangerous.

"Things became difficult, but I still had my teacher with me. He taught me the very same thing I'm teaching you now about using internal gravity magic. I struggled even more than you. Unlike you, I didn't have the patience of an adult mind to keep me going. And then when I did learn it, do you know what happened next?"

"What?"

"He left. Told me to find my way back on my own, then disappeared, stranding me in the middle of the mountain range." Igrette was still smiling slightly, and looking off to the distance as she reminisced, but Jonny felt a sudden wave of anxiety.

"But you're not gonna do that to me, right?" he said, half-joking. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"Only God knows what the future holds."

"Igrette… Are you dying?"

"Aren't we all?"

"Igrette," said Jonny sternly. Igrette finally looked him in the eyes as her smile faded.

"I don't plan on dying here," she said.

"But it's always good to prepare for the worst." Jonny looked deep into her face, and for what felt like the first time, he truly realized how old she was. He didn't know her exact age, but from what he knew about her past, and Helen's own age, he knew she had to be close to eighty, if not older. But he had never thought of her as that old because of the way she carried herself.

She was strong, and walked with steady confidence, and even while injured in their travels, she had always been a strong pillar, standing tall against the magic beasts that came her way. But now, the firelight cast shadows on ever wrinkle, and slumped against the wall of their makeshift ice tent, she looked frail.

"You're not dying," he said.

"You're gonna be fine."

"If the Lord wills it." The next day, the mood was awkward. Igrette was out of the strange state she had been in the night before, but she was also moving slower than usual. She had already been relying on a cane they carved out of a fallen log, but now, even that wasn't enough to keep her going. She used the staff as a crutch, barely putting any weight on her left side, and around noon, Jonny crested a small ridge only to turn around and find that Igrette had stopped fifty feet back.

"Igrette!" he called, running back down to meet her.

"I'm fine," she said when he arrived. She didn't seem to be lying. Well, she wasn't fine, but she didn't look any worse than she had earlier, and she didn't look like she was in pain. Instead, she was looking off into the distance to her right with a contemplative expression.

"What is it?" asked Jonny.

"Let's go that way," she said, pointing.

"Why?"

"There's a mana well."

"Aren't we avoiding mana wells?"

"We were," she said.

"But if we don't get to one, I might really die."

"What?"

"I'm out of mana," she said.

"I've been trying to ration it out, but I underestimated how much I would need. I don't have enough to heal myself anymore, and there's not enough in the atmosphere to maintain my expenditure. I need a mana well. The one over there feels relatively weak. It shouldn't be difficult to take, even in my current state."

"Oh. Okay!" Jonny started marching in the direction she pointed, smiling slightly. Igrette's current state might have been concerning, but he much preferred this to how she had been acting the night before. She had almost seemed like she was giving up, but it was clear now that she hadn't. They didn't have to walk far before Jonny could sense the mana well too.

He wasn't sure if "weak" was the right term, because it seemed like it was probably still at least three times denser than the one by the orphanage, but compared to what Igrette's descriptions of what she called "major mana wells," it was indeed weak. Jonny took a long, deep breath while the walked, enjoying the feeling of mana entering his lungs. In truth, he had been struggling with his own mana a little too, though without needing to heal himself, he was in much better shape than Igrette.

It probably also helped that he was both smaller, and had weaker mana than Igrette. She was a sixth layer mage, and while his own mana was a little unique, it still only amounted to first layer density. It didn't take him anywhere near as much mana to recharge as it did for her. As he inhaled, he used his first breathing technique to speed up his mana circulation, which had the added effect of pulling the mana from his lungs more quickly. Then, he had a sudden thought.

It was an idea he had a few months back, when he was trying to come up with ways to absorb mana, and had completely slipped his mind after he learned how to breathe it. Stealing mana from others. According to Helen, all living creatures had a kind of natural barrier for mana. It helped them to contain their mana, but more importantly, to protect it from outside interference. For most people, this barrier was semi-porous, which let them absorb and emit mana normally. For Jonny, it was sealed, so he couldn't.

Helen said this would also make him more or less impervious to anyone trying to directly affect his body with mana from a distance, but actually made him more vulnerable to anyone who could get up close.

Physical contact could bypass the natural barrier, and while Helen and Tommy used it to donate him mana, someone less friendly could use it to inject malicious mana, and without the ability to push it back out, Jonny would have no choice but to try to process it and purify it internally, which was by far the slower method. That was somewhat worrying, but Jonny personally wasn't too concerned.

If anyone got that close to him, that meant they were in his range, and he personally thought that the threat of his fists was much greater than the threat of foreign mana injection. At least, it would be once he got stronger. Regardless, though, while he couldn't absorb mana from the atmosphere without breathing it in, he theoretically could absorb it from other living creatures. He had done a proof of concept for it already.

When Tommy was donating his mana to him, Jonny could pull more out of him by circulating his mana faster. It didn't work on Helen, but he suspected that was just because she had better mana control. That didn't bode well for his ability to forcibly steal mana from someone or something else, but it might have been possible, and that was enough for his mind. He ran through a few possibilities of how he would test that. It would probably be pretty easy, actually.

He was already resorting to grappling on larger foes, so prolonged physical contact was already part of his gameplan. It wouldn't be that hard to try to siphon off some mana while he did that, right? If he couldn't use gravity magic yet, he could at least make progress on something.

"Igrette, can you–?" he started.

"Shhhh!" she hissed.

"Oh," Jonny breathed.

"Can you leave one for me?"

"I will leave more than one for you," she replied, barely audible before sighing.

"Well, they heard us. Get ready to fight."