Chương 40: Apprentice

The wooden weapons cost almost nothing, which told Alex something about how the store valued dignity. They bought a practice glaive and a practice spear out of the miscellaneous racks and walked out to a flat stretch of ground inside the wall while the last of the light held. Alex had rested a couple of hours first, enough that his mana had crawled back up off the floor into something usable, though usable was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

"Rules," Jeremy said, planting the butt of the spear.

"No offensive skills. Not Cleaving Strike, not Blazing Core, nothing that comes with a notification. Weapon and body only."

"Agreed. I want to run mana manipulation, though. Not offensively." Alex turned his free hand over.

"I want to try anchoring myself. Everything that hits me sends me somewhere and I'm tired of it."

"That's fine. That's the whole point of doing this." Jeremy rolled his shoulder once.

"I'll use some skills. Movement, mostly. You need something fast to fail against."

"You're very encouraging."

"I'm accurate," Jeremy said, and Alex heard his own words from the field come back at him wearing a slightly different coat, and decided he'd earned that. He settled into his stance. Feet wide, weight low, glaive held horizontal across the front of his body with both hands spread on the haft, the position he'd built out of a month of fighting things that came at him in numbers. It gave him the whole arc.

It let him sweep, thrust, and shoulder into a crowd without resetting, and it was, he was quietly proud of it, entirely his own, assembled from need instead of instruction. Then he looked at what Jeremy was doing and felt the pride wobble. Jeremy held the spear low and back along his right side, the point angled down and away, both hands separated, his body turned so his chest. It looked experience and unsettling.

"That's an odd grip."

"It works," Jeremy said, and moved. The first jab arrived before Alex had finished deciding to expect it. He got the haft across in time, barely, wood knocking on wood, and the spear was already gone and back and coming again, three quick straight thrusts snapping out of that strange low guard on a line he couldn't read until it was already committed. He blocked, blocked, and took the third one on the shoulder, a light tap that would have been a hole. Fast.

Not surprising, Jeremy was built like a cut of rope and had been quick his whole life. What surprised Alex was the precision. Every one of those jabs had gone somewhere specific, throat, armpit, the soft spot under the arm where plate stops covering, and in the space of about four seconds Alex ran the honest accounting and did not enjoy it. If those had been steel, and if his skin hadn't stopped being ordinary skin two days ago, he would already be bleeding from three places.

So he stopped trying to out-fence a fencer and fought his own fight instead. The next thrust came in and Alex met it with a heavy parry, all shoulder, driving the spear wide with enough force to open Jeremy's whole right side, and then he went to work in the only style he had. Wide. Heavy. Consecutive. The glaive came around in a long horizontal sweep, reversed into an overhead, reversed again, each swing arriving fast enough that the follow-up was already on its way, and the point of it wasn't to hit.

The point was to fill the air with wood and force and make precision impossible, because a man who has to keep moving cannot pick which of your armpits to visit. It worked, for about eleven seconds. Jeremy did not block a single one of those swings. He read them.

He gave ground in small economical pieces, turning off the line of each strike with a half step and a shift of the hips, and the spear kept flowing around Alex's arcs like water finding the gaps in a fence, elegant in a way that had absolutely no business belonging to a man who fixed computer networks for a living twenty days ago. Every time Alex committed hard, Jeremy was somewhere adjacent to where he'd committed. Then the ceding stopped, and Jeremy came forward.

The second exchange was faster than the first by a noticeable margin, and Alex, blocking, registered that as data before he registered it as trouble. Jeremy's attack speed was climbing. Not gradually, not with warm-up, but in steps, like a man taking stairs, and with the speed came something worse. He'd started finding Alex's weaknesses on a timer.

Every heavy swing had a moment at the end of it where the weight of the glaive had to be caught and turned around, and Jeremy had located that moment and begun living in it, sliding inside the reversal each time, pivoting in ways Alex found genuinely hard to follow, redirecting Alex's own momentum with a touch on the haft and stepping through the gap it made. The wooden spear cracked against Alex's cheek. It stung.

Barely, a firm slap of a thing, no damage under it, and the humiliation ran considerably deeper than the impact. Alex reset, went again, and got tagged in the ribs. Then the thigh. Then the cheek again, on the other side, which felt pointed. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement. Fine. He'd try the other thing. He abandoned defense entirely. If the body didn't take damage, defense was a habit, not a necessity, and habits could be spent.

He walked straight through the next thrust and let it hit his chest to buy the range, swung with everything he had, and actually connected, the glaive clipping Jeremy's shoulder hard enough to move him. A second later he landed another, low, across the hip. For about a minute it felt like a plan. Then Jeremy patched it. Alex watched him do it in real time, watched the man register what the reckless approach cost him and simply stop being where the trades happened, and everything got worse.

Jeremy's footwork went from clean to inexplicable, pivots that had no business generating that much redirection, the spear appearing at angles that required Alex to accept his own left side had been open the entire time. He wasn't getting hit once per exchange anymore. He was getting hit twice, and then he was getting hit every second, tap tap tap, ribs, arm, chest, cheek, a wooden metronome keeping time on his body while he swung at empty ground.

He tried mana manipulation twice in the middle of all that, reaching for something to root his feet, and both attempts collapsed under the demand of trying to also fight. Anchoring was a thing he could maybe do standing still and thinking hard. It was nowhere near being a thing he could do while a man in his family attempted to bruise his entire surface area. Then the spear tip came in low and it came in glowing.

The thrust arrived with a snap of speed that had not been available thirty seconds earlier, and it hit Alex in the chest, dead center, just under the arch of his ribs. He felt it land, and then he felt something he had not felt in two full days. It stung. A real sting, sharp and specific, the kind of small hot line that meant something had come close to opening him. Both of them stopped. Alex looked down at the spot, pressed two fingers to it, and found no mark, no blood, nothing.

But he had felt it, and that was the entire event, because this morning twenty mages had emptied half their pools into his bare chest and produced a firm shove, and yesterday a level twelve boss had punched him hard enough to launch him across a field and produced a dull notice. A wooden training spear had just produced an actual sensation. If it had been steel, he thought, and could not finish the thought comfortably. It might have broken skin.

"That was Piercing Strike," Alex said.

"That was Piercing Strike."

"We agreed no offensive skills."

"We did." Jeremy grounded the spear and had the decency to say, "Sorry," in a flat and distracted tone.

"You don't look sorry."

"I am but Something happened." Jeremy turned his hand over and stared at the spear like it had spoken to him.

"Right before I threw it. My mastery moved. Spear Mastery, Novice to Apprentice, and it landed in the middle of a pivot, and I could suddenly, Alex, I could see the next four things I could do from that position. Not guess. See. And I wanted to know if it was real, so I threw the one skill I had, and it came out of my hands for maybe a third of the mana it normally takes." Alex sat down in the grass without deciding to.

"A third."

"Give or take. And I think Piercing Strike can evolve." Jeremy said it carefully, like the idea might spook.

"It feels close. The way you described Cleaving Strike coming out of Power Strike, that pressure right before it changes. It's doing that." Alex sat with it, and the whole shape of the thing came together in front of him. He'd had mastery skills for weeks and had never thought about them properly. Polearm Mastery had sat at Novice on his sheet since the second day, and he'd registered it as a quiet passive that made his hands slightly smarter, background furniture, nothing worth investing in.

Meanwhile his manipulation skills had been the obvious stars, thermal and mana and now gravity, each one making his casting cheaper and letting him touch an element directly, and he'd assumed that was the whole category, that manipulation was the interesting branch and mastery was the boring one. Wrong. Completely wrong. It was the same branch.

Mastery did to weapon skills exactly what manipulation did to elemental ones, and Jeremy had just crossed a threshold Alex hadn't reached and gotten a third of his mana costs back, a new dimension of movement, and a skill halfway to evolving. All from repetition. All from a man practicing the same weapon every free hour for two weeks while Alex chased the shiny thing. And then the thought went further, and stopped being encouraging. Everyone in this camp had been holding a weapon for days.

Somewhere out there in whatever the multiverse actually was, there were beings who had been holding theirs for decades. For centuries. People with no rare class, no perfect anything, nothing special on their sheet at all, who had simply put ten thousand hours into one mastery and one manipulation until the costs fell through the floor and the skills evolved twice over. A person like that would be a nightmare.

A person like that would look at Alex Morningstar, twenty-one years old with a Rare class and three Novice manipulations, and see a very well-equipped beginner. Alex had been quietly hoping, in the back of his head, that whatever came after the tutorial would mostly involve Earth. That the aliens would be somebody else's problem. Life had never once given him a thing he was quietly hoping for, so he made a note to stop hoping and start practicing, and got back up off the grass. They went a few more rounds.

He lost all of them. He lost even worse than before. But he got a strike in due to recklessness. His damage and Jeremy's durability were not in the same conversation. But connecting was the whole problem. Jeremy was fast, and Jeremy was getting faster, and against something genuinely quick, Alex's entire game was a very strong man hitting the space where a person had been. That was the hole.

He'd suspected it since the Canifolk leader's eye had found him across a battlefield before he'd sensed a thing, and tonight it stopped being a suspicion. Two problems, then, and he named them properly while Jeremy caught his breath. One, he could not touch fast things. Two, he weighed too little for what he was. Not literally, he was enormous, but relative to the forces landing on him now, his body was a leaf in a wind, and everything with real power behind it sent him somewhere.

Both problems had the same possible answer, and he'd already written its name at the top of his list this morning. Gravity. Weight on demand, anchor and reach, a way to make himself immovable and a way to make things come to him. He was still turning that over when Jeremy's head came up, and Alex followed his line of sight to the gate. His father was walking toward them with Mia at his shoulder and Liam trailing behind, a couple of the uncles in tow.