Chương 268

Orion hit the ground hard, tasting blood and dirt. Before he could even finish the thought needed to push himself back up, the sharp sting of hard light pressed against the back of his neck.

"Dead again," Asteria stated calmly, without even a hint of exertion. Orion rolled over, staring up at his mother, framed by the canopy of pale leaves. For all that he liked to think of himself as something of a prodigy, she had neither drawn on the power she had used against the Enders nor needed to wield her brews to win. In fact, she had explicitly limited her mana output to the second tier, aligning with his own constraints. It hadn't mattered.

She had dismantled him in less than twelve seconds, which was by far his best result.

"I couldn't even finish adjusting the tracking algorithm," Orion wheezed, sitting up and wiping mud from his glasses. She had taken to moving through the grove like lightning, zipping back and forth to slash at him without giving him any time to set up. It was more frustrating than he'd expected. He liked to think he was a reasonable man, and it shouldn't have stung to lose to someone so clearly superior, but his mother wasn't using spells beyond his ken or relying on her much higher stats.

Hell, she's even using a sword! I didn't even know she knew how to wield one, much less do so well as to cut through [Light Exoskeleton].

"You still fight as if you were a siege engine, moonbeam," Asteria reprimanded gently, letting the blade of silver light dissolve from her hand.

"You possess incredible destructive power, but as long as you remain entirely stationary, you will always lose to a more mobile opponent. You keep repeating the same pattern, planting your feet, drawing mana, running your equations, and firing. It's a good strategy for breaching a fortress, or when you have companions to keep the enemy's attention off you, but when you are on your own, it's a fatal flaw." Pauline, sitting on a sturdy ironwood branch above them, leaned back casually, looking much less stressed.

In fact, she seemed to be enjoying watching him get beaten around the clearing a bit too much for his tastes.

"She's right, you know? You look very impressive when you cast, but I could have stabbed you three times while you were busy taking into account her movements." Orion scowled, though he knew they were both correct. His CC was a marvel of processing power, but complex physics still took time to model. When he cast [Event Horizon] or even an offensive spell, he had to account for dozens of variables, variables that Asteria deliberately changed so he couldn't use his previous calculations.

In the heat of a duel, without anyone to shield him, those moments were enough to get him killed.

"Uther's apprentices will not wait for you to be ready," Asteria continued, pacing around him in a slow, predatory circle.

"They will know to change the battlefield constantly. They will use alchemy to obscure your vision, alter the terrain, and disrupt your casting. You cannot rely on static, perfect spells, love. You must adapt."

"How?" Orion asked, pushing himself to his feet.

"The math is the math. If I start cutting elements from the formula, the spells will become far too generalized."

"Then change the way you cast," Asteria ordered.

"Stop trying to include everything in your magic. Use those generalized formulae you seem to hate so much. Chain them together into something more. Now, move." As always, she didn't give him a countdown, though he'd learned to expect it. Asteria raised a finger, and a dozen bolts of stinging silver light streaked toward him. Orion instinctively tried to weave a spatial deflection, pulling up the matrix in his mind to adjust to their trajectory.

But the bolts moved too quickly and passed through the warped space before it could solidify. Three of them struck him in the chest and shoulder, knocking him back into the dirt. [Event Horizon] would have made short work of them, but he'd learned not to hunker down behind it during their first duel. He lasted only six seconds as she battered his spell down, until it gave up and left him open to dozens of stinging hexes.

Thus were born his efforts to adapt lesser spells, but as was clearly evident, they weren't working very well.

"Again!" Asteria barked, her tone more like a drill instructor's than a concerned mother's. I can't believe I was worried she'd scold me again! And so, the crucible began. For the next three days, the secluded clearing on the outskirts of the druidic village became Orion's personal hell. Asteria harassed him relentlessly. She refused to engage in a proper exchange of blows.

Instead, she constantly shifted the terrain, using weak earth spells to trip him, unleashing sudden flashes of light to blind him, and pelting him with stinging hexes the moment his feet stopped moving. Most of the time, Orion tried to gain the upper hand through his stronger spells, but he was interrupted without fail.

The few times he managed to cast one of those spells properly, Asteria adapted on the fly, either raining down hundreds of silver arrows if he was shielding, or simply dodging his attacks while punishing his attempts. By the end of the third day, every muscle in his body burned, and even his coat was stained with dirt and sweat, which was saying something, considering it was enchanted by a Mistress of the art to prevent just that.

But under extreme pressure, his mind finally snapped out of its rigid academic paradigm and began to compromise. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I can't keep doing this, Orion realized, dodging a sudden sweep of hard light and rolling behind a thick ironwood trunk, pulled by a weak gravity well. I need new heuristics.

Instead of pulling up the full gravitational equation needed for [Gravity Cannon] and adjusting it for his target, he began carving out pre-calculated, modular components. He isolated the math for a simple upward vector, a lateral push, and a sudden spike in density. He stored these "macros" in the active memory of his CC, ready to be deployed without requiring his full input. It might be a bit weaker in Knowledge than I'm usually comfortable with, but it's not so different from using [Slowed] spells.

They're incomplete, so I can't cast them without a connection to the Field, but I only need to activate them. The hard work is already done.

"Again!" Asteria called out as the air shimmered, preparing another volley. Orion stepped out from behind the tree, determined that this time things would go differently. Not that he expected to win, no, but he'd be happy if he could just shake up his mother's flow for once. As she unleashed a wave of silver darts, Orion didn't even try to hunker down. Instead, he activated a pre-planned lateral vector beneath his left boot. The spell required a fraction of the mana and time of his usual casts.

A sudden gravitational pull yanked him violently sideways, sliding him across the mud as if it were polished ice. The silver darts struck the tree behind him. Asteria blinked in surprise, but quickly adjusted, aiming a sweeping wave of light at his knees that sent him rolling more than once. Orion didn't stop to aim. He couldn't. His mind slipped into a flow state as he chained a second macro to the first. As he slid, he inverted the vector beneath his feet, launching himself upward into a diagonal flip.

While inverted in the air, he triggered a third fragment, and a sudden point of positive gravity appeared directly behind his mother. Asteria felt the unnatural pull and slipped out, easily flying out of the distortion's range. But Orion's intention wasn't to crush her in the first place. He hit the ground and immediately anchored a repelling field to his forearms.

Dashinh forward, lasers of all colors and shapes burst from his light armor, some weak, some strong, using it as a power reservoir to cut the time even further. Every step he took was artificially lightened by a continuous loop of negative gravity, granting him a gliding speed that devoured the distance between them.

When Asteria raised a shield of woven light, preparing to meet him head-on, he aimed a positive vector at the dirt a few feet beneath her shield, forcing the ground to buckle and ripping her footing out from under her. For the first time, Asteria actually stumbled. She recovered instantly, unleashing a blinding flash of silver fire, but Orion was already moving, his body becoming a conduit for chains of rapid-fire spells. Push, pull, lighten, strike.

He was turning the battlefield into a shifting web of esoteric energies, most of which would have harmlessly splattered against any half-decent shield, but that hid more dangerous ones in their midst, forcing his mother to keep moving, just as he'd done for her. Of course, that was when he sensed a pull stronger than he'd grown accustomed to from the Field, and he couldn't even shout in annoyance as a blast of silver light overwhelmed a dozen reflective shields and knocked him into a tree.

"You are getting better," Pauline commented from above, casually tossing a shadow dagger that sank into the earth where Orion had stood before being blasted away.

"But you're still telegraphing your next moves."

"I… wouldn't have lost… if she hadn't cheated," he grumbled, slowly rising to his feet. Technically, she hadn't used anything beyond tier-two magic, but the spell had been far more structured and powerful than a witch at that level could manage. And it was the spirit of the thing! His mother laughed merrily.

"You should always expect your enemy to have a secret trump card up their sleeve. I certainly know you do!" That didn't mollify him much, but he agreed with the sentiment. Day four bled into day five, and the clearing looked as if it had been chewed apart by a furious beast. The mud was cratered, the trees scarred, and the air kept shifting between frosty gales and infernal heat. After his near-victory, Asteria had begun adding more varied spells to her repertoire, including elemental and even arcane ones.

That had quickly cost him the small advantage he'd carved for himself, but now that he knew what worked, he just needed to adapt. And adapt he did. Orion's breathing was ragged, his lungs burning from exertion, yet his mind was in a state of fluid clarity. Asteria stood across the clearing. She raised both hands, and space coalesced into dozens of razor-sharp blades, hovering like a flock of predatory birds poised to attack.

"Show me," she demanded. The blades descended upon him. Orion didn't hesitate to drop his mass by eighty percent, kicking off the trunk of a nearby tree. He shot forward, parallel to the ground, threading the needle between the descending blades. When a cluster of spatial cuts blocked his path, he snapped his fingers, unleashing a kinetic shockwave that shattered the incoming magic like glass. He landed and immediately reversed his momentum, snapping backward as Asteria tried to catch him in a cage of light.

Vector one, push. Vector two, friction zero. Sliding backward out of the cage, he spun on his heel to build rotational momentum. He then channeled that momentum directly into a spell, merging his motion with his mana output as he unleashed a spinning disk of gravity. It was something he wouldn't have considered before. Such a thing didn't exist in nature, after all, and even an accretion disk was only vaguely similar in concept.

Necessity was the mother of virtue, though, and sometimes his mind worked too fast for even him to fully grasp. Which was an oxymoron, but again, it worked. [Accretion Disk] wasn't a world-ending spell, but it was incredibly fast, could be cast entirely on instinct, and perfectly complemented his evasion strategy. The disk screamed across the clearing. Asteria tried to sidestep, but Orion had already triggered a secondary pull, curving the disk's path mid-flight. That was another thing he'd learned to do quickly.

It was much better to seed the battlefield with gravity points and use them to guide a spell than to prepare a locking algorithm, though he was sure that, depending on the specifics of the situation, the values might invert. Realizing she could not dodge it without violating her own constraints, Asteria raised her hand, and a multi-layered shield of light erupted before her. The gravity disk struck hard, grinding against the barrier with a screech as space warped, then dissipated.

Silence fell over the ruined clearing. Asteria lowered her hand as the shield dissolved. This time, it was undeniable that she had broken the rules of the spar to avoid being hit. She looked at the smoking trench Orion's spell had carved into the earth, then back at her son. He was breathing heavily, his hair a mess, but he could go another round or ten. She smiled.

"Good job, moonbeam. I'm proud of you." A melodious chime echoed in Orion's mind, and he straightened, pulling up the System's script as it cascaded across his vision. System Notification Combat Heuristics Established. Integration of Physical Momentum and Arcane Structuring achieved. Spell Chaining efficiency increased by 310%. Casting Speed heavily augmented. +350, 000 Exp +3 Body Level Up! That was the third level he'd gained so far.

By the predatory light in his mother's eyes, he suspected it wouldn't be the last before the week was over.