Chương 430: Limitless Path Chapter Four Hundred Fifty-Four

They set up for more, with Zane still keeping his hands in his pockets, which was certainly infuriating, but Beth did her best to ignore it, as she was sure the other two were. The man didn't really coach them, not anything like what Baelvyr or others would do, but his fighting style was complex and clever enough that it let them learn while engaging with him without being overwhelmed.

Besides, they were all in Expert with their weapons and simply needed to put in some time and effort to work the skills up rather than have some great epiphany to progress any further. He kept the same kind of pace as he had last fight, but this time Beth was fully in the zone, not bothering with working on manipulating her skills but instead focused on what they were doing. It wasn't like that really changed anything, as Zane still easily handled them without bothering to use his hands or very many skills.

He did change up what he was doing, however, which proved rather interesting to fight against. This time, he had suddenly started to manipulate gravity on the training stage, causing it to fluctuate wildly and even re-orientate in strange and unpredictable ways. Beth would be just fine one moment, then under ten times gravity the next, then in almost zero gravity a few seconds after that.

Before she could even adjust to hurtling through the air at the slightest movement, she would be pulled to the side, as if all gravity in the room came from the eastern wall. Then, suddenly, gravity would be perfectly normal, a single gee of pull coming directly from the floor as it was at the start.

It was really hard to describe just how confusing and difficult to adjust to the changes were, so much so that Zane spent a little time just changing gravity and moving around, easily dodging any attack they tried as they staggered and flew and fell all over the place. He wasn't fucking with them, or solely doing it to mess with them, but just letting them experience the different adjustments to gravity and what happened when he rapidly chained those adjustments together.

Even just going from one gravity to ten gravities to one gravity to a hundred gravities over the course of a few dozen seconds was strange and disorientating in the extreme. It was more than the added weight, as every change messed with their balance, confusing their inner ears and throwing off their proprioception in strange ways.

It was very difficult to adjust when Beth would make an attack while experiencing a hundred gees of force and the gravity would change to one gee mid-swing, causing her to spin wildly out of control. Even after fighting under the changing conditions for a quarter hour, it was still confusing and hard to process what was happening.

They had managed to adjust a little bit, in that they didn't go flying out of control so severely when gravity went from high to low, but it still threw them off and caused attacks to go wide, them to stumble, or general confusion. Even as they started to get a small bit of a handle on what was going on, Zane threw back in the greater shifts, not just changing the force of gravity but the direction and sometimes turning it off entirely.

Beth hadn't really understood what Mortaine had meant when he had made an off-handed comment about knowing someone who was a real master of gravity, but she was getting a very good idea right now, spinning across the center of the room in microgravity because she had been trying to kick when that fundamental force just suddenly went away.

She didn't have any way to correct herself, either, before she bounced off the shielding around the stage, kicking off of that to correct her angle only to fall to her left as gravity reasserted itself but from a different wall. The amount of both power and control that what Zane was doing required was something she didn't even want to try thinking about.

Normally, manipulating or controlling gravity was done by complex arrays that required banks of mana crystals or massive arrays placed in mana rich environments that gulped down mana and funneled it through huge banks of Enchanter-made crystal storage before it was channeled into the gravity array. Zane was, without any array or mana storage of any kind, changing the operating principles of one of the fundamental forces of the universe just by thinking about it.

Not only was he doing it without any aid, he was precisely controlling how gravity influenced a very narrow cross-section of reality without affecting anything around it. Beth didn't see anything outside the training stage, such as the water bottle she had left sitting on a table, ever float away or move at all, and likely Zane wouldn't want to disturb the entire space station with his antics, meaning he was changing the gravity just for a hundred foot by fifty foot by fifty foot section of space.

The fight eventually ended, whether it was from Zane getting bored or just some timer that he was tracking that he didn't bother sharing, as he rapidly picked up the pace until he hit a tempo they couldn't keep up with even not counting the gravity constantly changing. He once again eliminated Blood first, showing again that if her speed was taken out of the equation, she was the most vulnerable of the trio.

That still wasn't very vulnerable, considering she had more than four thousand END and the ability to endure crazy amounts of pain and damage before it threatened her sanity and life, but on the other hand, they were fighting a Manumitted. That put Blood out of action, and left Sera and Beth against Zane, who was still tossing them around just by flicking the gravity on and off, up and down, whenever and however he liked.

He also knew exactly what they were all capable of already and chose to eliminate Sera next as, even though she was particularly tough, she wasn't quite as durable as Beth considering Beth's Mana Physique and newly evolved class giving her way more stats. Once Sera was taken out, which did take a minute with Zane still playing by his own rules of no hands and only moderate applications of his overall strength and skills, it was just Beth left.

She lasted a couple minutes more before she was knocked out by a strong hit from Zane that followed a kick she only partially blocked, getting blasted in the torso by a shock of pure kinetic force that had the training room stop the match and declare Zane the victor.

She sat up at the edge of the training stage rubbing at her chest even through her armor, no amount of Pain Tolerance able to totally erase the feeling of her lungs getting crushed into pulp, not that that was an instant fatality for someone of her stats and skills.

"Felt like you just ran me over with an airship," Beth grumbled as she hopped to her feet.

"Was that a skill?"

"Nope," Zane said, hands still held loosely in his pockets, his posture easy and relaxed.

"I generated a kinetic blast with nothing more than a manipulation of the mana around the two of us or, more specifically, I transformed mana in between us into kinetic force while giving it direction with runes. I made the runes and they executed their functions so fast you might not have even seen them."

"Isn't that wasteful?" Beth asked. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"It's a drop of water out of an ocean the size of a galaxy for me," he said with a dismissive wave before returning the offending hand to his pocket.

"I'm also skilled enough to make it use practically no mana and happen in a bare nanosecond, which is a lot better than even many other experienced fighters and crafters could do. I'm not saying I do the impossible, but I just like to remind people that I do have tens of thousands of years of experience with this stuff, so I do things that are mind-numbingly hard with casual ease. You can get there too, but you've gotta practice an awful lot."

"And what about the gravity?" Sera asked from outside the ring.

"What about the gravity?" he replied with a raised brow.

"Was that also just pure manipulation?" Sera pushed.

"No," he replied with a quick shake of his head.

"That was just the simplest usage of one of my skills, one that gives me almost unlimited control of gravity."

"What skill?" asked Beth, thinking he might clam up at that.

"Here," he said with a shrug, flicking a screen to all three of them. Beyond The Event Horizon Neutronium[9] {Gain total control and understanding of even the furthest secrets beyond the edge of the event horizon, where all laws are subject to inversion and collapse. All gravity is yours to command and understand, aiding in any task related to the manipulation of fundamental forces, space, time, and the constants of the universe. Nothing can escape the power of gravity, for even light cannot flee fast enough to escape the event horizon.}"Well, that's, uh, something," Beth said, staring at a skill that was so powerful it gave the wielder the ability, laid out directly in its description, to manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe.

"Is there, uh, a limit to its power?"

"Well, my mana pool, for one," Zane replied a bit crisply.

"Despite me bragging about it being a galactic-sized ocean, it does have limits, and using a Neutronium-level skill to manipulate space and gravity comes with an enormous cost. I can do things like change the gravity in this room relatively cheaply, but the costs become exorbitant as size, range, and level of manipulation increase, and that's coming from the guy with enough mana to turn a dust cloud into a star."

"And there are higher tiers to skills than this?" Beth asked in an incredulous voice.

"Oh yes. Fallon has a skill in the next tier, Black Ruby, and it's quite something. Don't let him know I said that; it's his time manipulation skill and he always gloats how it's one level above my gravity skill," Zane said with a slight frown.

"There are tiers even above that, but at Neutronium[9] or Black Ruby[0] we are already able to re-write the laws of the universe around us, albeit temporarily, and manipulate space, time, matter, mana, and energy as we see fit."

"I can't imagine what a fight between Manumitted is like," Sera said.

"No, you cannot," Zane replied coolly.

"A fight like that is literally a battle of wills to rearrange a sizeable chunk of reality around the persons involved until only one team or person remains alive. Most people can't really wrap their heads around something like that until they hit the peak of Ascended or reach Exalted.

The abilities and changes involved, the amount of power processed, the speed of the changes, the vast area affected by such rapid changes, and the understanding of the manipulation of the forces and mana involved is at such a high level that it's physically impossible for people below a certain threshold to fully, or sometimes partially, grasp just what is happening."

"And how many Manumitted fights have you been in?" Blood asked laconically, draped over a bench to the side.

"Plenty, actually," Zane replied calmly.

"Despite the lack of resources and powerful opponents in the Milky Way, the rest of the universe is nothing like that, and you can find people, monsters, beasts, and things stranger still of unimaginable power scattered all over the place. I have fought beings whose very presence in that spatial frame altered the movement of planetary bodies, caused time to unwind, matter to decohere, mana to reverse its operating principles, and the laws of causality to become… malleable.

I have ventured beyond the edge of space and the bounds of time, have fought men and women lost to an age unwound, peered into the very core of the operation of reality itself, and challenged the laws of said reality for a prize you cannot understand."

"I don't even know what any of that means," Beth said with a shake of her head.

"It does sound pretty impressive, though." He shrugged, saying, "Live for an uncounted age, travel more than you think possible, and fight anything that looks at you the wrong way. You'll encounter things far stranger than I could possibly explain, no matter how many words I use or the eloquence of my speech."

"I think I'd rather concentrate on staying alive and getting stronger," Beth said with a laugh.

"After all, I haven't even met my wife's family yet; I can't go thinking about fighting people that rule space or own the concept of time."

"Girlfriend," Sera said.

"Fiancée," Beth replied.

"Deal," Sera said.

"The two of you aren't as clever as you think you are," Zane said with a bit of a sarcastic undertone.

"Baelvyr says that a lot," Beth said.

"I usually just ignore him."

"This is why I usually don't teach," Zane sighed.

"Speaking of teaching," Beth said, hinting strongly.

"Yes, yes," he said, slouching in place.

"Whenever you're ready." The group did another several rounds with Zane, again not getting any real instruction from the man, but still learning an immense amount just from fighting against him and observing him. He never went too fast or used too complex or subtle a skill or ability that left them in the dark, preferring to slowly ramp up the pressure with a series of simple and easy-to-follow techniques and tactics whatever the girls may try.

They took a break for a while after a couple hours, still in the compressed time, and then got back at it again for another few hours. They repeated that cycle two more times, spending more than a day in the training chamber before they were ready for a bit of a longer break and plenty of food, having just eaten protein bars and nutrient packs while training.

"How much time did we lose? Or gain?" Beth asked Zane as he led them back to their temporary quarters.

"Hmm? Oh, that. We were in there for a day, but I had the compression set at a thousand-to-one, so only a few minutes have passed in objective time. I'm too lazy, these days, to use anything less than that, and I didn't want to go to a higher ratio to start in case the three of you had some problem," he explained.

"Since you seemed fine, you could even do ten thousand-to-one as the ratio, if you want to."

"Isn't that expensive?" Sera asked, a little aghast at the amount that session would have cost.

"Please," Zane said with a dismissive wave.

"It might be enough to bankrupt a poor world, but I could personally power that thing at that ratio without noticing the drain on my reserves. Don't worry about expenses while you're here; you're guests, you don't have to pay for anything."

"Thank you very much," Sera said, echoed by Beth almost in time with her saying it. Blood just grunted but gave him a nod, which was about the best they were going to get without forcing her.