Chapter 51: Training

Sylvaris was relentless in his teaching methods. Alex’s body screamed in protest, but Sylvaris gave him practically no rest.

“Again,” the elf said. The words came out the same way they had through the entire training day so far, calm and exacting.

Alex rose from the ground, his clothing and skin already drenched in sweat. His body was locked in a half-squat stance, arms held at precise angles, palms open and fingers loose. It looked like nothing special but holding it perfectly was agony.

“The body is a vessel,” Sylvaris intoned, “and your vessel leaks. Your spine buckles. Your essence gate wavers. Your feet do not speak to the ground.”

He snapped his fingers. Aether struck like a whip across Alex’s posture. It wasn’t painful, but sharp and jarring, the type of input that communicated corrective instructions spoken in the language of pain. Alex gritted his teeth and adjusted again.

“Your magic will never flow cleanly if your frame cannot bear it. Spellcasting without martial alignment is like pouring wine into a cracked cup.”

“Okay but why train like this?” Alex hissed through clenched teeth, his legs trembling.

Sylvaris circled him, his hands folded behind his back. “Because if I let you cast spells like you did before, you will die the moment a real warrior closes the distance. And the Kobolds you plan to face are not just beasts. Many of them are warriors, killers. Some, even besides their chieftain, will have combat experience that you do not.”

Alex blinked sweat from his eyes. “You’re saying they know how to fight like this?”

Sylvaris stopped walking. “I’m saying that up until now, you’ve only been playing at combat. Again.”

He had been at this for four hours. Sylvaris’ teachings had started with what he understood to be “proper aether control” when casting his spells.

Once Sylvaris had finished seemingly reality warping the clearing they were in, he found himself beside the elf in a new glade with a tiny hovel hut a dozen yards away to his left. There was also a pond a few feet to his right which looked clean and refreshing, and Alex had yearned for a drink of the waters upon first gazing at it.

The elf let him enter the hut first, where it looked Alex would be living for the next three days. It was essentially a tiny studio apartment in log-cabin form from what he could see. A bed, a table and chair, and a small furnace that doubled as a small cooking stove. It was at least better than the military dorms he had experienced in his early enlistment days. Alex was relieved to think that Sylvaris trusted him with a cooking appliance in his living space, unlike the military.

His sight eventually fell on to his backpack sitting against the wall to his left. On top of it was his storage bracelet and thus Obby, in all his pebbly glory, tucked inside. He quickly picked up the bracelet, slipping on to his arm and giving it a small trickle of aether to make sure everything was still inside.

“I was manhandled Alex. How dare they treat me in such a way. I think one of them scanned me.” Obby’s voice blared in his head. The sentient rock was certainly upset. He had never heard Obby so riled up. Alex grinned.

Finally, someone gave you a spoonful of your own medicine huh? Alex checked the contents of the bracelet and the backpack, it was all properly accounted for. Let’s limit our communications for now though, I’m sure Sylvaris will notice something.

“Continue without me for now if you must, but I will be watching and listening in case you miss anything. And you will, meat boy.”

“ Okay,” Alex turned back to the elf with a determined glint in his eyes. “Where do we start?”

***

And thus, Alex found himself standing in the grassy glade for the last hours moving between various stances with his body. Attack, defense, retreat, lateral positioning, all with multiple movements and precise footwork, arm posture and hand placements.

Every mistake that Alex made was punished by Sylvaris. Not always by direct pain, but by relentless repetition until he eventually got it right. Until the next mistake revealed itself, and the whole process repeated once more.

If it was just the stances, he would have been able to learn them easily enough. It was a lot of things to remember, but it wasn’t horribly hard. That was double when Obby was capable to projecting a translucent image of what he was supposed to be doing in his vision. It was like having a framework to follow along with.

Then Sylvaris made it more complicated.

“Your body is the riverbed, your aether the water. It must flow naturally.” The elf threw yet another rock at him. The stone shot forward like cannon ball. Alex continued moving into the next stance, not letting the incoming attack interrupt his movement. At the same time, his aether was shaped in his body, a rapid-paced spoken word on his lips.

The stone impacted a barrier of energy that sprung into place around his right elbow, shattering into dust and fragments. The energy died away just as quickly, Alex having not wasted any aether keeping the spell active longer than necessary. He moved to the next stance, and another stone was thrown. It too exploded on a aether shield.

Same with the next one, and the next one.

A dozen stones came and went, each one he blocked with his spell as he continued to dance through the stances Sylvaris had taught him. He felt his energy reserves in his body begin to dwindle away, even with the limited up-time for the barrier.

“Fuck!” Alex was moving through the final stance when he saw Sylvaris wave his hand quickly, a dozen difference rocks all launched in at him from varying angles. He couldn’t make a [Shield] capable of blocking all the rocks, the spell covered too small of an area.

He drew from the gemstone in his bracer, shaping the aether into the pattern for [Flare]. It erupted from him in a sphere, knocking away or destroying all the stones at once and ripping up the ground around him.

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He finished the stances, breathing heavily from the stamina and aether drain his body was experiencing. He was near empty and would need to rest for awhile to cultivate aether energy and replenish his body.

“What have you learned?” Sylvaris looked at him with his hands clasped together.

“I… need more… aether reserves.” Alex spoke between breathes, exhausted.

“No.” He felt a pressure push down on his shoulders, forcing him to sit. “You need to stop wasting the aether you have.”

Alex frowned. “I’m activating the [Shield] spell for the smallest possible amount of time. I couldn’t be more efficient.”

“You are throwing your aether headlong into your attacker. You act like a you wish to stop a forest fire by punching it.”

“How else could I—”

“Why not deflect it instead?” His tone was stern as he cut off Alex’s protest. “Guide the enemy away. It is easier then forcing them to stop their charge.”

He looked up at the elf and let out a long groan. It was obvious, yet Alex hadn’t seen it. It took less energy to deflect someone’s punch away rather than try to block in completely. He knew that from his martial arts training back on earth, and yet he hadn’t brought that experience into his spellcasting.

He had gotten better at limiting the duration of his [Shield], but not it’s over all power, or controlling is angle, to assist in limiting his expenditure. It was the same in his use of the [Flare] spell of course. He didn’t need to use it at its normal strength to handle that barrage of rocks. Even at a quarter of its normal strength, he would have been fine. He was being wasteful.

“Meditate, recuperate, then we will go again.”

He nodded and closed his eyes. He focused on his gate, starting his gathering technique to pull in the ambient aether. He had barely finished forming the braid of energy and began pulling it into his gate when Alex felt the energy being pried from his control and the braid unraveled.

“Is that the cultivating method you’ve been using?” Sylvaris looked at him with pity, the stars in his twinkling softly.

“Yes, it’s the one I’ve had.” Alex said.

“I see. You have no element now, and thus pull all the aether in regardless of attunement without true worry. It is a potential boon you are not using properly.” He waved his hand, once again creating a translucent screen in front of himself. After a few moments the elf nodded then swiped it away. “You need to think more broadly and more narrowly at the same time.”

The next two hours became a lesson in aether gathering.

Sylvaris instructed him to expand his awareness out around himself as far as possible. Alex had previously focused on the ambient energy near his gate and drawing in the aether using the natural pull of his gate in a constant flow, like a vacuum in space. Sylvaris instead had him pull on as much surrounding aether as he possibly could.

A volume of energy that size was larger and far more unwieldy for Alex. Once he managed to get a handle on forming all that aether into a braid, it became slightly easier from there. Which resulted in the next problem, his gate couldn’t absorb the aether fast enough.

So Alex had to think more narrowly. The braid was not condensed enough. If he condensed the energy more, the volume wouldn’t be a problem and his gate could handle the cultivation technique.

Sylvaris walked him through this process as well. The idea; forming three smaller braids at the start, and then braiding those three into a tighter singular braid of aether. It was simple, and drastically more difficult to do.

It was hard enough starting one braid, to do three at once seemed impossible.

Once again, Sylvaris’ teaching style reared its head and made sure he learned how to perform the task properly, correcting mistakes with ruthless repetition. As Alex learned to create them, Sylvaris crushed his formed braids with his own aether, over and over again. He was told to form the braids faster, more precisely each time, and each time Sylvaris unraveled it just as quickly.

Finally he formed three braids at the same time and Sylvaris did not correct him, his aether braids were left untouched. He nearly stopped and started over himself, but he managed to keep the braids going instead.

“Good,” the elf clasped his hands once more. “Now you will learn to entwine those three into one strand.”

Alex almost started to cry.

***

Refilling his body’s aether reserves was much faster with the new version of Alex’s [Condensing Spiral] technique. He was excited to later see if it had any impact on the rate he could increase his [Aether Attuned Body] ability. It was something extra to look forward to.

“Back to training then Human-friend. Remember, place your focus on efficiency and use,” he watched as Sylvaris bent down and gracefully plucked a stone from the ground.

“Motherfucker.”

The grueling torture continued for Alex all day.

He had to stop and practice the [Condensing Spiral] two more times before he finally started to get a true grasp on applying the correct intent to his spellcasting.

Turns out, that was what Alex was truly supposed to be learning in this training, ‘Intent’. Celeste had spoken about it when first teaching them about spells. How the intent of the caster had influence on the result of the spell. The mage had some control over shape or minor changes to function.

Making the angle of the [Shield] spell shift slightly was somewhat easy. It was trying to get the angle precisely right to deflect an attack properly, all while thinking about it on the fly, which made it hard. Adding the martial stances on top of that was just insult to injury.

Adjusting the strength of the [Flare] was actually trickier than angling the [Shield] spell. When Alex first tried to do so by restricting the amount of energy he supplied the spell pattern, the spell simply fizzled and failed, earning him nearly a dozen bruises from Sylvaris’ rocks for the effort.

“Again.” He felt the elf simply mocked him now.

The next attempt didn’t fair better. Then he depleted his body’s energy and the gemstone in his bracer on the next attempts after that. Once he rested and they got back to the training, he failed two more times until he got a promising result.

He lowered the energy output for his casting even further the following two times before he needed to rest once more.

“You are beginning to grasp this lesson for once.” It was the first sort-of compliment the elf had given him all day.

“Thank you.” Alex breathed deeply as he cultivated.

“In these next attempts, you will work on the final part of this lesson. It will be drastically harder than what we’ve done before. Normally, I wouldn’t teach it.” The elf tapped his chin and gave a smile that warmed Alex’s heart and froze his spine at the time. “Given your peculiar state though, I think it would be worth it for you to work on.”

“We will go through the entire lesson once more. But during it, I want you to try actively using your aether gathering technique at the same time.”

Alex nearly coughed up blood in shock.

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